When is a blog not a blog? Blog: noun (informal) an online journal. Contraction of: web-log. This isn’t really a blog; it’s a repository, an archive of everything I write for various newspapers, magazines, websites, newsletters and books. Occasionally, I’ll feel inspired to write something exclusively for these pages, too.
CHEAT-SHEETS
FREE CRIBSHEETS TO HELP YOU UNDERSTAND OFSTED’S NEW INSPECTION FRAMEWORK
> The draft new Ofsted FE and skills inspection handbook explained
> The draft new Ofsted schools inspection handbook explained
> The draft new Ofsted framework explained
Supporting students with speech, language and communication needs
Before you picked up this article, did you know what SLCN stood for? Don’t worry if not. I polled several secondary teachers before I began writing and was surprised to find that a majority hadn’t heard of the acronym. And yet SLCN is a major cause of SEN in secondary school pupils and prevents many pupils from accessing the curriculum and fulfilling their potential. So, before we go on, let’s define SLCN… READ MORE PART 1 | PART 2 | PART 3 | PART 4 | PART 5
Leading PSHE
A few years into my teaching career, I was appointed head of PSHE in a large comprehensive school. I knew even before I was interviewed that I’d get the job. It wasn’t arrogance, I was the only candidate. In the staffroom, we didn’t call it PSHE, we called it The Poisoned Chalice. My first task as Keeper of The Poisoned Chalice was to rebrand the subject. That may sound a little too “corporate” for an inner-city comprehensive school but I knew I had to make staff – and then pupils – recognise the importance of PSHE and enjoy teaching it. Of course, changing ingrained attitudes takes time and I knew I needed to start with a “quick win”… READ MORE PART 1 | PART 2
HOT OFF THE PRESS – LATEST ARTICLES:
> The good, the bad, and the ugly (truth) about educational technology
> Why the Pupil Premium isn’t working and what we can do about it
> Solving the teacher recruitment and retention crisis
> A teaching sequence for SEND
Working with teaching assistants
You can now set about turning your classroom into your kingdom – it is your domain and you are responsible for building a positive learning environment and an inspiring physical space. You want your pupils to know that as soon as they walk through the door they are on your turf and must follow your rules. Sometimes, however, you will find yourself sharing your turf with another adult, such as a teaching assistant or specialist support teacher. How well you and they manage that relationship is crucial if you are to retain your authority and if you are to become a successful teacher. So, what is the secret to fostering a successful working relationship with other adults in your classroom? I have developed the 4Cs to help: Consistency, Communication, Clarity, and Connections… READ MORE
SEND and school governance
The foreword to the SEND Code of Practice (DfE, 2015) states that “Our vision for children with SEND (should be) the same as for all children and young people – that they achieve well in their early years, at school and in college, and lead happy and fulfilled lives.” If we are to achieve this vision, all schools must ensure – as far as is reasonably practicable – fair and equal access to all pupils, irrespective of need. This includes access to the school site and facilities, to the formal curriculum as well as extra-curricular activities, and to opportunities for social and emotional development. It is beholden on a school’s governing body – perhaps executed through the role of a named governor for SEND – to support and challenge the SENCO and other staff in ensuring this fair and equal access for all. In practice, this means that the governing body or named governor should work with the school to ensure that pupils with SEND join in the activities of the school… READ MORE
Making sense of metacognition
You’re lucky. As a teacher today, you have access to a wealth of research evidence about what works in the classroom. But knowing what evidence to look at and what it means in practice remains a challenge – especially for those new to the chalkface. The Educational Endowment Foundation’s (EEF) Teaching and Learning Toolkit ranks strategies by the “extra months” of pupil progress they secure and topping their chart is feedback tied with metacognition and self-regulation. Both these strategies have, says the EEF, “consistently high levels of impact, with pupils making an average of eight months’ additional progress”. The EEF also states that “teaching these strategies can be particularly effective for low-achieving pupils”… READ PART ONE | PART TWO
Curriculum matters – a new 7-part series
The curriculum can be found, not just in a policy statement, but in the subjects and qualifications on the timetable, in the pedagogy and behaviours teachers and other adults use, in the space between lessons when pupils interact with each other, in approaches to managing behaviour, uniform and attendance and punctuality, in assemblies and extra-curricular activities, and in the pastoral care and support offered to pupils – in short, in the holistic experience every child is afforded in school. So, if the curriculum is the whole experience of education, what, then, makes it broad and balanced? … PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR | PART FIVE | PART SIX | PART SEVEN
How do we solve a problem like teacher retention?
