Weekly round-up: The education battle lines are drawn

Catch up on your must-read Tes news and analysis from the past week right here:

• Conservatives’ education policies: all you need to know
  The Conservative Party’s policies announced in its manifesto include making its school mobile phone ban guidance statutory and protecting “day-to-day” per-pupil funding.
• Labour manifesto: the education policies
  Labour’s newly released manifesto says that, if elected, the party would hire 6,500 new expert teachers and scrap single-word Ofsted judgements.
• Liberal Democrats announce their education policies 
  The Lib Dems, launching their election manifesto, have pledged to make teacher pay fully funded and independent, and to cut the amount schools pay towards education, health and care plans.
• Schools under “severe strain”, ASCL warns party leaders
  Schools are short of funding and teachers, and they are struggling to cope with the impact of rising child poverty, the Association of School and College Leaders has warned the three main political parties.
• Funding crisis “will increase class sizes” in most schools 
  Most headteachers responding to a survey say they will have to cut teachers within the next year because of a lack of funding.
• Flexible working: what are schools and trusts offering? 
  Flexible working in education is slowly increasing in popularity. But what does it look like on the ground and how can more settings follow suit? George Phillips finds out.
• More schools train mental health “triage” staff amid “crisis”
  More than a third of teachers report their school now has an emotional literacy support assistant as heads’ leaders warn schools “can’t afford to wait” for pupils to get support from backlogged health and social services.
• How we restructured our multi-academy trust
  As multi-academy trusts grow, their central structures can become fragmented. Two trust strategy leads explain their solution to operating across multiple regions.
• Why kindness is fundamental to success in our classrooms
  A focus on kindness should be a “basic working principle” in schools, says teacher Kimberley Roan McVeigh.
• Jennese Alozie: “My career is a love letter to my parents” 
  In Tes’ How I Lead series, we ask education leaders to reflect on their careers, their experience and their leadership philosophy. This month, we talk to Jennese Alozie, CEO of the University of Chichester Academy Trust.
• Why tutoring needs consistency and oversight
  In response to new government guidance recognising the growing role of tutoring in schools, principal Mark Steed says it is time the market was better regulated.
   

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