Happy New Year! Here are a few final reflections from my time teaching in 2024. In a couple of weeks I’m moving to West Africa for a couple of months - combining some consultancy for UNICEF’s Education Outcomes Fund with support for Educaid in Sierra Leone and some organisations in Ghana. If you are in this part of the world or know people, schools or organisations I should connect with, please get in touch.
Teaching in Tower Hamlets during 2024 has been one of the privileges of my career. I’m aware that, compared to a career-long teacher’s 120 terms of service, my two-term return is a drop in a pedagogical ocean. Although I have always kept working in and visiting schools, I had frankly forgotten a simple truth: the longer you are with one group of children, the more they let you into their lives and their learning journeys, and the more wonderful each relationship with you feels. I will miss all of them some of the time, and some of them for even longer than that. Come March I hope I’m lucky enough to be back amongst them.
My time in one school has reinforced lots of my wider views on education – how government needs to create space for schools’ own curricula to emerge outside of the national curriculum; how maintained schools can and should play a vital role in our school and school improvement systems; how we need to resuscitate arts learning in schools. But here are five emerging thoughts I’ll keep pondering during 2025.
1. Creating a curriculum of strange belonging
2. Decluttering lesson task design
3. An ASDAT (Arts, Science, Design and Technology) room in every primary school?
4. Team Teaching with Oak Academy
5. Making space for teacher influence
1. Creating a curriculum of strange belonging
First, as I did the traditional teacher’s leaving ‘dance off’ with kids at the Friday ‘woop woop’ assembly’ (no videos available, I hope/promise), I looked around the hall and felt a rush of belonging – four hundred kids’ sense of belonging to the school, how it cares for them, and how they can trust each other within its safe walls. There is lots of talk about belonging, including from Bridget Philipson herself. Despite the challenges beyond the school gates so many schools do this so well for so many of their children. How? Of course, there are the obvious solutions around care, love, engagement, and making sure every child and family are known as names not numbers. But beyond this, I feel that every school has some kind of ‘curriculum of belonging’; one that is open to any member of a school’s community, but might be hidden – or at least not immediately transparent - to outside visitors such as inspectors or other external agencies. As with most organisations and communities, schools develop some strange rituals and practices that build and strengthen bonds between the people in them. From ‘woop woop’ assemblies, to insider jokes about certain teachers, to parts of the playground where certain things happen because they have always happened there, schools create norms that are not necessarily normal, cultures that border on cults. Put simply, schools are weird places, and that’s how it should be. Yes, these can sometimes feel exclusive or odd to outsiders, but who cares, if (and it’s a big if) every member of that school community feels part of the club?
2. Decluttering lesson task design
Second, I’m increasingly convinced that the too many key stage two lessons are just too cluttered. When I was teaching history this term, deep in a box of dusty resources I stumbled across an (ever so slightly) updated version of the Invaders and Settlers textbook I had used when at school in the 1980s. There was no obvious need to blow off the dust. Our curriculum planning had already created and curated all the bells and whistles of a range of inputs and activities: videos, quizzes, interactive textbooks, knowledge notes, and many pieces of paper to stick into many exercise books. These are not random acts of stuff-creation. Behind this clutter lies lots of deep thinking and structure – a systematic way to sequence and reinforce knowledge. My best bit of feedback came when a random group of children were selected by the deputy head to talk about their learning and many chose to mention their history lessons with me. So amongst the mess, something was working. However, I was left wondering whether all children, but especially those who struggle to focus, face not only cognitive overload but also logistical overload? In most lessons I had to organise a barrage of cutting, glueing, sharpening, (and, to my perpetual teacher-irritation, worrying about the cutting, glueing and sharpening of others) that my knowledge-rich lessons had to get through before getting to any knowledge. I’m not suggesting an easy answer such as the Gibbite ‘return to textbooks’ philosophy. For a start, there is too much brilliant video content that can enhance all sorts of learning. However, as primary schools continue to refine their curriculum planning and task design, hopefully in response to a sensibly-reduced curriculum I hope they find opportunities to decrease the clutter that can sometimes risk the logistical being prioritised over the pedagogical.
