All articles on this site

  • Why We Should Give Teachers a Pay Rise

    Teachers are demanding a 10% pay rise. To educate the country out of this recession, we should give it to them I bet there were a few teacher-hating members of the public chucking their breakfast at their television sets this morning when they saw the moaning members of the National Union of Teachers asking for […]

  • My profession needs a better voice than these morons

    On Saturday the work-shy teachers at the NUT conference backed a boycott of SATs. On Sunday they moaned about too many tough guys going into teaching (if only!). On Monday they demanded an eye-popping 10 per cent pay rise and yesterday they were threatening to strike over the vagaries of sixth-form funding. What next? A […]

  • Links to English teaching sites at the Guardian

    A useful page of links to English language teaching resources can be found on the Guardian‘s website here.

  • A Blairite learns a lesson

    The premise of this book is intriguing for anyone who is remotely interested in politics or education. The privately educated Peter Hyman was an advisor to Tony Blair from 1994 until 2003; for the last two years of his tenure he rose to being Head of Strategic Communications at Number 10, and was one of […]

  • Do thirty-something men need their mothers more than ever?

    I found Sutcliffe’s novel very easy to read, skipping through it in a day. I particularly enjoyed the way Matt, the features editor of a lad’s magazine, was depicted. The scenes where his mother gate-crashes a launch party he’s at, bosses him around in his warehouse flat, sets him up with a girl are funny, […]

  • Too many tests?

    Emphatically not! I think schools need to test and assess children more; more often, in shorter and sharper ways. At the moment, we have these clunking assessments for children at 7 years, 11 years and 16 years. These exams fail to assess children properly because they are so unwieldy, and the test papers are so […]

  • Is journalism about humiliation

    A powerful piece by Jill Parkin highlighted the issues connected with writing personality based journalism — especially if you are a woman. They are increasingly being asked to write about very humiliating subjects: weight loss, their sex lives, their troubled children and so on. Is the new journalism about humiliation? Have the values of reality […]

  • Life on a Refrigerator Door — the first post-it note novel

  • Dishing out fines won’t stop the chaos in class

    There are riots, drugs and even death threats… and all our leaders offer are sticking-plasters As a battle-hardened teacher, I can’t help but be a little cynical about the latest government initiative to quell indiscipline in our schools. A three-year study into classroom behaviour has called for teachers to be able to slap £50 penalties […]

  • Teaching as triumph

    It is impossible to read Frank McCourt’s new memoir, Teacher Man, about his life as a teacher in New York, without the incessant rain of Ireland drizzling into one’s thoughts. McCourt’s first book, Angela’s Ashes, published when he was 66, won the Pulitzer Prize, has sold millions of copies throughout the world, was turned into […]

  • Worrying about schools

    The worrying has started! My child is in Year 4 but already I’m worrying about where he might go to secondary school. Living as I do in Tower Hamlets, the choices are rather stark. There’s an Academy which all the parents want their child to go to; there’s a pretty good Local Authority comp but […]

  • Are A-Levels still the gold standard they used to be?

    My answer is a resounding “No!” Several things have made it a lot easier to get an A grade: The Assessment Objectives: if pupils tick the right boxes, they’ll get a good grade Re-takes Less stringent marking. The old English A Level was a difficult exam to get an A grade in. Overwhelmingly, you had to write […]

  • The horrors of Ecstasy

    Very troubling article about Ecstasy in the Guardian today – it’s had a good day.

  • Dealing with grief

    An amazing article on a wife’s grief after the death of her husband for sixty years.

  • Are we the same as the war generation?

    Just finished reading One Fine Day by Mollie Panter-Downes, a rather wonderful short novel published just after the Second World War. The novel largely describes in lyrical, humorous and incisive detail one hot summer’s day in the life of a housewife living in a rural village just after the war. For me, the book was […]

  • Was Rousseau the first person to write about being alone?

    Reading Rousseau’s biography, in which it is stated that great philosopher was the first person in his autobiography to write about being ‘alone’, to explore the interior state of a child who felt lonely, isolated, alienated. In his Confessions, Rousseau describes feeling troubled and isolated as he ventured through a graveyard in the dark, hearing […]

  • What is ‘well-being’ and how do you measure it?

    Now that schools will have to report on student’s well-being and consider it more deeply than before, it prompts the questions:What is well-being?How do you measure it?How do you improve students’ well-being?Is well-being contradictory to raising standards?

  • Getting closure

    Despite clear roads and public transport running, schools are still closed because teachers can’t afford to live near where they work At least my school isn’t one of the wussy ones – it’s got a blizzard-proof excuse. The comprehensive where I teach is essentially stuck in a field in Essex and is currently encased in […]

  • The league tables are a game – don’t take them too seriously

    My old school is now one of the ‘most improved’ in the country. Yet I’m not sure it’s so different from a decade ago. I will never forget the day when I learned that the secondary school in which I was teaching had come bottom of the School Performance Tables. That was more than 10 […]

  • Please, Mr Johnson, stop tinkering with our schools

    THE Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, is definitely a worried man. You only have to look at the all the spin issued by his department to know that something is up. The school inspectors Ofsted issued a report last week, 2020 Vision, that called for every pupil to have lessons and exams tailored to their "personalised" […]

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