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…. 

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Regular listeners will know that we recently dedicated a whole episode to the main education stories from this year’s Conservative and Labour Party conferences, but there was one story we didn’t get a chance to look at in that episode because it was announced on the last day of the last conference. 

On the 11th of October, Shadow education secretary Bridget Phillipson outlined plans for a large-scale review of the early years sector, which essentially covers the period from birth up to the start of primary school. The review will be chaired by Sir David Bell, the former chief inspector of Ofsted, and the former top civil servant at the Department for Education. 

So what issues will this review be investigating? Are they the right issues? And how much of a difference could a new government make in early years provision when extra funding will be very hard to come by? 

Our guests today are June O'Sullivan MBE, Chief Executive of the London Early Years Foundation, and Dr Laura Outhwaite, Principal Research Fellow at UCL's Centre for Education Policy and Equalising Opportunities (CEPEO). 

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If you’ve been following the recent headlines on teacher recruitment and retention, you’ll know that the government’s statistics paint a grim picture of missed targets and schools finding it increasingly hard to find enough teachers. 

In September, the Government decided to set up a new Workload Reduction Taskforce because ministers seem to believe that if they can reduce teachers’ workload then perhaps more people will sign up to become teachers and then remain in the profession once they get there. 

To help this new taskforce with their important work, I have devised three proposals to reduce teacher’s workload and I have two expert guests who are going to tell me whether my three proposals are useful or useless. 

Our guests are Becky Allen, co-founder and Chief Analyst of the teacher survey tool Teacher Tapp and Professor of Education at the University of Brighton, and James Zuccollo, the Director for School Workforce at the Education Policy Institute. 

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 This year’s party conferences could be the last big gatherings before the next General Election, so it was the perfect opportunity for the Conservative Party and Labour Party to set out their respective plans. 

That said, the challenges facing the two parties are very different. Can the Conservative Party convince voters that they are still the right people to oversee the education system after 13 years in power? And can the Labour Party convince voters that their ideas would improve the system that the Conservatives have overseen for so long? 

To talk us through the education policy announcements from the last couple of weeks, we have brought together two education experts who have plenty of experience of working alongside senior politicians in both main parties. 

My first guest is David Thomas, who was until recently an advisor at the Department for Education and is now the chief executive of Mathematics Education for Social Mobility and Excellence, and my second guest is Joe Moore, an Associate Director at Hanbury Strategy and a former Labour Party advisor. 

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It has not been a great three and a half years to be a school pupil. The pandemic, repeated openings and closures of schools, illness and absences, exams disappearing then reappearing – it has clearly been a difficult time for many children and young people.

In response, there have been numerous calls to prioritise pupil wellbeing as much as academic progress in the aftermath of the pandemic, given the disruption over the last few years. 

But do we all agree on what pupil wellbeing means? Can you actually measure wellbeing in a meaningful and consistent way? And even if we do find that many pupils are indeed struggling with their wellbeing, whose job is it to address that deficit? 

Our guests today are Kirsten Colquhoun, a teacher, pastoral lead and writer on pupil wellbeing, and Ros McLellan, an Associate Professor and researcher at the University of Cambridge. 

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The annual cycle of school and college students applying to university, sitting their summer exams and being awarded their grades in August finally returned to normal this year after the severe disruption to delivering and grading exams caused by the pandemic. 

But a recent news story shows that some things in our university application system have evidently not returned to business as usual. 

Earlier this year, it was announced that Lucy Cavendish College at Cambridge University had become the first college at the university to admit over 90% of its students from state schools, and it also received the most diverse intake in the history of the university. 

So how did Lucy Cavendish College achieve this goal? Is their greater emphasis on state school pupils a welcome boost for social mobility, or just an example of social engineering? And should we focus so much on which students get into university rather than worrying about where students end up after university?   

Our guests today are Professor Dame Madeleine Atkins, the President of Lucy Cavendish College at Cambridge University, and David Kernohan, the Deputy Editor of Wonkhe – a higher education news site.

