Nine out of 10 school leaders tell survey they are finding it harder to meet special needs of pupils than a year ago

The crisis in special needs education appears to be worsening, with nine out of 10 school leaders finding it harder to meet pupils’ needs than they did a year ago, according to a survey.

Almost all (98%) of the respondents to a National Association of Head Teachers’ (NAHT) poll covering England, Wales and Northern Ireland said they did not have the resources to meet the needs of all their pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (Send).

Nato for higher education – a mutual defense pact is a long-shot approach, but it might just convince the bully in the White House to back off

Higher education is under attack from the person who inhabits the White House. Universities are being threatened with an array of punishments, including the cutoff of their federal contracts and grants, the loss of their nonprofit status and a tax on their endowment. The Trump administration is demanding a say in whom they admit, whom they hire and even what courses they teach.

It’s a grim message – abandon your fundamental values, or else. The idea of an “existential moment� has become a cliche, but this situation warrants that grim description. Academic freedom, the lifeblood of higher education, is being threatened.

David Kirp is professor emeritus at the University of California-Berkeley and the author of The College Dropout Scandal

Education department says school program to improve Black academic performance violates 1964 Civil Rights Act

The US Department of Education has launched an investigation into Chicago public schools over allegations that a program aimed at improving academic outcomes among Black students violates federal law.

The department has also warned that it could withhold federal funding from the district.

A restoration project at Sharpham near Totnes aims to tackle the loss of the natural world while helping people build mental resilience

Two landscapes separated by a wide sweep of river tell a story of change. On one side is traditional farmland, close-cropped grazing, uniform grasses, neatly tended hedges and a sparsity of trees, a farmscape ubiquitous across England. On the riverbank opposite, rougher, less uniform grasses grow unevenly between trees, thistle and brambles, in a chaos of natural disorder swaying in the breeze towards the reedbeds below.

The land on the Sharpham estate side of the River Dart used to be a mirror of the traditional farmscape on the opposite bank. It hosted a non-organic dairy farm and a vineyard, within a tightly controlled 18th-century heritage landscape of deforested parkland.

Wrack, whose appointment as NASUWT chief faced legal challenge, condemns ‘ludicrous’ efforts to undermine him

The head of a teaching union has said he plans to stay in post despite a “ludicrous� and “coordinated� attempt by political enemies to undermine his position.

Matt Wrack, whose appointment as general secretary of the NASUWT led to a week of legal challenges and the reopening of nominations for the post, said he would stand in a new election as the nominee of the union’s executive.

Dismissed claims he does not have enough experience to lead a teaching union, saying “neither do many secretaries of state or senior civil servants�.

Reassured members that he would not merge the union with the National Education Union and denied claims that he was friends with the NEU’s general secretary.

Said he had never downplayed antisemitism, as claimed by reports, saying: “I’m not a Zionist but I believe in a two-state solution.�

Youth Endowment Fund says specialised lessons needed to tackle issues such as abuse, consent and coercion

A thinktank is calling for schools to appoint relationship violence prevention leaders, modelled on the success of mental health coordinators, as teachers say they are ill-equipped to advise on the complex issues involved.

A study by the Youth Endowment Fund (YEF), supported by the Home Office, wants young teenagers in England and Wales to be taught “relationship violence prevention lessons�, aimed at tackling emotional, physical and sexual violence, psychological abuse, stalking and harassment.

Harvard’s president noted ‘searing personal accounts’ from listening sessions with about 500 students and employees

Muslim and Jewish students at Harvard University experienced bigotry and abuse as the Massachusetts campus was roiled by protests last year, according to two reports released on Tuesday that found many felt shunned by peers and professors for expressing political beliefs.

Harvard and other universities face extraordinary pressure from Donald Trump’s administration over allegations of antisemitism and leftist bias. The reports, jointly amounting to more than 500 pages, were the result of two taskforces Harvard set up a year before Trump took office, one on combating antisemitism and anti-Israel bias, the other on combating anti-Muslim, anti-Arab and anti-Palestinian bias.

Initial training to be offered in north-west England, as report shows disparities in access to the subject

The Bank of England is backing a drive to put more economics teachers into state schools, as a report has revealed young people from disadvantaged backgrounds are the least likely to study the subject.

Targeting students in the north-west of England in its first year, the scheme will aim to overcome huge shortages of teachers across the state sector with the skills to teach economics.

Campaigners urged universities to be more cautious in their engagement with Facebook’s owner

Britain’s elite universities are continuing to benefit from multimillion-pound funding from Facebook’s owner, Meta, amid criticism over its approach to harmful content, ditching of independent factcheckers and political influence.

Members of the Russell Group benefited from a total of £2.8m worth of funding from Meta last year, and £7.7m over the past four years. Imperial College alone has taken £3.6m from Mark Zuckerberg’s companies since 2021.

Find a course at one of the top universities in the country. Our league tables rank them all subject by subject, as well as by student satisfaction, staff numbers, spending and career prospects

The private school will open its first US campus in Long Island. Will it assimilate Americans into the upper crust – or is it more about branding?

