The Schools' News Service

According to the government the Key Stage 3 Achievement and Attainment tables for individual schools show that the percentage of pupils achieving the expected level in English and Science slightly improved in 2007, but had fallen back by one percentage point in Maths. In comparison to the figures for 1997 this means an additional 100,000 [...]

The Guardian this week carried a story about a simple but brilliant piece of hospital research.  The researchers wanted to know if an incredibly simple modification to what people in hospitals do when working with intravenous drips could cut infection rates. Please don’t give up on me at this point – there is a real [...]

 Slowly, very slowly, the concept of efficiency is creeping into education.   Three years ago a new course for school administrators (the Certificate in Educational Administration) was launched, which focussed very much on efficiency in the school office.   Then the government set up the Financial Management in Schools programme, and the Value for Money Unit. Back in [...]

The amount of mail being received by schools towards the end of last year was far less than most people imagine, according to a survey by Hamilton House Mailings plc. Many heads of departments received at most one direct mail advertisement per week. The survey was conducted during the Autumn Term 2007 and analysed the [...]

£21 million funding for the School Food Trust over the next three years has been announced by the Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families in England.  The aim is to drive up the quality of school food and increase take up of meals through better education for parents, children and young people. A further £2 million [...]

The network of specialist schools in England is just about complete – which means that anyone wishing to market to schools can do so according to the specialism they are interested in. Obviously if you are mailing all secondary schools and getting a decent response rate you might not want to break it down further, [...]

The full quote is Schools are free to organise and deliver the curriculum in the way that best suits their circumstances and needs.  There are no constraints relating to time allocation or organisation of subjects. They can choose to retain their existing approach to curriculum organisation whilst adopting a new approach to delivery or develop [...]

All the talk has been about closing small rural primary schools, but in fact the government is going to fund its education plans by closing secondary schools in urban areas.  This is because 10% of secondary schools have 25% spare places – making a total of 792,000 spare places out of a total number of available places of 3.2 million.  There [...]