Welcome to the Scholarpack blog

School staff wellbeing is a subject that has received extensive coverage in the news during the past year and it has generally been acknowledged that more needs to be done to support rising stress-levels. We worked with Carolyn Unsted, a former headteacher and education consultant, to get tips on improving the work-life balance of staff and learn how to make sure employees have a voice on workload issues.

Online safety is a hugely important issue in schools, but with new trends in social media and gaming constantly emerging, it can be difficult to know what to look out for. We speak to Tom Pinfield, Senior Education Officer at Childnet International about how teachers and school leaders can keep on top of the latest online safeguarding concerns.

As you will know, the General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) came into force on May 25 2018, and was designed to modernise laws that protect the personal information of individuals.

Many educators believe that school attendance is essential to a child’s academic and social development. They want all their pupils to have the chance to reach their full potential and this can only be done through giving them as many opportunities to learn as possible. But attendance continues to be a concern for a number of UK schools, where levels are dropping below national averages. So what can be done to improve things? We spoke to a number of schools who shared their useful experiences of how they managed to improve attendance.

According to a recent study, there are now more than a million pupils in UK schools who speak English as an additional language (EAL), which forms around 15% of the total school population. EAL learners come from a vast range of backgrounds - they include asylum seekers, economic migrants and the children of diplomats. At the present time, most teachers in UK schools will have at least one EAL pupil in their class.

At present, the UK is still exploring their options for Brexit. Most things will stay the same for schools until at least 31 December 2020, but there are some important things that you should be mindful of if you have staff or pupils from the EU, or when you’re planning to travel to the EU after Brexit.