In the news: your weekly round-up

Top stories

£740m boost given to schools to improve accessibility for SEND pupils. The funding is targeted at adapting buildings in mainstream schools to make them more accessible to pupils with special educational needs and disabilities [BBC News]. 

Support from GovernorHub Knowledge: Get on top of all aspects of accessibility by reviewing your accessibility plan. All schools must have an accessibility plan under the Equality Act 2010. Understand the requirements here.

Attracting 6,500 teachers through pay alone is set to cost the government more than £7 billion a year, according to a new report from the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER). The NFER report reveals that salaries would need to rise by almost 10% for 3 years in a row if pay was the only incentive for recruitment and retention [Schools Week]. 

Support from GovernorHub Knowledge: Exit interviews help improve staff retention by letting you find out why staff are leaving. Understand when governors and trustees should be involved.

Over 300,000 children are “missing” from education, new data reveals. Data from the Education Policy Institute suggests that the number of children missing from education could be around 2.5 times higher than the DfE’s original estimate [Schools Week]. 

Support from GovernorHub Knowledge: Read our tips on monitoring and challenging your school's attendance figures by questioning your senior leaders, benchmarking against national data, and understanding how Ofsted will use your data.

This week's headlines

Schools Week

• Performance-related pay should be ditched from all schools, unions urge
• Job satisfaction is on the rise, but behaviour risks are still affecting retention, according to the latest working lives of teachers survey
• Schools’ rising costs likely to eat up extra funding, according to DfE
• Winners of the 2024 Pearson Teaching Awards announced

Tes Magazine - registration required

• Curriculum and assessment panel to examine reasons for content overload
• New DfE report reveals how some schools have coped with budget pressures
• 1 in 3 teachers currently considering quitting in the next 12 months, new DfE survey reveals
• Delays to Pearson's digital English exam plans
• Concerns raised about progress 8 pause making system “even more unfair”

GOV.UK

• £15 million funding announced for government’s school-based nurseries plan
• Ofsted chair Dame Christine Ryan to step down in 2025

The Guardian 

• Support staff at the centre of the behaviour crisis, Unison says
• English pupils excel in international maths and science tests

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