Expert Contributor | Schools Week

Ten tips for good teacher recruitment

As the resignation deadline for staff planning to leave in the summer looms, Anna Hennell James’ hints help to ease the pain of recruitment I always look forward to the summer term since it’s a really upbeat time of year in school. But it’s also the term in which the resignation deadline of May 31 […]

I’m proud to be a Conservative, but the funding crisis makes me angry

The Conservative party has achieved much in education, says Steve Mastin, but school funding has become a huge distraction If you’re a teacher who will never consider voting Tory, then best look away now. I discovered my support for Conservative principles when I was at secondary school, around the time the communists crushed democracy supporters […]

Amir Arezoo’s top blogs of the week 20 May 2019

My teaching hall of shame Bob Pritchard @rjpritchard There comes a time as a teacher where you start to hone your practice to include elements that you know have a massive impact. During this process of approaching pedagogical nirvana, however, there are also moments where you reflect on certain lessons and say to yourself “what […]

AP is firmly on the landscape of education – and Timpson knows it

The Timpson review reveals the importance of engagement between alternative provision and mainstream, says Steve Howell. Why not a local representative group or some sort of commissioned oversight? When the long awaited Timpson review of exclusions was finally published last week, those of us working in alternative provision (AP) were keen to see how our […]

The huge ground inspectors are expected to cover will force them to cut corners

Ofsted has admitted that it struggles to recruit and retain its inspectors. Its new framework will leave those in post with a huge amount to do , leaving them with little choice but to cut corners, says Ian Hartwright Ofsted stands at a crossroads. With limited resources and under pressure to resolve issues about the […]

Transform Teaching and Learning Through Talk

In my 16 years of teaching I have never had the urge to explore oracy in detail because I didn’t really see why teaching speaking skills was necessary. Amy Gaunt and Alice Stott’s manifesto for teaching speaking skills has changed all that. People wrongly assume that children pick up oracy as they go along, but […]

Nick Gibb: “The crisis of capitalism”

There is a well-worn lexicon of how you describe speeches in Westminster. Anyone giving a “thoughtful” or “wide-ranging” speech has ambitions for higher office. Anyone explicitly talking “beyond their brief” is about to run for leader. Email comes in. Would I like to come and see Nick Gibb give a wide-ranging speech, going beyond his […]

Julia Skinner’s top blogs of the week 29 April 2019

Six months in . . . chair v marathon? @vawells1 Who would have thought there were several similarities between being a chair of a board and training for the London marathon? This is an appropriately pacey piece from Vicci Wells who (hopefully) completed the London marathon last Sunday. She has selected four areas that each […]

How to make collaborative learning worthwhile

Everything that teachers do has a cost, a benefit, and (ideally) a valuable balance between the two. Often that cost is class or preparation time — a resource that always seems to be scarce — the benefit, student learning. But there are other indirect benefits that can come from many activities. Given this, we naturally […]