JL Dutaut | Schools Week

Too many factors outside of heads’ control are causing anxieties to rise

Trying to earn the trust of communities while feeling untrusted by government is a recipe of sleepless nights, writes Alison Peacock I have worked within the teaching profession throughout my entire career, but I have never witnessed the levels of supreme professionalism that I am seeing in our schools and colleges right now. As chief […]

How are maths departments responding to the challenge of blended learning?

UCL Institute of Education drew on their research network to find out how maths departments were adapting to closures and what they need to do it better. Here’s what they found When schools closed to the majority of pupils earlier this year, the immediate challenge for teachers was how best to enable pupils’ learning to […]

Robin Conway’s blogs of the week, 14 September 2020

Behaviour for learning, pace, reflective leadership and teachers’ right to be heard are Robin Conway’s top picks of the education topics this week EEF Blog: Five-a-day – Achieving Effective Learning Behaviour in Our Classrooms @kirsten_mould I have found the EEF’s evidence reviews and guidance reports hugely useful in identifying areas in which I can […]

Teach Smarter: Efficient and Effective Strategies for Early Career Teachers

Anyone embarking on a PGCE course will find useful takeaways from a book that has plenty to deliver, says Sameerah Mussa The is a CPD book that lives up to its title. As an early-career teacher myself, I’ve found Teach Smarter has provided an excellent introduction to popular theory such as Rosenshine’s principles of instruction […]

Our complex system leaves too many schools to navigate their way alone

Localism isn’t a problem in itself but the lack of mechanisms for sharing best practice is, writes Toby Greany “Anyone who has recently tried to explain the English education system to overseas visitors will be sharply aware of its startling complexity.” So wrote the Educational Endowment Foundation’s Becky Francis in her foreword to our 2018 […]

The class of 2021 could end up being the most disadvantaged in recent memory

The biggest looming crisis in education is at risk of being missed in the frenetic news cycle, writes Eleanor Harrison From August’s algorithm crisis, to the controversy surrounding school reopenings, teachers and pupils have rarely been far from the front pages. But despite the influx of news, there’s a chance that the biggest crisis facing […]

Teachers’ time is being wasted on inconsistent marking methods

The Teacher Assessment Framework used to mark writing in primary school takes a long time to apply – and isn’t even that reliable, writes Daisy Christodoulou Teachers frequently report that one of the most time-consuming aspects of their job is marking. Given that time at the start of a frantic new year is in especially […]

Knee-jerk government directives could cause an outbreak of early retirements

Expert senior leadership teams have supported one another, but they must now be afforded the space to make decisions without constantly reacting to government, writes Sarah Ray The past six months have been described as stormy. For trust and school leaders it’s been more like a hurricane. The sense of responsibility and unpredictability has been […]

Profile: T’Challa Greaves

Jess Staufenberg meets a middle leader intent on breaking the glass ceiling, if only for others It’s rare for Schools Week to feature a middle leader (our main readership base is senior leaders), but T’Challa Greaves, lead practitioner for science at Meridian High School in Croydon, is a powerful voice to listen to. In January […]