This fall, the British boarding school Harrow will open its first offshoot in the US: a lush 170-acre waterfront campus in Long Island. For $75,000 a year, parents can wave away their children to the prestigiously named school, renowned for its centuries-old traditions (such as calling teachers “beaks� and bad behaviour “skew�). Classes will take place in the Bourne mansion, the opulent former home of a wealthy American businessman, around which modern facilities will be built.

A shiny teaser video paints an idyllic picture of an anglophile life at Harrow New York. “The school is like an oasis,� says Nick Page, former deputy head of Harrow UK, as drone footage pans out over pristine lawns and lakes, where ducklings and deer roam wild. “Yet so close to this huge metropolis of New York.� (The new school is almost equidistant from New York City and the Hamptons, so parents who have a seaside pied-à-terre can whisk away their darlings for the holidays.) In the video, students stroll about the verdant campus wearing Harrow’s trademark straw hats, and are seen painting, playing soccer, wearing VR goggles, reading poetry by Lord Byron and books about Winston Churchill.

Every year, more pupils are granted special ‘access arrangements’ to give them a fairer chance in GCSEs, A-levels and other exams. But with more than 600,000 arrangements in England alone, can the schools keep up? And are some students gaming the system?

‘It’s a logistical nightmare,� sighs associate headteacher Kirstie Moat after taking me through the mind-boggling complexities of the weeks ahead. Her school, Harrogate Grammar, a state secondary school in North Yorkshire, is in the final throes of preparations for exam season and it is a marathon task.

This is not about teaching algebra, or Jane Austen, or the periodic table. She’s talking about special “access arrangements� – a range of adaptations for students with additional needs who would otherwise struggle to take exams – for GCSEs, A-levels and other qualifications.

As a new documentary explores Boarding School Syndrome, seven former pupils share their stories…

Boarded from the age of nine

Schools are tough workplaces, and the government should endorse the case for higher pay

Teachers deserve a pay rise. So it was good to learn that the independent pay review body is expected to recommend an increase of around 4% in England for 2025-26, along with 3% for NHS workers. There are staff shortages across many parts of the public sector. Schools are not unique in having trouble with recruitment and retention. But the importance of education means that the government must do all in its power to prevent children from missing out, and fund the increase in full.

By refusing to do so, ministers would send the wrong signal to a beleaguered profession and the country at large. There are strong arguments for investing in public services across the board – and not only in England. But the case for ensuring that there are enough teachers should be unarguable for a government that is hopeful about the future and wants voters to feel the same.

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Harvard is leading the pushback because it can afford to fight. Others are realising that they can’t afford not to

Enfeebling universities or seizing control is an early chapter in the authoritarian playbook, studied eagerly by the likes of Viktor Orbán in Hungary. “Would-be authoritarians and one-party states centrally target universities with the aim of restricting dissent,� Jason Stanley, a scholar of fascism at Yale, wrote in the Guardian in September. Last month, he announced that he was leaving the US for Canada because of the political climate and particularly the battle over higher education.

It is not merely that universities are often bastions of liberal attitudes and hotbeds for protest. They also constitute one of the critical institutions of civil society; they are a bulwark of democracy. The Trump administration is taking on judges, lawyers, NGOs and the media: it would be astonishing if universities were not on the list. They embody the importance of knowledge, rationality and independent thought.

Low school attendance is a symptom of the problem, an expression of something deeper

I was on the phone to a friend talking about our kids as I clicked through a new report launched at Westminster a couple of weeks ago. It was about how children are facing a “crisis of lost learning� because they are being suspended or excluded from school, or they’re not attending because their needs are not being met. She chuckled darkly. Her teenage daughter has barely been to school this year – as my friend works on her laptop in the kitchen the teenager remains in her bedroom, and they meet sometimes on the stairs. My friend knows this stuff, she breathes this stuff, this stuff is living in her house.

The family has been threatened with fines and then, if they get three, a parenting order or prosecution. I guess I can sort of understand the government thinking here, but it’s the same sort of thinking that leads someone to open a bottle by smashing it against a wall, isn’t it? Or fix a paper-cut with staples. The term the school uses to describe the difficulty kids like my friend’s daughter face is “emotionally based school non-attendance�. It’s a term that’s evolved over time, rarely fully describing the anxiety at its core. When I was at school it was called truancy or delinquency. Before that perhaps it was just “laziness�, more recently “school refusal�, but all these terms have obscured the mental health needs of the young person, instead implying blame or bad parents or a kind of moral weakness. The truth is, for people like my friend’s kid and the thousands like her, school is a place of fear and despair. I read my friend excerpts from the report (“Absence and suspensions are two-thirds higher than they were pre-pandemic�) and she sort of sighed and said, sometimes, “yep�.

Substituting liberal biases with conservative will only serve to subvert academic objectivity

Few people want to live in an echo chamber. Many have no problem being friends with those who vote differently to the way they do. And many would probably agree with John Stuart Mill that “he who knows only his own side of the case, knows little of that� – that to truly know one’s own argument, one must also know the arguments of those who disagree.

How to create a culture that encourages more fruitful engagement between those of differing political views has become a key question in contemporary public debate. Nowhere more so than in universities, where there has been much debate about “viewpoint diversity�, the aspiration to nurture differing and conflicting perspectives within an institution or group as a means of sharpening arguments and teasing out truths.