Considered - the Faculty of Education blog at Canterbury Christ Church University
Faculty of Education Blog at Canterbury Christ Church University
Discussions around ‘British’ values, faith schools and inclusion remind us that values stand at the heart of what we do in education. At a national level values are embedded in the national curriculum and government policy decisions. At a local level schools must formulate and publish aims or mission statements identifying the principles which underpin […]
For a number of reasons it’s getting harder to find schools to say yes (to student placements), with two factors above all cited – the fear of the progress data of a particular class getting damaged by teaching from a very inexperienced student and, similarly, ‘our data isn’t good enough and we’re expecting an Ofsted […]
Given that teachers in schools can be positioned principally with being policy enactors and that education policy tends to be deeply implicated in political imperatives, some alternative perspectives are required if the thinking in schools is to evolve beyond the constant bending to policy initiatives…
The Carter Review comes after a radical restructuring of the ITE funding mechanism, giving much more money to schools and incentivising them to train their own teachers alongside traditional university-led routes into teaching…It’s interesting to speculate what such a report might have said four years ago. At that time the DfE could have taken a […]
…Let’s start a serious conversation about retention and teacher development, to stop the wholesale wastage of expertise in both schools and universities to which the current situation is leading and to show that we are serious about sustainable, long-term investment in the thing that matters – the quality of teaching in schools.
It seems axiomatic that if there is a choice between appointing someone to a teaching post who is ‘qualified’ and someone who is not it makes sense to appoint someone who is ‘qualified’. However…we may be wise to see the notion of being ‘qualified’ to teach in its broadest sense and this leads into questioning […]
Nobody is going to argue that high levels of teacher stress and consequent attrition are a good way to run an education system; even if they (possibly) get ‘results’ in the short-term, their longer-term damage is both an educational and a moral hazard…
England is ranked the worst country in Europe for the level of acquisition of foreign languages amongst teenagers. And yet for decades, English schools have tried to improve this situation, perhaps most notably through experimenting with teaching modern foreign languages in primary schools (PMFL). Clearly, something has gone wrong…
…there is a real mismatch between what teachers, leaders and policy makers feel research should do and what it actually does…Engaging with theory is difficult and bringing it to bear on real classrooms is even more so, but this does not mean we should abandon it.
Ben Goldacre’s recent call for more randomised controlled trials (RCTs) in education has renewed interest in evidence-based or -informed practice. Large-scale syntheses of existing studies, such as John Hattie’s, have also become popular reading. While such evidence is thought to tell us ‘what works best’, it does not always reveal why. It is also not […]