Published in
In this section I archive features and articles that have been published elsewhere. I contribute regularly to the national press, including The Times, The Daily Telegraph, The Guardian, and The Daily Mail.
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A Century of Teaching Creative Writing in Schools: the Newbolt Report and teaching creative writing
Newbolt strongly advocates imaginative ways of teaching writing, championing self-expression above rote-learning.
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The Haunted House: Teaching Creative Writing Through Collaborative Learning to 9-13 year olds
Many teachers of creative writing find teaching 9-13-year-olds tricky. What exactly should you teach? And how? I might have discovered an answer…
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Becoming the falconer: productive feedback for the redrafting of creative writing
Aspects of the neoliberal education system can preclude the development of young writers. Feedback can be unempathetic, but it can also be productive, creating an internal dialogue that develops the writer over time.
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Teaching Mindfulness in an Unmindful System
A case study of a mindfulness teacher, Beth, and her experiences of teaching mindfulness to 11- to 16-year-olds in several English schools
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Turned Away At The School Gates
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 to ask our caretakers to escort her off the premises. But she wasn’t surprised. Every year, she gets hundreds of calls from panic-stricken parents wanting to know why […]
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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 […]
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Dishing out fines won’t stop the chaos in class
As a battle-hardened teacher, I can’t help but be a little cynical about the latest government initiative to quell indiscipline in our schools. A three-year study into classroom behaviour has called for teachers to be able to slap £50 penalties on the parents of pupils who persistently misbehave. After spending 20 years working in various […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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, […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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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 […]
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Dishing out fines won’t stop the chaos in class
There are riots, drugs and even death threats… and all our leaders offer are sticking-plasters As a battle-hardened teacher, I can’t help but be a little cynical about the latest government initiative to quell indiscipline in our schools. A three-year study into classroom behaviour has called for teachers to be able to slap £50 penalties […]
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Teaching as triumph
It is impossible to read Frank McCourt’s new memoir, Teacher Man, about his life as a teacher in New York, without the incessant rain of Ireland drizzling into one’s thoughts. McCourt’s first book, Angela’s Ashes, published when he was 66, won the Pulitzer Prize, has sold millions of copies throughout the world, was turned into […]
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Getting closure
Despite clear roads and public transport running, schools are still closed because teachers can’t afford to live near where they work At least my school isn’t one of the wussy ones – it’s got a blizzard-proof excuse. The comprehensive where I teach is essentially stuck in a field in Essex and is currently encased in […]
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The league tables are a game – don’t take them too seriously
My old school is now one of the ‘most improved’ in the country. Yet I’m not sure it’s so different from a decade ago. I will never forget the day when I learned that the secondary school in which I was teaching had come bottom of the School Performance Tables. That was more than 10 […]
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Please, Mr Johnson, stop tinkering with our schools
THE Education Secretary, Alan Johnson, is definitely a worried man. You only have to look at the all the spin issued by his department to know that something is up. The school inspectors Ofsted issued a report last week, 2020 Vision, that called for every pupil to have lessons and exams tailored to their "personalised" […]
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Spooks in the classroom
Of all the roles I thought I might play as a classroom teacher, it never occurred to me that I might be called upon to be a spook. Social worker, surrogate parent, cleaner, technician, crowd controller, salesman for the damaged goods of the national curriculum, yes – but I never imagined I might be required […]
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 […]