EdBlogs

It's been more than a year since the Department for Education published reports from three independent review groups addressing issues raised by the Workload Challenge survey. All three reports gave clear recommendations to help reduce teacher marking , planning and data management . But is the message getting through to leaders? To look at sc...

"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...

What is it?  ​It depends who you speak to. For some, homework is a way to develop students' independent learning skills and ensure they have understood – and then consolidate – work from the classroom. Others, meanwhile, contend that it's a largely pointless tradition that brings stress to young people and their families, robbing them of much-...

Whilst relatively few in the education world are aware of it, the impact of the American educator and academic Professor Eric Donald Hirsch Jr on the UK government's education reforms since 2010, has been profound. Reformers have claimed that 'progressive' child-centred education from the 1960s has been 'curriculum-lite' and damaging to children's ...

Is your school full of hedgehogs or foxes? Hedgehogs are people who are committed to certain ideas, and will stick with them even when they've been shown to fail. Foxes are people know lots about everything, but not everything about anything – they are pragmatic, prone to self-doubt and willing to admit when they are wrong. In his 2005 study Expert...