Education

The Education Funding Agency is responsible for handing out £54bn of taxpayers’ money every year, funding every state school place in the country. Winnie Agbonlahor meets its chief executive, Peter Lauener

The Education Funding Agency (EFA) needs to get “to grips with effective oversight to improve public confidence in the system,” the Public Accounts Committee warned in a report.

Education can help improve social equality, says Alison Wride – but only if the universities radically change their approach to recruiting and teaching students

Departments need more flexibility on pay so that civil service organisations don’t feel the need for “bureaucratic reorganisations” designed to escape pay controls and enable them to recruit skilled staff, the Public Accounts Committee has said.

Audit and governance arrangements for free schools are “not yet effective,” according to a Public Accounts Committee report published last week.

A teacher whose school has become an academy enjoys new freedoms – but not from central reforms

Project management may be as much art as science, but it’s not magic – yet government often fails to replicate the alchemy behind its biggest PPM successes. Winnie Agbonlahor reports back from a round table on the topic 

A Labour government would set targets for the proportion of people from BME and working class backgrounds joining the Fast Stream, as part of a drive to improve diversity across the civil service.

The consumerisation of IT has resulted in a dramatic cultural shift in the modern workplace, writes Cornerstone.

The Commons’ Education Committee is calling on the government to develop a national strategy for care provision in its report on residential children’s homes published yesterday.

The Labour Party has criticised the Department for Education (DfE) for employing “party ideologues” as senior officials.

Educationalists are being artificially divided into two opposing camps, damaging continuity in education, the former Department for Education permanent secretary Sir David Bell has told CSW.

We need to rethink education – and the DfE’s response to constructive critics, says David Bell

As the head of the Office for Fair Access, Professor Les Ebdon is in charge of ensuring universities open their doors to a broader range of applicants. Joshua Chambers meets a surprisingly controversial public servant

The government should send more civil servants to the European Commission (EC) as part of their regular career paths, chief secretary to the Treasury Danny Alexander has said.

A former special schools headteacher explains how child protection rules swing from pole to pole, creating confusion all round

Economic recovery presents a challenge for public sector talent management, as the cap on salaries makes it hard to recruit and retain talent. Stuart Watson reports on a round table that discussed how to deal with the problem.

Data is increasingly important for the public sector, but trust in public statistics is falling. Hetan Shah, head of the Royal Statistical Society, talks to Suzannah Brecknell about the importance, and the limits, of statistics

The UK has long had a strong space industry but, until recently, government support for it was small-scale and fragmented. David Parker, UK Space Agency chief executive, tells Joshua Chambers how things have changed.

Civil servants believe their employers failed to manage talent effectively during their redundancy programmes, a CSW survey has found, with the result that many talented and highly-skilled individuals left the civil service whilst poor performers were allowed to remain.

The number of civil servants taking courses with the government's new training provider, Civil Service Learning (CSL), has increased from 40,000 to 400,000 in the past year, it was revealed today.

Outgunned on salaries by the private sector, the civil service often struggles to recruit and retain world-class talent. Stuart Watson attends a CSW round table on how to bring top employees into Whitehall – and keep them there.

Very few jobs these days can be undertaken without any qualifications or tuition – but if you’re running the country, you may not even receive an induction. Joshua Chambers reports on the prospects for ministerial training.

The Cabinet Office has created a joint venture company to commercialise government’s portfolio of ‘Best Management Practice’ training tools and services.