For many, the start of a new year comes in January, when they make resolutions of how they are going improve or change their lives for the better in the coming 12 months. For me, the start of the new year comes in with September. Having spent most of my life in education - either studying or teaching - my life really does seem to run in the academic year. So ...

Schools throughout the world are beginning to plan for the upcoming academic year. The underlining aspect of the improvement process is how it can be achieved on a budget. For instance, if teachers want smaller class sizes, that will come at an increased cost to the district / local authority. If staff want to redesign the front entrance to the school, is it affordable? If the staff identifies curriculum as an ...

How are teachers ensuring results in an environment where no one size fits all? I thought it would be useful to ask Primary and Secondary school learners for their own views about how a teacher brings teaching and learning to life for them. I imagined some rather all-singing-all-dancing responses but, surprisingly, this really was not the case. Here are some of their responses:

Christmas is a double-edged sword; both a time for celebration and a powder keg ready to explode at any point. Many a teacher will spend Christmas party day waiting for the inevitable fight/argument over the last jaffa cake/sickness through troughing too many crisps.

Until writing this article, I had assumed that Halloween in America and in the UK were very similar. However, it has been brought to my attention by Mr. Cain, the editor of Innovate My School, that “Americans make British Halloweens look massively understated”. This fills me with a bit of pride. It is my hope to shed light on American Halloween in education by using bits of my own experiences ...

Despite all the educational changes that have happened since I started teaching History just under a decade ago, one thing has remained a constant. Source analysis is the hardest component for students to understand. This is part of my ‘why’ in that I do not remember any lesson in Secondary, A-level or degree that asked me to develop my ability to use sources. This may be me being incredibly disingenuous, ...

The above is me after one of our training climbs - tweets intact! In my last post, on virtual reality, I wrote about how I could fly over Chicago or climb high mountains effortlessly. All you needed was Google Cardboard. Well, what do you do if you want to document a real adventure?

Young children learn through their imaginations. They experiment with the world and people around them through role play and creative activities. While this is often done individually in playtimes and at home, schools can also harness the power of creative play in classrooms to develop well-rounded pupils.

At the latest British Educational Suppliers Association (BESA) and Publishers Association Conference, Nick Gibb MP highlighted the importance of high-quality curriculum resources, citing results from the annual PISA reports, which showed that high-performing countries including Singapore and Finland, make far more use of textbooks in the classroom. The UK, on the other hand, has a thriving edtech market. So how can teachers utilise the combined power of the textbook and ...

The standards of a pupil’s literacy should, in my opinion, be not only measured by how adept they are at reading written texts, but also their ability to read media texts, too, especially in this case film. However, when the 2016 Programmes of Study for English were published, all mention of film, indeed of most media texts, had vanished and instead we were handed a throwback curriculum full of, well, ...