Keep the bigger picture in view The image of the Reading Rope is a powerful one. As a primary school teacher for 20 years, I worked to twist together the fibres to build and strengthen the rope with the aim of sending pupils to secondary school fully able to access the curriculum. Now, working at […]
Read more Most teachers will tell you that the longer you remain in education the more you feel: training, professional development dialogue and staff CPD goes in cycles. New variations of past ideas emerge and make you question two things: one how old you feel and two, why you didn’t pursue these ideas when they first emerged? […]
Read more I am a teacher working in a school which is in a deprived area of Portsmouth, England. As Lead of Phonics and Reading, I am really keen to promote language skills within the school, as the children who start nursery and school in this area come with very limited language. As is the case for […]
Read more I was appointed as Language for Learning Lead at Icknield Community College in September 2016 with a broad rather vague brief. ICC is an Oxfordshire academy of 700 11-16yr olds on roll with lower than national average FSM, EAL and SEN cohorts. Building on my predecessor’s legacy, I continued to deliver a ‘word-of-the-week’ to tutors […]
Read more As a graduate in both English Language and Literature, I always had a vague notion that vocabulary development was best undertaken through reading a variety of texts and encountering new words in context. I assumed that vocabulary could be built merely by using context clues and by encouraging pupils to read for pleasure. We would […]
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Beth Cox has been making books incidentally inclusive since 2005. She works with publishers to help them understand the basic principles of inclusion so that they can embed inclusion in everything they publish. She’s also a co-founder of Inclusive Minds , a collective of people championing authentic inclusion in the children’s book world. Inclusive Minds has a […]
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Balancing work with parenting was hard enough before a global pandemic shoe-horned its way into our lives. But working from home AND being a home-school teacher is perhaps the most challenging balancing act most of us have ever encountered. For a while, when all this started (it seems so long ago), there were confident cries […]
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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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It is safe to say that there will be a pressing urge to ‘get back to normal’ when schools resume. However, it will be important to make space for recovery work: the conversations, routines, and relationships that help a school flourish. It is also important to remember that there is likely to be a wider […]
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Daisy Christodoulou talks about some of the important questions and popular ed tech ideas she explores in her new book, Teachers vs Tech? The case for an ed tech revolution. As long ago as 1913, people were predicting that technology was going to transform education. “Books will soon be obsolete in the public schools. Scholars […]
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