Monday
Enrichment benchmarks: no government commitment on funding for schools
The government’s long-awaited enrichment benchmarks for schools have finally been published, encompassing areas such as civic engagement, the arts, nature and sport
Social media ban cautiously welcomed by school leaders
Snapchat, TikTok, YouTube, Instagram, Facebook and X will all be inaccessible to under-16s under government plans, but messaging apps such as WhatsApp will be permitted
The big lesson we learned from returning to remote teaching
A leader at an international school in Dubai that was forced to return to online learning explains how this provided a valuable insight into the use of technology in education
The subjects where the fewest KS3 students are taught by specialists
The proportion of hours taught by a specialist teacher declined slightly across the board for 2025-26, with key stage 3 seeing the largest drop
Thursday
Natural history GCSE finally gets go-ahead
Landmark qualification to be made available in schools years after its initial target start date, with content to be decided after a 12-week consultation
Ofqual fines Cambridge English £875,000 over automated marking errors
Users of the International English Language 91¶¶Òõting System qualification were ‘let down by systemic failures over a long period’, says the regulator
Why schools still can’t (easily) measure skills
Teachers and policymakers are keen to get more skills into the curriculum, but assessing how well students can learn and apply those skills remains a major obstacle. Jasmine Norden asks the experts about potential solutions
How AI gets lesson planning wrong - and what we can do to fix it
Could knowledge graphs of subject curricula help to improve AI’s ability to generate lessons? Oak National Academy’s John Roberts believes they can
ECT induction abroad: the benefits for teachers and schools
AoBSO chair James McDonald outlines how more early career teachers are now completing their induction at British schools overseas – and why UK schools should welcome this
School paperwork surges due to ‘horrendous’ Ofsted workload
Around half of secondary schools have already produced extra documents to prepare for the new inspections
Wednesday
‘It’s just not cricket’: is brand the new battlefront for private schools overseas?
Commentators are predicting the dawn of a new era in international school competition in the wake of two Haileybury-branded schools in Kazakhstan switching to the Wellington brand
How to create a better reader (hint: hard texts matter)
The curriculum review has sparked debate about which texts we should make space for in our classrooms, but how far does text choice really matter for improving reading? 91¶¶Òõ speaks to US literacy researcher Timothy Shanahan to find out