3. An ASDAT (Arts, Science, Design and Technology) room in every primary school?
Third, I am more persuaded than ever that the biggest barrier to primary school children doing practical, hands-on learning is the fact they usually have to do this in bog-standard, books-biased classrooms. Turning your classroom round over a break from a maths-friendly environment to one where active science experiments, resource-rich arts lessons and messy design and technology activities can happen is a motivation-sapping task. In the process, the high ambitions of lesson plans are often compromised. Pencils instead of paint; glue sticks and scissors instead of glue guns and saws; 2D paper plans instead of actual 3D making; pupils watching a teacher do an experiment instead of doing it themselves. Of course, there are plenty of barriers beyond this space issue: time; resources; teachers’ capacities; But if I could do one thing to enrich primary school curricula, it would be to create one ‘practical classroom’ in every school, fully timetabled to maximise use, with every kind of arts, science and DT resource available, and space for each class to store half-finished projects. This is far from impossible – two other primary schools I taught in in Tower Hamlets have had spaces like these, led and organised by curriculum leads with support from teaching assistants and parents with particular skills or interests. As school rolls continue to fall, new spaces could become available in schools – and if there are any IT rooms still out there, they should be ripe for conversion anyway. Of course, creating and maintaining spaces like these takes money and time. Although in the long run schools would have to meet these costs themselves, maybe there are funders out there who are prepared to pump-prime, kick start and evaluate some ASDAT (Arts, Science, Design and Technology) rooms in primary schools?
4. Team Teaching with Oak Academy
Teachers’ use of broadcast media has always been a tricky space. I’m old enough to remember PE lessons as a child where a teacher used to press play on a BBC radio tape and kick back, doing almost nothing to improve our dancing and prancing. ‘Sticking a TV programme on’ is pathologised as the last refuge of a scoundrel supply teacher, or any tired Friday afternoon teacher. However, during my Autumn term I have started to supplement the school’s curriculum plans with Oak Academy’s new Primary Maths and English lessons. I’m not a natural fan of Oak (with various worries about state curriculum control, public interventions unjustified by market failure, and the threat of fully mandated, fully scripted lessons). However, encouraged by my friend Emma Madden (a headteacher who led on the English curriculum for Oak) I found their resources incredibly useful with my Year 4 intervention groups. This was far from a ‘Stick an Oak video on” process, I promise. I carefully chose units or lessons pitched right for their levels of reading fluency and general comprehension. I selected particular lessons and resources within lessons, and switched between using their slides and their videos. I’m not sure I’ve yet used Oak enough to give any robust insights. However, my one observation is about the power of observation. When using their videos, it’s like having a second teacher in the room, enabling me to observe how the children are engaging with the content, and pausing at appropriate moments to reinforce key points, check for understanding, and nudge particular children to retain their focus. Of course, you can do this whilst teaching; but it’s one of the toughest parts of the job. Sharing the load of direct instruction with another (videoed) teacher did feel like a partial liberation from the painful, thankless and often impossible job of multitasking that teachers attempt when teaching from the front. Oak is far from perfect (and the number of quizzes in particular can be tedious at times). However, I would encourage all schools, as part of the ongoing process of curriculum and task redesign, to consider a ‘pick and mix’ approach to using their plans and lessons. It could save huge amounts of time in developing activities that fill gaps in particular subjects or particular groups of children, and give all teachers a bit more headspace to observe if and how their pupils are engaging.
5. Making space for teacher influence
Finally, as I continue to observe the world of education policy and research that I have partly left behind, I feel like I am witnessing a growing marginalisation of teachers from education debates. The voices of those outside schools who attempt to influence what happens in them – Civil society in all its forms – have over the last decades become ever noisier and more sophisticated in influencing approaches. But should we listen that seriously to policymakers and opinion-formers who are so removed from the daily reality of classrooms, if they were ever there at all? Events and panel discussions are more desperate than ever to include a ‘young person’ and organisations are falling over themselves to establish youth advisory groups. But is there a risk that this (largely welcome if sometimes problematic) focus on youth voice further quietens the voices of practicing teachers? Should we tolerate education event panels that are teacher-free? As I suggested in my work with WISE on teacher leadership1, giving teachers leading roles in articulating the impact of current policies and practices, and shaping future policies and practices, requires a proactive role from government and others. It needs more than warm pro-profession rhetorical platitudes; more than engaging with those teachers bold enough to get busy on social media; more than including teacher unions in policy conversations. It is not about whether teachers should have greater or less agency in their classroom practices – that’s another debate entirely. It is about a systematic approach to capturing and valuing the ‘lived insights’ from those of us at the whiteboard-face. As I leave the classroom again, hope that we can all find time and space to listen, more deeply and actively, to the voices of teachers in 2025.
We defined teacher leadership as ‘(largely class-based) educators enacting influence through relationships beyond the scope of their own classroom that result in changes in pupil learning, professional practices, organisational strategies and/or government policies.’
I think your 5th point is particularly important. This issue has worried me for a long time especially in the years when I attended numerous round tables’ at which I was often the only person with extensive first hand experience of teaching albeit already no longer current. There is a massive disconnect between such discussions and the reality of schools and the day to day priorities and needs of their students and staff .