All blog posts, from all of time.
This post was written as part of my day job for Community Brands / Assembly: https://assembly.education/monitoring-improving-attendance/. The Attendance Challenge There is no bigger challenge in school leadership in 2022 than monitoring and improving school attendance. Despite the incredible progress in remote learning, we know students achieve best when taught face-to-face by subject specialists. During the…
My blog is resurrected! I’ve not posted for years and have lost the last few posts in various moves. I don’t stand by much of what was written here anymore, but it stands as a relic from the past that’s important to me and my learning. Someone wise once said to me you should have…
A positive Ofsted school improvement experience — credit where it’s due 4 min read There have been enough Ofsted scare stories to last a lifetime, and the perverse effect they can have on schools are well known. But sometimes credit should be given where it’s due, so here is a tale of a supportive and constructive Ofsted visit…
9 Ways to Turn Around a Failing School — Sir William Atkinson 2 min read I had the pleasure of seeing Sir William Atkinson close the GL-Assessment Conference on Friday. He’s an incredible character, responsible for turning around ‘the worst school in England’. He regaled that tale to us, reflecting on the 10 years it took to…
Strong Positions, Weakly Held 2 min read Starting a new job as Vice Principal at a new school, doing my NPQH, reading profusely and collating 9 years of blog posts into this one site have made me realise how my views on education have changed over recent years. Without blowing my own trumpet this post struck…
Assessing without levels – Milestones At our school we took the decision last Summer to embrace the opportunities available to move away from National Curriculum levels. Our approach isn’t revolutionary, but I think it’s worth sharing. Background I personally felt that there were numerous issues with the old NC levels. They were not as well…
Back in September I was keen to get the Computing teaching community to work together to write a bank of high quality multiple choice questions. In fact, rather poorly, it was the last thing I wrote on this blog! Head back to see why I think that good quality MCQs can be an invaluable part…
A plea to teachers of Computing GCSE, please join an effort to write a bank of high quality multiple choice questions to support the teaching of this course. Why multiple choice questions? There is an increasing body of research and writing showing that skilfully written multiple choice questions are an effective means of developing retention….
I’ve been using the excellent Editorial app on my iPad increasingly for all my writing and note taking needs. Editorial is a geeky combination of text editor and Python programming playground. You can create or install workflows that do everything from basic text formatting to highlighting verbs to sharing the text with other services like…
How accurately can we set targets and predict performance of pupil’s exam attainment? At this time of year the pressure is on teachers and leaders in school to know exactly how their young people will perform in the GCSE exams that they are currently sitting. There is an expectation from leaders, governors and of course…