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The Forgotten

The House of Commons Education Committee has reported on the forgotten status of White Working Class in education.  In 2014 and in 2021.  During a seven-year period not much has changed.  This group of young people continues to underperform against all groups except travelling and Roma communities. The Opportunity Areas say things have improved there.  […]

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National Numeracy Day

Should we just dedicate a day to this as a nation? Especially as it’s all about taking steps to improve maths. It’s great to see 120,991 people have had the opportunity to get to grips with numbers via National Numeracy Day | National Numeracy But let’s start earlier. Let’s get children engaged with maths… NO […]

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It’s Deaf Awareness week. 

I guess that this week is designed as an opportunity to make the hearing world more aware of challenges faced by d/Deaf people. This needs to be done by d/Deaf people. I’m not d/Deaf, but I’m passionate about improving the lives of d/Deaf people, so I thought I’d do my bit to raise awareness of […]

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‘Lockdown hurts child speech and language skills – report’

There are many factors that contribute to the social mobility gap here in the UK, not least the huge variances in day to day childhood experiences. Today’s report highlights ‘There is growing evidence that the past year of lockdowns has had an impact on young children’s language skills, according to research. Data from 50,000 pupils […]

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Raising awareness of Autism

“One of our young people has just passed their driving test and is driving themselves to school. Now lot’s of our young people want us to help them learn to drive! We’re just a school and don’t have capacity to help them with this. Could you help us please?” This was our very first conversation […]

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It lies in the personalisation of teaching

By accident, lockdown has shown English schools the secret of closing the achievement gap | Teaching | The Guardian I wholeheartedly agree with this article published today, with one exception; BBC bitesize and Oak National do not offer personalisation of teaching. They offer generic curriculum coverage content that can be accessed as many times as […]

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A different approach to a school improvement plan

There are few harder tasks than to rapidly improve a school. I know because I did it. I’d like to share some of the things I learned along the way… To improve a school quickly, you have to improve teaching so that learning increases and achievement rises. To improve teaching quickly, you have to focus […]

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Teacher conundrums

As a teacher, I once taught a boy called Jay*. Jay was lovely; a 5 year-old bundle of energy who lit up our classroom. He was also a flipping nightmare to get work out of. If I sat beside him he could get on. If I moved to the table next to his, his work […]

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Shhhhh it’s too noisy in here!

I bet if you’re a teacher you’ve not said that in a while! I imagine it’s something you’d love to say again soon… a class full of children is better than a muted live lesson, right? Right now it’s really noisy out there when it comes to all the EdTech tools vying to support online […]

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What’s your gold standard?

A recent TES article debating whether live teaching is actually ‘gold standard’ online teaching has got us on our soapbox (you can read the full article here https://www.tes.com/news/coronavirus-schools-online-learning-are-live-lessons-really-better-recorded-ones). Think back to your pre-Covid teaching, the days when you had a classroom and you taught ‘traditional’ lessons. Imagine if you taught a series of lessons, had […]

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