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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Effective leadership in schools

That's the easy part. Finding enough leaders to transform the school system presents a huge challenge and one that we don't appear to be meeting at the moment. What does a good leader look like? ... after all, good leaders come in all different shapes and sizes. Do you need someone possessing a basket of generic leadership skills (in other wor...

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Key sources in education research

At EdCentral you can access hundreds of pieces of research to help inform your teaching practice or policy decisions - whether it's in the form of a book, monograph, literature review or research paper. Our user friendly platform is easily searchable, provides time saving summaries and is updated constantly. You can also see how other practitioners...

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Maths: finding the fix to our problems

 We are not good at Maths in this country. In the latest PISA results (2012), England ranked 24th in the maths tables. This equates to a three year achievement lag between the performance of our 15 year olds and those at the top of the performance table - in Shanghai. But if you look at the performance of our 16-19 year olds, the picture is ev...

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