Gearing up for the new careers guidance strategy

With the Department for Education about to publish a comprehensive careers strategy (expected post referendum), articulating the careers provision responsibilities of each and every school from primary to age 18, how can schools gear themselves up for their new responsibilities? By 2020, the government has stipulated that it wants a system where yo...

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Bringing the discoveries of neuroscience to the classroom

Progress in neuroscience is rapidly influencing the way we think about teaching and learning. Cognitive scientists and behavioural psychologists now claim to have a better understanding – based on new empirical evidence – of how our minds and memories work, how and why we make decisions and how we learn. Cognitive science is an interdisciplinary fi...

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Formative assessment. How do teachers know their students are learning?

The short answer is, of course, that they don't. Not unless they get effective, structured feedback from their students. This is where 'formative assessment' comes in. Paul Black and Dylan Wiliam, in their seminal work, 'Inside the black box: raising standards through classroom assessment' define formative assessment as encompassing: "all those act...

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Improving the outcomes of teacher CPD

Professor Simon Burgess of the University of Bristol says: "Having a good teacher as opposed to a mediocre or poor teacher makes a big difference. Teacher effectiveness matters enormously. A pupil being taught for eight GCSEs by all effective teachers (those at the 75th percentile of the teacher effectiveness distribution) will achieve an overall G...

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Optimising your school's use of the Pupil Premium

If there is a holy grail in education, then it is probably to improve the education outcomes of our most disadvantaged pupils and narrow the performance gap between them and their peers. It has certainly been a key objective of successive governments. To tackle the long tail of under-achievement, the Coalition government introduced the Pupil Premiu...

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