There is a staffing crisis in England’s schools. What does the literature on the subject of teacher retention teach us about how we might solve this crisis? PART ONE | PART TWO
The back-to-work collection:
The new teacher’s staffroom survival guide
Learning the tricks of the teaching trade
Curriculum matters: just Google it
Curriculum matters: what does ‘broad and balanced’ mean?
Curriculum matters: what will Ofsted inspect in the 2019 CIF?
The 4-part teaching sequence
Research by Kirschner, Sweller and Clark compared guided models of teaching, such as direct instruction, with discovery learning methods, such as problem-based learning, inquiry learning, experiential learning, and constructivist learning, and found that the latter methods didn’t work as well as the former. It didn’t matter, they argued, if pupils preferred less guided methods, they still learned less from them. In his book, Visible Learning, Professor John Hattie found that the average effect size for teaching strategies which involved the teacher as a “facilitator” was 0.17, whereas the average effect size for strategies where the teacher acted as an “activator” was 0.60. Direct instruction had an effect size of 0.59 compared to problem-based learning with an effect size of just 0.15. Direct instruction – it seems – is more effective than discovery learning approaches. But what, exactly, does good direct instruction look like in practice? Personally, I think direct instruction works best when it follows this four-step sequence… READ MORE
The problem with the key stage 3 curriculum
The Chief Inspector of Schools, Amanda Spielman, gave a speech at the Festival of Education in June 2017 in which she trumpeted the importance of the school curriculum. She said that, all too often, schools lose sight of the real substance of education: “Not the exam grades or the progress scores, important though they are, but instead the real meat of what is taught in our schools and colleges: the curriculum.” She said that, although it’s true that education has to prepare young people to succeed in life and make their contribution in the labour market, “to reduce education down to this kind of functionalist level is rather wretched.” Education, she argued, “should be about broadening minds, enriching communities and advancing civilisation” and “ultimately, it is about leaving the world a better place than we found it.” READ MORE
Transition days are not for testing
Think about what your school does on its transition day in July. Many schools use the opportunity to test pupils in English and maths in order to get baseline data for setting classes and writing targets. Personally, I feel this is misguided and potentially harmful. Other schools, in contrast, strap their pupils into a roller-coaster and give their new pupils an exciting, high octane ride through the very best that secondary school has to offer. Every ‘taster’ lesson is a veritable firework display – literally in the case of science. Teachers are funny and self-effacing, relaxed and patient, and lessons are fun-packed and short, punctuated by lots of ‘down time’ to socialise. I feel this is – though perhaps not quite as misguided as testing pupils – potentially harmful, too, because it proffers a false promise upon which reality inevitably fails to deliver… READ MORE
20 top tips to improve transition
Moving from the relative comfort and security of a small primary school to a big, scary secondary (with its maze of rooms and myriad teachers) will always be socially and emotionally challenging. We can’t mitigate all the woes and worries and nor would we want to: dealing with change is all part of growing up, after all; an important life lesson. But there is much we – primary and secondary teachers and leaders – can do to ease the burden of transfer and to ensure that pupils are better prepared for the move and settle into secondary school life more quickly and easily… READ MORE
Feedback – the mark of success
Although feedback is an important part of teaching, not all types of feedback are of equal value and feedback is not in itself a panacea or indeed a proxy for good teaching. In this seven-part series, I argue that our obsession with feedback has led to unhealthy and unsustainable levels of teacher workload which, in turn, have adversely affected teacher retention. I argue that we should be pragmatic, weighing energy versus impact – in other words, we should balance the amount of time and effort a strategy takes a teacher to employ with the academic gains it produces for pupils, investing in those strategies that lead to the biggest impact for the lowest investment of energy. I argue that schools should abandon “one-size-fits-all” assessment policies and strike a better balance between consistency and autonomy. And I argue that better isn’t always synonymous with more – in fact, feedback is made more effective if we do less of it but do it more strategically. Let’s start by examining the issue of teacher workload… READ MORE: PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR | PART FIVE | PART SIX | PART SEVEN
How to motivate students
When I first started exercising a couple of years ago, following a bout of ill-health, I could muster but 15 minutes’ half-hearted jogging on a treadmill while watching trash television before collapsing, coughing and spluttering, to the floor. Until, that is, I had an idea. What I did next not only helped me conquer my natural phobia of physical activity, it also taught me a lesson about motivation – a secret that I believe can help unlock the potential of our most reluctant, difficult-to-reach pupils… READ MORE: PART ONE | PART TWO
Top 10 tips for stimulating the sensory memory
Top 10 tips for gaining the attention of working memory
