“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. 

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

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!

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

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. 

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

Existential crisis - at risk of insolvency - looming financial crisis - ticking time bomb -  bankruptcy.

Newspaper headline writers have certainly not been holding back in recent months as they try to describe the predicament that UK universities apparently find themselves in. 

Then again, with a General Election on the way, universities and other higher education (or HE) providers are not going to be the only educational institutions hoping to secure more money from a future government. 

So what do we know about the financial health of the HE sector? Who or what is responsible for the financial pressure that some, if not all, HE providers are experiencing? And who should be responsible for alleviating that pressure in future?  

Our guests today are Professor Jane Harrington, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Greenwich, and Jess Lister, an Associate Director at the consultancy Public First. 

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

With a General Election on the way, all eyes and ears are trained on what our politicians are saying about the future of education and skills. 

However, there are plenty of other important individuals who you won’t see in the political spotlight but are nevertheless thinking hard about how to improve the life chances of the most disadvantaged children, young people and adults. 

One such individual is Alun Francis OBE, the Principal and Chief Executive of Blackpool and The Fylde College and also the Chair of the Social Mobility Commission. 

The Commission is funded by government but acts as an independent body to promote social mobility in England, carry out research, publish annual reports on the progress being made with social mobility and provide advice to ministers on how to improve social mobility. 

As Alun has just completed his first year in the hot seat at the Social Mobility Commission, I thought now was the perfect time to get his views on some fascinating policy issues.  Where have we got to with social mobility? Do we actually know if social mobility is getting better or worse? And what would make for a really strong agenda on improving social mobility going forward? 

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

“The arrival of on-screen and online high stakes assessment has been predicted for many years.”

Those are not my words, but the words of the exam regulator Ofqual back in 2020, in their report on the barriers to greater adoption of high stakes on-screen and online assessments, and how these barriers may be overcome. 

Perhaps the wait for these digital assessments is finally over because in recent months all three main exam boards in England have announced plans to start digitising their exams – particularly GCSEs. 

So what have been the experiences so far with high stakes digital assessments in this country and abroad? What barriers will digital exams face in England if they are to be delivered at scale every year? And are digital exams potentially fairer than assessments done on pen and paper? 

Our guests today are Grainne Hallahan, senior analyst at the Times Educational Supplement, and Hayley White, the Vice President of Assessment, Standards and Services at Pearson who own the Edexcel exam board. 

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

Almost exactly 12 months ago, Prime Minister Rishi Sunak set out his plans for all students in England to study some form of maths to age 18.

Ten months later, the Prime Minister went much further by announcing plans for a single qualification – called “the Advanced British Standard” – to bring together A-levels and T-levels as well as making both maths and English compulsory to 18. 

Just before Christmas, the government published a consultation on how they think the Advanced British Standard could work in practice – albeit at the end of a 10-year implementation period. 

So what do we know so far about the Advanced British Standard? Does it look like a step in the right or wrong direction for educating 16 to 19-year-olds in England? And even if the Advanced British Standard is a good idea, is it an achievable idea? 

Our guests today are Tom Sherrington, a former teacher and headteacher and now education consultant, author and blogger, and Tim Oates CBE, Group Director of Assessment Research and Development at Cambridge Assessment.  

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

Welcome back to Inside Your Ed in 2024 and happy New Year to all our listeners. 

Speaking of things that are new, this episode is all about the new institutions - often called Challenger institutions – that have been appearing in England’s Higher Education (or HE) sector in recent years. 

So what is a challenger institution? What obstacles have these new HE providers faced? Have the challenger institutions been able to innovate in a way that other providers cannot? And what does the future hold for these small new institutions when the politics and funding of HE remain so uncertain? 

Our guests today are Kat Emms, a senior researcher at the Edge Foundation, an education charity, and James Newby, president and chief executive of the New Model Institute for Technology and Engineering (or NMITE, for short) based in Hereford. 

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

It seems as though the government are intent on continuing their crusade against what they call ‘low value’ Higher Education, with the Prime Minister declaring at the Conservative Party conference in October that he would be “cracking down on rip-off degrees and boosting apprenticeships”. 

Fast forward a few weeks to the Kings Speech in November, and again, the government iterated its goal to “reduce the number of young people studying poor quality university degrees and increase the number undertaking high-quality apprenticeships”. 

All of which raises an obvious question: if the government succeeds in reducing the number of supposedly poor quality degrees, are there enough apprenticeships for students to choose instead? And even if there are enough apprenticeships, are they good quality apprenticeships? 

Our guests today are Alison Fuller, Professor of Vocational Education and Work at the UCL Institute of Education, and Olly Newton, executive director at the Edge Foundation, a charity that promotes vocational and technical education through a wide range of initiatives. 

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X

Ever since the Labour Party moved away from its plan to scrap university tuition fees, the debate over how to fund Higher Education, or HE, has gone rather quiet.

Step forward Dr Mark Corver, the Managing Director and co-founder of dataHE, who wrote an article for the Higher Education Policy Institute at the start of November that set out an entirely new vision for how we could fund our HE system: https://www.hepi.ac.uk/2023/11/08/funding-undergraduate-higher-education/    

So how does Mark want to reform HE funding? What trade offs and tensions do his proposals generate? And would students, universities and government be better or worse off if Mark’s plans were put into action? 

I’m Tom Richmond, the director of the EDSK think tank.  

And to hear more about a radical plan to reform our HE funding system, let’s go INSIDE YOUR ED…. 

CLICK HERE TO BROWSE OUR PODCAST BACK CATALOGUE

FOLLOW US ON TWITTER / X