In January 2025, I recorded an episode of Inside Your Ed titled ‘Will the debate over vocational and technical qualifications ever end?’.It is therefore rather fitting that my final podcast of 2025 will prove beyond all reasonable doubt ...

For the Higher Education, or HE sector, it may be starting to feel like one step forward is almost immediately followed by one step backward.Last year, the announcement of a rise in tuition fees in line with inflation was accompanied by ...

“Today is a landmark moment in improving the lives of children with SEND and their families. For too long, families have found themselves battling against a complex and fragmented system.”Those words from then Children and Families Minis...

The goal was evolution, not revolution, and when the final report from the Curriculum and Assessment Review, chaired by Professor Becky Francis, was published on November 5th, that is precisely what was delivered.Across primary and secon...

It is entirely normal for a Government to announce plans to reform either Higher Education (HE) or Further Education (FE). What is much less normal is a Government announcing a plan to reform HE and FE at the same time.The Post 16 Educat...

Prime Minister Keir Starmer generated plenty of headlines at the Labour Party conference in late September when he set a new target of two-thirds of young people completing some form of higher level learning beyond school or college.Rath...

If you were looking for reasons to be optimistic about the future of Higher Education, or HE, in England, the last academic year was a rather disappointing spectacle.The inflation-linked rise in tuition fees towards the end of 2024 was s...

When Ofsted, the school and college inspectorate in England, launched a consultation earlier this year on their new framework for conducting inspections, the response from teachers and leaders was pretty damning.That’s not to say that an...

Welcome back to Inside Your Ed – I hope you all had a great summer.For many people working in politics, the summer break offers a gentler pace of life while most MPs and government ministers are away from Westminster. However, one former...

Since T-levels were introduced in 2020 as new technical qualifications for 16 to 19-year-olds, they have rarely been out of the spotlight.In the last two years alone we have had major reports on T-levels from the Education Select Committ...

On Thursday 4th July 2024, the Labour Party won a resounding victory in the UK General Election.In their election-winning manifesto, Labour’s number one pledge within their mission to ‘break down barriers to opportunity’ was to recruit 6...

On June 11th, the Chancellor Rachel Reeves announced the result of the Government’s Spending Review, which confirmed the budgets that each government department will have until 2028.The Department for Education, or DfE’s budget will rise...

I think most people would agree that England’s rise up the international education league tables over the past decade or so has been a welcome sign of progress.But when government funding is now in such short supply and is likely to rema...

Since the COVID pandemic, many jobs have been transformed by the dramatic expansion of hybrid and remote working.A recent survey by the education charity Teach First found that 80% of young people now want some element of hybrid work in ...

Shortly before £1,000 tuition fees were first introduced in 1998, a landmark report by Sir Ron Dearing had pointed out that employers were also “major beneficiaries of higher education through the skills which those with higher education qualif...

No-one is surprised when a newly elected government decides to create new initiatives and new organisations to signify a change in direction and a break from the past.Skills England, a new agency within the Department for Education, was ...

The Curriculum and Assessment Review, which is being chaired by Professor Becky Francis, was commissioned by the Department for Education last summer and will not conclude its work until this autumn.Even so, the Review has attracted so m...

Those who work in and around the Higher Education, or HE sector, have been having a rough time if recent media headlines are anything to go by.Since the turn of the year, there has been what’s felt like a constant stream of stories about...

Seeing as the government is clearly short of spare cash, you would have thought the Department for Education investing in a new national programme to improve pupils’ outcomes would be well received.The Government recently announced over ...

Given the endless debates and disagreements about Ofsted, the school and college inspectorate in England, Ofsted’s proposed new framework for conducting inspections was never going to go unnoticed when it launched in early February to kick off ...

Shortly after the General Election in 2024, the newly elected Labour government announced a Children’s Wellbeing Bill – a new piece of legislation that set out a range of policies such as a register of children not in schools, restrictions on b...

Just before the end of 2024, the Government announced the outcome of their review of Level 3 vocational and technical qualifications, which are offered to 16 to 19-year-olds along with A-levels, apprenticeships and the new T-levels.The ...

Happy New Year and welcome back to Inside Your Ed.Regular listeners will know that this podcast usually focuses on the latest education news in England, but for my first episode of 2025 we are taking a quick trip over the Atlantic becau...

“Labour will establish a youth guarantee of access to training, an apprenticeship, or support to find work for all 18- to 21-year-olds, to bring down the number of young people who are not learning or earning.”So said the Labour Party e...

When it feels like every voter and politician has their own opinion on how to run the education system in England, wouldn’t it be nice if there was a credible, independent, evidence-led organisation that provided balanced information to politic...