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…. LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

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). LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

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. LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

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. LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

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. LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

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.LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

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.LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

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. LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

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-teachersLISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

With 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, showed that England was ranked 4th out of 43 participating countries when assessing the reading skills of 9 and 10-year-olds. Such an impressive performance inevitably attracted plenty of praise, so what exactly was behind the rise in England’s ranking from 8th in 2016 to 4th in 2021? Are there any reasons to be slightly cautious about England’s level of performance? And what do the PIRLS rankings tell us, if anything, about best practice in the classroom? Our guests today are Tarjinder Gill, the Associate Director of Research and Pedagogy for Primary at Outwood Grange Academies Trust, and Kathy Rastle, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

In 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 to abolish university tuition fees in England, saying it was necessary to “move on” from the idea because of the economic situation facing the country. So how did Labour end up here? Was Keir Starmer’s announcement a surprise or simply a political inevitability? Do current and future students actually want Labour to scrap tuition fees? And where should the Labour Party go next after abandoning their previous plans? Our guests today are Debbie McVitty, the editor of Wonkhe – a higher education news site, and Gordon McKenzie, the CEO of GuildHE - which represents 60 smaller specialist universities and colleges.LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

Covid 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 affecting pupils at home that could in turn be affecting their attendance at school? Why have pupil absences risen in some schools but not others? And what can schools, parents and government do to reduce the rates of pupil absence in the near future?Our guests today are Margaret Mulholland, the Special Needs & Inclusion specialist at the Association of School and College Leaders, and Ellie Costello, the director of Square Peg, a parent-led group that focuses on the barriers to school attendance.LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

As 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 role in future. To delve into the upsides and downsides of the use of written exams, we have brought together two guests who can offer very different perspectives on the future of assessment in England. Dr David James is a Deputy Headteacher and regular writer on education issues, and Dr Amelia Peterson is Head of Learning and Teaching at The London Interdisciplinary School. You can read a summary of 'Examining Exams' or download a copy here:https://www.edsk.org/publications/examining-exams/LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

In 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 growing well before we hit March because in February two new reports were published that both raised serious questions about whether we can trust the judgements made by Ofsted inspectors when they visit schools. Our guests today are the authors of those two reports. First, Dr Sam Sims from the Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities at UCL will be taking us through the new research paper that he and his two co-authors have published on the impact of Ofsted inspectors on the outcome of an Ofsted inspection. And second, Steve Rollett, the Deputy Chief Executive of the Confederation of School Trusts, will be outlining the main conclusions from their new discussion papers about the future of Ofsted.Paper from Sam Sims and colleagues: https://eprints.soton.ac.uk/473908/1/WP_Inspector_Effects_FINAL_020223.pdfPaper from Steve Rollett: https://cstuk.org.uk/knowledge/guidance-and-policy/cst-discussion-paper-reforming-inspection-10-proposals/  LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

On 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 proposed replacing the current apprenticeship levy with a Growth and Skills Levy. So what do we know about the Growth and Skills Levy? How might employers react to a new levy system? And when the current levy has become a major source of frustration for many employers, what would a Growth and Skills Levy have to do to avoid the same fate? Our guests today are Kate Shoesmith, Deputy CEO at the Recruitment & Employment Confederation, or REC, and Kevin Rowan, the Head of Organisation, Services and Learning at the TUC, the umbrella body for almost 50 trade unions.LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

Doctors, 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 level, which inevitably caused some disruption for schools and their pupils. So, looking back at this spring term, what do we know about why the strikes took place and whether they could have been avoided? What have parents and the wider public made of the teacher strikes? And are we still heading for more strike action after the Easter holidays? Our guests today are Niamh Sweeney, the Deputy General Secretary of the National Education Union (or NEU) - the largest education union in the UK - and Ed Dorrell, a director at the consultancy Public First and former journalist.  LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

The 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, or perhaps the reintroduction, of universal work experience for secondary school pupils. So would bringing back compulsory work experience be a good idea for pupils and schools? Would employers be willing to offer schools enough placements to deliver this proposal? And when schools are battling on so many other fronts, have teachers and headteachers got the time and energy to take on this challenge? We are joined today by Dr Aveek Bhattacharya, the Research Director at the Social Market Foundation and co-author of their new report, and Dr Elnaz Kashef, the Head of Research and Policy at Speakers 4 Schools, a social mobility charity that links young people to leading speakers and employers. LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

In 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 desire to increase this proportion seemed to generate more questions than answers.  Did he mean maths or numeracy? Would it only apply to school pupils, but not those in college or on anapprenticeship? How much will it cost, and who will teach the extra maths lessons needed to realise his ambition? To delve into these tricky policy questions, we are joined today by Sarah Waite, the chief executive of Get Further – a charity that provides tutors for students retaking GCSE English or maths in further education - and Jack Worth, an education economist at the National Foundation for Educational Research. LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

Almost 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. Just seven months later in December, the Schools Bill was dead, having encountered fierce opposition from representatives of both main political parties. So where did it go wrong for the Schools Bill? Did the critics of the government’s plans have a point, or was the government on the right track all along? And what could and should happen next after the Bill’s demise?  Our guests today are Leora Cruddas, the Chief Executive of the Confederation of School Trusts (or CST), and Joe Hallgarten, the Chief Executive of the Centre for Education and Youth.LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org

Despite 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 change on a significant scale – with the then Education Secretary Gavin Williamson describing the White Paper as a “blueprint for the future”. So has the FE White Paper delivered much in the two years since its publication? Did it have the right ideas to start with? And have the challenges facing the FE sector changed since 2021? Our guests today are Jo Maher, the Principal & CEO of Loughborough College, and Darren Hankey, the Principal of Hartlepool College of Further Education,LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON iTUNEShttps://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/inside-your-ed/id1591570847LISTEN OR SUBSCRIBE ON SPOTIFYhttps://open.spotify.com/show/10kt0KmtNRUo4kZ6Xk1ROKFIND OUT MORE ABOUT EDSKhttps://www.edsk.org