We have been approached by a number of different businesses including property companies.
Roy Blatchford National Education Trust

The former Labour government used the idea of academies to transform failing schools. But now the new Education Secretary Michael Gove wants to turn the best schools into academies.

Cambridge dons have written to the education secretary criticising his plan to reform A-levels in England, the Times Educational Supplement reports.
Sixth-formers usually take four or five AS-levels in the first year, before specialising in A2s in the second year.
Michael Gove wants to return to one set of exams after two years to revive what he calls the "art of deep thought".

The former Labour government used the idea of academies to transform failing schools.
But now the new Education Secretary Michael Gove wants to turn the best schools into academies.
If these schools take him up on the offer they will be given more money and freed from the control of the local authority.
This would mean that they could determine a whole raft of aspects about how the school is run.

Last week the Coalition Government passed the halfway mark of its first hundred days. It provided an early opportunity to see how things are shaping up.

Over the last decade Reform has developed a deep understanding of the problems facing Britain's public services and has brought together people of real experience from across the world to develop a practical agenda for their change.

While you have recognised that investment can be part of the solution, you have argued that reform of the way money is spent can be just as or, sometimes even more, significant. This insight - always important - will be crucial in the years ahead.

Today I want to start with the issue that is most important to me: education, its purpose, its focus, its principles. I say most important, because after the accident of birth, over which government has no say, education is the most powerful way in which life chances are shaped, and it is an area over which Government has greatest power. I know this from my own education – at two primary schools, three comprehensives (one in the USA), and two universities in Britain and America. And I know it from my own constituency, whose schools and teachers are a vital inspiration for my optimism about educational change.

Hundreds of millions of pounds will be saved in education by cutting quangos, ditching school initiatives and removing red tape, the Treasury said today. The chancellor, George Osborne, announced more than £300m in savings from four- to 19-year-olds' education. It was part of a package of £6.25bn cuts across Whitehall.

The wonderful thing about my job is the opportunity it gives me to see the very best of this country - young people achieving more than they ever thought they could, finding their special talent, taking charge of their own destinies, becoming authors of their own life stories.
Seeing the work you do - often against the odds, in difficult circumstances, with tight resources and challenging intakes - reaffirms one of my deepest convictions - there is no way to spend your life which is more admirable than following the vocation which inspires all of you - the calling to teach.

The education secretary, Michael Gove, says he wants to give schools greater freedom over the curriculum and "allow teachers to teach". That is an admirable aim. But as he prepares to abolish the QCDA, the body that develops the curriculum at arm's length from government, is he about to take unprecedented direct political control over what children learn?

Few in the present economic climate will be surprised that the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) is to be scrapped. It has become overblown financially and has lost its way educationally. The current curriculum is full of vacuous generalities about cultural understanding, collaboration and inclusion, but leaves us little wiser about substance. But this government faces the practical realities of what, if anything, is to take its place.

Pressure for quick fixes can outweigh research evidence when ministers set schools policy, according to a study of three decades of education initiatives.
Media pressure and political expediency are more likely to influence decision making, says a report from the CfBT Education Trust.

'Humbled' to be in the job, the new Education Secretary has rolled up his sleeves to produce the coalition's first legislation. Autonomy may be its focus, but Michael Gove, in his first newspaper interview since taking the post, tells Richard Vaughan that no one will be compelled to be free.

The coalition government will break with the past. But from the two party manifestos, which promises on education are to be kept and which ones broken, asks Mike Baker

Labelled in the Times "a fascinating mix of radical reforms and policy fudges," the working agreement between the Conservatives and the Lib-Dems released last week now effectively takes over from the Party Manifestos as the guide to future policy, potentially for the next five years. Based by all accounts on the German approach to coalition government, the agreement between the two Parties sets out the working arrangements for eleven of the more crunching policy areas.

The general election is dominating our news. From nurseries to lifelong learning, the three main parties' education policies have been thoroughly scrutinised and commented upon.

Each manifesto has a few progressive ideas: Labour's trial of free school lunches for all primary children; the Conservatives' support for the provision of free nursery care for preschool children – although Michael Gove's equivocation about top-up fees is worrying; and the Liberal Democrats' plans to phase out university tuition fees.

John Cleese, apparently, didn’t write a third series of Fawlty Towers because he felt that the material had been exhausted.

Had he transferred his attentions to the world of education, he could have had an endless supply of the absurd to work on.

How would you feel if every four or five years a complete stranger entered your office and announced they were taking over regardless of the fact that they lacked any form of training or knowledge of the industry?

It was David Blunkett who put it most candidly when he admitted to a committee of MPs recently that politicians are "full of contradictions" on education policy. He was referring to the mismatch between political rhetoric on school autonomy and the irresistibility of ministerial interference.

Schools should stop treating their heads like football managers - sacking them when they fail to deliver good test and exam results, a conference was told yesterday.

Mike Welsh, president of the National Association of Headteachers (NAHT), told his annual conference in Liverpool: "We must move away from the football metaphor of saying that unless the manager achieves promotion this year then they should face the sack."

It will be music to 750,000 pairs of ears. As students prepare to sit their GCSE exams next month, a leading exam expert has asked: why bother?

Top comprehensive schools are more socially exclusive than selective grammar schools, according to a major study out today.

It found that they were far less likely to take their fair share of youngsters from disadvantaged homes than the 164 remaining grammar schools.

In fact, a list of the 100 most socially selective schools in the country included 91 comprehensives, eight grammar schools and even one secondary modern schools.

The Scottish Labour Party could go into the Holyrood elections next year on a platform of removing education from local authority control.
Its conference this weekend will consider a policy consultation paper which moves cautiously in that direction.
The need for radical change has the heavyweight support of Peter Peacock, the former Labour Education Minister, who believes education should be run by 12 regional "boards" which would be responsible for all spending on schools.

"No one ever died of excitement with a Darling Budget" exclaimed Anne McElvoy giving her judgement on the Budget in the London Evening Standard this week. But of course with the election only weeks away now, this was never going to be a Budget about excitement, it was, as most of the media recognised, more about politics. So what were the main messages for the world of education?

England's new Children's Commissioner, Dr Maggie Atkinson, has an uncanny talent for unsettling the public. First she caused outrage by questioning whether James Bulger's killers should have had an adult trial. Now she has raised blood pressures by suggesting that we push our children too hard and talk to them too little, driving them far too hard to be successful and offering them endless activities and gadgets rather than the emotional support they really need.

A former Labour Cabinet minister has added his voice to calls for the the £3,200-a-year cap on tuition fees to be lifted, paving the way for annual charges of £20,000. Alan Milburn, appointed by Gordon Brown as his "social mobility tsar", has broken the unofficial Labour/ Conservative pact of silence on the issue by saying he is in favour of universities being allowed to charge higher fees.