Some commentators have felt that there are as many as 17,000 incompetent teachers in our schools, and yet only a handful of them have been sacked officially. A recent Panorama programme suggested that these teachers are passed from school to school because headteachers are too frightened to sack them. It’s basically easier for a head […]

The Standard Assessment Tests for 11-year-olds, while not perfect, are necessary. There are three reasons why teachers shouldn’t boycott these tests. Firstly, the tests as they stand do help drive up standards in reading, writing and arithmetic. Extra lessons are put on for those children who are not up to scratch and pupils who are […]

The new General Teaching Council’s Code of Conduct states under Rule 6, which is “Work as part of a whole-school team”, that teachers should “recognise the important role of school in the life of the local community, and take responsibility for upholding its reputation and building trust and confidence in it.” This guideline is very […]

There’s a lot of evidence that exams actually help children learn if they are properly designed and executed. The problem at the moment is that there are far too many exams and what’s being tested is far too narrow. I think we should set more real tests in our exams, using ‘real-life’ facilities. For example, […]

Having been there and done it, I feel now that parents are usually best off sending their child to the local school as a government adviser recently suggested. Having helicoptered my child into a private school and seen him subjected to rote-learning and the barbaric, pointless competition of the private sector, I decided to pull […]

Emphatically not! You’re far better off reading a school’s admission criteria very carefully and reading books like my Working The System. A BBC investigation has revealed that parents are paying lawyers thousands of pounds to get into the school of their choice. I appeared on BBC Radio Wales and BBC Radio 5 Live and explained that […]

Leonora Rustamova was suspended from her post as English teacher this January because she wrote a book about her pupils. At first glance, it sounds monstrously unfair: a teacher tries to motivate the disaffected teenage boys in her class by writing a book about them. Initially, her headteacher was very supportive of the plan, but then had […]

Have we gone mad with the way we use jargon? A sentence used by the police in this article suggests so. I appeared on the Steve Nolan show, talking about this, partly defending jargon. In some cases, it can be helpful. For example, the label “Special Educational Needs” is jargony, but it’s far better than […]

I think they should. At the moment, there’s a bit of an epidemic of short skirts sweeping through the land far faster than the swine-flu virus. Some of this attire doesn’t actually deserve the name of ‘skirt’, ‘belt’ would be more appropriate! Quite frankly, I don’t think that the girls wearing them are aware of the negative […]

Emphatically not! Orwell’s last novel has not survived the test of time. I know this through the hard graft of having to teach the dreary novel to reluctant Year 10 and 11 students. There are a number of serious flaws with the book. First and foremost, the plot is predictable and relatively undramatic: a miserable […]