Thursday. How on Earth is it not Saturday yet? Having been up marking some of my 250-plus books till the wee small hours, I wake up taking a few seconds to recall what day it is. I’m off on a course, which adds 90 minutes to my travelling time and ...
Well, that was a hoot, wasn’t it? SATs are all over bar the awkward meetings where they make up a suitably puzzling grade boundary, and teachers across the land are now able to focus on the more important things in life…or, at least, which set of assessments or report-writing is ...
As someone in charge of education, surely some things may be a hint you may not be presiding over the most glorious era of our schools’ history. Firstly, the fact teachers are leaving the profession not in a trickle, but in a flood. People who have done a fine job ...
Up and down the nation, parents of children aged around 7 and 11 will be doing battle with the horror that is SPaG tests – or, to the uninitiated, Spelling, Punctuation and Grammar. Large numbers of children are arriving in school so much further back in their development than they ...
Many of you may have heard the government’s latest wheeze to interfere in education: to force all schools to become academies. Now, in times past, the term academy as a title of an organisation was seen as a sign it was quite good. When someone found out I worked at ...
Huzzah! The Easter holidays are nearly here! Surely, the holidays are the reason why teachers join the profession. Well, the reality is that for many of us, they are simply a brief period where we can do the following: let our exhausted bodies catch up on some sleep after working ...
With the pressures of assessments, government shaftings, endless new curriculum decrees and the ever-present sceptre of Ofsted hovering like a bureaucratic vulture above us, the average person could be forgiven for assuming we teachers are all either Stakhanovite indestructible machines or gibbering wrecks. When people know what goes on in ...
Most people are familiar with SATs tests, the milestone assessments that pupils, teachers and schools are judged on and which have a lasting impact on all concerned. What most people who do not work in schools will not realise is what an absolute swizz, travesty and total mockery of education ...
I remember my training year vividly. I did the Graduate Teacher Programme, a postgraduate route into teaching which, while harder to get onto and fewer places available, gives you a better training wage and you are contracted to a school for the year. I was fortunate enough to train at ...