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Welcome back to Inside Your Ed - I hope you all had a good summer.

Just as the summer break was getting underway in late July, you may have missed a new report published by UNESCO, an agency of the United Nations, which investigated the use of education technology, or ed tech, around the world. 

The report’s findings were quite startling, as they discovered that “there is little robust evidence on digital technology’s added value in education [and] a lot of the evidence comes from those trying to sell it.” 

When budgets are so tight across the education system in England, schools, colleges and universities will be keen to ensure that any investments in ed tech are well spent, but UNESCO’s report suggests that this may be easier said than done. 

So why is there so little evidence on the impact of ed tech? Who should decide which ed tech products will have the greatest impact on learning – frontline educators, senior leaders, government ministers or the ed tech companies themselves? And does the hype around new innovations such as ChatGPT make it easier or harder to spot when something truly valuable does come along?  

Our guests today are Jodie Lopez, an ed tech consultant and former primary school teacher, and Tony Parkin, a freelance speaker, lecturer and writer on all things ed tech.

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The early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic led to widespread predictions of a catastrophic situation for young people in terms of unemployment and lost earnings.

However, although we did see a rise in youth unemployment by the middle of 2020, it never reached the scale of job losses that had been feared by many politicians and economists. 

In the middle of 2023, it could hardly feel more different, with newspapers having spent most of this year running stories about record low levels of unemployment, firms running out of workers, wages rapidly increasing and high numbers of job vacancies. 

So has the gloom of the pandemic given way to a boom in young people’s job prospects? Are there any lingering effects of the pandemic that should still worry us? And should young people be feeling optimistic or pessimistic at the moment about their chances of finding a good well-paid job? 

Our guests today are Barry Fletcher, the Chief Executive at the Youth Futures Foundation, and Naomi Phillips, the Deputy Chief Executive at the Learning and Work Institute. 

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It has often been said that school teachers should be called superheroes for heading into classrooms every day across the country to try to improve the lives and prospects of children and young people.

But every superhero has a weakness, and a new book released at the start of June says that bad behaviour in the classroom can be like kryptonite to an unprepared teacher.

By coincidence, the Department for Education has just released their first ever national behaviour survey covering the 2021/22 academic year, which will now provide the government with regular updates on pupil behaviour in mainstream primary and secondary schools in England.

So what is the current state of behaviour in mainstream schools? Has the new survey given a positive or negative view on what’s happening in the classroom? And what can be done to better support both new and experienced teachers when it comes to spotting and addressing poor behaviour?

My guest today is Sam Strickland, who is the Principal of Duston School in Northamptonshire as well as a blogger, trainer, speaker and the author of this new book on managing behaviour in schools.

SAM'S NEW BOOK
'They Don’t Behave for Me: 50 classroom behaviour scenarios to support teachers'
https://www.johncattbookshop.com/products/they-don-t-behave-for-me-50-classroom-behaviour-scenarios-to-support-teachers

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With widespread strike action already underway across the education system and with so many institutions in need of more staff and more money, things can understandably feel a little gloomy. Even so, a story that hit the headlines last month provided a welcome bit of good news. 

May 16th saw the release of the latest results from the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study – known as PIRLS. It is conducted every five years and the 2021 data, which was delayed by the pandemic, showed that England was ranked 4th out of 43 participating countries when assessing the reading skills of 9 and 10-year-olds. 

Such an impressive performance inevitably attracted plenty of praise, so what exactly was behind the rise in England’s ranking from 8th in 2016 to 4th in 2021? Are there any reasons to be slightly cautious about England’s level of performance? And what do the PIRLS rankings tell us, if anything, about best practice in the classroom? 

Our guests today are Tarjinder Gill, the Associate Director of Research and Pedagogy for Primary at Outwood Grange Academies Trust, and Kathy Rastle, Professor of Cognitive Psychology at Royal Holloway, University of London.

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