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

Metacognition sounds complicated. Conversations about it can certainly feel that way at times, partly due to the difficulty in containing...

While I was completing my NPQSL last year, I read a few case studies in which leaders created a team of “Champions”: teachers who would...

It’s that time of year again. Another year 11 cohort have disappeared into the ether of study leave and some tasty gained time can be put...

Perhaps a little late to the party but I finally got around to reading Alex Quigley’s ‘Closing the Vocabulary Gap’. While focused on a...