Research Blog

In the last couple of years, Michael Gove has urged teachers to stop using new practices in the classrooms and return to more traditional, academic teaching methods. In this respect, he is going against the tide. In many countries, the idea of progressive teaching methods has gained traction among policymakers, who have begun to introduce them en masse.

For entrepreneurs to succeed, they need space to innovate that is sufficiently free of regulatory constraints, buyers who are receptive to their breakthroughs and uninhibited in their procurement decision-making and a competitive market environment in which efficacy and efficiency are the overriding priorities.

When analysing the effects of education reforms, researchers tend to restrict themselves to traditional outcomes, such as pupil achievement and attainment. There are exceptions, but they are still relatively few.

Britain’s place as a world-leader in education may be consigned to the past, after repeated headlines regarding Britain’s slide down education league tables. Last month, the OECD found that the knowledge and skills of our adults are worse than those of Latvia, Lithuania and Slovakia, among others.

In a recent blog post, Sam Freedman, former advisor to Education Secretary Michael Gove, announced that he has changed his mind about the viability of for-profit schools. He no longer believes such schools can ‘improve the current education system as it is’. This is for three reasons: 1.