Positive thinking

Janet Lord, Manchester Metropolitan University Recent changes to school funding in England mean that, although there may seem to be more money for education, in general schools will be worse off in 2021 than they have been over the last few years. In the second half of 2019, the government announced a £14 billion increase in funding for schools in England. This is over three years: £2.6 billion in 2020-21, increasing to £4.8 billion in 2021-22 and £7.1 billion in 2022-23. The National Education Union (NEU) analysed the figures , and despite the cash injection, found “a strong link between deprivation and the scale of government cuts to school funding”. The NEU suggests that, when inflation is taken into account, over 16,000 schools will have less income in April 2020, compared to 2015. Over the past decade, school spending per pupil in the UK has fallen by about 8% in real terms. According to the Institute for Fiscal Studies , this is the largest decline since at lea...

  Angel Urbina-Garcia, University of Hull Diagnoses of mental disorders and drug prescriptions among school-age children have skyrocketed over the last two decades. The World Health Organisation (WHO) reports that 20% of children experience mental disorders – such as depression, anxiety, ADHD and autism – at any given time. This is a significant problem in the UK, where one in eight children between the ages of five and 19 has been diagnosed with an emotional or behavioural disorder . Even children as young as five are getting ill: according to the latest reports, 6% of five year olds suffer from a mental disorder. The challenges are greater still for children from low income families, who are four times more likely to develop mental health problems than their better off peers. While home life, friends, social media and body image all have an impact on the mental health of children, a recent report from The Children’s Society found that more young people feel un...

Mary Thornton, University of Hertfordshire Teachers have a lot to put up with at the moment in terms of workload and stress. But what may come as a surprise to some is that, just like in the playground, bullying can be a big problem in the teaching world. Research shows that when a teacher is being bullied, the bully is often (but not always) the headteacher – who is increasingly stressed and can sometimes take out their worries about Ofsted inspections on their staff. And with this in mind, Dr Pat Bricheno and I recently studied the experiences of 39 bullied teachers in the UK. All became ill as a result of being bullied – mostly with anxiety, stress and depression. The symptoms they described included palpitations, shaking uncontrollably, crying a lot, drinking too much, raised blood pressure, and taking multiple medications. We also heard about teachers who were getting so upset they were crying in their cupboards, while still on the job. This was due to an atmospher...

Julia Badger, University of Oxford   The latest Statutory Assessment Test results (Sats) have been released and will reveal whether all the coaching and anxiety has paid off for schools and pupils. Sats have never been far from controversy. Introduced in 1989, the national curriculum aimed to ensure standardised teaching across all government funded schools – and Sats were the assessment of performance against expectation. The results provide schools with a way of monitoring children’s progress and can be accessed by secondary schools to help set their Year 7 pupils into ability groupings. The data, which is published by the Department for Education, also allows for comparison of schools – which can help parents with school selection. On top of this, Sats provide additional insight into school performance for Ofsted inspections – which allows the government to monitor whether schools are enabling children to show progression. The tests have become “high-stakes” –...

   Clare Cunningham, York St John University More than 20% of all primary school and 16% of secondary school children in the UK speak languages other than English. And there are now more than 360 languages spoken in British classrooms. But more often than not, in mainstream schools in the UK, the “home languages” of children can be sidelined at best, and prohibited at worst. English is the language of the classroom – this is despite the fact that the UN Convention on the Rights of the Child is clear that children from linguistic minorities should not be “denied the right” to use their own languages. In my recent research , I found there was often a lot of fear associated with the use of “home” languages among the typically white, monolingual demographic of the teaching profession. In my study , which looks at educator’s attitudes towards multilingualism, one teacher I spoke with explained how she likes children to respond to the register in whatever lan...