WELCOME

This time of year brings movement: new roles, new schools, internal promotions as people begin looking ahead to September. If you’re stepping into a Head of Department role, some of what follows may be useful. As a new HoD there’s an undercurrent of pressure - perhaps, in part, self-imposed - that becomes more explicit as the year goes on. The clock is ticking and you’ll feel like you need to make an impact, and quickly. Perhaps the best way to make a positive impression with

Designing curriculum for more than a grade Emerging from the annual fog of mock exam-marking often leaves me wondering what we’re actually building toward in English. Assessment absolutely has its place, of course it does, but the gravitational pull of exams shapes far more of our curriculum than we often admit. By January, classrooms contort around timing drills, confidence gaps, and rubrics at the expense of all else. But schools push huge numbers of students through exams

This is the second post in a series on moving into middle leadership. The first explored those accidental beginnings; this one focuses on team culture, filtering noise, and the mechanisms that help a department function. I’d been lucky to spend a year at the school beforehand and knew that colleagues already shared core values and curriculum instincts. Nevertheless, as I put together the first induction meeting with the team and a schedule for department time, that imposter s

Four years into my English HoD role, I’ve skirted enough pitfalls to know exactly what I’d pretend was intentional if I were starting again. I took over a fully functioning and high-performing Secondary English department four years ago. What had originally been an interview for a second-in-department role turned into a HoD position because of last minute internal promotions. The department was well resourced and the team were thoroughly adept in their roles. I put my present

My reading of a text - the one that I hedge and couch and posit in the classroom, the one that I use as the ‘way into a text’ - is not the one that matters. We position ourselves, as teachers, as the sole authorities on the texts that we teach. Which makes sense after years in the classroom and the familiarity that one gets to have with a text when making units of work. A large stepping stone on the road to independent interpretation is helping students first get comfortabl