Inside Your Ed
63 episodes - English - Latest episode: 9 days ago -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. You can find out more about EDSK at edsk.org or on Twitter @EDSKthinktank.
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Episodes
Should oracy play a greater role in primary and secondary education?
April 10, 2024 05:00 - 30 minutes - 20.7 MB“It’s not just a skill for learning, it’s also a skill for life. Not just for the workplace, also for working out who you are – for overcoming shyness or disaffection, anxiety or doubt – or even just for opening up more to our friends and family. We don’t do enough of that as a society, and I’m as guilty as anyone, but wouldn’t that be something precious for our children to aim for? I think so.” Those words from Keir Starmer in July last year were how he described the importance of oracy. ...
Why adding VAT to private school fees is more complicated than it sounds
March 26, 2024 05:00 - 31 minutes - 21.6 MBIn 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 investigatio...
How and why have 'academy schools' evolved over the past quarter of a century?
March 14, 2024 05:00 - 42 minutes - 29.3 MBOn 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 r...
Are universities facing a 'financial crisis'?
February 28, 2024 04:00 - 36 minutes - 25.3 MBExistential crisis - at risk of insolvency - looming financial crisis - ticking time bomb - bankruptcy. Newspaper headline writers have certainly not been holding back in recent months as they try to describe the predicament that UK universities apparently find themselves in. Then again, with a General Election on the way, universities and other higher education (or HE) providers are not going to be the only educational institutions hoping to secure more money from a future government. ...
Should we rethink how we talk about (and measure) social mobility?
February 14, 2024 05:00 - 33 minutes - 23.3 MBWith 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...
Is the switch from paper to digital exams finally underway?
February 01, 2024 05:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MB“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 ex...
Would the 'Advanced British Standard' improve 16-19 education?
January 17, 2024 05:00 - 37 minutes - 26.1 MBAlmost 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 Stand...
Are 'challenger' institutions in HE challenging the status quo?
January 05, 2024 05:00 - 33 minutes - 23.4 MBWelcome 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...
Is there a trade-off between apprenticeship quantity and quality?
December 13, 2023 05:00 - 38 minutes - 26.3 MBIt 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...
Time to radically reform the way that we fund Higher Education?
November 29, 2023 05:00 - 48 minutes - 33.1 MBEver 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 Ma...
Is Labour's 'Early Years' review asking the right questions?
November 15, 2023 05:00 - 35 minutes - 24.5 MBRegular 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 ...
Reducing teachers' workload - easier than it sounds?
November 02, 2023 05:00 - 35 minutes - 24.7 MBIf 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 ...
What was the best new policy to emerge from the Labour and Conservative Party conferences?
October 14, 2023 05:00 - 35 minutes - 24.7 MBThis year’s party conferences could be the last big gatherings before the next General Election, so it was the perfect opportunity for the Conservative Party and Labour Party to set out their respective plans. That said, the challenges facing the two parties are very different. Can the Conservative Party convince voters that they are still the right people to oversee the education system after 13 years in power? And can the Labour Party convince voters that their ideas would improve the s...
Pupil wellbeing: what is it, and can we actually measure it?
September 27, 2023 05:00 - 30 minutes - 21.2 MBIt has not been a great three and a half years to be a school pupil. The pandemic, repeated openings and closures of schools, illness and absences, exams disappearing then reappearing – it has clearly been a difficult time for many children and young people. In response, there have been numerous calls to prioritise pupil wellbeing as much as academic progress in the aftermath of the pandemic, given the disruption over the last few years. But do we all agree on what pupil wellbeing means? ...
Should we welcome rising state school admissions to Oxbridge?
September 14, 2023 05:00 - 40 minutes - 28.1 MBThe annual cycle of school and college students applying to university, sitting their summer exams and being awarded their grades in August finally returned to normal this year after the severe disruption to delivering and grading exams caused by the pandemic. But a recent news story shows that some things in our university application system have evidently not returned to business as usual. Earlier this year, it was announced that Lucy Cavendish College at Cambridge University had becom...
Is 'ed tech' heading in the right or wrong direction?
