News

Keeping Children Safe in Education changes (Sept.2022). The Times Educational Supplement has alerted schools to ten changes to KCSIE for September.

Has OFSTED got it wrong? Well after the trouble OFSTED are in for insisting that future teacher-training should ONLY include synthetic phonics for the teaching of reading, OFSTED is now being critised for ITT accreditation.

This article says it all.

The Queen's Platinum Jubillee celebration book for all children is arriving in primary schools in mid-May. 'Children in state-funded primary schools across the United Kingdom will, from mid-May, begin to receive a free commemorative book to mark Queen Elizabeth’s Platinum Jubilee'. More details in the DfE link above.

Bigger classes? Yes, but pupils have got bigger too, say UK teachers. The article reflects delegates' views at the annual onference of the NASUWT teachers’ union that classes and the size of class furniture is not 'fit' for purpose.

Ukraine children starting school in the UK. Has your school started taking children from Ukraine? This article caught my attention about a mother's perspective of starting her children in an Oxfordshire primary school. How did the children get received? What support had to be put in place. Well, there are few ideas here.

In an article in the Guardian, Dr Mary Bousted, the joint general secretary of the NEU, said successive education secretaries had “failed to get a grip on the issues facing teachers”.

Issues relating to:

> High workload for teachers

> The pernicious effects of a punitive and deeply flawed inspection system

> The effect of real-terms cuts to pay over many years

> 

It is the ministers who do require improvement according to the Guardian. This is a hard-hitting, well researched and so supported article about long-term absence, covid and life-chances.

Read it here

Focus on phonics to teach reading is ‘failing children’, says landmark study - Today the Guardian has published an article on what they call a 'A landmark study'. The article goes on to  say that the research has described the way primary school pupils are taught to read in England as “uninformed and failing children”. The researchers,  is calling on the government to drop its narrow focus on phonics. 'The UCL researchers are among 250 signatories to a letter which has been sent to education secretary Nadhim Zahawi, calling on the government to allow for a wider range of approaches to teaching reading, which would allow teachers to use their own judgment about which is best for their pupils'.

https://www.theguardian.com/education/2022/jan/19/focus-on-phonics-to-teach-reading-is-failing-children-says-landmark-study