Top 10 tips for improving retrieval from long-term memory
Closing the vocabulary gap
If you’re a high ability pupil from a low income home (and, therefore, a low social class), you’re not going to do as well in school and in later life as a low ability pupil from a higher income home and higher social class. In other words, it is social class and wealth – not ability – that defines a pupil’s educational outcomes and their future life chances. But why should this be?… READ MORE
If you enjoy reading this blog, why not download a free copy of our magazine? It’s packed full of education advice…
Supply teachers: Make a success of your CPD
Supply teachers have a duty to keep their professional knowledge up-to-date and, as such, should access regular CPD. It may be possible to join in with school-based CPD such as INSET days and twilight training while you’re on a placement but you should not limit yourself to these ad hoc opportunities. Your CPD is your responsibility. And there are plenty of opportunities for you to engage in more informal, personalised professional development… READ MORE
How to achieve a work life balance
It is important that leaders retain perspective and lead healthy lifestyles if they are to cope with the demands of the job and achieve longevity. The term ‘work-life balance’ is frequently used but, in my experience, rarely understood. Leaders accept that it is healthy to have a life outside of work but rarely acknowledge that this is also a sign of increased effectiveness. Too many people think that keeping sensible working hours is a sign of laziness or is symptomatic of a lack of commitment. Some people measure a leader’s ability by how early his or her car pulls into the car park and by what time of night it drives away again. Nothing could be further from the truth… READ PART ONE | PART TWO
Leadership and staff retention
“The strength of a nation’s economy and the vitality of its society depend on the quality of its schools.” So begins a report by the Centre for High Performance (published in the Harvard Business Review in 2017) on what it takes to be a successful school leader. The study, by researchers Ben Laker and Alex Hill, examined 411 school leaders working in 160 academy schools in England. Laker and Hill concluded that the education system in England was appointing, recognising and rewarding the wrong kind of school leader. Our system, they argued, favoured short-term thinking – quick fixes rather than sustainable improvements. It is perhaps unsurprising that the system is somewhat myopic when you consider that policy decisions are made within Parliamentary cycles and often with the objective of making a politician look good rather than with the best interests of pupils in mind. In short, politicians with just a few years to demonstrate impact favour school leaders who quickly improve exam results through intensive interventions, rather than those leaders who carefully and thoughtfully build schools in which good results can be sustained over the long term as part of the natural order of things… READ MORE: PART ONE | PART TWO | PART THREE | PART FOUR | PART FIVE
Supply teaching: Top tips for a successful placement
Being a supply teacher is tough. At times it can feel like you’re spinning plates and, if you’re not careful, it starts to resemble a Greek wedding. One trick to keeping all those plates spinning is to break down what can be a complex, multi-faceted job into each of its constituent parts, to deconstruct the whole and identify its components, then reconstruct it again one piece at a time. In practice, this might mean creating a checklist of short-term, manageable tasks. To help you get started writing your own checklist, here are five top tasks you might want to tick off as soon as you start a new supply job… READ MORE
The four qualities of great leaders
Great teaching is a nuanced, complex art form. And we refer to it as “teaching practice” for a reason – we are forever practising, forever striving towards excellence and expertise. And yet we will never master it. But great teachers never tire of trying new things, of taking risks. They experiment and evaluate; they try and reflect. For a teacher to be consistently and sustainably great, however, they need to work in a school or college where there is also great leadership. Great leaders, you see, create the conditions in which teachers can thrive; they build a culture in which risk-taking is encouraged and in which teachers are freed from any unnecessary burdens to focus on teaching. This is not to say that great leaders afford their teachers complete autonomy. Indeed, great leaders create a framework in which all their colleagues are assured of providing the highest quality of teaching, learning and assessment and do so consistently… READ MORE
The six realms of school leadership
There are many ways in which we could define and perhaps even measure the effectiveness of a school leader but I think it is reasonable and indeed practical to meld the myriad activities in which leaders are required to engage into six categories. These six realms of school leadership are as follows: 1. Setting a vision for the future, 2. Being a lead teacher, 3. Working with and developing others, 4. Leading the organisation, 5. Managing the team, and 6. Developing external links. Each school and each school leader will have a different interpretation of what the six realms mean to him or her in practice but here is my summary… READ MORE
Supply teachers – your legal duties
When you think of a teacher’s legal obligations, you tend to think in terms of child protection and safeguarding. So, although a supply teacher’s legal duties extend beyond this realm, it is a good place to start… READ MORE
