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SEND Green Paper: how can we update the system to improve children and young people’s experiences and outcomes?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 23 September 2022
Photo: olly via Adobe Stock
23 September 2022
By Jo Van Herwegen and Miriam McBreen
Children and young people with Special Educational Needs and Disabilities (SEND) too often report negative experiences of the UK educational system, and have poorer outcomes compared to their peers.
Responding to the Department for Education’s Green Paper on the future of special educational needs and disabilities (SEND) and alternative provision (AP), we consider how provision can be improved to ensure that more children and young people have positive educational experiences, as well as better outcomes.
In the first of three blogs, we propose ways to improve standards for supporting children with SEND, both during their time in school and beyond.
First of all, standards should be established to support pupils with SEND during transitions, such as the move from primary Read the rest of this entry »
Leave policies review: getting serious about more equal parenting
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 21 September 2022
darkside-550 / Pixabay
21 September 2022
By Alison Koslowski, Peter Moss and Margaret O’Brien
In 2015, the UK government introduced Shared Parental Leave (SPL), a measure to encourage more equal parenting. It enabled mothers to transfer up to 50 of their 52 weeks of Maternity leave, and some of the associated benefit, to fathers.
A government evaluation began in 2018, but has yet to deliver. It is clear, though, that SPL has not worked. A minister, in 2017, told the House of Commons’ Women & Equalities Committee that she ‘would regard anything over 20% [take up] as very encouraging’. A new analysis by Maternity Action comes up with the discouraging news that in 2021/22, ‘take-up among an assumed 285,000 eligible fathers was just 2.8%…just 8,100 fathers’. Just 0.66% of total public expenditure on Maternity and Paternity leave went on SPL.
Experience from countries with more successful leave policies provides pointers to what has gone wrong. That experience is available in the recently published 18th annual international review on leave policies, produced by a network of experts led by Professor Alison Koslowski, director
of UCL’s Thomas Coram Research Unit. The review brings together details of parenting leaves and other support for employed parents in 49 Read the rest of this entry »
The disadvantage gap: children of austerity or children of adversity?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 6 September 2022
chezbeate / Pixabay
6 September 2022
By Neil Kaye
Last month, hundreds of thousands of young people nervously opened their GCSE results – the first time in the post-pandemic world that such exams had been sat by a full cohort of Year 11 students. Whilst the headlines focused on the apparent fall in average grades from those of the previous two years, the results also highlight a seemingly-inevitable outcome of our present education system: the persistence of a ‘disadvantage’ attainment gap.
A recent IFS report concluded that, “despite decades of policy attention, there has been virtually no change in the ‘disadvantage gap’ in GCSE attainment over the past 20 years”. Whilst some improvement has been noted, modelling by the Education Policy Institute (EPI) from before the pandemic observed that “at the current rate of progress, it would take over 500 years for this gap to close completely at the end of secondary school” (Lupton & Hayes, 2021).
So, is this gap in attainment inevitable? Is it ‘baked’ into the system? Are the policies of successive governments doomed to failure, or have they Read the rest of this entry »
Does educational disadvantage persist among children of care leavers?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 6 September 2022
6 September 2022
By Sam Parsons, Emla Fitzsimons and Ingrid Schoon
There has been persistent research evidence that care-leavers tend to have lower educational outcomes compared to their peers. But there is little knowledge about the educational experiences of their children.
Our research, presented today at the British Educational Research Association annual conference in Liverpool, finds evidence of intergenerational transmission of educational disadvantage already in the very early years (age 3 and 5) through to GCSE attainment at age 16. However, once inequalities in family socio-economic background or area deprivation and housing are controlled for, children of care-leaver mothers perform just Read the rest of this entry »
The unbroken demand for (poorly paid) teachers
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 26 August 2022
26 August 2022
By Golo Henseke and Shunyu Yang
Teacher recruitment is faltering. Despite an increase in the number of teacher trainees in 2020/21, schools anticipate severe staffing challenges for the upcoming academic year.
How did we get here?
This is the second post in a two-part blog series on the teaching profession using data from online job vacancies. The first post investigated job skill requirements, how they have changed since 2012, and how they relate to pay. This blog tracks changes in the demand for and pay of teachers since Read the rest of this entry »
What does the National Reference Test tell us about achievement in maths and English over time?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 25 August 2022
25 August 2022
By John Jerrim
Congratulations to all the young people who got their GCSE results today.
