Let's Move On From Here...

In between my other jobs this weekend, I have been considering how to use the London marathon as a stimulus for a PSHE lesson - how to draw positive messages from it. This year, over 250,000 people entered the ballot to run the London marathon. Approximately 50,000 were selected and of those around 40,000 made it to the start line. It is run by elite athletes, keen amateurs and costumed warriors with a cause to champion. It is run by the able-bodied, those with sensory impairments, all genders, people living with mental health issues and people with all manner and degrees of physical challenge.  I love that all run the same race - there is no "easy" marathon, nobody gets a go on a segway half way round, and nobody gets someone else to come and do a bit of the run for them. It's very fair. Fairness seems very important to me - in sport, in education and in life - as does equality of opportunity. It's also very humane event. Every year we see heartwarming...

There is no such thing as one size fits all. There are those who believe that grammar schools can work for everyone - Justine Greening thinks so, and is staking her reputation on it.  I am not opposed to grammar schools - quite the opposite - I think they are great. They can be centres of excellence where our best and brightest students are stretched and challenged. For some lucky individuals they enable access to the best universities which would otherwise be denied them. But why anyone would think that grammar schools would be able to meet the needs of every child is beyond me. In fact I am angry for my colleagues in grammar schools - why would you want to dilute what they do so brilliantly?? Schools tend to do really well with a particular sort of learner. We become excellent at providing for them, understanding their needs, teaching them. Amazing work is done in all sorts of schools with all sorts of learners. The student who will do well to gain a handful of F and E ...

The vast majority of students will experience stress during the exam season - in fact something would be strange if they didn't. I am not one of these people who think that all stress is bad - just the opposite. For one thing, the modern world is one of deadlines and accountability for most of us and stress goes with the territory. For another, some of what we call stress is actually what motivates us to try hard and to do our best! However, for some students stress gets out of hand, and rather than driving them on, it paralyses them. That is what we must help our students to avoid at all costs. Here are my 4 P's of exam readiness... 1. Preparation It is vital that students not only are prepared, but that they feel prepared for exams. They need to know what each paper will look like, how long to spend on each question and what they are being asked to do. Preparation is about having no suprises on the day. It also means having a plan if things go wrong. I use things l...

The new grading system which replaces the familiar A*-G with 9-1 is giving me a bit of a headache and the recent nonesense about "standard passes" and "strong passes" has really not helped. Rob Webster posted the following on Twitter recently: 1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 At least the emojis are easy to understand! I don't necessarily have a problem with talking about passing and failing exams, but I do have a problem with shifting goal posts and a lack of clarity.  I also have a problem with a grade 9 that is norm referenced. How do I as a teacher answer the question: "What do I have to do to get a grade 9?" when the answer is, "Be better than the vast majority of other students."? For this reason, I have a problem with predicting grade 9s. Honestly, I don't think we should do it. It's hard enough to predict the criteria referenced grades, but how do I predict whether or not a particular student will be one of t...

Should schools teach about "fake news" says the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's education director: Click for BBC News article I have no interest personally or professionally in what is in the PISA tests; they are at best an irrelavance as far as I am concerned, and at worst a dangerous distraction from the real business of education. I do however completely agree that we need to teach our young people the skills to evaluate the information that they are bombarded with. And it's not something you can necessarily put into an exam. We are bombarded with information which puports to be valid and true: the President of the United States of America tweets lies and then denies it. For Trump, and many like him, words have power but no weight - he uses words to influence the credible and then blames someone else for putting the misinformation into his hands. You have to admire the balls on the guy. History departments do a great deal toward...

Some days you just wonder if you are losing your touch as a teacher. It happens to us all - even those of us who have been teaching for 20 years and pride ourselves on our classroom management. How true it is that pride goeth before a fall! Just when you think you have got this whole teaching and learning malarky down, and have a behaviour management strategy for every occasion, along comes a child to confound you. None of your usual approaches works for more than five minutes - or at all. They laugh in the face of detentions, smirk when you tell them off and throw kindness back at you like a well aimed cow pat. You have tried limiting the options, presenting a win-win choice, set individualised work, praised all positive behaviour choices, done tactical ignoring, tried 30 second intervention at the door, phoned home, invited parents in, consulted colleagues...you name it, you've bloody tried it. Worse still, the class think they are utterly hilarious and start to join in. ...

There's an old adage that "a stitch in time saves nine". It's an old, very practical saying. Putting a stitch  or two in a small tear or hole means not having to spend ages sewing it up later on when the hole has got more serious. We apply this in schools when we intervene with younger children who have gaps in their learning. We know those gaps will almost certainly grow and get bigger if we leave them. A short, targeted intervention in year 7 or 8 saves a much bigger set of interventions in year 11. We also do it with behaviour. A thirty second intervention at the door as the child comes into the classroom can save them and you from a stressful lesson - and maybe an incident. We are not so great with mental health. We seem to think it will go away on its own. That the child will "grow out of it" when they get more "mature". Think about that one for a minute. If children grow out of mental health problems then where in the heck did all the t...