About three years ago, in the middle of an SLT meeting, I used the word ‘undergird’ to describe how we needed to support staff. As is their wont, a couple of my colleagues reached for their smartphone to google (other search engines can be used) to check whether or not I had coined yet another […]
January 10, 2016
“I wish to register a complaint.” Thus begins the famous “Dead Parrot” sketch from the Monty Python team. Well, I wish to take up the complaint because, like John Cleese’s Mr Praline character in the sketch, I feel like someone keeps trying to sell me (and the education system generally) a dead parrot. In this instance […]
July 11, 2015
It was with a certain amount of reluctance that I agreed to be interviewed by a Schools Week reporter about my views on the government’s decision not to include legacy qualifications in the 2018 performance tables. That reluctance was twofold. Firstly because by placing one’s head over the parapet (individually), and one’s Head over the […]
June 2, 2015
This is my first ‘doing’ post as a Headteacher, but I thought it was about time to begin looking back at what has been going on at Canons since I took a hold of the reins last September. In fact, the aim of this post is to show how I have tried not to take […]
October 11, 2014
This is a summary of my presentation to Teaching and Learning Takeover (TLT14) this October. The organisers asked me to base my presentation on my most-read blogpost The Myth of Progress Within Lessons. This is what I came up with. I began by reasserting my twin premises from the original blogpost: There is no such […]
September 3, 2014
To paraphrase John Thomsett, I’ve been a Headteacher for just three days and this much I think I know already! 1. Being out of ‘limbo’ is good. Ever since I knew that the former Head was retiring I’ve been in a state of limbo. Initially this was because of waiting for the job to be […]
July 12, 2014
This morning I read and retweeted a Guardian ‘Secret Teacher’ article on the horrendous mess to which high stakes accountability and it’s recently deepened links to performance related pay (PRP) have led. I liked it, at least in the sense that I found it awful but was glad to see it placed in the public […]
June 22, 2014
Okay. I’ll admit it. Sometimes I write blogposts just so that I can crowbar in some favourite choons of mine. And this one is a case in point. Kind of. I’m also writing it because, every so often, I get a DM from someone asking me, from my vantage point as a school leader, about […]
May 22, 2014
I’ve blogged on quite a few aspects of my role as a member of two senior leadership teams: from data to line management and human resources, from Ofsted to Teaching Schools, from Student Leadership to Pedagogy. All of these posts are important to me, but this post is the one that delivers me into the […]
April 2, 2014
Since becoming members of the Teacher Development Trust’s ‘National Teacher Enquiry Network’ a number of opportunities have come the way of Canons High School. The latest of these was a general invitation to NTEN members to meet as a very small (I hesitate to use the word intimate) group with the CEO of the Education […]
January 30, 2016
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