Strangely, it was an interview with Katharine Birbalsingh (KB) a few years ago that set this particular bee buzzing in my head. It was strange because KB of all people has seemed convinced that you can change almost in a school. In the interview, she justified the relatively low number of girls taking physics at Michaela Community School by saying that this was because there was “a lot of hard maths in there that I think that they would rather not do.” This sparked outrage about sexism and outdated stereotypes at the time.

However, what really struck me was that KB seemed to think that this wasn’t something she could or should change as the headteacher. It was an odd example of her echoing a refrain which is heard a lot in schools - that of “our kids won’t…”. In most cases, KB would have been a scourge of this attitude. Just imagine what she would say in response so someone who said, “our kids won’t line up in silence” or “our kids won’t behave in lessons”. Yet, here she was effectively saying. “our girls won’t take A level physics in proportion to how well they did at GCSE.” It was revealing what we treat as an unchanging fact of life that we can’t do much about and what we treat as susceptible to being changed.

Other teachers might think that they can do something about getting more girls to take physics A Level but that we should accept some low-level disruption in class. As Bradley Walsh would say, “Stop the clock. That is wrong”. Adam Boxer explained why earlier this week. These things can be changed and schools have shown that they can be.

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We all have blind spots of things that we just accept as the way things are. One of mine was handwriting. As someone who went through school with poor handwriting and had to re-learn cursive on my teacher training course, I accepted that there would always be kids with poor handwriting and there wasn’t much we could do about it. A visit to Stanley Road Primary School is what changed my mind.1 As I record here, I was confronted with book after book of legible handwriting. The children at the school weren’t any different to the children I was teaching; the school just had an incredible focus on making sure all children could write neatly and legibly.

One note of caution. Just because things can be changed, I am not saying that it is easy to do so. Changing things is hard and takes incredible focus and follow-through,2 particularly if people have become used to things as they are. It can be hard to imagine how things can be different. However, hard is not impossible and we can do hard things. If there is something you feel can’t be changed in school but you really want to, think long and hard about what you could try and who and where you could learn from.

Starting as an ECT in primary is a daunting feeling. Suddenly, you go from being a student teacher in someone else’s class to having your own class. Although this makes life easier in many ways, it is very much in at the deep end. When I started as an ECT, I wished for a helpful blog to get me started and couldn’t really find anything exactly right. The aim of this blog is to fill that gap and get you off to a good start to your ECT first year.

I have taught from Year 2 to Year 6 (although never Year 5!) so the advice here is based primarily on those years. Going into Reception or Year 1 will be a bit different but I hope you can find something of use.

Before you start

1. Know your class

   As an ECT, you should not have been given a class with particular behavioural issues (and if you find out that you have been, this is a huge red flag about the school). However, any class in a mainstream primary school will have its issues. School data can tell you a certain amount here but the real gold mine of information is the previous year’s teacher and TA. They will tell you things that are not in the data but are vital to making sure you get off to a good start - which children need extra reassurance; which children should not sit together; which parents can be difficult to deal with and so on. Get as much information as you can from them but keep an open mind - it’s important that every child and parent starts with a clean slate.

2. Prepare the classroom

   Using the information about the children, prioritise a seating plan. Schools have lots of different views about how children should be seated so try to find out common practice and if any arrangements are recommended or frowned upon. That said, as far as possible, go for an arrangement which allow all the children to see you easily and minimises distractions - often easier said than done in many primary classrooms. There are often SEND and inter-personal considerations about where children can sit so I would recommend spending plenty of time on this. If something doesn’t work, you can move it around but give yourself the best possible chance at the outset. Once you have done it, ask another teacher or experience TA to look over it and see if they spot any problems.

   The school will likely have policies about how they want displays to look and you should comply with these. If you love making displays, feel free but, if not, err on the side of minimalism. You will likely want to build them up over the course of the year, using children’s work. There will be lots more classroom prep to do - trays, coat-hooks, exercise books and equipment and if you spend all your time making the classroom look beautiful, you can run out of time. With luck, you should have access to a TA who knows the ropes - get all the help you can from them!

3. Make sure you have key equipment for teaching

   There are two pieces of equipment that I think are vital for successful teaching that aren’t always present in every primary classroom - mini-whiteboards and a visualiser. The school really should have both for every classroom but, if not, try your hardest to get a set of mini-whiteboards (larger ones are better) and a working visualiser. If your school doesn’t have visualisers (such places exist, I am sorry to say!) and you can’t persuade SLT to get you one, I would just get a cheap one from an online retailer - you won’t regret it. There is lots to read on how to use these effectively but this on mini-whiteboards and this on visualisers from The Educakers are primary-focused and extremely useful.

   A couple of additional nice-to-haves are a slide-clicker (makes you much more mobile in the classroom) and a clipboard (very useful when circulating during independent work once you can get over the feeling of being a warehouse supervisor!).

