Emma Brockes
Emma Brockes writes about education as lived experience, using her own family and working life to interrogate how schooling, exams and higher education feel on the ground rather than in policy abstracts. She is a Guardian columnist whose work sits at the intersection of schooling, parenting and the changing labour market, often asking what current reforms and cultural shifts mean for the next generation’s prospects. Alongside her columns on education, she has a long background in feature writing and profiles, and is the author of the memoir She Left Me The Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me.
Parental lens on schooling, exams and school life
A defining strand of Brockes’s education coverage is her use of the parental viewpoint to examine the pressures of contemporary schooling. In pieces such as “My kids are taking their first big exams – and revealing my own anxieties about AI and long division”, she places her children’s experiences in formal assessment alongside her own worries about technology and curriculum, turning an exam season into a story about wider societal unease.
She returns to this angle in columns on attendance, school routines and milestones, using titles like “Digested week: So long primary school, it’s going to be hard – for me” to foreground how institutional changes are felt at home.
Her writing regularly takes a moment of family decision-making and uses it to explore policy debates. The “hard hat v graduation cap” column, for example, starts from the question of whether she wants her children to go to university and expands into a discussion of the diminishing sheen of higher education and shifting attitudes to vocational routes. Headlines about parenting trends, including “Should I try the ‘18 summers’ parenting trend?”, show her interest in how informal cultural expectations sit alongside formal schooling and shape what families feel they owe their children.
The tone in these pieces is personal and reflective, but the subject is consistently structural: how a particular rule, exam or norm lands in a household and what that reveals about the system around it.
Education, work and the changing labour market
Brockes frequently links education coverage to questions of careers, financial independence and the future of work. In the Guardian’s careers and university guides, she writes on topics such as “Can you futureproof your career by choosing an AI-resistant degree?”, examining how course choices now are framed by fears about automation and job security. Other headlines, including “Careers guidance should be at the centre of Alan Milburn’s final Neet report” and “A generation of young people has been let down by a lack of political will”, show her focus on routes from schooling into employment and on political responsibility for those who fall through the cracks.
Her reporting and commentary in this space often highlight generational economic pressures.
Pieces such as “‘It’s never enough’: young Americans struggle to build financial independence as cost of living spikes” and “Impact over income: a striking number of gen Zers are becoming teachers” look at how young people weigh security, purpose and pay, connecting education pathways to broader trends in housing costs, wages and public service work. Within the education pages she also engages with AI and classroom technology, contributing to coverage of parental and expert concern about digital tools in schools and their uncertain impact on learning and future employability. This cluster of work makes her a consistent voice on the relationship between what students study, how they work and whether the system equips them for a volatile labour market.
Home schooling and alternative education models
Brockes has written repeatedly on home schooling and non-traditional education, often balancing curiosity with scepticism. In “I never thought I’d say this, but I now understand the appeal of home schooling”, she describes the rise in parents opting out of the mainstream system while stressing her own limits, using the headline itself to signal an evolution in her thinking. She also contributes to coverage of “school refusal” and families described as “digital nomad” or “trad family” movements, where education becomes entangled with ideology, mobility and online culture.
Across these pieces, she pays attention to the lived realities of children and parents navigating alternatives, including isolation, wellbeing concerns and the lack of oversight for home-educated pupils. Her work sits alongside letters, editorials and reported features about home schooling registers and inspection regimes, but her own contributions tend to draw out narrative detail and emotional texture rather than solely legal frameworks.
This makes her a useful contact when a story touches both regulation and the emotional stakes of leaving or reshaping mainstream schooling.
Features, profiles and books beyond education
Beyond the education pages, Brockes has a long record as a feature writer and interviewer, regularly profiling major public figures and writing essays on culture and everyday life. Her Guardian archive spans decades and includes pieces on subjects ranging from extreme weather and city life to publishing and popular culture, demonstrating range beyond policy reporting. She has contributed to publications such as the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Economist, Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, Psychologies and The Believer, extending her narrative and profile work across news, culture and lifestyle outlets.
Her book She Left Me The Gun: My Mother’s Life Before Me adds a long-form, memoir-driven dimension to her work, drawing on family history and trauma to explore identity and secrecy. Earlier, she wrote What Would Barbra Do?, showing an interest in the intersection of celebrity, fandom and personal narrative. Taken together, these projects and bylines indicate a writer comfortable moving between deeply personal storytelling and reported profiles, and between education-focused columns and broader features. For education and careers stories with a human centre and an eye on longer-term social currents, her body of work shows consistent interest and experience.
4 more education journalists.
Ajit Niranjan
Ajit Niranjan links climate science, policy and hard numbers to how extreme weather and environmental damage disrupt daily life, public services and industry. He is European environment correspondent at the Guardian. His beat includes violent heat, pollution, wildfires, air quality, EU green policy, corporate responsibility, energy transition, clean home heating, public health and long-term risks to landscapes and ecosystems. He examines how lobbying, supply chains and regulation shape environmental harm, from data centres and fish farms to fossil fuel industries. His reporting covers schools, hospitals, transport, homes and infrastructure as climate stress points. He previously reported on climate for DW News. He combines data, scientific research, eyewitness accounts and on-the-ground reporting. He also produces explainers, dossiers, factsheets and Q&As that translate complex technical debates into clear, precise language.
Albert Tait
Albert Tait is Education Editor at The Telegraph, leading coverage of schools and universities as institutions whose decisions have direct consequences for staff and students. He focuses on how regulators, senior leaders and governing bodies respond when safety, standards or integrity are under scrutiny, and how those responses affect classrooms and lecture halls. His work links school inspections and teacher safety to regulatory frameworks and conditions on the ground, and he reports on incidents such as knife attacks and “Code Red” alerts with attention to immediate impact and emergency protocols. He produces multi-part investigations into university governance, including extensive reporting on Cambridge’s handling of Jason Arday’s appointment and resignation. He also covers curriculum debates such as changes in how scientists view evolution and inheritance. He began at The Telegraph as a news reporter and previously covered community news at a local paper.
Beth Kennedy
Beth Kennedy is editor at The PIE News and stands out for reporting on how UK policy, institutional strategy and new delivery models reshape international education. Her beat covers UK study visa rules, international student flows, Home Office and UCAS data, alternative study pathways, language schools, and mergers and acquisitions across the sector. She reports on the practical effects of visa changes, scholarship schemes, online and transnational education, school closures, job losses and sector consolidation. Her work is direct and data-led, with clear explanations of complex systems and a focus on what policy and market shifts mean for universities, language schools and private training organisations. She has over a decade in specialist media, including years reporting for primary healthcare professionals before joining The PIE in 2024.
Callum Clark
Callum Clark is a multimedia journalist at STV News who covers education through the lens of university finances, restructuring and their impact on students, staff and local services. He focuses on stories where cost‑saving plans, job losses and service closures reshape community life, such as Dundee University’s nursery and botanic garden closures, and sets those decisions within wider restructuring efforts. His reporting is direct and fact driven, built on official documents, statements and precise figures that show both the scale of savings targets and monthly losses, and the number of posts at risk. Clark’s background in local news and public service coverage, including mental health service reforms and redundancy schemes, shapes a methodical style that tracks formal processes while keeping the lived experience of workers, families and service users in view.