Need for Burnham to tackle regional inequality could not be clearer as London becomes ‘educational outlier’

Andy Burnham has put regional inequality at the top of his agenda as prime minister, and nowhere is the need for doing so clearer than in education.

As England’s A-level results were published on Thursday morning, students across the country were pictured celebrating a bumper crop of results, with record rates of As and A*s.

Higher education figures call on Labour to reverse tax on fees and warn institutions at risk of ‘going under’

University leaders are warning of financial turmoil in British higher education after new figures suggested a collapse in international student numbers would deprive the sector of vital income and undermine its future.

The sector’s leaders called on the government to rethink the levy on international student fees imposed under Keir Starmer, as a former universities minister warned there was a risk of a university “going under” because of the financial crisis.

Exclusive: Analysis finds cost of higher education ‘falls overwhelmingly on the individual’

The government is piling mountains of debt and higher tax rates on young people heading to university, according to analysis into the “ticking timebomb” of costs faced by future students.

Hundreds of thousands of sixth formers will receive their A-level results on Thursday, with many expecting to continue on to higher education courses.

Seventy years after CP Snow warned of estrangement between the sciences and arts, breadth in education should be encouraged

After the playwright Tom Stoppard died last year, one of the most striking tributes to his work came from a clinical scientist. Michael Baum explained in the British Medical Journal how, in the interval of a 1993 performance of Arcadia, he experienced an epiphany. Thomasina Coverly’s attempt to plot the equation for a rose prompted him to realise that chaos theory was the best way to explain breast cancer’s pattern of recurrence. It was, he wrote, “the bond that links the arts and the sciences as one enterprise rather than the contents of two silos”.

Mr Baum was not the first person to celebrate the bridging of this gap. CP Snow famously criticised the incuriosity of “literary intellectuals” about technology in his essay The Two Cultures (later turned into a lecture and a book). Whether or not this was justified at the time, many literary intellectuals besides Stoppard have since taken a close interest in science; Richard Holmes’s latest book, about the influence of evolutionary theory on Tennyson, is just one example. But the split between the humanities and sciences remains pronounced, and will be evident when this year’s A-level results are released on Thursday.

Pausing the scrapping of existing qualifications was the right decision. But the wider battle over further education continues

The government’s granting of a stay of execution to popular courses including health and business studies BTecs, while alternatives are developed, is a victory for common sense. It should not have taken a years‑long campaign by the college sector to prevent the over‑hasty defunding of qualifications that are taken by more than 200,000 students each year in England and Wales. Belatedly, the government has admitted as much. Jacqui Smith, the skills minister, said that the previous timetable was “too aggressive”.

Welcome though this admission is, the problems with this package of reforms to 16-19 education go beyond the timetable. Other questionable decisions remain to be either justified or unpicked. The most important of these is the replacement of numerous existing diplomas with brand-new V-levels, which are being designed as A-level-size equivalents, with a view to enabling students to mix and match (for example, studying an education V-level alongside sociology and drama A-levels). Education is one of the first three V-levels due to be launched, along with finance and digital, next year.

Qualifications watchdog launches consultation amid complaints from pupils about writing fatigue in exams

Students could be sitting some of their GCSEs and A-levels on a laptop by the end of the decade, according to England’s qualifications watchdog.

Amid complaints from pupils of writing fatigue in exams because their hand muscles “are not strong enough”, Ofqual is launching a three-month public consultation about the introduction of onscreen assessments.