Education news

Oldham's classrooms have spent the past year quietly turning into laboratories for ideas that most towns only talk about. Mavis Clegg, the headteacher who believed every child belonged, died at 92 in December, and her passing became the moment many schools chose to prove her right. St Agnes started handing out free breakfasts in May; attendance rose within weeks.

Results days backed up the experiments. August brought twin sets of twins collecting top A-level and T-level grades, while GCSE tables showed the borough's highest share of grade 9s since the new marking system began. Behind the headlines, 250 residents had told the council exactly which roads felt unsafe on the school run; engineers are now redesigning those routes.

The biggest shift may be language. Oldham is one of nine areas testing the Early Language Support for Every Child programme, and early data show reception pupils doubling their vocabulary gap closure in a single term. At Newman Catholic College, teachers write the day's breaking news into lesson plans so anxiety about the world can be talked through rather than bottled up.

None of this feels abstract on the ground. Bethany Dale and Sophie Byrne run a before-and-after club so popular that children beg to stay until 6 pm, giving parents shift-work flexibility they never had. Councillor Arooj Shah spent an afternoon in the sixth-form common room because students wanted to know how council budgets really work, not just how to protest them.

The council's SEND team used new funding to train 45 teaching assistants in speech and language therapy techniques, and every specialist place is now full. Yet the waiting list for educational-psychology assessment is still 11 weeks long, and transport cuts mean some of those robot-linked pupils can't get the devices home. Mavis Clegg's funeral ended with staff humming the school song she wrote; they left the church wondering if the town can keep the momentum she started.