The Parent Portal Weekly

England has more teaching assistants than ever, and most parents in the SEND system are fighting for hours of them. The biggest British study of what those adults actually do found that the children getting the most support made the least progress - and the reason has nothing to do with the assistants.

By the age of three, poorer children have heard 30 million fewer words. It is the most quoted number in early education, and it came from 42 families and about an hour of tape a month. What has replaced it is less frightening and far more useful at a kitchen counter.

By September, 680,000 children in England were getting a free breakfast at school. The trial that got the policy this far found something odd: the children who never went to the club did better too. Which suggests the thing doing the work isn't the food.

It is the kindest sentence you own, and most of us have said it over a half-finished worksheet. A run of studies on what happens next at the kitchen table suggests the thing that travels from parent to child isn't the ability. It's the feeling.

Five minutes after they finished, the students who had just re-read their notes were ahead. A week later they had lost badly. The odd part is that nearly every teenager now knows which method works, and the reason they still avoid it isn't laziness.

Almost half of London's secondary pupils have had a private tutor, and hardly anyone talks about it. The strange part is that tutoring really is one of the best-evidenced things in education - just not in the form most families are buying.

Last year councils in England fined parents nearly half a million times for taking their children on holiday in term time. The odd part is what the government's own research says about whether a week in the sun actually hurts a child's results - and who the fines keep missing.

Almost every seven-year-old in England has already been sorted onto a table, and by Year 7 most are in maths sets. The biggest study yet, out this spring, says the sorting isn't the disaster its critics feared - but nearly a third of children are in the wrong set, and the label has a habit of sticking.

Somewhere in the pitch for your child's music lessons there is usually a claim about maths. When researchers pooled 54 studies and nearly 7,000 children, the claim fell apart - and the way we defended music may be exactly why it is disappearing from state schools.

The row about banning phones in schools carries on as if it were still to be decided. In England, 90 per cent of secondaries and almost every primary already stop phones during the day. The research on what changed afterwards is stranger than either side of the argument would like.