Best known for: Appointed Chair of the Social Mobility Commission in October 2021, Katharine Birbalsingh first shot to fame following a speech she delivered at the 2010 Conservative Party Conference. Her heated rhetoric drew a lot of abuse on social media, and the nature of her sentiment apparently led the governors of the school she was ...

While it might feel like having fewer pupils in your class would help you make more progress, there is strangely little hard evidence that reducing class sizes consistently improves student attainment. It's not just teachers who gravitate towards a leaner classroom; reducing class sizes is extremely appealing to parents and one of the main attracti...

Whilst relatively few in the education world are aware of it, the impact of the American educator and academic Professor Eric Donald Hirsch Jr on the UK government's education reforms since 2010, has been profound. Reformers have claimed that 'progressive' child-centred education from the 1960s has been 'curriculum-lite' and damaging to children's ...

Best known for: Dweck's best known work is about Mindset, which she transformed into a book of the same name. The concept revolves around two different types of 'mindset' – an individual's concepts of their self. In a fixed mindset, an individual believes their basic qualities – such as intelligence and talents – are fixed traits that cannot b...

Best known for: Willingham's work has worldwide appeal: his writings on education have been translated into fourteen different languages. Applying his expertise in cognitive psychology to the education field, Willingham's books include Raising Kids Who Read Why Don't Students Like School? and When Can You Trust the Experts? Quick facts: Born: 1961 ...