Education

A university official charged with recruiting students tells Will Hazell of his fears that higher fees are cutting student numbers and reducing efficiency.

A council’s education expert explains to Philip Bevan the impact of recent reforms to the schools system.

Chris Wormald

Permanent Secretary, Department for Education

A primary school teacher laments the loss of centralised standards.

The Department for Education (DfE) should not make the National Pupil Database (NPD) available to the public, according to the Open Data Institute – a publicly-funded organisation dedicated to helping departments publish information and the private sector benefit from public data.

Pruned hard, the civil service will be lost without new skills.

Failure to properly communicate the increase in university tuition fees to £9,000 a year has already caused a large drop in student numbers and may also affect applications this year, Professor Les Ebdon, director of the Office for Fair Access (OFFA) has told Civil Service World.

To encourage poorer and ethnic minority youngsters to consider a career in the civil service, the government has introduced new internships. Tim Fish reports on efforts to ensure Whitehall’s high-flyers are less uniformly white.

A special educational needs teacher considers realistic ambitions, unfair criticisms, and how the EBacc might affect non-academic children.

A leaked review of the Department for Education (DfE) sets out plans to cut about 1000 jobs, introduce a project team-based structure, focus work on “ministerial priorities” and radically reduce office space.