Inside Your Ed

September saw the launch of the results from the 2025 Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA for short.
Run by the OECD, PISA includes maths, reading and science tests for 15-year-olds across 90 countries as well as a survey about pupils’ education.
At first glance, England appears to have done very well in the latest PISA tests, rising to 10th place in maths, 9th place in reading and 8th place in science.
This led Shadow Education Secretary Laura Trott to say that “countries around the world look at our schools and marvel at the progress we’ve made”, adding that “it would be an act of national sabotage to ignore the evidence of what is working.”
However, Schools Minister Georgia Gould claimed that England’s results showed that we were “stagnating” and Education Secretary Lucy Powell recently said that “too many are being left behind and failed by our education system”, adding that we need a “revolution”.
So how well did England perform in the latest PISA tests? Should we look at raw scores or rank positions when it comes to judging England against the rest of the world? And what can we learn not just from England’s performance, but that of other countries too, about our relative strengths and weaknesses?
I’m delighted to be joined by Luke Sibieta, a Research Fellow at the Institute for Fiscal Studies, to get his expert take on England’s performance in the PISA tests.
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As the new academic year kicks off across the country, there will inevitably be a lot of attention on whether enough people have chosen to embark on a new career in teaching to hit the Government’s teacher recruitment targets.
However, a new book called 'Love the One You’re With: Why teachers stay and what we can learn from them' argues that teacher retention matters just as much as teacher recruitment despite the latter typically stealing the political spotlight, and even within teacher retention the focus is too often on retaining newly qualified teachers instead of experienced colleagues.
Using a mixture of anecdotes, personal experiences and research evidence, the book explores why some teachers choose to remain in the profession for two decades or more, in the hope that by understanding what motivates and sustains experienced teachers, more people could be convinced to stay in teaching in future.
For this episode I’m delighted to be joined by both authors of this new book. Dr Haili Hughes, who is an Associate Professor of Educational Innovation and Impact at La Trobe University in Melbourne, Australia and served as a school leader in the UK for over 20 years, and Sam Gibbs, who has taught and led in secondary schools for 12 years and is now Director of Professional Learning at Greater Manchester Education Trust.
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So here we are, with a new Prime Minister in place two years on from the General Election.
In my last podcast, we had two expert guests join us to explore what an Andy Burnham premiership might mean for schools in England.
In this episode, I have brought together two policy experts to help us take a look at what could happen in post-16 education, consisting of universities, colleges, apprenticeship providers and many other organisations. 
So, will universities be top or bottom of the priority list for Andy Burnham and his new team of ministers? What might devolution and Manchesterism mean for colleges and other education providers across the country? And are the recent debates over student loans and cuts to apprenticeship funding likely to continue or fade away under this new administration? 
My guests are Julian Gravatt OBE, Deputy Chief Executive at the Association of Colleges, and Professor Diana Beech, Director of the Finsbury Institute at City St George's, part of the University of London.
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“The days of a school system configured entirely around the university route will be brought to an end.”
Our likely next Prime Minister Andy Burnham did not hold back in his speech at the end of June, adding that “we need a complete rethink of how we support the next generation to succeed”.
The question now is what do these sorts of comments mean for pupils, teachers, school leaders and those working on schools policy in Westminster and beyond?
In the first of two podcasts on what an Andy Burnham premiership might mean for education in England, I am joined by two experts to look at how our school system could be about to change course in the coming months and years, and what the potential benefits and drawbacks of those changes might be. 
My guests are Meg Powell-Chandler, Director of the New Schools Network and a former special advisor to the last Conservative government, and Reza Schwitzer, a principal consultant at Avencera and a former civil servant at the Department for Education.
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“Labour will end the VAT exemption for private schools to invest in our state schools.”
So said the Labour Party election manifesto in 2024, and in the Budget later that year the addition of VAT to school fees was enacted.
This was soon followed by predictions of a dramatic fall in the number of pupils attending independent schools, with some claiming that we would see a 25% drop as a result of this policy.
In June 2026, the Department for Education’s official data showed that the drop in pupil numbers in independent schools since 2024 was, in fact, 5.6%.
In this episode, I am joined by two people who have never been fans of this controversial policy. What do they make of the 5.6% decrease in independent school pupils since 2024? Is VAT the only reason why pupil numbers are falling? And how has the politics of VAT on school fees changed since this policy was introduced?
My guests are Julie Robinson, CEO at the Independent Schools Council, an umbrella body for 1,400 schools, and Maxwell Marlow, the Head of Public Affairs at the Adam Smith Institute.
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