Archived

  • Give me more powers and I’ll stop my pupils fighting

    Tony, a little boy in an oversized uniform, was trembling at the back of the playground. As I approached I could see why. He had fresh bruises on his face and little knife cuts on the back of his hand. At the far corner of the playground, I saw John, a large boy of 13 […]

  • The key to cultural understanding

    Recently, the best way I’ve taught cultural understanding is through a quick ‘grammar’ starter exercise. As soon as my pupils enter the classroom, I shout out: “Give me an adjective that describes your mood!” Treating for the purpose of this exercise a few pages of their English books like posters that they hold up for […]

  • Bottom Of The Class

    As an experienced teacher in the state sector and as a parent, I know just how harmful large classes can be. The OECD’s report, which has pointed out that Britain has some of the largest primary school class sizes in the developed world, only confirmed what I have known for years: successive governments – both […]

  • Lost Boys — A Book Review

    At the heart of James Miller’s first novel is the shocking theme of missing children: images of abandoned, abused, ghostly children soak the book’s pages, invading the characters’ dreams, their waking visions, filling up its streets, corridors, schools and barricaded homes. This imagery has a global width and depth. Throughout the novel, Miller disturbingly juxtaposes […]

  • The SATS disaster

    Labour Ministers are fond of telling us that education is one of the Government’s success stories. They boast of soaring investment in schools, ever rising standards, record-breaking exam results and huge improvements in literacy and numeracy. We are informed that, thanks to eleven years of Labour rule, Britain now has “a world-class” education system, equipping […]

  • Education Act anniversary: I was a robot, not a teacher

    For teachers like me, who have taught for nearly two decades in the state sector, the latest fiasco over Sats is as predictable as bad weather on an August Bank Holiday. The same could be said for the action of Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, the man who won’t apologise for the fiasco: he joins […]

  • There’s no rhyme or reason to this ban

    Having been head of English at my school for some years now, I find it deeply disturbing that the exam board, AQA, should withdraw Carol Ann Duffy’s amazing poem about knife crime from their anthology. If any poem should be studied as an antidote to our current woes, it is this one. Her poem, Education […]

  • The Truth About Results’ Day

    Many teachers are evasive on results’ day. There was a time when I freely volunteered to hand out results to pupils, assisting with the examination secretary’s job of supplying this vital information as quickly and efficiently as possible. However, bitter experience has made me wary: I found myself in the firing line, facing sobbing students […]

  • Closing students’ minds

    The news that A-level grades have risen yet again comes as no surprise to teachers like me. We’ve become much better at teaching to the tests, and pupils are much more proficient at passing them. But does this mean that our students are genuinely becoming cleverer? Worryingly, I think not. My experience suggests that precisely […]

  • The lesson we can learn about schools

    These include allowing teachers physically to restrain pupils who are out of control and scrapping a parents’ right of appeal when their children are excluded for misbehaviour. While I can see why they are worried about current standards of discipline, my own experience on the education front-line leads me to believe the proposals are misguided. […]

  • Mentors for schoolchildren

    Of all my pupils, Carly Springham, 17, isn’t the sort that you’d think would need mentoring. She doesn’t fit the stereotype of the truculent kid who’s languishing at the bottom of the class, chucking bits of paper at the teacher and yelling at anyone who annoys her. She’s a quiet, hard-working student who’s got good […]

  • Give children rewards and they’ll soon fleece you

    The news that a mother rewards her 13-year-old daughter with cigarettes when she behaves has confirmed what I’ve been thinking for a while – rewards are, at best, ineffectual and, at worst, positively damaging. A jobless single mother, Tracy Holt, 43, of Gosport, Hampshire, is so despairing of her daughter, Sam, that she now gives […]

  • How you can win your school appeal

    This article explores how and why parents can win their school appeal, if they failed to get their child into the state school of their choice in England.

  • The Livesey children’s museum really does matter

    How do you save a curio such as the Livesey Museum for Children? It is not well known, it is not glamorous, but the UK’s first museum for children is magical – and it is now in peril. Last week, shamefully, Southwark Council executive decided to cut its funding and the final council vote today […]

  • Schools are for learning, not imprisonment

    A father’s refusal to allow his son to be punished in a school’s "isolation room" has focused the public’s mind on this form of punishment. According to the father, Andrew Widdowson, Ridgewood school in Doncaster has a darkened, poorly lit room where naughty children are sent which is "like Guantanamo Bay". His son was ordered […]

  • Class war zone

    Mohammed was only 13 years old and wasn’t especially tall or powerful, yet I was terrified of him. "I’ll fucking kill you. Do you get what I mean, geezer? I’ll fucking deck you!" he screamed at me as I asked him to leave my classroom. He had hit a boy over the head and spent […]

  • Soldiers in the classroom

    Sometimes I’ve wished I was a soldier in some of my rowdier classrooms. I could have swaggered with my rifle and my combat fatigues before the spotty teenagers who have told me where to get off and worse, and blasted them with some military discipline; asking them to do push-ups every time they sniggered, to […]

  • Open Season

    I am walking down the corridors of Sir John Cass secondary school in Tower Hamlets and it feels very weird. I am not dodging missiles, hearing abuse or witnessing scraps between children. This seems a totally different school from the one I taught at during the early 1990s; there isn’t a fight in sight, not […]

  • Controlling the classroom

    In my second year of teaching at a tough inner city comprehensive in the early 1990s, I occasionally used to grab my insolent pupils by the arm and fling them out of the classroom – if they were small enough. Once or twice, I gave the really troublesome boys a light clip over the back […]

  • Silent Voices, Still Lives — A Radio Lecture

    Welcome and thank you for coming. My talk is entitled ‘Silent Voices, Still Lives’ and focuses upon the importance of teaching communication skills properly in schools. It is divided into two parts: firstly, I will look at the issue of excluded children where problems of communication are most severe, and then will look more widely […]