Build a Brilliant Teacher

Build a Brilliant Teacher

When a teacher fails, it's "mea culpa"; when we succeed, it's "didn't the students do well?" Something that struck me when listening to John Hattie speak at the recent London Festival of Education was his exhortation for teachers to speak up in defence of our own...

The Real World – A Meta-Letter to My Pupils

The Real World – A Meta-Letter to My Pupils

Picture this: a classroom inhabited by a class preparing for a "functional skills" English assessment. The students are clear about what was expected of them. They are working with focus and the atmosphere in the room is calm. What these boys are earnestly doing, in...

First Impressions Count

Here I write some of my thoughts as I head into the new teaching year. I recently received a message from a newly qualified teacher who was filled with anxiety about her first week at a new school. It got me thinking... We can go a long way towards alleviating the...

Transcending Grade Boundaries

In the eye of the GCSE English "grade manipulation storm", I’m seeing a silver lining Almost as soon as this year’s GCSE English grades were released, the twittersphere, broadsheets and tabloids were set alight, first with murmurings, and then all-out accusations that...