Teaching creative writing
teaching english

Leave Us Kids Alone — BBC Breakfast

Appeared on BBC Breakfast having watched Leave Us Kids Alone, a BBC3 Doc about teenagers who run their own shambolic school. I said I thought the teaching looked quite poor. I was speaking with Amy, one of the teenage teachers. She was the best thing on the show: she looked like the only organised teenager of the lot; she managed to make some school dinners the kids actually liked. The show was a grotesque parody on what actually happens in school; a headteacher who hates kids, creepy inspectors speaking goobledy-gook, control freak teachers getting the top jobs and the best ones uninterested in management or left behind. http://www.bbc.co.uk/bbcthree/programmes/kids_alone/‘

Related reading

  • Hey kids, leave that teacher alone

    As a teacher, I felt distinctly uncomfortable watching Channel 4’s new show, The Law of the Playground. But maybe that’s the point. This seven-part series is about all the stuff a phalanx of trendily dressed, tedious twenty and thirtysomethings got up to at school: the silly pranks, the mindless nicknames, the cruel imitations, the ritualised […]

  • Appearance on BBC Breakfast

    Appeared this Tuesday on BBC Breakfast giving my views about homework. A recent survey shows that not many parents understand their children’s homework and don’t have much of a clue about how to help. I spoke about the two types of parent: the nagger, who is always hovering over their child, checking to see if […]

  • Rose-tinted government recruitment campaign on BBC Breakfast

    Appeared yesterday on BBC Breakfast talking about the new government advertising campaign to recruit teachers. I complained on the Beeb’s very red sofa that the government didn’t tell the truth, that it gave false hopes and that it sold the lie that teachers are paid like people in the corporate world. The campaign highlights all […]

  • BBC Breakfast, Monday Morning

    Spoke on BBC Breakfast about the new legislation meaning that all students will have to be in some form of training until they are eighteen. I said it would be a nightmare for teachers, and explained that if a pupil hadn’t learnt to read and write properly by the time they were sixteen, what good […]

  • Are truants overwhelmingly from poor backgrounds?

    Recent research completed by the Tories suggests what we’ve known for a long time that kids from socially deprived backgrounds are much more likely to bunk off school than their middle class peers. I appeared on BBC Breakfast talking about the issue. I categorised children who bunk off into three categories: the arrogant, the alienated […]