Inside Your Ed
214 FOLLOWERS
This podcast from the education and skills think tank EDSK takes a look inside the latest stories from across the education system in England including schools, colleges, universities and apprenticeships.
Inside Your Ed
2d ago
In the current education policy landscape, the debate over adding VAT to independent school fees is by far the most high-profile dividing line between Labour and the Conservatives.
That said, the question of what would actually happen in practice if Labour won the next election and tried to implement this policy has received remarkably little attention in political circles.
That is why at the beginning of March, EDSK published a new report that outlined the findings from our investigation into the obstacles that a future government may face if it tried to add VAT to school fees.
This ..read more
Inside Your Ed
1w ago
On the 15th of March in the year 2000, then Education Secretary David Blunkett invited businesses, churches and voluntary groups to build and manage a network of "city academies", a new type of urban secondary school outside the control of local authorities.
Little did David Blunkett, now Lord Blunkett, know that a quarter of a century later, there would be over 10,000 academy schools in England educating over half of all school pupils.
In January this year, EDSK published a major new report called ’20 years of muddling through’, in which we argued that the government has ended up runn ..read more
Inside Your Ed
1M ago
With a General Election on the way, all eyes and ears are trained on what our politicians are saying about the future of education and skills.
However, there are plenty of other important individuals who you won’t see in the political spotlight but are nevertheless thinking hard about how to improve the life chances of the most disadvantaged children, young people and adults.
One such individual is Alun Francis OBE, the Principal and Chief Executive of Blackpool and The Fylde College and also the Chair of the Social Mobility Commission.
The Commission is funded by governme ..read more
Inside Your Ed
2M ago
“The arrival of on-screen and online high stakes assessment has been predicted for many years.”
Those are not my words, but the words of the exam regulator Ofqual back in 2020, in their report on the barriers to greater adoption of high stakes on-screen and online assessments, and how these barriers may be overcome.
Perhaps the wait for these digital assessments is finally over because in recent months all three main exam boards in England have announced plans to start digitising their exams – particularly GCSEs.
So what have been the experiences so far with high stakes digital ..read more
Inside Your Ed
2M ago
Almost exactly 12 months ago, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out his plans for all students in England to study some form of maths to age 18.
Ten months later, the Prime Minister went much further by announcing plans for a single qualification – called “the Advanced British Standard” – to bring together A-levels and T-levels as well as making both maths and English compulsory to 18.
Just before Christmas, the government published a consultation on how they think the Advanced British Standard could work in practice – albeit at the end of a 10-year implementation period.
So what d ..read more
Inside Your Ed
2M ago
Welcome back to Inside Your Ed in 2024 and happy New Year to all our listeners.
Speaking of things that are new, this episode is all about the new institutions - often called Challenger institutions – that have been appearing in England’s Higher Education (or HE) sector in recent years.
So what is a challenger institution? What obstacles have these new HE providers faced? Have the challenger institutions been able to innovate in a way that other providers cannot? And what does the future hold for these small new institutions when the politics and funding of HE remain so uncertain ..read more
Inside Your Ed
3M ago
It seems as though the government are intent on continuing their crusade against what they call ‘low value’ Higher Education, with the Prime Minister declaring at the Conservative Party conference in October that he would be “cracking down on rip-off degrees and boosting apprenticeships”.
Fast forward a few weeks to the Kings Speech in November, and again, the government iterated its goal to “reduce the number of young people studying poor quality university degrees and increase the number undertaking high-quality apprenticeships”.
All of which raises an obvious question: if the ..read more
Inside Your Ed
4M ago
Ever since the Labour Party moved away from its plan to scrap university tuition fees, the debate over how to fund Higher Education, or HE, has gone rather quiet.
Step forward Dr Mark Corver, the Managing Director and co-founder of dataHE, who wrote an article for the Higher Education Policy Institute at the start of November that set out an entirely new vision for how we could fund our HE system: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/11/08/funding-undergraduate-higher-education/
So how does Mark want to reform HE funding? What trade offs and tensions do his proposals generate? And w ..read more
Inside Your Ed
4M ago
Regular listeners will know that we recently dedicated a whole episode to the main education stories from this year’s Conservative and Labour Party conferences, but there was one story we didn’t get a chance to look at in that episode because it was announced on the last day of the last conference.
On the 11th of October, Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson outlined plans for a large-scale review of the early years sector, which essentially covers the period from birth up to the start of primary school. The review will be chaired by Sir David Bell, the former chief inspector o ..read more
Inside Your Ed
5M ago
If you’ve been following the recent headlines on teacher recruitment and retention, you’ll know that the government’s statistics paint a grim picture of missed targets and schools finding it increasingly hard to find enough teachers.
In September, the Government decided to set up a new Workload Reduction Taskforce because ministers seem to believe that if they can reduce teachers’ workload then perhaps more people will sign up to become teachers and then remain in the profession once they get there.
To help this new taskforce with their important work, I have devised three propos ..read more