500 schools sign up for DfE breakfast scheme

Five-hundred schools have signed up to a government-funded scheme that offers healthy breakfasts to children in disadvantaged areas.

The Department for Education announced up to £26 million for the National School Breakfast Programme in March, delivered by charity Family Action, in partnership with charity Magic Breakfast.

According to new figures released last week, 15,000 breakfasts are currently being served every day to children.

Of the 500 schools that have signed up, more than 150 breakfast clubs are currently up and running.

The scheme is funded by the soft-drinks industry levy, and the government is encouraging more schools to provide breakfasts.

Read more via TES

Most influential UK education blogger discusses teacher workload at Hertfordshire Primary Headteachers’ Conference

Herts for Learning’s (HfL) annual Primary Headteachers’ Conference recently took place in Brighton, with 180 primary school headteachers attending the two-day event.

The theme for this year’s conference was ‘Navigating Leadership in the Real World’ and focused on key issues that Hertfordshire schools are facing including:

• a huge surge in numbers of children with significant SEND in mainstream schools, especially autism and ADHD
• rapidly growing numbers of children experiencing attachment difficulties, often resulting in extreme behaviour
• changes in expectations around what our curriculum provision should look like
• further changes to the Ofsted framework.

Headteachers also had the opportunity to listen to the UK’s most influential education blogger, Ross Morrison McGill (pictured), also known as @TeacherToolkit, who has become the most followed teacher on Twitter in the UK, amassing over 203,000 followers.

Read more via Herts for Learning

St Albans pupil in final for national science competition

A budding engineer studying in St Albans will compete alongside other teenagers in the final of a national science competition.

Susan McKendry is through to the final of The Big Bang UK Young Scientists and Engineers Competition, which will be held in 2019.

She was a winner of the regional heats in Northern Ireland with her project entitled Magic Marbles.

Studying the properties of liquid and gas marbles, Susan researched how droplets behave in hydrophobic particles - these are molecules which do not have a negative or positive charge.

The Year 13 student at Loreto College, a Catholic secondary school on Hatfield Road, is in with a chance of receiving the title of UK Young Engineer and GSK UK Young Scientist of the Year.

Read more via Herts Advertiser