The Muddy Stilettos Best Schools Awards 2024 celebrate outstanding UK independent schools in categories such as inclusion, learning support, and pastoral care. These awards recognize schools’ exceptional contributions to education.
Celebrating the achievements of staff and schools across the UK
The Pearson National Teaching Awards celebrate the teachers, support staff, schools and colleges that transform young people’s lives across the UK. They are run by the Teaching Awards Trust, a registered charity, with Pearson as headline sponsor, and categories cover early years, primary, secondary and further education, from Headteacher of the Year to the Award for Unsung Hero.
Entry is free, and so are all the events. Anyone who works closely with a nominee can complete an entry, and settings in England, Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland can take part. Volunteer judges, most of them practising teachers, contact shortlisted nominees by the end of April and arrange a virtual judging visit in May. Silver winners are revealed on National Thank a Teacher Day in June, and Gold winners at the end of November on BBC One’s The One Show and at the UK Ceremony in London.
Open to everyone involved in early years education and childcare. Through all the challenges that face them, dedicated professionals continue to improve their skills and qualifications and do a fantastic job for young children – this is your chance to be recognised and celebrated.
The National School Awards bring together over 250 education pioneers to recognise, celebrate and reward senior leaders, schools and multi-academy trusts for their dedication and hard work.
The first and only scheme based in the UK to recognise great practice of pastoral care providers in the education sector.
Designed to showcase our schools’ success stories and celebrate the extraordinary and compelling student experience they provide.
Firmly established as the premier annual event to celebrate outstanding success for the suppliers and teaching professionals of the education sector throughout the UK.
The Education Business Awards recognise excellence in UK schools and academies across more than 20 categories, from outstanding progress and leadership to SEN provision, ICT innovation, school building and catering. Run by Education Business magazine and now in their 17th year, they are open to state and independent schools. The winners are announced at a ceremony after the Education Business LIVE conference; the 2026 ceremony was held on 26 March at Old Billingsgate, London.
For those who put in so much time and effort into making Education so great.
The AoC Student of the Year awards celebrate truly unique students from AoC member colleges across England who deserve recognition and will go on to inspire others
A global recognition of efforts towards the quest for entrepreneurship and engagement in higher education.
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August Awards
We firmly believe that the internet should be available and accessible to anyone, and are committed to providing a website that is accessible to the widest possible audience, regardless of circumstance and ability.
To fulfill this, we aim to adhere as strictly as possible to the World Wide Web Consortium’s (W3C) Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.1 (WCAG 2.1) at the AA level. These guidelines explain how to make web content accessible to people with a wide array of disabilities. Complying with those guidelines helps us ensure that the website is accessible to all people: blind people, people with motor impairments, visual impairment, cognitive disabilities, and more.
This website utilizes various technologies that are meant to make it as accessible as possible at all times. We utilize an accessibility interface that allows persons with specific disabilities to adjust the website’s UI (user interface) and design it to their personal needs.
Additionally, the website utilizes an AI-based application that runs in the background and optimizes its accessibility level constantly. This application remediates the website’s HTML, adapts Its functionality and behavior for screen-readers used by the blind users, and for keyboard functions used by individuals with motor impairments.
If you’ve found a malfunction or have ideas for improvement, we’ll be happy to hear from you. You can reach out to the website’s operators by using the following email
Our website implements the ARIA attributes (Accessible Rich Internet Applications) technique, alongside various different behavioral changes, to ensure blind users visiting with screen-readers are able to read, comprehend, and enjoy the website’s functions. As soon as a user with a screen-reader enters your site, they immediately receive a prompt to enter the Screen-Reader Profile so they can browse and operate your site effectively. Here’s how our website covers some of the most important screen-reader requirements, alongside console screenshots of code examples:
Screen-reader optimization: we run a background process that learns the website’s components from top to bottom, to ensure ongoing compliance even when updating the website. In this process, we provide screen-readers with meaningful data using the ARIA set of attributes. For example, we provide accurate form labels; descriptions for actionable icons (social media icons, search icons, cart icons, etc.); validation guidance for form inputs; element roles such as buttons, menus, modal dialogues (popups), and others. Additionally, the background process scans all the website’s images and provides an accurate and meaningful image-object-recognition-based description as an ALT (alternate text) tag for images that are not described. It will also extract texts that are embedded within the image, using an OCR (optical character recognition) technology. To turn on screen-reader adjustments at any time, users need only to press the Alt+1 keyboard combination. Screen-reader users also get automatic announcements to turn the Screen-reader mode on as soon as they enter the website.
These adjustments are compatible with all popular screen readers, including JAWS and NVDA.
Keyboard navigation optimization: The background process also adjusts the website’s HTML, and adds various behaviors using JavaScript code to make the website operable by the keyboard. This includes the ability to navigate the website using the Tab and Shift+Tab keys, operate dropdowns with the arrow keys, close them with Esc, trigger buttons and links using the Enter key, navigate between radio and checkbox elements using the arrow keys, and fill them in with the Spacebar or Enter key.Additionally, keyboard users will find quick-navigation and content-skip menus, available at any time by clicking Alt+1, or as the first elements of the site while navigating with the keyboard. The background process also handles triggered popups by moving the keyboard focus towards them as soon as they appear, and not allow the focus drift outside it.
Users can also use shortcuts such as “M” (menus), “H” (headings), “F” (forms), “B” (buttons), and “G” (graphics) to jump to specific elements.
We aim to support the widest array of browsers and assistive technologies as possible, so our users can choose the best fitting tools for them, with as few limitations as possible. Therefore, we have worked very hard to be able to support all major systems that comprise over 95% of the user market share including Google Chrome, Mozilla Firefox, Apple Safari, Opera and Microsoft Edge, JAWS and NVDA (screen readers).
Despite our very best efforts to allow anybody to adjust the website to their needs. There may still be pages or sections that are not fully accessible, are in the process of becoming accessible, or are lacking an adequate technological solution to make them accessible. Still, we are continually improving our accessibility, adding, updating and improving its options and features, and developing and adopting new technologies. All this is meant to reach the optimal level of accessibility, following technological advancements. For any assistance, please reach out to