The first day

1. First impressions

   As an ECT, you likely don’t come with any reputation in the school.1 At best, you might have been introduced to the children during a transition morning in the previous school term but, for the children, you are largely an unknown quantity. Unfortunately, humans (including children) tend to form judgments about people very quickly.2 Even if nobody says it seriously these days, we have all heard that dreadful piece of advice - “Don’t smile until Christmas.” On the contrary, you want your first interaction with children to be positive, warm and friendly - they need to feel safe in your class and a stern and unsmiling face isn’t Like a lot of ridiculous advice, “don’t smile until Christmas” contains a tiny kernel of truth. It’s best to be really firm on rules and routines at the outset when the children are sussing you out and considering whether to push the line. It’s quite easy to relax a little later on if you have been too insistent on something. However, if you start off too friendly and a bit loose on routines, it’s a lot harder to ratchet up the firmness and can cause resentment if you start imposing rules that weren’t there at the outset.

   Whilst we are on the subject of smiling, humour is notoriously difficult to get right in the classroom and best saved for when you know your children better. It can be great for relationships once you know children well (and they know you) but misfiring early on can be damaging. Much better to reveal your sense of humour over time once boundaries are clear.

2. Teach the behaviour you want

   I am a strong believer that behaviour should be regarded as part of the curriculum and needs to be taught just like everything else. In particular, good behaviour in school involves a whole set of individual behaviours which need to be taught. You will sometimes see it said that this good behaviour needs to be taught explicitly and this is true up to a point. However, children in KS2 are not novices in classroom behaviour and are very capable of coming up with rules that should apply in the classroom and why they are necessary. Co-creating your classroom rules and norms with the children can be a powerful way of getting buy-in and pointing to a classroom charter that they have all discussed and signed up to can be an effective behaviour tool. Of course, there are school-wide rules and you may have things that are particularly important to you. Explain why these are important rather than simply imposing them.

3. Teach content

   Some teachers don’t teach any content on the first day, concentrating on a combination of getting to know you activities and developing ground rules. I am not a fan of this. School is a place to learn and I think it sets a better classroom culture to teach some content on the first day. This doesn’t necessarily mean hammering children with full content. Furthermore, logistical issues such as absence of books or stationery might well impede you from some lessons you want to teach. My first day approach now is to teach short lessons with a lot of focus on key routines that we will be using a lot – for example, fluency reading; a mini-whiteboard routine and demonstrating that I will ask them questions to check for listening.

4. Speak to a parent or two

   If you have done the preparation recommended above, you will know which children may have difficulties coming into school and which parents can be difficult to handle. Speak to one of these parents at pick-up if there is time / availability and/or make a call home. Most parents only receive a call when their child has done something wrong and if they get a call just to check in or discuss how the first day went, they will likely respond positively. It makes it much easier to call if you later have to raise an issue with them. I’d recommend making a few more calls during the first week.

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The first week

1. Testing boundaries

   So, you survived the first day. In fact, it probably went pretty well because primary children normally have an honeymoon period with their new teacher. As an ECT, you likely have a novelty factor and most children will behave well whilst they sound you out. The honeymoon contains the seeds of potential problems though…when things are going well, it is very easy to let things slide a bit. By the end of the first week, some of your more enterprising students will be testing boundaries. It’s important to reinforce them at this point because it will only get harder in weeks 2, 3 and thereafter. Also, it is inevitable that some children will miss the first day or two of term and this is a great opportunity to re-teach some of the behaviour lessons you already covered.

2. Get on top of playground issues

   My experience of teaching KS2 in English primary schools is that there are a lot of friendship issues bubbling away underneath the surface which get released once the children are in a more unstructured environment on the playground.3 Morning break often produced a few issues but it was returning after lunch when I found myself overwhelmed with complaints about what had happened on the playground. It took me the best part of a year (and several observations of other teachers) to get to grips with this. At first, I was too keen to get on with teaching and tried to deal with issues too quickly. This was fine for minor issues but bigger issues would resurface in class or, in some cases, even after the children had gone home and complained to parents. The system that eventually worked for me was to have a standard, simple activity after lunch that the children could get on with largely independently whilst the TA and I triaged the lunchtime complaints into things that were minor / had already been dealt with and ones that needed some action to resolve. I was fortunate to have some semi-private areas in the corridors to speak to children and supportive colleagues nearby. Your system may well be different but you will need to plan for post-lunchbreak issues and getting that going in the first week when things will be calmer is useful.

