“Read my lips — I will bring immigration numbers down” said Keir Starmer during the recent General Election campaign.

The Labour Party election manifesto also said that “Labour will act to create a secure future for higher education”. 

In isolation, both these goals are legitimate aspirations, but when you put them together it raises an interesting policy question: how will the new government approach the issue of international students coming to the UK, as these students increase immigration numbers and also increase the income of UK universities? 

Just before the election, the Social Market Foundation, or SMF – a centrist think tank – published two reports that set out their plans to address these competing priorities. 

And here to discuss the analysis and recommendations in these reports, we are joined today by Jonathan Thomas, a senior fellow at the SMF. 

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Sometimes a UK General Election can be a tense and nervy affair with little indication of which party will prevail. The upcoming election on July 4th is not one of those situations, with the Labour Party miles ahead in the polls and set to form the next government.

However, for today we are put the polls to one side and dive into what we’ve seen and heard over the past couple of weeks from the current Conservative government and the likely next Labour government. 

Which manifesto has the boldest plans to reform our education system? Who ran towards controversial issues, and who ran away from them? And were there any great manifesto ideas that didn’t hit the headlines but could still transform the life chances of children, young people and adults? 

Our guests today are John Dickens, the editor of Schools Week, and Shane Cowen, the editor of FE Week. 

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With a General Election just weeks away, people’s thoughts are quickly turning to which education policies the next government will try to implement. 

I think it’s fair to say that decisions made over the last 14 years have not always gone down well with teachers and lecturers or the people running our schools, colleges and universities. 

But would a new set of ministers, advisors and government officials really do any better, or would they end up facing the same barriers to designing and delivering good education policies? 

A new book called Improving Education Policy Together investigates why policymaking in English education often fails to improve outcomes for children and young people, even when policies are driven by the very best of intentions. 

Our guests today are the co-authors of this new book - Nansi Ellis, who is a freelance education policy consultant and a school governor, and Gareth Conyard, who is the co-CEO of the Teacher Development Trust and a former civil servant. 

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Since the National Tutoring Programme, or NTP, was launched in 2020 to help combat the effects of the pandemic on children’s academic progress, it has provided 5 million tutoring courses to pupils of various ages at a cost of over £1 billion. 

However, these figures will not be increasing much further because the government has decided that after four years of operation, the NTP should have its funding removed and it will be closing down this August. 

So why has the government turned away from providing funding for the NTP across the country when the effects of the pandemic are still visible? Did the NTP deliver what pupils and schools needed? And if a national tutoring programme was to continue in future, should it look different from its current iteration? 

Our guests today are Susannah Hardyman, the founder and CEO of Action Tutoring, a tutoring provider, and Ben Gadsby, the Head of Policy and Research at Impetus. 

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On the 16th of May, EDSK published a new report called ‘Evolution and revolution’, in which we set out a 10-year plan for reforming primary and secondary education in England.

Our plan included, among other things, a Baccalaureate for all 14 to 18-year-olds that would bring academic, applied and technical courses together under one roof as well as everyone studying Core English and Core maths, otherwise known as literacy and numeracy, up to age 18. 

Bold as these proposals may sound, we do not pretend to be the first people to make such suggestions. In fact, two decades ago in 2004, Mike Tomlinson – now Sir Mike Tomlinson – chaired a working group for the then Labour government, which ended up proposing a Diploma for all 14 to 19-year-olds that contained many of the same ideas as EDSK’s new report. 

Our guest today is Sir Mike himself, who is perfectly placed to tell us what the Diplomas were, what benefits they were supposed to offer, and also why his proposals were never fully implemented in the months and years after the working group’s final report was published. 

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Despite the endless debates and disagreements in education policy, there are some things that we can all agree on, such as the need for a fair education system. 

However, a new report suggests that while we may agree on the need for a fair education system, we may well disagree on what fairness actually means in practice.

The report – titled Mapping the way to educational equity – offers a range of perspectives on how to define and use concepts such as equity, fairness and opportunity and it also describes a path to achieving a more equitable system in future. 

Who better to talk us through this new report than its author Loic Menzies. Loic is a visiting fellow at the Sheffield Institute of Education and a former teacher and think tank director.  We are also joined today by Jim Lauder, the Trust Assistant Principal at Dixons Academies Trust.

