LeadingLearner

What Impact Your Half Year of Teaching?

We’ve reached the mid-point of the academic year; the mornings are getting lighter and the days longer.  It’s worth reflecting on what impact your teaching has had in term of pupils’ progress during the first half of the year.

It’s important to understand that this is a question to reflect on not a means for holding teachers to account.  Since the days of pupils allegedly making three sub-levels progress a year we’ve used unreliable data to make invalid conclusions.  There is a lack of precision in the question, as well as any answer, which makes high stakes or even low stakes accountability nonsensical.  Continue reading →

Our New Secretary of State is on a Workload Mission

The new Secretary of State for Education, Damian Hinds, has made addressing workload one of his top three priorities. The public perception of teachers wasting time needlessly filling in form after form grasps the issue but misses the point. It’s not needless forms, though there will be some of those, it is the culture that is driving workload.

Continue reading →

Focus on Getting Better at Getting Better

The standard school improvement process, certainly Blackpool’s default modus operandi; find kitchen sinks, ramdomly throw them with as much energy and passion as you can, have no impact then fall down exhausted.  Repeat ad nauseam. Continue reading →