Everywhere you look in the education world currently, it seems that discussion is centred around the forthcoming new Ofsted Framework. For many (including myself), the framework is a welcome change – an opportunity to put the what and why back at the heart of our teaching discussions and decisions. With the framework clearly centred on […]
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I have been floating the idea of treating key mathematics ideas as handrails for teachers and students. Recently several positive comments about this perspective have floated back to me, so I am sharing the idea with you. In mathematics, teaching key ideas could be handrails. Handrails can be held, used as guides or supports, or […]
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This month we welcome Rebecca Nobes, Head of Spanish to the Teaching Languages Today Blog with her reflections on the Ofsted Framework… Having read the new Ofsted Framework, all in all I am feeling positive. I’m really encouraged by the way in which it outlines all the things that they will not be expecting early […]
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Every year thousands of young people from across the UK pick up their pens to enter BBC Radio 2’s 500 Words competition. As part of ongoing language and lexical research, the Oxford Children’s Dictionaries & Children’s Language Data team at Oxford University Press has analysed almost 113,000 short stories submitted to the competition for the […]
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Following a 3-month public consultation period that got more than 15,000 responses, Ofsted has published its new Education Inspection Framework. The new framework will apply from September 2019, but what’s changed and what does this mean for schools? “Our goal is really simple: to be a force for improvement through our inspections. We want to […]
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I am not sure about you, but I am constantly curious about how plays get their titles, as some appear to be quite random; think of Tennessee Williams’ Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, or A Streetcar Named Desire or Ionesco’s The Bald Soprano. Have your students ever asked you why Miller called his play […]
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By Emma Bishop, Subject Leader for Science in a Devon Academy During my 23 years as a teacher, I have endured my fair share of jumping through Ofsted-generated hoops. Fads have come and gone and the days of high stakes lesson observations where we were falling over ourselves to show rapid progress are still fresh […]
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What to expect during the GCSE years and how to support your child If you have a child about to embark on their ‘GCSE journey’, there are probably any number of questions spinning around your mind. Aside from the obvious one (which is “where has all the time gone? It only seems like yesterday they […]
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GCSEs (General Certificate of Secondary Education) are the main academic qualification taken in several subjects by the vast majority of pupils in secondary education in England, Wales and Northern Ireland. But, in England, there have been significant reforms to many of the topics studied within the subjects, as well as to the examinations themselves and […]
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A new Ofsted inspection framework will be used with schools from September 2019. The four key inspection elements will be: quality of education; behaviour and attitudes; personal development; and leadership and management. Notably, the ‘outcomes’ element has gone and there is a clear shift in focus towards the way a school designs and implements its […]
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