All articles on this site

  • Sometimes strict teachers can be the worst at actually helping children learn…

    The news today that assaults on teachers have risen to a five-year-high and that nearly 1,000 children are excluded from school every day got me thinking about behaviour in our schools. I find headlines like this depressing because they actually tell us very little about what is really going on in schools. I suspect, though I […]

  • Only Connect — Teach First award winners reveal their secrets…

    I attended the Teach First Awards this Thursday and interviewed some of the award winners afterwards. The ceremony was your average award winning affair: lots of praise for sponsors and quite a bit of back-slapping. I like the Teach First programme because it has at its heart the idea of promoting good teaching — which is […]

  • Let’s support the summer reading challenge and get every child reading!

    The Summer Reading Challenge is a really cool project which aims to get schools, libraries and parents working together so our children might actually do some reading they like this summer! For an English teacher like me, this is the Holy Grail: if one of my pupils actually enjoys reading, then everything else follows; happiness […]

  • The Machine Gunners — Teaching Activities, links and videos

    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qaul5qhenY0 BBC Schools Radio has produced an excellent scheme of work on The Machine Gunners, which can be accessed here.

  • Dream of a lost friend by Carol Ann Duffy

    Dream of a lost friend

  • The Last Day Of Term

    Told within a single day, The Last Day of Term is a novel which interweaves the gritty realities of teenage life in an inner-city school with a touching and comic story of a man in crisis.

  • Exam boards are failing our pupils

    The faceless bureaucracy of exam boards has led to error-strewn papers. Exams should have a single, accountable author My pupils are all looking very stressed these days. Not only are they sitting their mocks, but they’ve also been sitting “modular” exams and have had to endure the nightmare of tackling exam papers sprinkled with errors. […]

  • The councillor in charge of my LA’s schools will tell parents not to send their children to my local comp if it becomes an Academy…

    Last night, I attended a meeting convened by the National Union of Teachers about my local secondary school, Bethnal Green Technology College, becoming an Academy. The school has already had a public meeting about this – as I noted in a previous post. Alex Kenny, a prominent NUT activist in east London, Alasdair Smith of […]

  • Structuring GCSE writing

    Learning how to structure writing on Prezi

  • Using personal experience to improve your writing

    Using personal experience to improve on Prezi

  • Should climate change be dropped from the national curriculum?

    was shocked to read today that climate change may be dropped from the national curriculum. As a teacher in various state schools for 20 years, I’ve seen how much the education on this issue has really improved in the past decade and how everyone has benefited from it being a prescribed part of the curriculum. […]

  • An introduction to A2 Media Studies OCR, Collective Identity

      Task: Devise your own Prezi which explores all the groups you feel a part of and which ones you feel define you, and which definitely do NOT. My collective identities on Prezi

  • Gove’s free schools policy is already in trouble

    From the outset, the coalition’s support of free schools was heralded as its defining education policy. Groups of parents, teachers or community members would be given the power and resources to set up their own schools, particularly in areas of high social deprivation. These groups would sweep aside the concerns of the bureaucratic local authorities […]

  • A presentation on the problems with Free Schools

    The problems with free schools on Prezi

  • The unions’ cause is just, but I’m ambivalent about striking – and I shudder at the legacy of the ’80s disputes

    Recently we have had localised strikes over pay, badly behaved pupils, redundancies and cuts to school services, but the biggest ones in a generation are on the way over pensions. While the majority of us were not surprised that the most left-wing of the unions, the NUT, voted to strike over pensions last week, you […]

  • How did Edinburgh influence the writing of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde?

    I think I’m getting a bit better at making these videos now. I produced this video for my GCSE pupils who have not been to Edinburgh but really need to know how the city influenced the writing of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde for their English Literature exam. Robert Louis Stevenson had a love-hate relationship with […]

  • The unfair representation of a collective group in two media platforms

    Ryan Linham has written interesting answer to an A Level OCR Media Studies question here. What are the strengths and weaknesses of his answer?

  • Media Studies: John Dunford, Head of Media Studies, and student blog links.

    The Head of Media Studies at my school has his blog here. It is full of useful links and information. A2 students: http://linhamr3m4.wordpress.com/ http://danielbmedia.wordpress.com/ http://alexoconnor2.wordpress.com/ http://missemilystevens.wordpress.com/ http://joannebones.wordpress.com/ http://www.lukedarlingslifeblog.blogspot.com/ http://mollycliftona2.wordpress.com/ http://rachelhelsby2.wordpress.com/

  • Collective Identity — Media Studies, Youth Demonisation

    There’s a useful blog on Collective Identity connected with Youth Demonisation here, devised by a chief examiner at OCR.

  • The classroom should be a place of learning – but not for teachers

    Michael Gove’s plans to move teacher training out of universities will provoke protest at teachers’ conferences No article on matters educational is complete without a disquisition on standards. So here’s one, right at the top. The coalition’s plans to replace teacher-training at university with on-the-job learning will mean that standards – standards in teaching, that […]

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