Well, obviously! Who could reasonably say otherwise? But an almost-contemptuous yes risks glossing over the pre-eminent part that exam results play in the UK education system and jobs market. School…

Is that doing it to judge its quality for an individual teacher is problematic for a number of reasons - this common scenario should exemplify the problem. I am a…

By ‘live’ feedback and marking, I mean teachers giving students feedback and marking their work as a matter of routine during lessons. I prefer it when teachers do their feedback…

1. The meaning of the word ‘learning’, in a one-sentence definition that’s easy to recall, and say 2. How learning happens - a simple ‘model of learning’, of the kind…

‘Mystification is simple; clarity is the hardest thing of all’.  Julian Barnes The world is more complex now than it has ever been. The internet has both shrunk our world and…

The adage, ‘Practice makes perfect’ is only rarely true, because perfection - whatever we mean when we use this word - is very hard to attain, and maintain. We can…

I don’t know who first coined the term, ‘low-level disruption’, but at some point Ofsted got hold of it and it has become widely-used in schools: the September 2021 Ofsted…

Since retrieval practice is the most important activity in learning, AFTER the point when new information has been ‘taught’/presented, I intend to use the next 3 blogs to offer you…

Until 2019, Ofsted expected schools to focus on their students making both ‘rapid’ and ‘sustained’ progress in their learning, and in response, school leaders filled their school development plans with…

I have quoted Dylan William before, who says ‘hands up makes the smart kids smarter’. In this blog, I want to say a bit more about why whole-class questioning should…