After their big win at the 2017 TES Awards, we wanted to discover just how Manchester Communication Academy (MCA) capitalises on the city’s rich culture and history. We sat down with principal John Rowlands to find out more, and were soon joined by vice principal extraordinaire Patsy Hodson!

It takes a village to raise a child. It takes a community to work together to provide support and guidance, resources, and practical help. This is especially important when someone - a child, a family - faces challenges and are feeling lost and alone. Schools are, by their very nature, a community. Built of myriad parts, it has human relationships at its heart: teacher-pupil, SLT-teacher, head-governors, and so on. This community, as a system, when functioning well, has the children, at its core.

With a history as long as ours, it won’t come as a surprise that we’ve learnt a thing or two about teaching boys along the way. The past 175 years has taught us much about understanding boys and how to motivate them to perform to the best of their ability. We greatly value our heritage and traditions, and our school motto - ‘Supera Moras’, or ‘Never Give Up’ - still inspires our way of thinking.

It was just over a year ago that Innovate My School published an article about a school in Brighton that had brought in some goats to support their pastoral provision. That was us. Two weeks after Innovate My School made us famous, we were getting up at 4am for our first live TV appearance, on Good Morning Britain, after the TES ran a story on us which was picked up by the national media. Since then it's all gone a bit bonkers, and our hairy resources are now superstars in their own right.

In a recent assembly at Felsted School here in Essex, I spoke to pupils about the significance of ‘active good behaviour’. It felt like an idea that must have belonged to someone else, an initiative that I was borrowing from elsewhere, but something that was obvious and really important at the same time.

Former BESA chair of edtech Maria Brosnan is on a mission to boost teacher wellbeing. Here, she shares her inspiration, her concerns about one SLT role in particular, and her three-step method for wellbeing success.

How best to build pedagogic bridges across the world? We recently had a lively Skype conversation with Stewart Cook (Frances Olive Anderson Primary School in Lincolnshire) and Myassar Al Itani (Mohammad Shamel State School in Beirut) on their award-winning, transglobal partnership. The two educators were meeting at a Connecting Classrooms event in Amman, Jordan, and were keen to tell us about the power of such a collaboration….

All children need support both at home and at school, feeling happier and more secure when the two work collaboratively as one. This is when effective learning takes place; pupils grow in confidence and self-esteem and feel fulfilled. So, how do we as schools achieve this partnership and make it work effectively for our children?

Haverstock School in Camden was re-built by Kajima in 2004. This was done with a central focus, by the local authority, to make the school a true community institution; operating as an integral part of the local area and fostering a sense of community cohesion. In the 13 years of close collaboration since, the school’s community access has been managed by Kajima Community. The results have been spectacular...

This is the second part of budgeting team activities. Once you have established eight-to-10 budgeting ideas for next year, now the hard part begins. If you have done the team activities with fidelity, then everyone will feel a part of the process. Unfortunately, not everyone will be able to get their way, and you will not be able to please everyone.