Nicky Phillips | Schools Week

Featured: Kathy takes top honours

Kathy Harwood won this year’s top prize for teaching assistants at the annual Pearson teaching awards. Kathy, a higher level teaching assistant, who has been on the staff at the Hospital and Home Education Learning Centre in Nottingham since 1995, works with children facing a variety of health issues, some of whom are extremely ill. […]

Christine Bayliss, Roger Pope, Chris Jansen, Rees Withers

Christine Bayliss has been appointed chief executive of Prima Learning Trust, a new academy trust based in Bristol. A civil servant for 15 years, she led school improvement initiatives and spent time as head of education strategy and performance for Manchester City Council. Until the summer, she headed the Department for Education’s South East and […]

Share those best moments at work

In appeal on social media is urging young teachers to “stay the course”. This month the Education Support Partnership will use Twitter to encourage teachers to share their best moments at work with the hashtag #NotQuittingTeaching. The move is designed to motivate “struggling young teachers” and make clear there is “light at the end of […]

‘It’s cushy to be a male primary school teacher’

A Y-chromosome makes male teachers instantly visible in a primary schools. It also benefits them enormously; they are over-represented as school leaders while women are over-represented as cleaners, midday assistants, teaching assistants and dinner ladies. I could produce for you a salacious moan-rant about how hard it is being a man in a female-dominated profession […]

You’re not the ‘mastery’ of me

The masculine narrative of current education reformers won’t lead to freedom. It is infiltrating teachers’ consciousness; changing perceptions of who they are as teachers, what they stand for and what they do. I wrote a blog a few weeks ago about the rise of a peculiarly masculine narrative within British education. Not everyone liked it. […]

Andrew Old picks his top blogs of the week 23 October 2015

Is there such a thing as a crap school? By @SurrealAnarchy Sometimes it is the most obviously true statements that are the most controversial. To say that some schools are terrible can lead one to be accused of attacking teachers or children. Here, Martin Robinson describes some schools he’s known where there is no excuse […]

Doug Lemov, author and managing director of Uncommon Schools

Doug Lemov had a “pretty miserable” time in his early teens. “I was kind of the ugly duckling. To add to that, I would say I was… socially awkward, and eager to not be.” To fit in, he says, he wanted to be seen as someone who didn’t really care about school. “That was cool. […]

Academy chain offers extra £5k to ‘core’ subject teachers

Core subject teachers are being offered a £5,000 cash incentive in a bid to lure them to work for a multi-academy trust in Kent. The Swale Academies Trust is advertising the “salary enhancement” to full-time maths, science and English teachers, but not to staff in other subjects such as food technology. It comes amid growing […]

Life skills squeezed out of curriculum by academic subjects

The pressure on academic subjects is pushing life skills out of timetables – and organisations trying to support schools are struggling to get them back in. At an event in central London on Tuesday run by social enterprise support group UnLtd, representatives of charities and social enterprises discussed the problems of incorporating life skills into […]