Schools thrive with order, discipline and the eccentric teachers who do things differently

"Let down your buckets!" Mr Wilkes shouts at window-shaking volume. It's 1993 or 1994 and I am in my earth science class, a subject I think would be called geography today. Mr Wilkes paces the front of the room, red-faced and miming semaphore. "The becalmed ship flagged back its reply. We need fresh water! We need to drink!" We all lean forward, th...
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Too many school governors just don’t put the effort in

"Can we make these reports a bit shorter? I didn't read it."  Carol, a recent addition to our governing board, peered expectantly at the chair while the rest of us looked something between aghast and infuriated. The chair faltered in surprise while Mr Frank, the careers advice lead – who had spent hours of his own time writing the report, on e...
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‘We’ve cut everything’: governors discuss the school funding crisis

​Ever-decreasing budgets, a new national funding formula (NFF) and reports of headteachers asking parents to plug holes in finances – schools in the UK are feeling the pinch. This leaves many governors with the difficult task of trying to raise standards while having no option but to make cuts. We spoke to three governors to get a fr...
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‘My students don’t care that I am a woman teaching a ‘male’ subject – I wish other people would follow their example’

I recently taught a PSHE lesson to a year 8 group on the assumptions we make about people. I started with the word "Australian" – students said common judgements were that they would say "g'day", wear cork hats, like beer, wear shorts, have barbecues all the time and be good at rugby. Then we moved on to "American" – apparently they like burgers, a...
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A modest proposal from a language teacher: let's stop using b*llocks learning outcomes

Any discussion among teachers about good practice will get around, at some point, to learning outcomes. Conversation will often turn to Bloom's Taxonomy and the attendant verbs connected to the "lower" and "higher" order "thinking skills". And then someone will raise the idea of SMART targets, which, in conjunction with Bloom's, enable us to develo...
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