Inside Your Ed

It is hard not to raise an eyebrow when a government policy is described by some as a ‘vital lifeline’ for students, while others describe the same policy as ‘demoralising’ and ‘soul destroying’.

The GCSE resits policy, which has been in place since 2014, continues to divide opinion among academics, researchers, school and college leaders and the frontline staff who support those students who must retake English and Maths GCSEs after not passing their exams first time around.

So what is the thinking behind GCSE resits? Is the current resits policy having a positive or negative impact? And are exam resits the best way to improve the English and maths skills of young people beyond age 16?

My guests are Sarah Waite, the founder and CEO of Get Further, a charity that supports students who are resitting their GCSEs, and Lee Elliot Major OBE, Professor of Social Mobility at the University of Exeter.

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Although complaints from universities about a perceived lack of funding continue to attract plenty of media attention, some very interesting shifts in policy thinking that are potentially more significant than simple questions about money are already underway.

Several countries such as Australia, Wales, Scotland and Ireland have begun to talk less about universities and colleges in isolation and instead talk more about ‘tertiary education’, with the aim of bringing universities and colleges closer together in terms of how they are funded, regulated and managed.

So why have these nations started thinking about tertiary education as a whole? What benefits could a more integrated tertiary system offer than cannot be achieved when Higher Education and Further Education, or HE and FE, are dealt with separately? And could England follow suit by building a single tertiary system in the coming years, or would it face too many obstacles along the way?

My guests are Professor Ellen Hazelkorn, Professor Emeritus at Technological University Dublin and Joint Editor of Policy Reviews in Higher Education, and Professor Ewart Keep, an emeritus professor in Education, Training and Skills at the Department of Education at Oxford University.

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Although this year’s exam season has largely passed without incident or drama, many exams and assessments throughout our education system are potentially facing their greatest ever threat in the form of ChatGPT and other artificial intelligence, or AI tools.

When freely available websites and apps can write entire essays, projects, articles, poems and stories as well as produce art and music among other things, it presents a daunting challenge to the teachers, lecturers and institutions trying to award fair and trustworthy grades. 

So what impact are ChatGPT and similar AI platforms having in schools, colleges, universities and elsewhere? Do we know how much cheating is already linked to these AI tools? And is anyone or anything ready and able to combat AI-powered cheating in future?

Our guests today are Dr Thomas Lancaster, a computer scientist at Imperial College London who has conducted research on academic integrity, cheating and plagiarism, and Jessica Hill, senior investigations and features reporter for Schools Week and FE Week.

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“Read my lips — I will bring immigration numbers down” said Keir Starmer during the recent General Election campaign.

The Labour Party election manifesto also said that “Labour will act to create a secure future for higher education”. 

In isolation, both these goals are legitimate aspirations, but when you put them together it raises an interesting policy question: how will the new government approach the issue of international students coming to the UK, as these students increase immigration numbers and also increase the income of UK universities? 

Just before the election, the Social Market Foundation, or SMF – a centrist think tank – published two reports that set out their plans to address these competing priorities. 

And here to discuss the analysis and recommendations in these reports, we are joined today by Jonathan Thomas, a senior fellow at the SMF. 

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Sometimes a UK General Election can be a tense and nervy affair with little indication of which party will prevail. The upcoming election on July 4th is not one of those situations, with the Labour Party miles ahead in the polls and set to form the next government.

However, for today we are put the polls to one side and dive into what we’ve seen and heard over the past couple of weeks from the current Conservative government and the likely next Labour government. 

Which manifesto has the boldest plans to reform our education system? Who ran towards controversial issues, and who ran away from them? And were there any great manifesto ideas that didn’t hit the headlines but could still transform the life chances of children, young people and adults? 

Our guests today are John Dickens, the editor of Schools Week, and Shane Cowen, the editor of FE Week. 

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With a General Election just weeks away, people’s thoughts are quickly turning to which education policies the next government will try to implement. 

I think it’s fair to say that decisions made over the last 14 years have not always gone down well with teachers and lecturers or the people running our schools, colleges and universities. 

But would a new set of ministers, advisors and government officials really do any better, or would they end up facing the same barriers to designing and delivering good education policies? 

A new book called Improving Education Policy Together investigates why policymaking in English education often fails to improve outcomes for children and young people, even when policies are driven by the very best of intentions. 

Our guests today are the co-authors of this new book - Nansi Ellis, who is a freelance education policy consultant and a school governor, and Gareth Conyard, who is the co-CEO of the Teacher Development Trust and a former civil servant. 

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Since the National Tutoring Programme, or NTP, was launched in 2020 to help combat the effects of the pandemic on children’s academic progress, it has provided 5 million tutoring courses to pupils of various ages at a cost of over £1 billion. 

However, these figures will not be increasing much further because the government has decided that after four years of operation, the NTP should have its funding removed and it will be closing down this August. 

So why has the government turned away from providing funding for the NTP across the country when the effects of the pandemic are still visible? Did the NTP deliver what pupils and schools needed? And if a national tutoring programme was to continue in future, should it look different from its current iteration? 

Our guests today are Susannah Hardyman, the founder and CEO of Action Tutoring, a tutoring provider, and Ben Gadsby, the Head of Policy and Research at Impetus. 

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On the 16th of May, EDSK published a new report called ‘Evolution and revolution’, in which we set out a 10-year plan for reforming primary and secondary education in England.

Our plan included, among other things, a Baccalaureate for all 14 to 18-year-olds that would bring academic, applied and technical courses together under one roof as well as everyone studying Core English and Core maths, otherwise known as literacy and numeracy, up to age 18. 

Bold as these proposals may sound, we do not pretend to be the first people to make such suggestions. In fact, two decades ago in 2004, Mike Tomlinson – now Sir Mike Tomlinson – chaired a working group for the then Labour government, which ended up proposing a Diploma for all 14 to 19-year-olds that contained many of the same ideas as EDSK’s new report. 

Our guest today is Sir Mike himself, who is perfectly placed to tell us what the Diplomas were, what benefits they were supposed to offer, and also why his proposals were never fully implemented in the months and years after the working group’s final report was published. 

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Despite the endless debates and disagreements in education policy, there are some things that we can all agree on, such as the need for a fair education system. 

However, a new report suggests that while we may agree on the need for a fair education system, we may well disagree on what fairness actually means in practice.

The report – titled Mapping the way to educational equity – offers a range of perspectives on how to define and use concepts such as equity, fairness and opportunity and it also describes a path to achieving a more equitable system in future. 

Who better to talk us through this new report than its author Loic Menzies. Loic is a visiting fellow at the Sheffield Institute of Education and a former teacher and think tank director.  We are also joined today by Jim Lauder, the Trust Assistant Principal at Dixons Academies Trust.

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This time last year, we did a podcast episode about the growing problem of pupil absences in the aftermath of the pandemic, with record numbers of children and young people failing to attend school on a regular basis. 

Since then, finding ways to reduce absences has become a priority for both main political parties in England, and numerous initiatives have been put in place by the current government to try and address the problem. 

But despite all this extra attention, and in some cases extra funding, pupil absence rates have remained stubbornly high in the current academic year. 

So what sits behind these high rates of absence? What does the research tell us about the factors behind pupil absences? And are we any closer to finding effective ways to reduce these absences both now and in future? 

Our guests today are Dr Sally Burtonshaw, an Associate Director at the consultancy Public First, and Emily Hunt, an Associate Director at the Education Policy Institute. 

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