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This 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 main political parties in England, and numerous initiatives have been put in place by the current government to try and address the problem. 

But despite all this extra attention, and in some cases extra funding, pupil absence rates have remained stubbornly high in the current academic year. 

So what sits behind these high rates of absence? What does the research tell us about the factors behind pupil absences? And are we any closer to finding effective ways to reduce these absences both now and in future? 

Our guests today are Dr Sally Burtonshaw, an Associate Director at the consultancy Public First, and Emily Hunt, an Associate Director at the Education Policy Institute. 

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“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. In the same speech, he announced that the Labour Party wants to give every primary school new funding to “invest in world-class early language interventions, and help our children find their voice.” 

Which is all well and good, but what exactly is oracy, why does it matter, how do you teach oracy, and is oracy as important as literacy and numeracy or is it something different altogether? 

To help answer these questions we are joined today by Geoff Barton, who was until very recently the General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, or ASCL for short. Not only is Geoff a former English teacher and headteacher, he has also just been announced as the Chair of a new Commission on Oracy Education. 

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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 podcast episode will not be offering, and does not intend to offer, any legal or financial advice, but what this episode is absolutely going to offer is an important and timely insight into what VAT is, how it works and the complexity that lies beneath the surface. 

If you thought that adding 20% VAT to independent school fees would be a straightforward matter then you may well be having second thoughts by the end of this episode. 

To help us unravel some of the complexities of VAT legislation and bust a few myths along the way, our guest today is Kieran Smith, a Partner in the VAT group at Crowe, which is an audit, tax and advisory firm. Kieran has over two decades of experience working on VAT, and yes, VAT is that complicated that people can spend their entire careers working on it!

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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 running two separate state school systems – one for academies, and one for local authority schools – which is causing all sorts of problems for headteachers, parents, academy bosses and local authorities as well as government ministers. 

Rather than taking a detailed look at the present, as we did in our report, this podcast will instead look back into the past to understand the journey that the academies programme has been on since the first academy schools opened in 2002. 

Our guests today are Sir David Carter, a former headteacher, Multi Academy Trust leader and National Schools Commissioner for England, and Laura McInerney, a former teacher and editor of Schools Week and now the co-founder of TeacherTapp. 

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Existential 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. 

So what do we know about the financial health of the HE sector? Who or what is responsible for the financial pressure that some, if not all, HE providers are experiencing? And who should be responsible for alleviating that pressure in future?  

Our guests today are Professor Jane Harrington, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, and Jess Lister, an Associate Director at the consultancy Public First. 

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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 government but acts as an independent body to promote social mobility in England, carry out research, publish annual reports on the progress being made with social mobility and provide advice to ministers on how to improve social mobility. 

As Alun has just completed his first year in the hot seat at the Social Mobility Commission, I thought now was the perfect time to get his views on some fascinating policy issues.  Where have we got to with social mobility? Do we actually know if social mobility is getting better or worse? And what would make for a really strong agenda on improving social mobility going forward? 

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“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 assessments in this country and abroad? What barriers will digital exams face in England if they are to be delivered at scale every year? And are digital exams potentially fairer than assessments done on pen and paper? 

Our guests today are Grainne Hallahan, senior analyst at the Times Educational Supplement, and Hayley White, the Vice President of Assessment, Standards and Services at Pearson who own the Edexcel exam board. 

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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 do we know so far about the Advanced British Standard? Does it look like a step in the right or wrong direction for educating 16 to 19-year-olds in England? And even if the Advanced British Standard is a good idea, is it an achievable idea? 

Our guests today are Tom Sherrington, a former teacher and headteacher and now education consultant, author and blogger, and Tim Oates CBE, Group Director of Assessment Research and Development at Cambridge Assessment.  

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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? 

Our guests today are Kat Emms, a senior researcher at the Edge Foundation, an education charity, and James Newby, president and chief executive of the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (or NMITE, for short) based in Hereford. 

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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 government succeeds in reducing the number of supposedly poor quality degrees, are there enough apprenticeships for students to choose instead? And even if there are enough apprenticeships, are they good quality apprenticeships? 

Our guests today are Alison Fuller, Professor of Vocational Education and Work at the UCL Institute of Education, and Olly Newton, executive director at the Edge Foundation, a charity that promotes vocational and technical education through a wide range of initiatives. 

