How do you best secure a successful reading culture? How can you ensure pupils, and teachers, are reading better in every classroom? These questions about reading in classrooms are vital questions about how we monitor change and steer school improvement. Literacy leaders – including literacy leads in secondary schools, or reading
Adaptive teaching is about the decisions teachers make to ensure their pupils access the curriculum and learn. Those expert decisions involve teachers anticipating, assessing and adapting in their classroom with confident judgement. Of course, teachers’ decision-making is limited by what leaders prioritise, mandate, and what structures they dictate. Leaders
Leah is revising for her 'Romeo and Juliet' mock exam. Two hours before bed, with the exam in a fortnight, she starts writing and revising about the theme of fate. She asks her AI chatbot for the key quotations and what they show. Back comes a tidy list
Oracy is at the centre of the news. The education secretary, Lucy Powell, wants oracy to have “equal status” to reading and writing. With the importance of oracy set to be enshrined into new national curriculum and assessment, we need to ask an important question: how do you make oral
Let's begin with a familiar scenario of a pupil struggling with reading. Amelia is in year 7 but she is finding the leap to secondary school tricky. She has a good group of friends, but she is finding the curriculum harder to access than she did in year
Adaptive teaching can prove tricky to pin down. Most teachers welcome it. The phrase is now familiar in staff rooms and inspection reports alike, but I’m repeatedly experiencing a different understanding from school to school, and in some cases, from teacher to teacher. A shared and sound understanding of
Every teacher has taught a version of Craig. Craig was unfailingly polite, cheerful and never any trouble. He'd say good morning, rummage in his chaotic bag, settle into his chair, and waits for you to do the work. Faced with a hard question, he'd produce the
Around one in four 15-year-olds spend 6 hours or more in their bedroom on a typical weekend day. Consider that for a moment. These teens, hidden away in their bedrooms, often tethered to the blue-light of dopamine spiking devices, have been labelled a ‘bedroom generation’. New research
More than 1.8 million children in England are now identified as having special educational needs. That is more than one in five, and it has risen every year since 2016. Among the large majority of them, the children on SEN support, rather than those holding an education, health and
