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Rupert Murdoch’s News International offered £2m to sponsor an academy in east London close to the company’s headquarters at Wapping, it emerged yesterday at the Leveson Inquiry. But the project foundered because the Department for Education was unable to afford the cost of building the new school specialising in media and technology near the Olympic [...]

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At least three-quarters of the coalition’s flagship free schools have admitted a lower proportion of deprived pupils than is average for their wider neighbourhood, government data shows. Figures lodged in the House of Commons library by the Department for Education reveal that 18 of the 24 free schools that opened last autumn have taken a [...]

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Half of the free schools due to open this year have not yet secured premises, an education minister admitted yesterday. Nick Gibb, the Schools minister, said that just 35 of the 79 free schools due to open in 2012 had a confirmed school site. Labour said that the Government’s free-school plans were “in disarray” and [...]

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Education Secretary Michael Gove has succonded 133 civil servants to oversee his free schools project despite the fact only 24 of the schools are open. The National Union of Teachers today criticised Mr Gove for dedicating £337.2 million of taxpayers money to his free school and academies programme since taking office in April 2010. In [...]

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A mosque where clerics were filmed allegedly preaching hate against homosexuals and non-Muslims is opening a fee-paying school. Pupils will be expected to memorise the Koran and wear traditional Pakistani uniforms when it opens in Birmingham this September, with fees of £3,500 a year. Arabic will be the ‘key language’ taught to the annual intake [...]

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The go-ahead has just been given for what will effectively be a new grammar school in the Kent town of Sevenoaks. This move blows apart the smugness of many people, including most of Labour’s frontbench for the past 15 years, who were relaxed about the continued existence of selection in a quarter of English local [...]

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Turkey’s parliament has passed a bill that allows parents to move their children into Islamic schools earlier. The education reform bill extends compulsory education from eight to 12 years and allows children to switch to specialist schools from as young as 10. The ruling AK Party says the bill will mean pupils stay longer in [...]

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Some 36 per cent of schools are altering – or planning to alter – the traditional academic year in an attempt to raise standards, it was revealed. In one case, an academy is cutting the summer break in July and August from six to just three weeks to reduce the amount of time children spend [...]

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Kent Council wants to proceed with plans to expand the number of grammar school places in the county amid growing parental demand for more selective education. In a controversial move, they are proposing to take advantage of new Government powers that allow existing schools to expand to take additional pupils. A report to be considered [...]

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The Government is “shamefully” wasting taxpayers’ money on free schools by setting them up in areas where there is no need for extra places for pupils, the Education Secretary Michael Gove will be told today. Brian Lightman, general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders, will tell his annual conference that existing state [...]

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The behaviour management policy of Christian Family Schools starts with a quote from Proverbs: “Foolishness is bound up in the heart of the child”. It concludes with a disquisition into the whys and wherefores of “appropriate” corporal punishment. The company, which runs the independent Bethany school in Sheffield, states that: “In order to comply with [...]

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Until recently, home schooling in the US was mostly practised by white families, but a growing number in the black community are now also turning their back on the public school system and educating their children at home. Why? “There were lots of fights and people getting shot,” says Sonya Barbee. “It was just too [...]

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It’s a Saturday morning on the sixth floor of the HSBC building in London’s Canary Wharf, and a group of about 90 schoolchildren are milling expectantly around the reception area. Despite the location, this isn’t an open day for a career in banking. These 15- and 16-year-olds are all candidates for the London Academy of [...]

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Eighteen months ago, nobody had heard of Katharine Birbalsingh. Now, at 38, she is the most famous teacher in Britain, with a widely praised Penguin book about life in the classroom, a blog on the Telegraph website, a column in the highbrow rightwing magazine Standpoint, and an appearance on Radio 4′s Any Questions?. She plans to [...]

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The standards of the Government’s new flagship free schools will not be inspected for around two years after opening. Ofsted said yesterday that the schools will be visited earlier only if concerns are raised about their performance. The National Union of Teachers said the move was “odd”, adding that it would make sense for Ofsted [...]

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A free school being set up by the Tories’ star teacher, Katharine Birbalsingh, will not open this year as planned. Birbalsingh gave a blistering speech to the Conservative party conference in 2010 in which she attacked dumbed-down standards in exams and “chaos” in classrooms. She illustrated her speech with pictures of pupils at her then [...]

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Once upon a time, we knew three things about John Lewis. One: it’s a very nice, very middle-class department store. Two: it owns Waitrose, that very nice, very middle-class supermarket. Three: it is, or claims to be, never knowingly undersold. These days, we can add a fourth: never knowingly under-referenced within plans to reform the [...]

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Teachers should be encouraged to take a stake in John Lewis-style partnerships to run state schools as profit-making enterprises, according to proposals outlined by the conservative Policy Exchange thinktank. Private companies would be allowed to set up and run schools under a social enterprise model that would give employees a share of ownership and re-invest [...]

