This week I did something that I probably wasn't supposed to: I looked up some of my old students on Facebook. I would never add students or chat with them on social media – despite requests popping up all over the place – but in a moment of procrastination, curiosity got the better of me. So I took a look. I left that school (my first) three years...

So you're working in your personal time because you just don't seem to be able to finish it all during the day and if everyone else at school is coping, why aren't you? There's marking to be completed, the next day's lessons to be reviewed, reports that need to be written, development plans to be created; the list goes on and on. Before long y...

Where does he work? Goldacre is currently a senior clinical research fellow at the Centre for Evidence-Based Medicine in the Department of Primary Care in the University of Oxford. He is also a bestselling author, broadcaster, campaigner and medical doctor who specialises in unpicking the misuse of science and statistics by journalists, politicians...

The thing about being a school teacher – be it primary, secondary, early years or whatever – is that you see an awful lot of interesting behaviour in the course of your daily grind. There is always someone doing something unusual, and, a large amount of these behaviours have at their heart a desire to get something that they really want: not time o...

Tom Bennett (the Behaviour Tsar) recently stated that, "behaviour problems crush learning." Few would disagree. Yet many teachers see managing and controlling behaviour in the classroom as their greatest challenge - and fear. Just one disruptive child in a class can have a negative impact on a teacher's ability to teach and on other students' abili...