How are British children responding to the emerging themes and issues in their writing? When OUP was asked if we’d like to be the language expert for a ‘pop up’ 500 Words: Black Lives Matter children’s writing competition, we didn’t hesitate for a moment. OUP has been the language partner to 500 Words since 2012, […]
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Coronavirus is the 2020 Oxford Children’s Word of the Year! 2020 marks the 10th anniversary of BBC Radio 2 Breakfast Show and Chris Evans’ 500 Words short story competition, and saw more than 134,000 children submit entries, hitting the millionth story milestone! As part of ongoing language and lexical research, the Oxford Children’s Dictionaries & […]
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Last week we saw the final criteria for the MFL speaking endorsement published by Ofqual ( link here ). For our colleagues in English this is not a new thing, but for us in MFL it is a novelty and as such it has raised a certain amount of uncertainty and concern. How can we decide fairly […]
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The Translation Exchange at the Queen’s College, Oxford, launched a brand-new competition for schools in September 2020. The competition is inspired by the work of the translator Anthea Bell OBE (1936–2018), one of the finest and most influential literary translators of the 20th and 21st centuries. The competition takes place in March 2021, but we […]
Read moreGood schools have always known the fundamental importance of building positive relationships in order to create successful learning environments. But relationships are much easier to build when face-to-face than in the online world, so how can schools keep their communities connected if remote learning is still the only option? Relationships – the key to happiness […]
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This return to school has been like no other. As usual, we have had to face confirmation of Ebbinghaus’ forgetting curve after a long summer break; but this time, with the addition of those months in lockdown. And, although happy to be back in school, we have found ourselves having to work extra hard not […]
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Anti-Bullying Week 2020 takes place from Monday 16th – Friday 20th November. We’ve gathered together a collection of anti-bullying books to encourage your class to work together to make a difference and help put a stop to bullying.
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A recent webinar with Mike Askew explored the connection between reasoning, problem solving and fluency. This blog post summaries the key takeaways from this webinar.
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Lionel Bolton, Head of English, Languages and Humanities, Oxford University Press Read the report What have we discovered? Our new report, Bridging the Word Gap at Transition, builds on our previous report from 3 years ago, Why Closing the Word Gap Matters. In that first report we highlighted that nearly half of the children in Year 1 and […]
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Jane Harley, Policy and Partnership Director, Oxford University Press Read the Oxford Language Report OUP has a deeply rooted commitment to young people’s language development – it sits at the heart of education. We seek to drive positive change in educational outcomes through our publishing and nowhere can be more important than the area of language and literacy. Through our Oxford Children’s Corpus we monitor closely the […]
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Sarah Eggleton: Continuing from the previous blog – ‘Closing the word gap – introducing a whole school approach’ this blog will explain how we moved from staff delivering key words in lessons to enabling teachers and students to engage with and interrogate vocabulary to get a genuine deep understanding of it. What we wanted to […]
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Sarah Eggleton: Following on from my previous two posts regarding developing a consistent approach to closing the word gap in the English classroom, I’m pleased to share how we moved from English to a whole school approach to explicit vocabulary teaching. Experience has taught me that when moving to implement a Literacy strategy the overwhelming […]
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