Insights

February 22, 2017

Are bigger MATS more efficient?

One of the driving factors behind the MAT philosophy is that these collaborations bring out the best in schools, whether through sharing talent or pooling resources. In discussions about MATS, there’s often a lot of talk about how big a MAT has to be to maximise efficiency – what’s the critical mass? It’s been very difficult to get an idea of this because there’s no consistent way to measure it.

March 13, 2017

New free schools budget 2017 – too little too late?

Here’s what yesterday’s budget said about new schools: “The government … will deliver the manifesto commitment to open 500 new free schools by 2020. The government will extend the free schools programme with investment of £320 million in this Parliament to help fund up to 140 schools, including independent-led, faith, selective, university-led and specialist maths schools. Of these 140 schools, 30 will open by September 2020 and count towards the government’s existing commitment.”

September 5, 2019

School funding and efficiency – secondary

Schoolzone’s latest report examines the suggestion for topping up secondary school funding to ensure that all school receive £5,000 per pupil per year. We use the DfE’s School Efficiency Metric to see how effectively each school uses its existing funding, to consider whether this additional funding will make any difference, or whether it could just be throwing good money after bad.

November 22, 2016

Schoolzone research

We are pleased to make available to BESA members the following research reports undertaken by research house Schoolzone.

International Teachers
Coasting Schools

February 17, 2017

What are the drivers for increasing the use of digital learning resources?

Bett seems to be bigger and more diverse every year. To my mind, looking at it as a teacher, it’s getting too difficult to find the resources for teaching and learning among all the other stuff. There are some fantastic digital resources, but at Bett, they’re all muddled up among routers and filtering services etc, which are all useful to someone, but maybe the show should divided into two sections.