I’ve taught Year 6 many times in my career and memories of SATs week are all too fresh in my mind. Three hours and fifty minutes of silence will produce a snapshot of where our 11-year-olds are in reading, writing, mathematics and grammar, punctuation and spelling all summed up neatly as a scaled score. The […]
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Boy, Everywhere is a story of survival, of family, of bravery. It looks at the refugee crisis from a new perspective, and through Sami’s eyes shows that we are all one cruel twist of fate away from becoming refugees ourselves: it can happen to anyone. Historical context By 2015, the war in Syria had been […]
Read moreMore than 400 teachers, leaders and support staff joined inspirational speakers at our first ever two-day interactive Oxford International Curriculum Schools Conference this term. The exclusive online event on the topic of ‘Making learning meaningful: empowering future leaders and changemakers’ included sessions from Alex Beard, Karem Roitman, Jo Cogan, Adrian Bethune and Louise Aukland, on trending topics in education. […]
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I don’t know about you, but I look forward to introducing a new class reader with the various classes I teach. There’s something about the opportunity to share great literature with young people and also have the chance to share my own passion as a reader. It’s always enjoyable to challenge myself with a new […]
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‘Cultured…Engaged…Informed’. This vision strapline underpins everything we do in my English Department. Vocabulary teaching, naturally, plays an important role in fulfilling this vision. When we spoke to students about the disadvantages that poor vocabulary acquisition brings, the one that came up repeatedly was that of frustration – the inability to communicate that which is in […]
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Written by The Children’s Society in partnership with Oxford University Press As we emerge from the upheaval and disruption of the pandemic you could argue that it was young people who paid the highest price, especially those who were taking exams. The Children’s Society (TCS) has been carrying out research with children and young people […]
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For very good reason the last several years has witnessed an explosion in thinking about effective revision strategies, with an increasing focus on self-testing and retrieval. As we increasingly use and model these skills in our own classrooms so too do students increasingly use them in their own independent practice. Yet, whilst we may be […]
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The Oxford Children’s Language Team reflect on the Government’s white paper for schools, highlighting the importance of vocabulary.
Read more Recently, I’ve been playing around with and using a lot of Oxford University Press Shakespeare materials and resources, which are proving to be excellent. In particular, I’ve been experimenting with their ‘Macbeth GCSE Revision Workbook’ by Graham Elsdon, which is part of the Oxford School Shakespeare series. I’ve been using this in the more traditional […]
Read moreThe start of the new academic year is always an exciting time. Enthusiastic students (on the whole), rested teachers (mostly), new books and a world of potential ahead of us. This year, of course, things are a bit different. Across the world, students are starting new courses or looking ahead to exams against the backdrop […]
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