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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 would students, universities and government be better or worse off if Mark’s plans were put into action? 

I’m Tom Richmond, the director of the EDSK think tank.  

And to hear more about a radical plan to reform our HE funding system, let’s go INSIDE YOUR ED…. 

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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 of Ofsted, and the former top civil servant at the Department for Education. 

So what issues will this review be investigating? Are they the right issues? And how much of a difference could a new government make in early years provision when extra funding will be very hard to come by? 

Our guests today are June O'Sullivan MBE, Chief Executive of the London Early Years Foundation, and Dr Laura Outhwaite, Principal Research Fellow at UCL's Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO). 

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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 proposals to reduce teacher’s workload and I have two expert guests who are going to tell me whether my three proposals are useful or useless. 

Our guests are Becky Allen, co-founder and Chief Analyst of the teacher survey tool Teacher Tapp and Professor of Education at the University of Brighton, and James Zuccollo, the Director for School Workforce at the Education Policy Institute. 

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 This 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 system that the Conservatives have overseen for so long? 

To talk us through the education policy announcements from the last couple of weeks, we have brought together two education experts who have plenty of experience of working alongside senior politicians in both main parties. 

My first guest is David Thomas, who was until recently an advisor at the Department for Education and is now the chief executive of Mathematics Education for Social Mobility and Excellence, and my second guest is Joe Moore, an Associate Director at Hanbury Strategy and a former Labour Party advisor. 

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It 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? Can you actually measure wellbeing in a meaningful and consistent way? And even if we do find that many pupils are indeed struggling with their wellbeing, whose job is it to address that deficit? 

Our guests today are Kirsten Colquhoun, a teacher, pastoral lead and writer on pupil wellbeing, and Ros McLellan, an Associate Professor and researcher at the University of Cambridge. 

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The 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 become the first college at the university to admit over 90% of its students from state schools, and it also received the most diverse intake in the history of the university. 

So how did Lucy Cavendish College achieve this goal? Is their greater emphasis on state school pupils a welcome boost for social mobility, or just an example of social engineering? And should we focus so much on which students get into university rather than worrying about where students end up after university?   

Our guests today are Professor Dame Madeleine Atkins, the President of Lucy Cavendish College at Cambridge University, and David Kernohan, the Deputy Editor of Wonkhe – a higher education news site.

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Welcome 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 trying to sell it.” 

When budgets are so tight across the education system in England, schools, colleges and universities will be keen to ensure that any investments in ed tech are well spent, but UNESCO’s report suggests that this may be easier said than done. 

So why is there so little evidence on the impact of ed tech? Who should decide which ed tech products will have the greatest impact on learning – frontline educators, senior leaders, government ministers or the ed tech companies themselves? And does the hype around new innovations such as ChatGPT make it easier or harder to spot when something truly valuable does come along?  

Our guests today are Jodie Lopez, an ed tech consultant and former primary school teacher, and Tony Parkin, a freelance speaker, lecturer and writer on all things ed tech.

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The 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 unemployment, firms running out of workers, wages rapidly increasing and high numbers of job vacancies. 

So has the gloom of the pandemic given way to a boom in young people’s job prospects? Are there any lingering effects of the pandemic that should still worry us? And should young people be feeling optimistic or pessimistic at the moment about their chances of finding a good well-paid job? 

Our guests today are Barry Fletcher, the Chief Executive at the Youth Futures Foundation, and Naomi Phillips, the Deputy Chief Executive at the Learning and Work Institute. 

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It 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 2021/22 academic year, which will now provide the government with regular updates on pupil behaviour in mainstream primary and secondary schools in England.

So what is the current state of behaviour in mainstream schools? Has the new survey given a positive or negative view on what’s happening in the classroom? And what can be done to better support both new and experienced teachers when it comes to spotting and addressing poor behaviour?

My guest today is Sam Strickland, who is the Principal of Duston School in Northamptonshire as well as a blogger, trainer, speaker and the author of this new book on managing behaviour in schools.

SAM'S NEW BOOK
'They Don’t Behave for Me: 50 classroom behaviour scenarios to support teachers'
https://www.johncattbookshop.com/products/they-don-t-behave-for-me-50-classroom-behaviour-scenarios-to-support-teachers

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