While the mainstream media attention will likely be showing lots of pictures of Year 11s hugging or other such images (Teacher Tapp bingo anyone?) I am going to give my first impression of results from the latest National Reference Test – which were also published today.
What is the National Reference Test?
Since 2017, Ofqual has tested a large sample of Year 11s in English and mathematics around February/March time – just a few months before their Read the rest of this entry »
Did independent schools really ‘fiddle’ their A-Level grades more than other schools in 2021?
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 23 August 2022
23 August 2022
By John Jerrim
It’s August. And that can mean only one thing – results season is back!
Of course, when A-Level results were released last Thursday, one specific thing grabbed the headline – the sharp fall in 2022 grades compared to 2020 and 2021.
This was entirely predictable. And, actually, wasn’t that newsworthy. Ofqual told us that that 2022 grades would sit midway between those awarded in 2019 and 2021 almost a year ago.
But what also caught a lot of people’s attention was how the fall in grades differed between different groups and, in particular, Read the rest of this entry »
IOE at 120: knowledge, power and social class – a closer look at the Sociology of Education, 1972–1982
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 17 August 2022
Basil Bernstein, Professor of the Sociology of Education, 1967-90; Karl Mannheim Chair of Sociology of Education, 1983-90.
17 August 2022
This blog is the eighth in a series of 12 exploring each decade in IOE’s history in the context of the education and society of the times. Find out more about our 120th anniversary celebrations on our website, and follow us on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook and LinkedIn to keep up with everything that’s happening.
The 1970s was a period of change and excitement but ultimate disappointment for sociologists of education. Internal divisions within the field and external political developments would change the discipline irrevocably. This meant that the work of IOE’s most eminent scholar, Basil Bernstein, would only later enjoy the influence it deserved.
In 1965 Basil Bernstein was promoted to be the first Professor of the Sociology of Education at IOE, and those of us who subsequently joined his department hoped that his highly original research on social class and language codes might be the basis for how the discipline would develop. However, for all its theoretical sophistication, his early work on language became, at best, an outrider to the peculiarly English obsession with the educability of working-class children and its correlation with their persistent low attainment at school. Despite Bernstein’s own powerful Read the rest of this entry »
Thinking of becoming a teacher? These are the top skills employers are looking for
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 16 August 2022
16 August 2022
By Golo Henseke and Shunyu Yang
Excellent, highly skilled teachers are crucial for quality education – as this year’s round of exam results highlight once again. However, while the critical role of teachers on student outcomes has received a great deal of attention, less is known about how schools design teacher jobs and what skills they seek to enable excellent teaching.
This blog is the first post in a two-part series on the teaching profession, drawing on a large number of job adverts between 2012 and 2020. This first post looks at skills requirements in teacher vacancies, how they have changed since 2012, and how they relate to pay.
The analysis shows: First, skills requirements rose. Second, softs have become more important. Third, in 2020, employers would pay a premium for specialist expertise, people-management and cognitive skills – but IT skills were not highly valued, despite most teaching going online during Read the rest of this entry »
We need more research about the South, from the South
By Blog Editor, IOE Digital, on 4 August 2022
Mainstream media barely reported the election of Francia Márquez, an Afro-Colombian woman from the bottom of the economic hierarchy, as Colombian vice-president.
4 August 2022
If we are serious about decolonising education, we must prioritise research from the South, and fund it properly.
‘Decolonising’ academia means challenging the dominance of knowledge produced by historically privileged contexts and groups, and it is a trend that has taken higher education by storm. In the last year alone, I noticed numerous conferences, workshops, seminars, projects and reading groups, all focused on decolonising education, psychology, curricula and reading lists, research methods and ethics, teaching and learning.
At IOE’s Department of Psychology and Human Development, we have just set up an ‘epistemic justice working group’ to help us address the power imbalances between North and South in knowledge production and sharing, by reflecting on our curricula, teaching practice, and research. It is important to clarify that ‘North’ and ‘South’ do not necessarily denote geographical location. Instead, the ‘South’ is a metaphor for spaces historically characterised by inequality, poverty, and economic, political and cultural disadvantage.
In this post, I argue that these decolonisation-themed activities will remain empty rhetoric until we are prepared to see the South as of equal value Read the rest of this entry »
