Anyone who thinks teaching is easy should definitely watch Tough Young Teachers, BBC Three’s new fly-on-the-wall series. The six-part show follows six young trainee teachers at the start of their careers in secondary schools. They are all part of Teach First, the fast-track programme that after six weeks of intensive training sends high achieving young graduates to teach in schools in disadvantaged areas. The teachers are filmed over the course of ...keep reading
A new study has shown that sleep deprivation is a hidden factor in lowering children’s achievement at school. According to research conducted by Boston College in Massachusetts, 73 per cent of nine and ten-year-olds in the US are sleep deprived while a staggering 80 per cent of 13 and 14-year-olds don’t get enough sleep at night. All I can say is that even though the research is alarming it doesn’t surprise ...keep reading
Will Hughes slammed his pen down in frustration. It was ten fifteen on a rainy September night and he’d been marking Hamlet essays for more than an hour. And what a bloody shambles they were too. Admittedly he was teaching the bottom set, but he was stunned by the quality of the teenagers’ work. Some could barely string a sentence together, let alone use an apostrophe properly. Only one had ...keep reading
Downthorpe Hall is a posh boarding school in the wilds of the Oxfordshire countryside. Fresh from working in an inner-city comprehensive, Will Hughes has just been appointed as the new head. He knows there will be a host of challenges ahead. Tricky parents, rebellious teenagers and teachers who will fight his attempts to reform the school. He doesn’t expect a battle for his heart. But when he meets two women ...keep reading
School heads are a redoubtable breed. I’ve met loads in my time and most of them have bowled me over with their enthusiasm, clear-sighted focus and commitment to education. On one occasion I interviewed the super-inspiring head of a girls’ school. She wore leopard-print stilettos, knew every girl in the school by name and when she spotted a pupil using her mobile phone during school hours (strictly forbidden) showed her ...keep reading
When I went slightly mad a few years ago and decided to try my hand at teaching (I was useless), the main thing that made me throw in the towel was the endless paperwork. For every lesson I taught at my local FE college, I had to fill in reams and reams of forms. There were the schemes of work to plan out lessons for the whole of the academic ...keep reading
My teenage son’s trying to decide which universities to apply to. The only trouble is that after poring over countless websites, they’re all starting to blur into one. Neither of us can remember which university boasts 22 Nobel Prize winners or which has a library with four million books. But one thing I know for sure is that my university ambitions are over. I learned my lesson the hard way ...keep reading
My must-see TV of the week is Channel 4’s Jamie’s Dream School – the series where Jamie Oliver gets a host of celebrities to teach 20 tricky teenagers who’ve left school with barely any qualifications. The science teacher is fertility expert Lord Winston (who’s already hit the headlines for getting the boys in the class to study their own sperm). History is taught by Dr David Starkey, politics by spin ...keep reading