The Oxford Language Report: Why Closing the Word Gap Matters found evidence that an increasing number of children in UK schools have a limited vocabulary – a word gap – which is holding back their learning. The report brings together the thoughts of a number of leading academics and practitioners, based on market research with over 1,300 primary and secondary teachers. Over half of those surveyed reported […]
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Rebecca Royle Barnsbury Primary School and Nursery, Surrey Our Journey We are a two-form entry primary in Woking and the Numicon approach to teaching and learning maths has become an integral part of our school’s ethos. At Barnsbury Primary School and Nursery the Numicon approach to teaching and learning in mathematics is embedded from the start […]
Read more Deputy maths lead Claire Hall discusses the massive impact Numicon has made on the students and staff at Tilbury Pioneer Academy. Back in 2013 Tilbury Pioneer Academy was due to be closed as students weren’t achieving their expected grades, staff weren’t being supported and the school was deemed not worthy of KS2. However, since the implementation […]
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Deputy Headteacher and Maths Co-ordinator Katie Willis of Perton Primary Academy discusses the initial challenges faced and lesson learnt when implementing a mastery approach in her school, and the successes they’ve had as a result. Our mastery journey began in September 2015. I had just started my job at Perton Primary Academy in Wolverhampton. There were no […]
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Christian Bokhove Evidence explained Imagine you are designing a textbook and only at the end you decide to evaluate its effectiveness. This would be a risky thing to do, as it would mean making an enormous investment, without any inkling of ‘whether it works’. This would not be money well spent. During the whole design […]
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By Vanessa Pittard, former Assistant Director at the DfE No single person can take credit for Singapore’s success in the teaching of mathematics, but if I could nominate someone, it would be Berinderjeet Kaur, Professor of Mathematics and Mathematics Education at Singapore’s National Institute of Education. Along with others, I was lucky enough to hear […]
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Is spelling really that important any more? Especially in the modern world where children are growing up using onscreen documents, emails, texts, all with autocorrect? Unfortunately, as Jerrold Zar illustrates in his poem ‘An Ode to a Spellchecker’, we can’t always trust the computer to spot the ‘Miss steaks aye kin knot sea’. The truth […]
Read moreThe first few weeks of a new school year usually involves both looking forward and looking back. The summer of 2016 saw an almost completely new set of national assessment and accountability arrangements and schools are analysing how they’ve done and pondering the implications for the years ahead. We don’t have all the results yet […]
Read moreLast month, I was lucky enough to speak at OUP’s For the Love of Reading: Passing on the Passion conference. It was a wonderful occasion that brought teachers, authors and researchers together to talk about reading. I left with my brain fizzing with ideas, inspired to try the raft of new things I’d learnt from […]
Read moreIt’s almost over. Almost exactly four years after Michael Gove formally announced the abolition of National Curriculum level descriptions, the first use of the new statutory assessment arrangements is nearing completion. Children in Years 2 and 6 have done their statutory tests, external moderation visits to selected schools are in full swing and teacher assessment […]
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