Here are links to some of this week’s education-related news:
Schools:
- New professional standards for teachers in England say they must show tolerance and respect for the rights of others and not undermine “fundamental British values”. Read the official DfE announcement here.
- Comprehensive schools in Wales will be placed into performance bands from this autumn.
- The gap between the poorest pupils and their better-off peers in struggling schools in England is wider than in other schools, research suggests.
- Schools need to give more support to disadvantaged pupils, according to inspectors in Wales.
- One in five primary school pupils could be forced to move out of an inner London borough, an unpublished council study of housing benefit changes has revealed.
- A generation of boys has been let down by the decline of single-sex classrooms, according to a leading headmaster.
Exams and Standards:
- More than 1,000 head teachers in England have raised concerns about problems in the marking of this year’s primary school Sats tests.
- The exams watchdog claims that a lapse in due process was “an issue in more than one of the errors” in this year’s public examinations.
- An online entrepreneur says that poor spelling is costing the UK millions of pounds in lost revenue for internet businesses.
Behaviour:
- School inspectors in England are to carry out unannounced visits where there are concerns about behaviour. Read the official announcement on the Ofsted site.
- Teachers are being told to use force to physically control unruly pupils under a back-to-basics crackdown on bad behaviour in schools. Read the DfE’s statement about this here.
- The BBC also showed a programme this week which used hidden cameras to record the behaviour of primary school children in Leicester, which you can watch online for the next few days. This article in the Telegraph has reviewed the programme.
- The NASUWT teachers’ union says a lack of parental support is a major problem behind pupils’ lack of discipline.
- Japan is at the top of a pupil behaviour league table which also showed that pupils in the UK were better behaved than the international average.
- The way in which pupils in England are judged to be “persistent truants” is being tightened from October. Read the official announcement from the DfE here.
Universities:
- There will be no large increases in university tuition fees for students starting courses in 2012 in Northern Ireland, the first and deputy first ministers have confirmed.
Other News:
- Indiana is the latest US state which will not require its schoolchildren to learn joined-up, or cursive, writing.
- Children are running away from home at a younger age, putting themselves at risk, a children’s charity says.
- The winners of this year’s TES Schools Awards received their trophies at a gala lunch in central London.
Next week’s Teaching Events include:
- 2nd to 24th July - Tour de France
- 16th to 31st July - Festival of British Archaeology