August 31, 2023 05:00 - 42 minutes - 29.4 MBWelcome back to Inside Your Ed - I hope you all had a good summer. Just as the summer break was getting underway in late July, you may have missed a new report published by UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations, which investigated the use of education technology, or ed tech, around the world. The report’s findings were quite startling, as they discovered that “there is little robust evidence on digital technology’s added value in education [and] a lot of the evidence comes from those t...
Is it boom or gloom for young people in the labour market?
July 12, 2023 05:00 - 34 minutes - 24 MBThe early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread predictions of a catastrophic situation for young people in terms of unemployment and lost earnings. However, although we did see a rise in youth unemployment by the middle of 2020, it never reached the scale of job losses that had been feared by many politicians and economists. In the middle of 2023, it could hardly feel more different, with newspapers having spent most of this year running stories about record low levels of une...
Is behaviour in schools getting better or worse?
June 29, 2023 05:00 - 37 minutes - 26 MBIt has often been said that school teachers should be called superheroes for heading into classrooms every day across the country to try to improve the lives and prospects of children and young people. But every superhero has a weakness, and a new book released at the start of June says that bad behaviour in the classroom can be like kryptonite to an unprepared teacher. By coincidence, the Department for Education has just released their first ever national behaviour survey covering the ...
Has England just become a 'reading superpower'?
June 15, 2023 05:00 - 35 minutes - 24.3 MBWith widespread strike action already underway across the education system and with so many institutions in need of more staff and more money, things can understandably feel a little gloomy. Even so, a story that hit the headlines last month provided a welcome bit of good news. May 16th saw the release of the latest results from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study – known as PIRLS. It is conducted every five years and the 2021 data, which was delayed by the pandemic, showe...
Labour will not scrap tuition fees, so what should they do instead?
June 01, 2023 04:00 - 36 minutes - 25.1 MBIn the world of education and politics more broadly, we are all used to seeing politicians making major announcements and getting plenty of media coverage as a result. That makes it even more noteworthy when a politician gets plenty of media coverage for announcing that they don’t actually have a policy at all. And so it was that Keir Starmer, leader of the Labour Party, found himself hitting the headlines at the start of May for announcing that he had ditched their longstanding commitment...
What is behind the recent rise in pupil absence rates?
May 18, 2023 05:00 - 39 minutes - 27.4 MBCovid may no longer be forcing schools to close or requiring pupils to self-isolate at home but there are still a worrying number of empty desks in schools. Both government datasets and independent sources have confirmed that there has been a dramatic increase in pupil absences over the past year. In fact, the situation has got so bad that it is being described as the ‘new epidemic for schools’. So what exactly is happening here? Is COVID still causing widespread illness? Is something affe...
Has the time come to say 'time is up' to written exams?
May 04, 2023 05:00 - 36 minutes - 25 MBAs always, the month of May signals the beginning of exam season, with students around the country facing various challenges such as GCSEs and A-levels. Given the high-profile nature of these tests, EDSK has just published a brand new report called ‘Examining exams’, in which we looked in detail at why written exams have come to dominate the assessment landscape and also, perhaps more importantly, whether any other form of assessment such as coursework could and should be given a greater r...
Two reports raise questions about the future of Ofsted
April 19, 2023 05:00 - 46 minutes - 31.8 MBIn March this year, the news that headteacher Ruth Perry had taken her own life caused a huge storm both within and outside the teaching profession after Ruth’s family claimed that a recent Ofsted inspection had contributed to her death. In the weeks since this news emerged, a row has erupted between government and unions about whether Ofsted inspections should be paused, or possibly scrapped altogether, in the wake of this tragic incident. However, the pressure on Ofsted was in fact gro...
Is it time to replace the apprenticeship levy with a 'Growth and Skills Levy'?
April 05, 2023 05:00 - 41 minutes - 28.4 MBOn April 6th 2023, the apprenticeship levy celebrates its sixth birthday. The question now is whether the levy will get the chance to celebrate many more birthdays in future. The levy is essentially a payroll tax of 0.5 per cent for any UK employer with an annual wage bill of over £3 million, with the total pot of levy contributions funding the entire apprenticeship system for both large and small organisations. Last year, the Labour Party decided that it was time to change course and p...
Why did teachers go on strike, and are there more strikes to come?
