for creative writing educators
for teachers of English

All articles on this site

  • Mercutio, Nurse essays

    ‘Mercutio and Tybalt are trouble-makers who are presented by Shakespear as thugs who cause many of the problems in the play.’ In the light of this statement, analyse Shakespeare’s presentation of these two characters, saying whether you agree with it or not.   OR   ‘In attempting to solve the problems of the two lovers,…

  • A suspenseful story

    ‘His fingers squeezed around my throat, I felt myself starting to choke…’Using this first line as a starting point, continue this story remembering to use the same person (the first person pronoun) and write in the past tense. (Make sure that you structure your story carefully, and you use the FIVE SENSES and FIVE Ws…

  • Is 1984 the most influential novel ever written?

    Emphatically not! Orwell’s last novel has not survived the test of time. I know this through the hard graft of having to teach the dreary novel to reluctant Year 10 and 11 students. There are a number of serious flaws with the book. First and foremost, the plot is predictable and relatively undramatic: a miserable…

  • What will replace abandoned SATS?

    Teaching to the SATS tests can be murder. Recently, they have become more and more fiddly – and more boring. In English, there is a complicated reading paper, which consists of lots of small questions that pupils have to answer precisely to get a good mark, a writing paper which never seems to test writing,…

  • Give children rewards and they’ll soon fleece you

    As a teacher, I’ve tried every bribe in the book 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…

  • The truth about communication in schools

    This is the full text of a speech I gave under the title ‘Silent Voices, Still Lives’ 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…

  • One long SATS test

    In this emotional indictment of our education system, the writer and teacher Francis Gilbert explains how an obsession with testing has broken enthusiasm for learning The decision by the Children’s Secretary, Ed Balls, to kill off the Sats exams for 14-year-olds is arguably the most momentous decision taken by a politician since Gordon Brown became…

  • Will the teaching council ever learn?

    The new code of conduct for teachers is a masterwork in stating the blindingly obvious and deeply patronising The new draft of a code of conduct and practice for teachers really made me laugh. It’s a big and wordy document from the General Teaching Council for England (GTC) and full of the off-putting, sanctimonious language…

  • Is passion all that matters in education?

    Is stirring a pupil’s passion all that matters in edcation? Ken Robinson’s new book, The Element, suggests that this is at the heart of getting the best out of children. I appeared on Radio 3’s Nightwaves arguing a little differently. I said that if teachers just tell pupils to follow their passions then they could…

  • How to make your child succeed at GCSE

    The truth about exams So just what is the key to success at GCSE? As a teacher in various state schools for the past two decades, I still chew over the issue virtually every day! Just recently, I was talking late into the night at a Year 11 Parents’ evening. The parents of these sixteen-year-olds…

  • Competences through AfL

    It’s only when pupils put flair into their writing that they become competent When I first saw the word ‘competence’ stuck into the new English National Curriculum last summer, my heart descended into the abyss. Oh no, I thought, here we go again; yet more injunctions to give lots of boring grammar lessons which the…

  • How a good headteacher can save a school

    Without leadership and discipline, chaos rules. But this is exactly what the Government is allowing to happen, argues Francis Gilbert A few years back, I taught at a school that terrified me. Just walking down the corridor was hazardous. Frequently, children would rush up behind me and hit me on the back of the head,…

  • Turned Away at the School Gates

    This week thousands of children were denied places in their first choice secondary school. Here, a teacher argues that our education system is as crisis-ridden as our banks. The parent sobbed openly at the reception of the secondary school where I teach: “But it’s not fair! You have to let her in!” Our secretary had…

  • Why We Should Give Teachers a Pay Rise

    Teachers are demanding a 10% pay rise. To educate the country out of this recession, we should give it to them I bet there were a few teacher-hating members of the public chucking their breakfast at their television sets this morning when they saw the moaning members of the National Union of Teachers asking for…

  • My profession needs a better voice than these morons

    On Saturday the work-shy teachers at the NUT conference backed a boycott of SATs. On Sunday they moaned about too many tough guys going into teaching (if only!). On Monday they demanded an eye-popping 10 per cent pay rise and yesterday they were threatening to strike over the vagaries of sixth-form funding. What next? A…

  • Links to English teaching sites at the Guardian

    A useful page of links to English language teaching resources can be found on the Guardian‘s website here.

  • A Blairite learns a lesson

    The premise of this book is intriguing for anyone who is remotely interested in politics or education. The privately educated Peter Hyman was an advisor to Tony Blair from 1994 until 2003; for the last two years of his tenure he rose to being Head of Strategic Communications at Number 10, and was one of…

  • Do thirty-something men need their mothers more than ever?

    I found Sutcliffe’s novel very easy to read, skipping through it in a day. I particularly enjoyed the way Matt, the features editor of a lad’s magazine, was depicted. The scenes where his mother gate-crashes a launch party he’s at, bosses him around in his warehouse flat, sets him up with a girl are funny,…

  • Too many tests?

    Emphatically not! I think schools need to test and assess children more; more often, in shorter and sharper ways. At the moment, we have these clunking assessments for children at 7 years, 11 years and 16 years. These exams fail to assess children properly because they are so unwieldy, and the test papers are so…

  • Is journalism about humiliation

    A powerful piece by Jill Parkin highlighted the issues connected with writing personality based journalism — especially if you are a woman. They are increasingly being asked to write about very humiliating subjects: weight loss, their sex lives, their troubled children and so on. Is the new journalism about humiliation? Have the values of reality…

topics I’ve written about on this site