A lesson plan is not a planned lesson
This article is about planned lessons not lesson plans. I do not advocate spending your evenings and weekends writing detailed pro forma. Life’s too short and you need to strike a work/life balance if you’re to survive your probation. Although a lesson plan may help you in your NQT year (a written plan can be something to lean on in the hurly burly of the classroom), having a lesson plan does not equate to teaching a well-planned lesson… READ MORE
The open loop – improving feedback
To help pupils learn, we need to provide them with plentiful opportunities to practise, receive feedback, reflect, and then act upon that feedback. This is called the open loop because it spins endlessly: practice, feedback, reflection; practice, feedback, reflection; ad infinitum. Every skill can be improved and perfected by performing it repeatedly but not all forms of practice are equal. We learn most effectively when we engage in what Anders Ericsson calls “purposeful practice”. Purposeful practice is about struggling in certain targeted ways – placing artificial barriers in the way of pupils’ success in order to make it harder for them to learn something initially. In other words, we slow our pupils’ learning down and force them to make mistakes because this will ensure they operate at the very edge of their abilities… READ MORE
The learning process – 10-part series for SecEd magazine
What is learning? It’s a simple question, isn’t it? And surely, as teachers, our understanding of what we do – the act of teaching – is contingent on having first developed a fundamental understanding of what we are paid to produce – learning. After all, we wouldn’t attempt to assemble a flat-packed cabinet without first looking at a picture of the finished product and without then following step-by-step instructions that take us from flat-pack to fully assembled furniture. In short, if pedagogy is a process whereby teaching is the input and learning is the output, then we need to know what the output should look like in order to decide what raw components to use and in what sequence to put them together… READ MORE
How to deal with an Ofsted invasion
An Ofsted base room is the beating heart of any college inspection. It is the nerve centre (as well as a centre of nerves); it is the war room from which battles are planned and troops are sent forth; and it is the barracks to which loyal soldiers return, war-weary, to be debriefed and readied for their next attack. Get the base room right and half the battle is fought and won… READ MORE
Why I wrote Making Key Stage 3 Count
I started writing the first edition of my book, Making Key Stage 3 Count, in the summer of 2015 – having, over the previous decade, first as a teacher then as a school leader, become increasingly convinced that pupils in Years 7, 8 and 9 got a rough deal from our education system. But life and work got in the way and I was forced to put the book on the back-burner. In the autumn of that year, however, Ofsted published a report called ‘Key Stage 3: The Wasted Years?’ which had me scrambling for my manuscript… READ MORE
Welcome to the greatest job in the world. Yes, teaching is tough. It involves long days and lots of stress. It is emotionally and physically draining. In the days when I taught a full timetable, after five lessons back to back in an inner-city comp – punctuated only by bus and break duties, and running a lunchtime club and after-school detention – I was absolutely spent. I had to ingest wine intravenously whilst lying comatose on the carpet, mumbling about WALT and WILF. WTF. It was not pretty… READ MORE
La rentrée – make going back to school as easy as ABC…
The French have a term for it: la rentrée. If you ever visit France in August you’ll probably find it closed. Schools and clubs are what they call en congé; the government is in recess; and many businesses will have shut down for the summer too. As colleagues, family members and friends go their separate ways for the holidays, they depart uttering the special valediction “à la rentrée”, which can be loosely translated as “see you in September”. So far so familiar, you might argue. After all, we too wind down for the six weeks of summer. But, for the French, ‘the return’ in September – la rentrée – is much more than a ‘back to work’ ritual: it marks an entire country’s return to normality after a long summer break. It’s not only a time for children and teachers to go back to school as it is in the UK, but also for most adults to return to work, and for people to see their family and friends again, and begin attending clubs and teams once more. La rentrée, therefore, refers to returning home and getting back to reality, to a normal way of life. It means abandoning the carefree attitude and easy way of life that became a signature mark of the summer months and, instead, stitching yourself back into a starched shirt and tie, shackling yourself to a nine-to-five existence again… READ MORE
The rise and fall of the robots
I love technology but I’m not what you’d call an early adopter. I use technology when it can make my life easier and more efficient but, when a new gadget comes to market, I wait patiently for it to be tried and tested, and then – perhaps my biggest motivator – for it to come down in price before committing to a purchase. The same principle applies to other realms of my life, too, such as clothes and music where I can hardly – without a sarcastic lilt – be described as ‘on trend’. I’m not so much a la mode as a la commode… READ MORE
Closing the literacy gap