March 22, 2023 05:00 - 31 minutes - 22 MBDoctors, nurses, train drivers, ambulance drivers, postal workers, university academics – the list of professions that have gone on strike since the start of 2023 is as broad as it is deep. On that basis, the recent strike action by teachers has certainly not come as a surprise. Even before the end of last year, teacher and headteacher unions were warning of huge discontent among their members. Across February and March, six days of strike action took place at a regional and national lev...
Should we bring back work experience for school pupils?
March 09, 2023 05:00 - 39 minutes - 27 MBThe decision in 2012 to remove the duty on schools to arrange a work experience placement for all 14 to 16-year-olds was perhaps not one of the most high-profile changes made by then Education Secretary Michael Gove. Even so, it generated plenty of grumbling at the time, with the British Chambers of Commerce later describing the decision as ‘careless’. Over a decade later, the Social Market Foundation – a centrist think tank – has just published a new report calling for the introduction,...
Should we bring back compulsory work experience for school pupils?
March 09, 2023 05:00 - 39 minutes - 27 MBThe decision in 2012 to remove the duty on schools to arrange a work experience placement for all 14 to 16-year-olds was perhaps not one of the most high-profile changes made by then Education Secretary Michael Gove. Even so, it generated plenty of grumbling at the time, with the British Chambers of Commerce later describing the decision as ‘careless’. Over a decade later, the Social Market Foundation – a centrist think tank – has just published a new report calling for the introduction,...
Is 'compulsory maths to age 18' a sensible and achievable goal?
February 23, 2023 05:00 - 33 minutes - 23.2 MBIn a cost of living crisis and with widespread strike action taking place across the education sector, it is always going to be difficult for the government to build momentum behind any new policy ideas. That said, there is one proposal that the Prime Minister Rishi Sunak appears particularly keen on: an ambition for all pupils to study maths until the age of 18. As it stands, around half of 16 to 19-year-olds in England study some form of maths after age 16, yet the Prime Minister’s des...
The Schools Bill is dead - what happened, and what now?
February 09, 2023 06:00 - 38 minutes - 26.7 MBAlmost exactly a year ago, EDSK released an episode of this podcast about what the Department for Education should put into their upcoming Schools White Paper – which would set out the government’s plans to reform the state school system in England. The White Paper was then published in March 2022, and in May some of the plans in the White Paper were converted into the Schools Bill – which was essentially the new legislation required to implement a number of the government’s reforms. Jus...
Has the 2021 FE White Paper made a difference to the FE sector?
January 25, 2023 06:00 - 39 minutes - 27.2 MBDespite all the turmoil in our education system since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, there have been occasional glimpses of long-term policymaking at the Department for Education. One of the best examples of this is the White Paper in January 2021 that set out a large package of reforms to Further Education, or FE, in England. Like schools, colleges are used to being buffeted around by seemingly endless announcements from politicians, but the FE White Paper tried to bring about chang...
Which think tank has the best plan to fix our childcare system?
January 13, 2023 07:00 - 41 minutes - 28.2 MBAt the start of 2023, the cost of living crisis is still dominating the news. In recent months, the government has chosen to spend billions of pounds on reducing energy bills to ease the financial pressures on households. However, ministers have paid much less attention to another significant strain on many families’ budgets: the cost of childcare. In the UK, over a quarter of parents’ joint income is now spent on childcare – around three times higher than the average across developed co...
Two think tanks try to fix our childcare system
January 13, 2023 07:00 - 41 minutes - 28.2 MBAt the start of 2023, the cost of living crisis is still dominating the news. In recent months, the government has chosen to spend billions of pounds on reducing energy bills to ease the financial pressures on households. However, ministers have paid much less attention to another significant strain on many families’ budgets: the cost of childcare. In the UK, over a quarter of parents’ joint income is now spent on childcare – around three times higher than the average across developed co...
Is the government still interested in reforming Higher Education?
December 14, 2022 08:00 - 38 minutes - 26.5 MBThanks to a turbulent few months in British politics, it is easy to forget that earlier this year the government announced a sweeping set of reforms to the Higher Education system in England that could have a significant impact on both students and institutions. However, two Prime Ministers later at the end of 2022, the policy environment has changed dramatically. In the Chancellor’s Autumn Statement in November, universities were barely mentioned. What’s more, those sweeping reforms fro...
