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

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

In Part 1, I discussed some reasons for introducing a more challenging range of texts in an English curriculum that reflected a wider...

The next few blog posts in this series cover how we introduced more diverse, current and challenging texts into our English curriculum....