Latest Uk education news Podcast Episodes
Why are so many pupils still absent from school?
Inside Your Ed - April 24, 2024 05:00 - 31 minutesThis time last year, we did a podcast episode about the growing problem of pupil absences in the aftermath of the pandemic, with record numbers of children and young people failing to attend school on a regular basis. Since then, finding ways to reduce absences has become a priority for both m...
Should oracy play a greater role in primary and secondary education?
Inside Your Ed - April 10, 2024 05:00 - 30 minutes“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 ...
Why adding VAT to private school fees is more complicated than it sounds
Inside Your Ed - March 26, 2024 05:00 - 31 minutesIn 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 im...
How and why have 'academy schools' evolved over the past quarter of a century?
Inside Your Ed - March 14, 2024 05:00 - 42 minutesOn 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 Lor...
Are universities facing a 'financial crisis'?
Inside Your Ed - February 28, 2024 04:00 - 36 minutesExistential 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, wit...
Should we rethink how we talk about (and measure) social mobility?
Inside Your Ed - February 14, 2024 05:00 - 33 minutesWith 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 i...
Is the switch from paper to digital exams finally underway?
Inside Your Ed - February 01, 2024 05:00 - 35 minutes“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 bar...
Would the 'Advanced British Standard' improve 16-19 education?
Inside Your Ed - January 17, 2024 05:00 - 37 minutesAlmost 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...
Are 'challenger' institutions in HE challenging the status quo?
Inside Your Ed - January 05, 2024 05:00 - 33 minutesWelcome 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 w...
Is there a trade-off between apprenticeship quantity and quality?
Inside Your Ed - December 13, 2023 05:00 - 38 minutesIt 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...
Time to radically reform the way that we fund Higher Education?
Inside Your Ed - November 29, 2023 05:00 - 48 minutesEver 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 I...
Is Labour's 'Early Years' review asking the right questions?
Inside Your Ed - November 15, 2023 05:00 - 35 minutesRegular 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 conferen...
Reducing teachers' workload - easier than it sounds?
Inside Your Ed - November 02, 2023 05:00 - 35 minutesIf 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 Workloa...
What was the best new policy to emerge from the Labour and Conservative Party conferences?
Inside Your Ed - October 14, 2023 05:00 - 35 minutesThis 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 Conser...
Pupil wellbeing: what is it, and can we actually measure it?
Inside Your Ed - September 27, 2023 05:00 - 30 minutesIt 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 numerou...
Should we welcome rising state school admissions to Oxbridge?
Inside Your Ed - September 14, 2023 05:00 - 40 minutesThe 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 tha...
Is 'ed tech' heading in the right or wrong direction?
Inside Your Ed - August 31, 2023 05:00 - 42 minutesWelcome 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...
Is it boom or gloom for young people in the labour market?
Inside Your Ed - July 12, 2023 05:00 - 34 minutesThe 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 bee...
Is behaviour in schools getting better or worse?
Inside Your Ed - June 29, 2023 05:00 - 37 minutesIt 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 b...
Has England just become a 'reading superpower'?
Inside Your Ed - June 15, 2023 05:00 - 35 minutesWith 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 th...
Labour will not scrap tuition fees, so what should they do instead?
Inside Your Ed - June 01, 2023 04:00 - 36 minutesIn 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 ...
What is behind the recent rise in pupil absence rates?
Inside Your Ed - May 18, 2023 05:00 - 39 minutesCovid 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 ye...
Has the time come to say 'time is up' to written exams?
Inside Your Ed - May 04, 2023 05:00 - 36 minutesAs 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 deta...
Two reports raise questions about the future of Ofsted
Inside Your Ed - April 19, 2023 05:00 - 46 minutesIn 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 ...
Is it time to replace the apprenticeship levy with a 'Growth and Skills Levy'?
Inside Your Ed - April 05, 2023 05:00 - 41 minutesOn 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, ...
Why did teachers go on strike, and are there more strikes to come?
Inside Your Ed - March 22, 2023 05:00 - 31 minutesDoctors, 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 th...
Should we bring back work experience for school pupils?
Inside Your Ed - March 09, 2023 05:00 - 39 minutesThe 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 Chamb...
Should we bring back compulsory work experience for school pupils?
Inside Your Ed - March 09, 2023 05:00 - 39 minutesThe 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 Chamb...
Is 'compulsory maths to age 18' a sensible and achievable goal?
Inside Your Ed - February 23, 2023 05:00 - 33 minutesIn 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 ...
The Schools Bill is dead - what happened, and what now?
Inside Your Ed - February 09, 2023 06:00 - 38 minutesAlmost 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 ...
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