The Time Devil is a fantastic time-travelling story which teenagers will love. Six students from Deptford Green school are kidnapped by a Time Devil, an evil, gigantic time-travelling black bird having been lured by the TimeBook app he set up in cyber-space. They are flung into the National Maritime Museum where they enter the exhibits, […]

These suggestions are based on the points raised at the Reading Revolution Conference held at Goldsmiths, University of London on Saturday 23rd September 2017. ONE: Encourage Reading for Pleasure Read for the sake of reading. Read aloud, read in groups, read in pairs, read silently. Read poems, stories, articles, blogs, relevant social media and so […]

This article, in a slightly different form was initially published on the Teachit website. Shakespeare as Cultural Capital by Francis Gilbert on Scribd

Yesterday I spoke at the Guardian Education Centre for a conference on Reading for Pleasure in the secondary classroom. The Guardian’s literary editor, Claire Armistead, kicked off the day by explaining that we need our young people to enjoy reading and to read whole texts which are not part of the curriculum; she pointed out […]

I’ve been working hard at helping Key Stage 3 students in Deptford Green school, a London comprehensive, to develop their reading skills. To that end, I have written a book, The Time Devil, which is set partly in Deptford Green and partly in the National Maritime Museum, whom we are also working with.  I have […]

I had a very enjoyable day at Goldsmiths on the summer solstice to celebrate National Writing Day. The summer solstice is: “the time at which the sun is at its northernmost point in the sky(southernmost point in the South hemisphere), appearing at noon at its highest altitude above the horizon.” It is midsummer; the heart of this glorious season, a time when Vikings used to resolve legal disputes, when the sun would align with the Wyoming’s Bighorn medicine wheel and magnificent Aztec architecture, […]

  Respected research has shown for some time that certain teaching approaches are particularly effective at improving students’ reading skills; one such strategy is called Reciprocal Teaching (Oczkus, 2010:Palincsar and Brown, 1984) which gets learners reading in groups. I’ve written about the success of this strategy in two previous issues of NATE Magazine (June 2015/June […]

This article is an extract from a forthcoming book, The Long Game: The Lessons We Can Learn From Long-Serving Teachers. The aim was to interview long-serving teachers, listen to their stories and see if I could draw out any lessons from their experiences. Constructive comments are welcome; they will help me make it a better book. […]

We need him to move the Labour Party forward. Why is Jeremy Corbyn so popular? Here’s a backbench Labour MP, a serial rebel during the Blair/Brown era proclaiming the same ideas he’s spouted for decades and no one has listened to. Now he’s the favorite to win the Labour Party leadership. Even people, like me, […]

The prime minister’s announcement that, if re-elected, he will open 500 new free schools in the next five years, has catapulted this dismal policy initiative back into the headlines. Most commentators had assumed that David Cameron would keep quiet about free schools because it is generally acknowledged that they’ve been a bit of a disaster […]

How many times must academies be discredited before policymakers look at the proven but less headline-grabbing solutionn but less headline-grabbing solution? The prime minister’s announcement today that, if elected, the Tories will force “mediocre” schools to convert to academies was important for a couple of reasons. First, it indicated that the government wants to make […]

Why do 95% of teachers not know about what really works in the classroom? Why are the media and politicians even more clueless? According to Mike Bell, who runs the Evidence-Based Teachers’ Network (EBTN), very few people are actually aware of the teaching techniques that are proven to work across all the age ranges and subjects. […]

I appeared on Newsnight last night discussing the teaching profession with presenter Kirsty Wark and Sean Worth, who is a Fellow of the think-tank, Policy Exchange, which was set up by a few people, including Michael Gove. We were talking about Michael Gove’s comment on Newsnight the previous night that outstanding teachers supported his reforms […]

THE shocking, terrifying killing of Ann Maguire, an experienced, much loved teacher, has made the nation aware of how important it is not to take teachers for granted. It is tragically sad that it has taken this noble teacher’s death to make the public conscious of this because, let’s face it, there are too many […]

Is it possible that violent and unruly children pose a bigger problem than schools dare admit?   Having taught for more than 20 years in various comprehensives, I can honestly say that there has been no more shocking news about the profession in the past couple of decades than the death of Anne Maguire, a […]

Michele Roberts’ keynote speech at the ‘Beyond the Sheets’ conference marked, for me, a new epoch in the way we talk about sex. Here was an established literary figure seeking to change the discourse about sex, addressing at the conference pre-dominantly young writers and emerging academics; the new “intelligentsia” if you like. It was an […]

Last weekend, I spoke at the School Libraries Group conference in Derby. I was asked to talk about what education is for and how school libraries can contribute towards the aims and purposes of education. If you watch the YouTube video of my talk (above) you’ll see that I look at a number of key […]

Gove’s conference speech was misleading – his education policies give more power to the privileged and fuel social segregation The main claim made by Michael Gove at the Conservative party conference was that his education policies are focused on “social justice”. It was a lacklustre speech that sounded more like a list of acknowledgements. For a large […]

The biggest thing holding back bright pupils is the limiting structure of GCSEs, says a comprehensive teacher Sir Michael Wilshaw, the chief inspector of schools, depressed me no end when I heard him on the radio yesterday morning. I was getting ready to teach my mixed ability classes in the large comprehensive where I work […]