“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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“It’s not just a skill for learning, it’s also a skill for life. Not just for the workplace, also for working out who you are – for overcoming shyness or disaffection, anxiety or doubt – or even just for opening up more to our friends and family. We don’t do enough of that as a society, and I’m as guilty as anyone, but wouldn’t that be something precious for our children to aim for? I think so.” 

Those words from Keir Starmer in July last year were how he described the importance of oracy. In the same speech, he announced that the Labour Party wants to give every primary school new funding to “invest in world-class early language interventions, and help our children find their voice.” 

Which is all well and good, but what exactly is oracy, why does it matter, how do you teach oracy, and is oracy as important as literacy and numeracy or is it something different altogether? 

To help answer these questions we are joined today by Geoff Barton, who was until very recently the General Secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, or ASCL for short. Not only is Geoff a former English teacher and headteacher, he has also just been announced as the Chair of a new Commission on Oracy Education. 

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In the current education policy landscape, the debate over adding VAT to independent school fees is by far the most high-profile dividing line between Labour and the Conservatives.

That said, the question of what would actually happen in practice if Labour won the next election and tried to implement this policy has received remarkably little attention in political circles.

That is why at the beginning of March, EDSK published a new report that outlined the findings from our investigation into the obstacles that a future government may face if it tried to add VAT to school fees. 

This podcast episode will not be offering, and does not intend to offer, any legal or financial advice, but what this episode is absolutely going to offer is an important and timely insight into what VAT is, how it works and the complexity that lies beneath the surface. 

If you thought that adding 20% VAT to independent school fees would be a straightforward matter then you may well be having second thoughts by the end of this episode. 

To help us unravel some of the complexities of VAT legislation and bust a few myths along the way, our guest today is Kieran Smith, a Partner in the VAT group at Crowe, which is an audit, tax and advisory firm. Kieran has over two decades of experience working on VAT, and yes, VAT is that complicated that people can spend their entire careers working on it!

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On the 15th of March in the year 2000, then Education Secretary David Blunkett invited businesses, churches and voluntary groups to build and manage a network of "city academies", a new type of urban secondary school outside the control of local authorities. 

Little did David Blunkett, now Lord Blunkett, know that a quarter of a century later, there would be over 10,000 academy schools in England educating over half of all school pupils.

In January this year, EDSK published a major new report called ’20 years of muddling through’, in which we argued that the government has ended up running two separate state school systems – one for academies, and one for local authority schools – which is causing all sorts of problems for headteachers, parents, academy bosses and local authorities as well as government ministers. 

Rather than taking a detailed look at the present, as we did in our report, this podcast will instead look back into the past to understand the journey that the academies programme has been on since the first academy schools opened in 2002. 

Our guests today are Sir David Carter, a former headteacher, Multi Academy Trust leader and National Schools Commissioner for England, and Laura McInerney, a former teacher and editor of Schools Week and now the co-founder of TeacherTapp. 

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