Teaching creative writing
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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.

  • How to get a foot in the door at Oxbridge

    With the deadline of October 15 looming, it’s a crucial time for students applying to Oxford and Cambridge universities. They’ve got two days to fine-tune applications and little more than a month to prepare for the infamous Oxbridge interviews. For some parents, this time of year is the culmination of years of blood, sweat and…

  • Teaching school texts by txt

    Teachers should relax about pupils’ mobile phones – they can boost standards and liven up the lesson if used imaginatively   It appears lots of teachers like me are up in arms about pupils using mobile phones in the classroom. Teaching unions are terrified that if schools don’t ban them absolutely, chaos will ensue: the…

  • Michael Gove’s ruinous plans for education

    Today’s speech showed a party committed to micro-managing schools, using policies that have no empirical backing Michael Gove delivered a speech at the Conservative party conference which played to the prejudices of his audience. His oration was peppered again and again with talk of how the Labour party has failed the country in creating schools…

  • Why I moved my son from a prep school to a state primary

    As a private schools tsar extols their virtue, one teacher tells how he transferred his son from a public prep school to a state primary It seemed so perfect at first. Every parent at our son’s nursery was desperate to get their child into the exclusive prep school. On the open day the school was…

  • Sacking top teachers will be a bloodbath

    Ed Balls’s latest plans will be disastrous for schools such as mine It would be laughable if it wasn’t so serious — the Government’s latest wheeze is to sack thousands of teachers. Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, announced yesterday that to cut spending 3,000 teachers could be kicked out of their jobs in the coming…

  • Why ARE so many of my fellow teachers breaking the ultimate taboo?

    Heaven knows what it must be like to be among those parents with children at Headlands School in Bridlington, East Yorkshire. And who could blame them if they feel utterly betrayed by an education system that would seem to have failed lamentably in its duty of protection and care? In just three years, three male…

  • Labour ripped the heart out of education

    Scratch beneath the surface of successful GSCE figures and you’ll find a morass of ‘robot teaching’ that fails our children So the first generation of students to be entirely educated under New Labour has just got its GCSE results. On the surface, the government’s achievements look fabulous: boys have caught up with girls in maths;…

  • Teachers’ pets win prizes

    Are there far too many teachers’ pets in England? Do too many teachers from England unfairly favour certain students over others? A survey supervised by researchers at the University of Birmingham, in which 14,000 14- and 15-year-olds from England, Belgium, the Czech Republic, Japan, Italy and France were questioned, suggests that English teachers are the…

  • Licenced teachers won’t be better teachers

    Ed Balls’s teaching “MoT” will merely bring more pointless paperwork to the profession After two decades in teaching, I’ve realised that the really hapless members of my profession can be divided up into three distinct categories: the weirdos, the breakdowns, and the brown-nosers.The weirdos are the easiest to spot. We’ve all been taught by at…

  • Spelling out the cost of literacy lunacy

    Teachers feel vindicated by the dumping of failed policies Ed Balls’s ditching of the numeracy and literacy strategies is a jaw-dropping admission of failure. Until the strategies were dumped late last week, they were the flagship education policy of the Government.Indeed, the Department for Children, Schools and Families appeared to be so confident in the…

  • Drugs in Schools

    I have only come across a few children high on drugs in school time in all my sixteen years as a teacher in various London comprehensives. However, while drug taking in school is rare, I know many pupils take drugs away from the prying eyes of adults: often they’ve bought the drugs from a school…

  • Exams work

    My pupil Mark is proof that exams work. With a shock of red hair and acne to match, he was a loud, brash fourteen-year-old. In his Key Stage 3 English tests, which all Year 9 pupils take in May, he scored a miserable level 4. But when I taught him the next year, he got…

  • Interview about Yob Nation

    Why was it important for you to write Yob Nation? I was attacked by a gang on a bus and this, together with my experiences as a teacher in various comprehensives, made me want to know the causes of gratuitous, pointless, petty violence and whether it was a growing problem or not. Do you see…

  • Why our schools have plunged in world league tables despite billions being spent

    Rising school standards were meant to be at the heart of the New Labour project. "Education, education, education" was the famous mantra of Tony Blair, who promised that his Government would transform the quality of British schools.  When he succeeded Blair in the summer, Gordon Brown promised exactly the same driving commitment.  "Education is my…

  • British Teenagers Today

    Back in the mists of time, in the late 1980s, when I first started teaching life was relatively uncomplicated for the British teenager. They had far less distractions and pressures than today. They might watch too much TV, play the odd badly animated computer game, might hang around with their friends on streetcorners yearning for…

  • Revealed … the great schools test for parents. How to choose the right school?

    IT’S one of the most important things that you, the parents, will ever do. Unfortunately, you are not the only ones involved in the choice that could have such a monumental impact on your child’s life. Often it’s the local education authority or school itself that makes the final decision, and for many families the…

  • 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…

  • Letter in the Evening Standard

    I am profoundly concerned that teacher Angela Mason has been found guilty of professional misconduct for taking a secret camera into London classrooms and filming the appalling behaviour of the pupils (5 July). If any film was in the public interest, this was it. The film took care not to identify individual pupils but did…

  • 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…