Modern educational history was made last August.
A-level results were hit by the first fall in the proportion of candidates achieving the top grade for 21 years. Then a week later exactly the same thing happened with GCSEs. Twenty-four years of continuous improvement ground to a halt as the proportions of entries gaining A*, A*/A and A*-C grades all dropped.
Heads’ leaders have delivered a damning verdict on the new national curriculum, warning that it cannot be introduced in the time allotted, and that it could “create chaos” and result in lower standards.
Secondary heads have rejected the proposed curriculum’s strict focus on content and want implementation delayed beyond 2014. Primary heads say the government has reneged on its promise to provide them with room to innovate and has failed to get teachers on board.
Ofsted inspectors who have been banned from passing judgement on schools because they are not qualified teachers are to launch legal action against the watchdog for loss of earnings, TES has learned.
At least 30 inspectors, including a former policeman, a solicitor and a tax consultant, say their long and successful track records in holding schools to account make them better at grading lessons than some teachers.
The scores of people who walk along London's Bankside every day would find it hard to imagine that this was once a no-go area. Or at least a "why go?" area. Hardly a soul ventured on to Bankside, on the south bank of the River Thames, when Sam Wanamaker opened the Bear Gardens Museum in 1972 to showcase his plans for a new Globe theatre. I joined the project in 1984, and as Southwark Council had reneged on its planning agreement, the future looked bleak.
Student stress during exam season can manifest itself in some bizarre and disastrous ways. Having been a teacher for 15 years and an examinations officer for five years, Andrew Buck feels as if he has seen most of them.
Whatever you do, there never seems to be quite enough time to complete the course, so have a schedule well in advance and get organised.
I recently swapped the modernist new-build monolith of a large community comprehensive school for the ivy-decked quadrangles of an ancient boarding school.
The relationships that adults have with reality television have been deconstructed and discussed to death: the genuine one, the ironic one, the anti-ironic one, the anti-anti-ironic one and so forth. For teenagers – as my interviews with stars, producers and adolescent consumers of reality television confirmed – it is both simpler and more complex.
Teenagers are avid consumers of reality television, and are watching it in a way that is unrecognisable to previous generations: I wanted to find out if what they are consuming is harmless fun or something more damaging.
One of the government's favourite educational charities, Teach First, does not send its graduates to some of the country's most educationally disadvantaged schools, new research has found.
A study released today by the influential Institute for Fiscal Studies (IFS) has shown that Teach First would be able to better target the areas most in need if it changed the criteria it uses to select schools. At present, the charity does not send its recruits to about 100 of the poorest secondary schools in the country, the research says.
The number of English-speaking teachers working in international schools has topped 300,000 for the first time, with that number expected to grow to more than half a million in the next 10 years, new figures have revealed.
Strong economies, particularly in areas such as Asia and the Middle East, have fuelled a boom in demand for British and American-style education, leading to a sustained increase in the number of international schools overseas.
