Monday, July 27, 2009
News in brief, July 2009
A summary of news and announcements in education from July 2009
On July 1st the Uk government published the White Paper, Your Child, your schools, our future: building a 21st century schools system. The paper proposes new measures including Pupil and Parent Guarantees and, strengthened Home-school agreements, Teacher Licences and School Report Cards which will be legally enforceable. We have a detailed article on the White Paper in this newsletter.
The number of Academies in England offering "all-through" education for pupils aged three to nineteen will increase from 13 to 20 when seven new 3-19 academies open in September 2009. A further two are planned to open within the year.
The National College for School Leadership is changing its name to The National College for Leadership of Schools and Children’s Services. The new name and new logo will come into effect in September to reflect the integration of the work of leaders in schools and children’s services whilst keeping the well-established identity of the notion of a National College for leaders.
A new School Effectiveness Framework has been launched nationwide in Wales after a Pilot Scheme was evaluated as successful. The Framework is designed to transform collaboration between schools, local councils and government by creating networks of schools, teachers and students to support self-evaluation of each school. The framework promotes a model of managing change and transformation based on the notion of shared responsibility for change across all those in a community. The model is designed to increase both the quality and quantity of collaboration alongside more enhanced forms of tracking and data recording for each student and setting. The year-long Pilot study was conducted in96 schools and independently evaluated before this nationwide roll-out. Welsh Education Minister, Jane Hutt has described the School Effectiveness Framework as "the glue that holds together all of our policies aimed at improved teaching, learning, assessment, support, accountability and reform."
Private Education is growing rapidly in one sector - Higher Education. The 2009 World Conference on Higher Education reported that private providers now cater for 30% of global higher education with up to 80% of Higher Education Institutions in some countries such as Korea, Japan and Indonesia being privately run. The report concludes: "private higher education institutions, many of them for-profit...represent the fastest-growing sector world-wide." The conference ended with participants from over 150 countries agreeing to a communique to urge governments not to disinvest in education in the economic recession.
The Select Committee for Innovation, Universities, Science and Skills have published their report into the management of the Further Education Capital Programme by the Learning and Skills Council. The report says the LSC encouraged colleges to submit bids for funds which were not available and approved projects where funding had not been secured. The Select Committee concludes that the members of the LSC encouraged colleges to "big up " their schemes because they knew the LSC was going to be disbanded and "wanted to go out with a bang." The report follows the independent review of the LSC management of the programme by Sir Andrew Foster which reached similar conclusions. The Select Committee recommends colleges are compensated for their losses in preparing for the re-building programme. The management of the programme is described in the report as "catastrophic" and likely to cost millions of pounds to correct.