Why are so many apprentices dropping out of their training?
December 01, 2022 06:00 - 37 minutes - 25.8 MBOn the 27th of November 2012, the then Coalition Government published a major review of the apprenticeship system in England, which had been led by the entrepreneur Doug Richard – hence the title ‘the Richard Review’. The Review put forward a wide range of reforms to the design, delivery and funding of apprenticeships – all of which were intended to raise the quality, and eventually the quantity, of apprenticeships. On the 28th of November 2022, almost exactly ten years after the Richard ...
How do we prevent so many apprentices from dropping out of their training?
December 01, 2022 06:00 - 37 minutes - 25.8 MBOn the 27th of November 2012, the then Coalition Government published a major review of the apprenticeship system in England, which had been led by the entrepreneur Doug Richard – hence the title ‘the Richard Review’. The Review put forward a wide range of reforms to the design, delivery and funding of apprenticeships – all of which were intended to raise the quality, and eventually the quantity, of apprenticeships. On the 28th of November 2022, almost exactly ten years after the Richard ...
What does the future hold for private schools in England?
November 16, 2022 08:00 - 42 minutes - 29.2 MB“We shall withdraw charitable status from private schools and all their other public subsidies and tax privileges. We will also charge VAT on the fees paid to such schools” said the Labour Party manifesto. In 1983. Here we are 40 years and many changes of government later with the Labour Party yet again calling for major changes to the way that private schools are treated. Government-funded schools are certainly under immense financial strain, as we discussed in our previous podcast epis...
Why are teachers and headteachers on the verge of strike action?
November 03, 2022 08:00 - 40 minutes - 27.9 MBAs you have probably noticed, the Government has been going through Education Secretaries at quite a rate – with five people having held the post since July of this year. Given the chaotic political landscape in recent months, it is easy to forget that back in July, an important announcement was made about teacher pay. In effect, teachers and school leaders were offered a pay rise of between 5 and 9 per cent. Far from being welcomed, the pay offer was widely criticised by those in the prof...
Is enough progress being made with mental health support in schools?
October 19, 2022 06:00 - 42 minutes - 29.3 MB“I want children and young people to have access to mental health support in schools.” said Liz Truss during her campaign for the Conservative Party leadership this summer. Unfortunately the Prime Minister is having to deal with a few other matters at the moment, but that does not detract from how serious the issue of mental health has become. Approximately one in seven young people aged 11 to 19 in England experience at least one diagnosed disorder, with the most common being emotional ...
How many education policies emerged from this year's party conferences?
October 07, 2022 06:00 - 43 minutes - 30.2 MBIn some years, the political party conference season from mid September to early October can pass largely without incident. This year, party conference season was a bit of a rollercoaster. To kick things off, the Liberal Democrat conference didn’t happen at all, as it would have clashed with the Queen’s funeral. Then came the Labour Party conference in Liverpool, which had a spring in its step as it began to flesh out what a future Labour government may offer. And finally we had the Co...
What is sitting in the new Education Secretary's in-tray?
September 08, 2022 06:00 - 43 minutes - 30.2 MBThe “education prime minister” was how Liz Truss described herself during her leadership campaign this summer, and she offered plenty of proposals for how she would change things from primary schools up to universities. To help deliver her education reforms, Kit Malthouse has been appointed as Education Secretary – the fourth person to take on this role in the last 12 months. Although I’m sure everyone is now hoping for greater stability at the Department for Education, the rapidly chan...
What were the major headlines from the 2022 exam season?
August 26, 2022 07:00 - 38 minutes - 26.3 MBTo say that the last two years of public examination results have been controversial would be an understatement. In 2020, many students’ final grades were set by an algorithm, only for the government to change its mind and hand out the grades that teachers had awarded their students in the first place. In 2021, the government walked away from the process altogether and allowed schools and colleges to determine what grades each student should receive, leading to some dramatic grade inflat...
Is the government's COVID recovery plan having the desired effect?
