Like many other English teachers across the country, I have often agonised over how to demystify and break down the ever-complex process of analytical writing. Many teacher training programmes don't...

The sentence is a threshold concept in English; core knowledge that transforms how children think about reading and writing. Their understanding of a sentence also enables or inhibits other concept…

When under pressure, go upstream. Work out what to preempt. “We need to stop just pulling people out of the river. We need to go upstream and find out why they are falling in” Desmond Tutu The para…

I’ve written hundreds of SDPs (or SIPs). Many bad ones, and some good ones. I’ve written some really clever, smart-looking ones alone that were hardly touched, and a few really simple o…

‘Time is finite, and so curriculum can never include all the knowledge, or anything close to all the knowledge in the field. As such, curriculum is necessarily exclusive: decisions must be made as to...

This is (as promised) a blog of my presentation at the third national WomenEd unconference.  I will, in another blog, talk about my reflections of the whole day.  It was my first ever WomenEd event…

Teachers and school leaders are trailblazing a golden age of professional learning. 150,000 *now free* National Professional Qualifications over the next 3 years with a codified body of knowledge a…

Teaching history is different to teaching science. In recent years, much has been made of the differences in the way knowledge is organised in different subjects. Much discussion of the different c…

Achieving 100% student attention is not easy. But there are lots of things school leaders and teachers can do to make it easier. In the first post in this series, I explained why 100% attention fro…

Five million of us around the world lead schools. How can we develop ourselves as school leaders? For well over 20 years, Tom Rees and Jen Barker have led alongside and heard from thousands of teac…

For whom the bell tolls No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a piece of the continent, a part of the main; if a clod be washed away by the sea, Europe is the less, as well as if a pr…

This post is based on a Q and A webinar which I did with Niall Alcock for the We Are In Beta Secondary Curriculum Thinkers Community in March 2021. I have put some more information about this commu…

Mr A’s class are doing some independent practice about cells. One of the questions asks them to draw and label an animal cell. While Mr A is circulating, he notices that a couple of students have d…

Some two thousand years ago, a teacher, a playwright and an emperor asked: What is the best way to live? How can we deal with the difficult situations we face? What does it take to improve our mind…

We spend a great deal of time thinking (and writing) about school improvement, but far less about preventing decline. Perhaps we are guilty of assuming that once a certain ‘standard’ or…

An area of development my school has been focusing on this year is mass participation and checking for understanding. The curriculum is, of course, an ongoing piece of work – it’s never ‘done’, and…

I recently blogged about some of the things which go wrong with quality assurance in schools and set out some suggestions for how we might attempt to quality assure the curriculum more effectively.…

Five million of us around the world lead schools. How can we develop ourselves as school leaders? For well over 20 years, Tom Rees and Jen Barker have led alongside and heard from thousands of teac…

Teams are fascinating to me, perhaps because I spent a chunk of my early career dismissing the value of teamwork. Inefficient. Unproductive. Too many voices. Then, as I began to lead teams, from an…

I am a huge fan of the artist Anthony Burrill and have just treated myself to this new print to hang in my office. It makes me smile and for me it captures the spirit of the brilliant trust team I …

‘We must ensure that we hand down our great literary heritage to our pupils, explicitly and carefully, so that even the most disadvantaged are given the knowledge they need to develop personal...

ResearchEd is one of the most exciting developments in teaching in the last ten years. Teachers and school leaders are now asking questions that cut to the core of how we can improve education. The…

Ultimately, school improvement is about better outcomes for children. We can look at outcomes for children in a number of ways beyond what immediately comes to mind about attainment and progress, a…

Implementation is everything. Or is it? True, strategy without implementation doesn’t get done.  But implementation without good strategy gets the wrong things done.  No one could blame the so…

Image: @jasonramasami A few years ago, still under the spell of the starter/main/development/plenary model of my teaching training, I began to stray. My distinctly unimpressive timekeeping meant th…

Sometimes we are so deep in an orthodoxy we cannot see it. In their new book, Becky Allen, Matthew Evans and Ben White give us ways to question how we see and think about our schools.  They co…

Image: @jasonramasami A few years ago, still under the spell of the starter/main/development/plenary model of my teaching training, I began to stray. My distinctly unimpressive timekeeping meant th…

It’s clearly springtime and maybe for the first time in 12 months there is hope in the air. As our classrooms fill up again, we are all starting to ask the question, with the same air of slight con…

Unity Research School, part of the Research School Network

Staff Culture Staff Culture: seminal articles by teachers The intent here is to collate, curate and summarise the ideas that are most valuable for thinking about staff culture. 12+ seminal articles...

Ofsted's Head of Research, Daniel Muijs, explains how we've used cognitive load theory in the development of our new education inspection framework.

I’ve always marvelled at the dexterity and skill of those able to weave hair into elaborate braids (French, Dutch, Fishtail) – how they can keep the structure of the braid in tact whilst weaving in…

The to do list of the school leader is daunting to say the least. Just glancing at standard job descriptions for those in leadership positions can prompt the question: how does one human being do a…

Over the years I’ve given a few warnings about stuff. Curriculum, in the main. I also wrote a while back about ensuring that we give ourselves enough time to think. I want to return to this because…