Teacher Toolkit

The Department for Education says: “We will use [reception assessment] as the baseline for measuring the progress primary schools make with their pupils” from 2020. The DfE says: “No numerical score will be shared, and the data will only be used at the end of year 6 to form the school-level progress measure. The DfE says “The new assessment will create school-level progress measures for primary schools which show the progress pupils make from reception until the end of key stage 2. The genuine issue is not ‘how many tests’ or ‘when the tests are conducted’, it is how the results will be reported … and parental perceptions of the test and how the results are then translated and reported to teachers, parents, the school and the pupil.

All they want is evidence that the students learn about the multicultural world they’ll live and work in. Differentiation is important, but inspectors know it’s unrealistic to expect every task or activity in every class to be tailored to individuals. They just want to know that you’re thinking about different pupil needs and making sure all students can achieve their full potential. It’s completely up to your leaders what method they use to improve the quality of teaching, but for goodness sake, don’t beat teachers over the head!

The ‘choice overload’ concept is designed to help individuals improve the way in which they work, to understand themselves better, and to help improve others and understand others better. Having read it, I think this is a useful book for school teachers and leaders to help them use the book as a tool for ‘giving up on bad teaching ideas‘. Curate whole-school concepts in regular professional development sessions, then agree on key teaching and learning strategies that all teachers can practice to support pupils across a school. I can recall countless school policies and interventions that were far too detailed and simply, offered teachers and pupils too much choice.

When the Department for Education started to publish their workload findings, I started to take this issue seriously as a school leader. As a deputy head teacher, I was spending 15 hours per week in meetings, whether line management and collective team meetings, being a participant or the person leading from the front. In my teacher training sessions, as part of my introduction to Mark Plan Teach, I offer some simple solutions explaining how all leaders in schools can tackle the meeting culture in our schools; to reduce workload and make them more meaningful. Imagine if one timetabled period for a teacher is worth approximately £2k per year, per teacher for an academic year (of a teacher’s salary).