It can be difficult to find learning strategies and resources that both tackle of budgetary concerns and teacher workload effectively. In 2018/19, we plan on helping you double your pupils’ rate of learning, while not charging a penny. Our team of educators and scientists know that our new platform works, and we want to bring it to your school this academic year.

In the age of social media and ‘alternative facts’, sparking your pupils’ interest in the world around them and ensuring they know how to navigate current affairs is essential. Understandably however, in the face of tricky questions and misinformation, many education practitioners can find it difficult to know where to start. To help kick off your conversations, in this article I have outlined my top tips on getting pupils interested in current affairs that are easy to follow, and more importantly, effective.

Preparing students for the future is a hot topic right now, and with good reason. According to the World Economic Forum, 65% of children starting school today will go on to do jobs that don’t exist yet. For those of us who work in education, this presents a rather troubling dilemma: if we don’t know half of what they’ll be doing, what are we supposed to teach them?

To inspire greater physical activity in pupils, Public Health England (PHE) and Disney UK have launched Train Like A Jedi. This nationwide Change4Life programme sees the excitement of Star Wars - alongside Double Olympic Gold medallist Jade Jones - to encourage children to get their daily minimum of 60 minutes’ moderate to vigorous physical activity.

As Ofsted’s Sean Harford noted in a recent blog, “a school’s assessment system [should] support the pupils’ journeys through the curriculum.” But how to go about making this a reality?

With so many different assessment measures being used throughout Primary schools, we’re often asked to clarify the difference between them. So, we’ve gone back to the drawing board to provide some quick facts about two key test outcomes: scaled scores and standardised scores (because while both show performance, they aren’t the same thing).

The value of a school management information system (MIS) isn’t simply for the safe storage of data. Its true value is in the speed at which the data can be accessed and then used to inform decisions - from an individual student, right through to whole-school level. Assessment for learning is perhaps the best example of this.

Supported by Change.Org, school literacy project Change It invites the next generation to take action on real issues that matter to them, by writing and directing their own campaign video in the classroom. Teacher Dan Burden recently completed the project with his Year 6 class, in support of the #homesnotspikes petition. He explains the impact the project had on his pupils:

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.

“This has been the perfect combination of skills to help our students develop into leaders of the future.”