StephenTall.org

At the weekend I blogged the graph first published in the TES magazine highlighting research from the charity I work for, the Education Endowment Foundation, showing The 446 state schools where poorer children perform better than average. Well, we now know a little more thanks to the work of the Financial Times’s education editor Chris Cook who’s delved deeper into  [ Read More ]

One of the biggest questions in education is the extent to which schools can make a difference to the lives of the children they teach. Put more fatalistically, if you’re born poor does that mean you will perform poorly at school? Last week Kevan Collins (my boss at the Education Endowment Foundation) published an article in the TES magazine which  [ Read More ]

I’ve just finished participating in a web-chat with Lib Dem leader and Deputy Prime Minister, Nick Clegg, the latest in a series of #Clegginars (yes, that is the Twitter hashtag) open to all party members. Nick was in good, relaxed form (sipping water, munching Polos) — more importantly, he came across as honest, un-spun and informed about the Queen’s Speech  [ Read More ]

One of the first posts I ever blogged, over 7 years ago, explained my support for tuition fees, and why it would be in the interests of the Lib Dems to to drop their opposition to them. Ironically, given how history panned out, it was because I felt I couldn’t honestly stand for election to Parliament while being unable to  [ Read More ]

The Universities of London, Oxford and Cambridge are (perhaps unsurprisingly) the UK universities which have produced most graduate millionaires, according to a survey by the financial investment firm Skandia UK: The University of London is ranked first, with almost one in 10 millionaires gaining a degree or higher from one of its colleges. Oxford is ranked second, significantly ahead of  [ Read More ]

For years my colleagues at The Sutton Trust have been noting how the failure of the British educational/class/economic* system is nowhere more apparent than in the dwindling access to top professions for state school students. Now the satirical gossip website Popbitch is highlighting the increasing social mobility gap in this country between the haves and unlikely-ever-to-haves. Here’s a snippet from  [ Read More ]

A terrific piece of good news popped into my email inbox today from the Vice-Chancellor of the University of Oxford — and it’s good news whether you’re an Oxford graduate, or simply wish higher education more generally well: It is with great pleasure that I am writing to inform you that the Oxford Thinking Campaign has now passed its minimum  [ Read More ]

Jonathan Calder has an interesting post at his Liberal England blog tracing the evolution of the pupil premium, and asks if its lost its initial guiding purpose: The Pupil Premium seems to have dwindled into a scheme that positions the poor child as a social problem who needs more money spent on him. But if that child is in a  [ Read More ]

I’m going to do something now I haven’t had cause to do in a good few months: praise a Labour policy. Here’s why. On Tuesday night, I went along to listen to Stephen Twigg, Labour’s shadow education secretary, deliver a speech to a ProgressOnline debate on raising standards in education. (The event was in parliament’s [...]

Last Friday’s Guardian-hosted #HElivechat on the role of the philanthropy in universities, on which I was one of the virtual panellists, covered a range of issues. The single biggest issue for new development offices eager to start delivering a return on investment to their university is… “How do we start to build our number of donors?” Here’s one of the  [ Read More ]