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Companies are being allowed to generate substantial returns by running nurseries, units for expelled pupils and management and IT services for mainstream schools, it is claimed. The report by the Policy Exchange, one of the Coalition’s favourite think-tanks, said the sheer scale of involvement by profit-making organisations in the state sector made a mockery of [...]

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A flagship free school in Hammersmith has been swamped with applications only five months after it opened, with nine children vying for every place. A total of 1,072 children are competing for 120 places at the West London Free School, set up by a group led by writer Toby Young. The figures mean the school [...]

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A flagship free school in Hammersmith has been swamped with applications only five months after it opened, with nine children vying for every place. A total of 1,072 children are competing for 120 places at the West London Free School, set up by a group led by writer Toby Young. The figures mean the school [...]

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A question mark is hovering over the future of a free school just eight months before it was due to open to 100 pupils. Sponsors of the proposal, dubbed a “ghost” school because there was no evidence it had recruited staff or pupils, have been forced to ask the Education Secretary, Michael Gove, to postpone [...]

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The uniform would be tracksuit bottoms and T-shirts and pupils would do a dance class every day. This would be no ordinary school. In fact it would be no ordinary ballet school. The Class Free School would be aimed at boys aged 11 to 16 who may have taken ballet classes while at primary school [...]

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A free school in Suffolk will open for 300 pupils in September after plans were signed off by the government. Michael Gove, Secretary of State for Education, approved the application for Breckland Free School on Tuesday. The private, profit-making Swedish company IES UK has won a £21m contract to run the school, to be known [...]

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Katharine Birbalsingh, the teacher described as a Tory darling for her attacks on state education standards, is at the centre of a dispute over her plans to open a free secondary school with a “private ethos” in an area of south London desperately in need of primary schools. Birbalsingh has been accused of wasting taxpayers’ [...]

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A permit to run one of Sweden’s free schools – which inspired the flagship Tory policy of letting parents and teachers set up their own schools in Britain – has been advertised on the country’s equivalent of eBay. The permit, which was put up for sale on the Blocket auction website on 4 January, would [...]

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The government’s flagship free schools programme is unlikely to boost access to good schools as they are too expensive, research has suggested. The Bristol study said it was “inconceivable” more than one parent-founded school would be set up in an area with spare places. Their impact on raising standards in poor schools was a “one-shot [...]

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It was some time after the opening of her new school that headteacher Jane Sculpher was being confronted by a journalist.”I don’t get it,” he said. “All I can see here is a rather good primary school.” He was obviously expecting something radical to leap out from the classrooms when he visited one of Education [...]

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A charity that helped turn an orphan’s life around and lift him out of poverty is setting up a free school in London for troubled children.

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Denigrating teachers will not help the government’s education reforms

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The importance of marriage is to be taught to every pupil at the Government’s flagship free schools and academies.

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More free nursery places for two-year-olds and a massive boost to the Government’s flagship free school programme were the key education elements of Chancellor George Osborne’s package yesterday.

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The government is to spend an extra £600m on building 100 new free schools in England over the next three years.

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Toby Young:  Two years ago, if you asked me to predict the subject of my next book I wouldn’t have guessed it would be about setting up a free school. My first two books were both comic memoirs, one dealing with my adventures at Vanity Fair in New York, the other with my brief stint [...]

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The proportion of children who attend free schools and are eligible for free meals is half the national average.

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Findings at odds with the government’s claim that free schools are empowering working-class families

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Children as young as four will be taught transcendental meditation twice a day at a new free school in London.

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MI5 is monitoring applications to set up “free schools” to ensure they do not become a cover for teaching extreme views, the Education Secretary disclosed yesterday.

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Nick Clegg was last night accused of trying to wreck the Government’s flagship free schools policy by preventing them from being set up in middle-class areas.

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Kings Science Academy in Bradford comes closest to David Cameron’s vision of what a free school should be. Its principal is determined to help the poorest pupils

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Poorer white pupils under-represented, study finds, as Michael Gove scrutinised over political appointments

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Twenty four free schools are about to open their doors for the first time.

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The first free schools are about to open their doors – but they are still attracting controversy from enthusiasts and detractors.

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A total of 81 groups have applied to set up new free schools in London next year.

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More than 100 schools run by parents, teachers and charities will open in little over a year in a boost to the Coalition’s Big Society programme, ministers will say.

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Only eight new free schools are certain to open their doors at the start of the next academic year in September, it has been revealed.

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The first batch of “free schools” should be opening this year in line with the government’s flagship education policy in England.

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If it really takes off, the free schools policy threatens to overwhelm existing provision and segregate communities by teaching different faiths separately, says Warwick Mansell

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More than 50 poorly performing secondary schools in England are half empty – and face competition from free schools on the same site

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A number of independent schools are set to scrap their fees and become “free schools” under plans brought in by the Government.

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