Teacher Katherine Birbalsingh received a standing ovation at the 2010 Conservative Party Conference, when she said: "The [education] system is broken because it keeps poor children poor." She went on to condemn a "culture of excuses, of low standards"; "the chaos of our classrooms"; and a "sea of bureaucracy". Birbalsingh has since regretted her co...
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"Instead of comparing ourselves with the past, we should compare ourselves with the best" by Michael Gove (2010) Politicians and the media have long taken an interest in the results of the two main cross-national comparative studies of pupil achievement – The Programme for International Student ...
While it might feel like having fewer pupils in your class would help you make more progress, there is strangely little hard evidence that reducing class sizes consistently improves student attainment. It's not just teachers who gravitate towards a leaner classroom; reducing class sizes is extremely appealing to parents and one of the main attracti...
Intuitively, it seems obvious that reducing the number of pupils in a class will improve the quality of teaching and learning, for example, by increasing the amount of high quality feedback or one-to-one attention learners receive. There is no doubt that parents like small class sizes. However, Professor John Hattie in his book, Visible Learning: a...
With its network of over 600 teaching schools across nine English regional networks, the Teaching Schools Council (TSC) has a regional and national-facing school improvement role. Its belief that great teaching is at the heart of a self-improving school-led system underpins its ambassadorial role in 'developing, improving and changing education' so...