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As Halloween approaches it is perhaps time to face some of our fears about education. There are some people who haven't asked their school what is in the SRHE policy. It is clearly time to put your concerns to one side and make sure the policy, which is probably already available on the school website, is about teaching SRHE and not some imagined monster waiting to ensnare children into a life of degenerate behaviour. Another scare is the prospect of not having enough money to meet the school budget set before the numbers were changed and less money was there. This was achieved through a magical piece of sleight of hand which can surely be undone with the wave of a fiscal wand. Don't worry, help is at hand, Oak Academy are getting an extra £2 million to make sure that AI can be added to the £43 million of lesson plans they have already given you. It is rumoured ...

Our Crumbling Schools, in more ways than one. The government announcement that schools built in part or full, with reinforced autoclaved aerated concrete (RAAC) need to close those teaching areas affected. Of course, this was reported just before the beginning of the school term by the Independent Newspaper. Unfortunately, this could be indicative of the crumbling infrastructure of our schools in general. To understand the extent of this particular disruption to school communities, look at the statistics. By the 6th of September, with the warning that there were more schools to come, 82 primary schools out of all the 147 schools had potentially dangerous RAAC according to the Independent Newspaper. You might say that the crumbling infrastructure of schools is overstated. So let us look at another recent headline. ‘England’s special educational needs crisis ‘out ...

An Early Years Perspective: OFSTED: reform required This message adds to the blog that Mike Aylen wrote in April, when he commented on current concerns about Ofsted.  They are not new.  Early years provision has been persistently misunderstood and poorly served by Ofsted inspections. Early Years is a complex phase, involving provision in the private and voluntary sector as well as a decreasing number of maintained nursery schools.  It also includes the reception class in every primary school.  Research commissioned by the Froebel Trust, led by Dr. Susana Castro-Kemp of the Institute of Education at UCL, reported in May 2022 that “interactions with Ofsted inspectors are characterised by a power imbalance” (1). She quotes findings from a Nursery World survey which show grave failures in the Ofsted inspection process (2). Although there is general ag...

NIL SATis - Nothing is enough Why are we testing children so much? It is time once again for SATs and by now these children have already been subjected to Baseline assessment, Phonic Screening, Key Stage 1 SATs, Multiplication Tables Check, and some might be doing the 11 plus. Who are all these tests for? There have often been reports from secondary schools suggesting that SATs testing in primary schools is inaccurate and unhelpful in creating a profile for an individual child which they are then required to use to project a child's outcomes at 16. Do they enhance children's opportunities to learn and what do they tell us about children? A test is simply a snapshot at a particular moment in a child's life. This will only tell you about one small aspect of a child's development and growth and can't show how far knowledge and skill are embedded in the individual whic...

OFSTED OR BUST? You do not have to look very far on Google or indeed (if you have time) speak to your colleagues to conclude that Ofsted needs to change radically. The National Education Union’s recent webpage headline is ‘Replace Ofsted’.  Old news? The elephant in the room? Those lucky readers who work in schools know that this organisation is going badly wrong confirmed by the recent headlines in the press and social media. How many suicides, reported heart attacks and mental breakdowns do our colleagues have to endure before we all quit? The link between the reducing teaching workforce numbers, at all levels, is interesting. Ofsted seems to think that teachers ‘are fleeing to better paid jobs’. That may be true but with the stress of teaching AND Ofsted (the elephant) it certainly does require much better renumeration and free psychotherapist ses...