The Labour Party is drawing up plans ahead of the next general election to give local authorities new powers to set up state nursery schools. The maintained nurseries would be expanded to provide a more extensive childcare offer with qualified teachers. The article also references Labour's pledge to remove independent schools' charitable status and tax exemption. By Louisa Clarence-Smith, The Telegraph.

Schools Week considers what is driving Labour’s education policy and looks at the "traditional" and "progressive" groups seeking to influence it. By Donna Ferguson.

Writing in Schools Week, Ed Dorrell, director at Public First, considers why the education sector 'isn't getting the attention it deserves from politicians'.

Recent pay rises for teachers have added 'six-figure sums' to school costs, according to a number of schools which spoke to The Times. The increase of five per cent for most teachers was agreed by the Government but the extra money has not been provided. By Nicola Woolcock.

The Observer reports that teaching unions have campaigned for tens of millions of parents of state school pupils to see the 'precise level' of budget cuts affecting their schools via the 'School Cuts' website from April 2023. By Toby Helm.

Writing on the subject of professional development, David Weston, chief executive of the Teacher Development Trust, says that although budgets are tight, there is 'no reason for investment in staff development to decline in quality or effectiveness'. Schools Week.

Gráinne Hallahan writes in Tes considering the impact of changes to teacher pay.

Richard Russell, headmaster of Colfe’s School, writes to The Sunday Times on the "unintended consequences" of the drive by some Oxbridge colleges to recruit more widely from the state sector. Addressing the myth that independent school pupils are "wealthy", he says: "The implicit assumption that all independently educated pupils are wealthy is demonstrably untrue: at my own independent school 10 per cent of sixth-form pupils have at some stage qualified for free school meals, a higher proportion than in state grammars." The letter can be found towards the end of the page.

The Sunday Times invites readers to vote in a poll on whether independent schools should lose their charitable status and tax exemption. The results will be published in the paper on 13 November.

The Information Commissioner’s Office (ICO) has found the Department for Education (DfE) was responsible for an “unacceptable” breach of data protection laws involving betting firms using children’s information on a student database for age-verification checks. It said the DfE failed to prevent “unauthorised access to children’s data” from September 2018 to January 2020. By Jon Ungoed-Thomas, The Observer.

The National Institute for Health and Care Excellence (Nice) has proposed that videogames and quizzes based on cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT) should be offered on devices to children as young as five to help with mild to moderate anxiety driven by lockdown. By Laura Donnelly, The Telegraph.

The number of five and six-year-olds requiring speech and language support at school has risen by 10 per cent in England over the past year, analysis by the BBC's Shared Data Unit has shown. Experts from the Royal College of Speech and Language Therapists have said the increase is 'partly due to lockdown limiting social interactions'. By Vanessa Clarke, Paul Lynch and Paul Bradshaw, BBC News.

According to The Telegraph, the campaign group Keep Prisons Single Sex (KPSS) has warned that the safeguarding system is at risk from criminals claiming to be transgender who could use a “loophole” to hide their previous convictions when applying to work with children. A report by KPSS has found that criminal record checks are only carried out on previous identities if the individual personally notifies officials of their past. By Hayley Dixon.

In a blog on behalf of London Higher, a group representing more than 40 higher education institutions, policy adviser Andrew Boggs warns the Higher Education (Freedom of Speech) Bill risks unbalancing the way universities manage competing demands, for example compliance with laws about extremism. By Nicola Woolcock, The Times.

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