August 05, 2022 06:00 - 44 minutes - 30.4 MB“After schools shut their gates on Friday afternoon they will remain closed until further notice. This will be for all children, except for those of key workers and for children who are the most vulnerable.” So said former Education Secretary Gavin Williamson on Wednesday 18th March 2020. Most pupils eventually returned to school in September of that year after six months out of the classroom, only for more closures to follow in January 2021. Even though many pupils have now been at s...
Should teaching be less art and more science?
July 14, 2022 09:00 - 41 minutes - 28.7 MBPerhaps one of the most enduring debates in the world of teaching is the question of whether teaching is an art or science. In recent weeks, not one but two new books have made a strong case for placing a greater emphasis on the science of teaching. At the beginning of June, Ross McGill – the founder of Teacher Toolkit and probably the most followed teacher on Twitter – published a book called ‘The Teacher Toolkit Guide to Memory’. Then later in June, Paul Kirschner, Emeritus Professor...
Is the government right to reform qualifications for 16 to 19-year-olds?
June 29, 2022 05:00 - 41 minutes - 28.5 MBYou don’t often see teaching unions, schools, colleges, universities and education charities publicly join forces to resist a new government policy, but the debate over the future of qualifications for 16 to 19-year-olds in England has done just that. In 2016 when the government published their plans for T-levels, the new technical qualification for 16 to 19-year-olds, it raised an obvious question: what would happen to all the vocational and technical courses that were already in place? ...
Will the government's SEND proposals improve the lives of pupils and families?
June 16, 2022 06:00 - 43 minutes - 29.7 MBAt the end of March, the government published two significant documents in the space of two days. First came the government’s plans for the future of the state school system in England, which grabbed plenty of media attention. Next came their new consultation on how to improve the support available to children and young people with special educational needs and disabilities (or SEND for short), which may not have hit as many national headlines but it could end up being far more consequent...
Do we need to overhaul careers education in schools and colleges?
June 06, 2022 06:00 - 43 minutes - 30 MBA Greek philosopher once said that “change is the only constant in life.” I’m sure that rings true for anyone working in careers education in England over the past decade. In many respects, it seems obvious that we need to provide young people with careers information, advice and guidance because they need help to find out what jobs are available, and which qualifications and courses they need to get into those jobs. Even so, the careers landscape has seen many schemes, initiatives and g...
How can we prevent young people from falling out of our education system?
May 19, 2022 07:00 - 42 minutes - 29.2 MBAs the UK economy slowly emerges from the pandemic, the government has already begun withdrawing many of the schemes that it introduced to support young people over the last two years. This includes the demise of the Kickstart programme, which subsidised jobs for young people who were unemployed, as well as the incentive payments for employers who recruited apprentices during the pandemic. But the truth is that for some young people, their difficulties are far from over. Even a return to...
Will future students win or lose from the government's plans for Higher Education?
May 05, 2022 21:00 - 41 minutes - 28.4 MBWho would have thought - you wait three years for a government response to an independent review of the Higher Education system, and then two responses come along at once. Unsurprisingly, when ministers recently published their plans for the Higher Education, or HE sector, the headlines were dominated by the decision to freeze tuition fees at £9,250 for the next three years as well as some controversial changes to student loans. However, alongside those eye-catching decisions, the govern...
Is the National Tutoring Programme delivering what pupils and schools need?
April 20, 2022 21:00 - 42 minutes - 29.1 MB“Failing children and taxpayers”, “a bureaucratic nightmare”, a “spaghetti junction of funding”, “baking in deepening inequalities”, “pouring taxpayers’ money down the drain”..... Judging by these reviews, it is hard to conclude that the National Tutoring Programme in England has been a resounding success thus far. Having been announced in June 2020 as part of the government’s COVID recovery efforts, the National Tutoring Programme, or NTP, began operating in November of that same year. ...
What have we learned after five years of the apprenticeship levy?
April 06, 2022 06:00 - 45 minutes - 31.3 MBOne of the most common criticisms of politicians and policymakers is that they keep chopping and changing between different policies, making it hard for any idea or approach to build momentum and recognition among those it is trying to reach. On that basis, perhaps we should be glad that the apprenticeship levy – which was introduced in 2017 – is still very much alive and kicking as it celebrates its fifth birthday on April 6th 2022. The levy is, in effect, a payroll tax of 0.5 per cent ...