Do you believe your child’s teacher has lots of free time on their hands?
Our top blog of the week has really got our readers clicking to find out what the marking workload really adds up to when the calculations are done and we include our recommended reading for the year so far.
Top 5 blogs
- Dear Parents – Do you believe your child’s teacher has lots of free time on their hands?
- Is The Fear Narrative Out of Proportion? – The inspection ‘fear narrative’ out of proportion claims OfSTED’s chief, Amanda Spielman
- Lesson Planning For Trainee Teachers – How do you plan lessons?
- #1minCPD: Giving Instructions – What is an explanation station?
- Giving Constructive Lesson Feedback – Are you a critically reflective teacher?
Resource of the week
This week, we recommend some of our favourite books that have been published in 2018 so far.
- Daniel Sobel’s Narrowing the Achievement Gap is designed to support school leaders in understanding and reducing the attainment gap in the context of their setting.
- In How To Survive In Teaching author Emma Kell examines workplace stress and anxiety, conflict and ‘toxic politics’, and the other factors which lead teachers to ultimately decide to walk away.
- Education Forward is a collection of essays that presents a call to action, a positive way forward, and a programme of change for education in the UK.
CPD Spotlight of the Week: Marking
To help you manage the marking workload when you get back into the school term, here are our most popular marking blogposts.
- Live Marking
- 5 Tips To Eradicate Marking Misery
- #1MinCPD: Marking
- 5 Marking Tips for Teachers
- Meaningful, Manageable, Motivating Marking
From elsewhere
- Confused by ‘British values’? Don’t worry, every teacher is but without any real direction is t any wonder? British values can mean wildly different things and children may be growing up with damaging stereotypes and confusing ideas about what ‘being British’ is. Carol Vincent and Myriam Hunter-Henin at the UCL say, “Given the brevity of the current policy guidelines, teachers have considerable freedom as to how to promote these values, “translating” national policy to fit their own setting.”
- A survey by children’s mental health charity Place2Be reveals that 45% of school leaders (of 655 quizzed) said they struggle to get mental health help. Read the full report here. Catherine Roche, Chief Executive of Place2Be said: “School leaders are already under immense pressure to deliver academic progress – and we shouldn’t expect them to become mental health experts as well. Our evidence and experience shows that embedding skilled mental health professionals in schools, as part of a whole school approach, can have an enormously positive impact for pupils, families and staff.”
- Councils have suggested that some schools are lying to parents of children with additional needs or EAL saying they are full when they are not amid concerns about league table performance. In her annual report on school admissions, the chief schools adjudicator, Shan Scott, said she was “concerned” that vulnerable children “spend more time out of school than they should”.
- Charities and experts argue that children must have access to online sex education because they are too embarrassed to discuss relationships in the classroom. They have called for a “BBC Bitesize” style database to be created so that less confident students could access intimate and potentially embarrassing advice from the privacy of their homes. Download the Family Stability Network and Centre for Social Justice case for a more ambitious approach to Relationships and Sex Education.
- According to a study in the British Medical Journal, school programmes encouraging children to take more exercise and eat healthily are unlikely to have any real effect on childhood obesity. The study found “Schools are unlikely to impact on the childhood obesity epidemic by incorporating such interventions without wider support across multiple sectors and environments.”