In their 2012 report ‘Moving English Forward’, Ofsted said that “There can be no more important subject than English in the school curriculum.” Why? Because, they said, “English is a pre-eminent world language, it is at the heart of our culture and it is the language medium in which most of our pupils think and communicate. [As such,] literacy skills are crucial to pupils’ learning in other subjects across the curriculum.” READ MORE
The importance of reading fluency
I’ve recently discovered Instapaper, an app which collates reading material – newspaper articles and webpages, say – and converts them into audio so that I can listen to them on my daily dog walks. Text-to-speech technology allows me to ‘read’ articles, research papers and blogs whilst on the move, thus helping me to catch up on the backlog and ease my guilt somewhat. But there’s a problem… READ: PART ONE | PART TWO
Bridging the gap between school and college study
Last year I wrote a book on transition but, like most literature on this subject, it focused on pupils’ transfer from primary to secondary school, as well as between the various years and key stages of compulsory schooling. However, whilst working with FE colleges across the country, it’s struck me just how important the transition from school to FE is and how unprepared students are for this change… READ MORE
Transforming a failing school
Although genuine, sustainable school improvement is a slow, incremental process, time is often in short supply. The unrelenting cycle of inspection can put huge pressure on school principals and senior teams to demonstrate rapidly rising standards. What, then, is the secret to turning around an underperforming school in a relatively short space of time, whilst laying down the foundations for sustainable improvement? …READ MORE
School funding crisis? What crisis?
School leaders are facing the biggest challenge of their professional lives: they’re simultaneously trying to balance the books amid a national funding crisis and provide the resources required to bolster teaching and learning and improve outcomes for learners. According to the National Audit Office schools face an 8 per cent real-terms cut worth £3 billion by 2020. And what is the government’s response? Ministers insist, mantra-like, that school investment stanks at a record £40bn. But to say that school investment is at a record high is to make a mockery of the figures… READ MORE
Teacher explanations and modelling
Amid a focus on active learning approaches whereby students take the lead in the classroom and teachers act as mere facilitators, the art of quality teacher explanations – sometimes called “direct instruction” – has been, if not exactly lost, then denigrated and devalued. But here’s the unfashionable truth, the elephant in the room, the secret hidden in plain sight: the most effective, expedient way for students to learn is for the teacher – that educated, experienced, expert at the front of the room – to tell them, then show them, what they need to know. Rather than designing convoluted ways of enabling a student to “discover” new knowledge for him or herself, perhaps as a result of engaging in a range of group activities, teachers should take the shortest, simplest path: they should just tell them then show them what they need to know. In short, we should make effective use of teacher explanations (telling) and modelling (showing)… READ MORE
How to demonstrate the impact of Pupil Premium funding
One in four children in the UK grows up in poverty. The attainment gap between rich and poor is detectable from as early as 22 months and continues to widen throughout the education system. Children from the lowest-income homes are half as likely to get five good GCSEs and go on to higher education as the national average. White working-class pupils (particularly boys) are among the lowest performers. The link between poverty and attainment is multi-racial. The effective use of pupil premium (PP) funding is an essential aid in closing the attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and their non-disadvantaged peers. Schools need to ensure that they are making the best use of the school’s money and demonstrating its impact on pupil outcomes. The progress of every pupil who is in receipt of the funding should be monitored and interventions should be put into place in a timely manner as soon as their progress falters. Schools need to be sure that those interventions are the most effective strategies they can use and offer the best value for money for the public purse… READ MORE
Libraries gave us power
I left primary and started middle school aged nine unable to construct a written sentence. It was only thanks to my burgeoning love of books – plus the dedicated, determined – if not scary – teacher who pushed and pushed me hard – that I first caught up and then overtook most of my peers. Books were my saviour and my escape. Books provided me with a ladder of social mobility. Books educated me in life and love. Books were my passport to world travel. Books were the haute cuisine on which I dined, the elixir from which I sought succour… READ MORE
What makes an effective exam post-mortem?
Exam analysis meetings go by many names, most of them aptly funereal in tone, such as ‘post-mortems’ or ‘rapid improvement panels’ (RIPs). One by one, middle and senior leaders step forward, heads bowed reverently, to get a grilling from a grim reaper in the guise of academy sponsors, school governors and headteachers who form part of the post-exam review panel. The primary purpose of these meetings is to interrogate a school’s summative performance data, celebrating success where it occurs (recognising departmental improvements as well as individual accomplishments) and questioning under-performance or significant deviations from predicated outcomes in the hope that the same mistakes can be avoided next year… READ MORE
