SCHOOL LEADER

In an ever-changing and turbulent climate of expectations in education, the demands on educators is at a premium; a premium which is quickly becoming unsustainable. Many teachers, who are good at and passionate about their jobs, feel unable to cope with the changes and demands being placed upon them. Many schools have tried to introduce various initiatives to address teacher wellbeing, such as wellbeing-centric days, meditation activities, away days, and so on. Each of these initiatives, even with the best intentions, have no real-long term impact, and that is why the key to teacher wellbeing rests with middle leaders.

The African proverb “It takes a village to raise a child” expresses the universal truth that the responsibility for child-rearing rests with the broader community and not just the parents. Yet within many schools, this adage is neglected. Parents are perceived as being prone to unhelpful interventions, previous generations of students are abandoned, and local businesses are ignored.

To coincide with 25th May’s Geek Pride Day, we thought we’d interview one of British education’s most passionate, knowledgeable geeks. Enter Primary acting head of school, NPQML-holder, blogger, presenter and Primary Rocker, Tim Head.

Andrew Moffat is a well-known and respected figure in education. This passionate assistant headteacher made headlines after resigning from a school following a backlash against his sexual orientation and “some of the resource books being used in literacy lessons”. Since then, Andrew has continued to inspire educators as a school leader, founder of Equalities Primary, a speaker and author (No Outsiders In Our School: Teaching The Equality Act In Primary Schools is available from Routledge now).

Everyone agrees: children do better when their parents show an interest in their school activities, help their learning, and praise their achievements. Attendance increases, children’s motivation is higher, and classroom behaviour, happiness and outcomes all improve. It’s no wonder that parent engagement is a key school priority, and a select intervention to help close the gap for disadvantaged children. So how are some schools getting it so wrong?

The Innovate My School community is warmly invited to the ITTE and MirandaNet 32nd International Annual Conference at Winchester University, to be held from the 7th-8th June. This exciting event’s proceedings will be based around the theme of ‘Raising Aspirations for Digital Education’. Find out why you need to attend below...

Wilbury Primary School had been letting out its facilities to the local populace for some time, however their local authority-managed booking service was deactivated at short notice. This, as you might imagine, brought about a wave of new headaches for the SLT. It was clear that they would struggle to manage the bookings internally as they didn’t have the necessary resources, and therefore needed to find a system that could replace and improve upon the previous one. To solve this issue, the school looked for an alternative provider.

The teacher workload crisis is hitting headlines on an increasingly frequent basis. Educators are expected to keep huge amount of plates spinning at all times, so it’s vital that they have everything they need. However, even with all of the most cutting-edge resources around, schools are all-too-often short on arguably the most rarefied asset: time. This is the issue that the team at TrainingToolz is looking to overhaul for good.

Springpad began simply because I loved the learning benefits my students experienced when creating their work digitally. However, I hated the long-winded process of trying to keep this work organised or give effective feedback to it. I wanted to resolve the grinding workload that most teachers face with traditional paper workbooks, such as the difficulty of storing any multimedia and the lack of access for parents. It seems archaic that teachers globally still print reams of paper, cut and stick it inside each of their student’s workbooks. The app improves learning through a seamless, paperless teacher-student-parent workflow.

A few years ago, I began to use Twitter to develop my pedagogy. Looking back, I believe it was one of most significant decisions I have made as an educator. We should not feel confined in our classrooms or institutes. Once I started using Twitter, it proved to be a big game-changer.

Page 3 of 11

In order to make our website better for you, we use cookies!

Some firefox users may experience missing content, to fix this, click the shield in the top left and "disable tracking protection"