Blog

From September 2018

Maintained schools, academies and free schools

Careers programme information

From September 2018, you must publish information about the school’s careers programme. This information must relate to the delivery of careers guidance to year 8 to 13 pupils in accordance with Section 42A of the Education Act 1997. For the current academic year, you must include:

• the name, email address and telephone number of the school’s Careers Leader
• a summary of the careers programme, including details of how pupils, parents, teachers and employers may access information about the careers programme
• how the school measures and assesses the impact of the careers programme on pupils
• the date of the school’s next review of the information published

Key Stage 4

Publishing the % of students staying in education or going into employment (pupil destinations) is now suggested, not statutory.

Key Stage 5

Only now need to publish a link to the school and college performance tables website page.

Curriculum – all schools

The content of the Religious Education curriculum must be published, even if is taught as part of another subject or is called something else.

From April 4th 2018

Maintained schools, academies and free schools

In addition to the current PE and Sport Premium requirements, schools must now publish how many pupils within their year 6 cohort can do each of the following:

• Swim competently, confidently and preficiently over a distance of at least 25 metres
• Use a range of strokes effectively
• Perform safe self-rescue in different water-based situations

Schools may be subject to a sampling review to scrutinise their compliance with PE and Sport Premium regulations.

Hola! We’ve just launched a new book, Recetas de Daniela (Daniela’s recipes), with simple recipes that children can follow at home. Read and listen to Spanish and see the English translation. Great for listening to imperative verbs!

You might have noticed that we have tweaked the website a tiny bit over the last few days. This was to refresh the look of the site generally but also to prepare for something that we are quite excited about. We are soon to launch a Learning Management System (LMS) that will provide online CPD training materials for educators. These courses will cover a range of important issues in schools and provide CPD certificates once completed. Further details once courses become available!

From June 2017

Maintained schools

• Name and contact details for the SENco
• How you consider admissions for every age group
• Arrangements for managing complaints from parents of children with SEN
• SEN policy updated annually
• KS4 – % students staying in education or employment after KS4 – destinations
• KS5 progress results shown separately for A levels, applied general and tech level qualifications
• KS5 retention shown separately for each qualification type
• Equality objectives to show how your school is complying with public sector equality duty

Academies, free schools and colleges

• Admission arrangements published before the beginning of an academic year
• Include open days, process for applying, explain if priority is given to applications from particular schools
• KS2 results – average progress from KS1 to KS2 in reading, writing and maths
• KS4 – % of pupils entered for/achieved the English Baccalaureate
• KS4 – % students staying in education or employment after KS4 – destinations
• KS5 progress results shown separately for A levels, applied general and tech level qualifications
• KS5 retention shown separately for each qualification type
• Accessibility Plan – facilities you provide to help disabled pupils access the school
• Arrangements for managing complaints from parents of children with SEN
• FE and sixth-form colleges – publish instruments and articles of government, annual members’ report, audited financial statement every year

From March 2017, 16 to 19 academies, free schools and colleges must publish:

• the progress students have made in English and maths
• the progress students have made compared with students across England
• the average grade that students in your college get at 16 to 19 study (KS5)
• student ‘retention’ (the percentage of students who get to the end of their study programme)
• student ‘destinations’ (the percentage of students who continue in education or training, or move on to employment at the end of 16 to 19 study)

From January 2017, academies and free schools should publish the following information on their website:

• your school’s Progress 8 score
• your school’s Attainment 8 score
• percentage of pupils who’ve achieved grade C or above in English and mathematics at the end of KS4
• percentage of pupils who’ve achieved the English Baccalaureate

We have changed Primary Spelling from an annual subscription to a stand alone product, meaning schools can access the resources without the need to renew a subscription every year. Schools that have already purchased a subscription will now have unlimited access indefinitely. Of course, the resources can still be accessed by any device, at any time.

New today – the first three of several cross-curicular topic mini-books are available for KS2 Spanish subscribers. Covering a range of themes, they present topic vocabulary and short sentences in Spanish and English to integrate Spanish into your curriculum teaching. The following are online now:

• the solar system
• plants
• planet Mars

The following mini-books will be online between now and half-term:

• mountains
• rivers
• coastlines
• electricity
• Victorians
• ancient Greeks
• ancient Egyptians
• ancient Romans

As with all KS2 Spanish resources, click the words and sentences to hear them spoken by an authentic Spanish speaker.

We have changed Grammar Heroes from an annual subscription to a stand alone product, meaning schools can access the resources without the need to renew a subscription every year. Schools that have already purchased a subscription will now have unlimited access indefinitely. Of course, the resources can still be accessed by any device, at any time.

Assessment data is automatically submitted to our server when students do an assessment test in each Primary Spelling module. Following a suggestion from one of our schools, we have now added the option for teachers to manually add assessment data when students do a paper assessment (from the teacher books) for Primary Spelling. Individual pupils can be entered or the whole class can be edited at once for word family assessments. This data is then used to generate student reports alongside any data from the on-line assessments.

We have uploaded a range of support videos to assist school admin users. These videos show how to upload student data, how to edit student data and how to print user lists. Find the videos on our ‘support videos’ page – click the ‘support’ menu option for the link.