Ed Balls has, well, sorry, had the balls to ditch SATs for 14 year olds in England.
I can’t quite describe how elated I am! Ignoring last years fiasco, these tests have narrowed the curriculum, the teaching opportunities and pupils enthusiasm for the subject for years. The league tables that accompanied them often narrowed a school’s focus onto just the key Level 5 boundary pupils.
Can all of that really be gone? Fingers crossed!
I have introduced a fantastic resource into both of my recent schools over the last 2 years. It continues to impress me to this day and it’s about time I wrote a glowing review of it! MyMaths.co.uk has been around for a couple of years now and continues to grow. When I originally bought it…
Katharine Birbalsingh, the former Head Teacher famously sacked following her outspoken speech at the Tory Party conference. Started with the story of challenging behaviour in Secondary Schools. How have we got to this point, a dark age of education? How can we move schools on into the 21st Century? Need to equip children with a bag…
I attended a SSAT training day today about ensuring Maths progress for all. This included a 30 minute section about using IT within Maths. During this Paul Hynes from the SSAT demonstrated an augmented reality program that the Trust are currently working on. For those new to the term Augmented Reality it involves overlaying virtual…
As I have just ranted about on Tom Barrett’s blog post about using Google Docs for online reporting to parents, I am becoming increasingly frustrated with trying to use the Internet both myself and with pupils at school. It is to all intents and purposes blocked and Web 2.0 seems to be considered a security…
The two following videos have been doing the rounds over the last week in the ‘blogosphere’ (I do hate that word!). But just because you’ve seen them a couple of times doesn’t mean everyone in your school has – share them with you network now. We used them both as discussion starters in Leadership Meetings…
Estelle Morris on Gove – Is there a master plan? Amongst the consternation with Michael Gove this weekend – particularly his comments on the Andrew Marr show about the upcoming strike, Estelle Morris gets to the heart of the issue. Where is the long term plan amongst the cost cutting and curriculum narrowing? There surely…