3. Speak to your colleagues (a lot)

   As an ECT, you will be allocated a mentor who may or may not be in your year group. You should have regular meetings with them but this doesn’t mean you can’t speak to others. It’s easy to get trapped in your own classroom but things will go much better if you are in communication with people around you. If you are lucky enough to have your own TA, you should be communicating constantly with them – not only about lesson planning but about issues with individual students. They often have more playground duties and see more interactions that you. If you have year-group colleagues, they can help with planning and may share useful resources. Ask subject leads if you have questions about their subjects; contact the SENCO if you noticed anything in the first week and keep management informed of anything you think might turn into a bigger issue.

4. Be realistic about planning

   This one might be my most controversial take. Your teacher training may have created the impression that you have to plan amazing lessons from scratch for all the subjects you teach (and for most primary school teachers, that will be nearly all subjects!). This is a recipe for burnout and, in my opinion, a nonsensical way to run a school. Primary schools vary hugely in the amount of shared resources they have and their attitude to using them so you will need to scope this out quickly.

   If there is shared planning, then use it as much as possible. If your school follows a scheme for any particular subject, then I strongly advise you follow that scheme and use its materials. First, you can’t be criticised for doing this. Secondly, if it is, for example, a maths scheme, that is likely 5 lessons that you can spend less time on planning. If you are in the unfortunate position of having no shared resources and your school doesn’t use any schemes, think carefully about whether your want to be there long-term. In the meantime, look for some other high-quality resources that can take the pressure off you. My first port of call these days would be Oak National Academy – free with all main subjects covered - but there are other great materials out there for a price. Using scheme or Oak materials will probably mean teaching much more with Powerpoint / Google Slides than I consider optimal but you simply have to manage your workload effectively when you are relatively inexperienced and it’s better to do something which is 80% effective but is sustainable than burn yourself out. I tried to do too much on my own initially and didn’t do any of it well. Sticking fairly rigidly to the school’s scheme on maths (even when I didn’t like bits of it) freed up time to develop my English teaching. Try and get this balance right early on.

5. Manage behaviour issues

   As mentioned above, you will likely start seeing some behaviour issues arising towards the end of the first week. Primary schools don’t tend to have the detailed behaviour systems of secondary so you will find yourself having to manage a lot in class.4 There is lots of advice out there about behaviour and the ones I found most useful are mentioned in this previous blog. Importantly, the great thing about primary school is that the vast majority of behaviour issues will be “sins of enthusiasm” where the children want to participate but don’t always do it in the right way. The number 1 issue in both my ECT years was children calling out and the number 2 issue was children doing the wrong things because they didn’t listen carefully enough. Both of these can be massively reduced by a technique I learned from an Adam Boxer blog on Front-Loading the Means of Participation. The basic idea is simple. You tell children how you want them to participate before telling them what you want them to do. For example:

   “By raising a hand silently, who can tell me if this is an adjective or an adverb?”

   Or really cranking it up at the end of the day:

   “Sitting quietly behind your tables….with everything in your bag and with it zipped up on the table in front of you and with your eyes on me….we are going to listen carefully to what happens in Chapter 3 of our story”.

6. Carving out time for yourself

   I am not going to tell you not to work on the weekend. If you can manage that, you are either much more organised as an ECT than me or you have a breezy confidence that I did not (and do not possess). However, you have to carve out some time for yourself. Everyone is different in this regard. Personally, my brain was frazzled by Friday afternoon and I simply had to get home, switch off and relax. On one occasion, I stayed late for some reason and found one of my colleagues photocopying everything she needed for the next week. If you can do that as an ECT and take the rest of the weekend off, I salute you.

   However you handle your weekend, if you have survived your first week as a Primary ECT, you need and deserve time off! Make sure you get it.

The recent article in Education Next, The Cost of Over-Teaching Phonics by Liana Loewus has rightly attracted a lot of attention in the USA and “over-teaching” of phonics has become a hot topic there with experts such as Mark Seidenberg also weighing in. From the perspective of a teacher trained in England, reading the article can be quite bemusing because I would regard much of what is described not as “over-teaching phonics” but rather as teaching the wrong things.

Three examples direct from the article:

Trying to teach this to children learning phonics is, I would suggest, bonkers. I tried to find a politer way of putting it but it is really hard to believe that anyone thinks that complicated rules like this have any place in the early teaching of sound-spelling correspondences. Immediate cognitive overload warning lights should be going off all over.

This one is a bit more understandable but, as the article recognises, it’s just unnecessary to teach consonant clusters.1 Children can learn to pronounce them just by blending. It’s fair to say that children might need additional practice with them but you shouldn’t be wasting time teaching them.

Every time I read about using syllable division, I scratch my head and wonder why people think this is necessary for children to read. I have never used this or seen it used in any phonics lessons in England. Again, it screams cognitive overload to me given that we are thinking about teaching very young children.

Overall, reading the article made me think of US educators approaching phonics teaching in the manner of a poor piece of discovery learning. Lots of people seem to be trying to figure out a good phonics programme from first principles. Eventually, they are going to figure out what works but wouldn’t be better to start with an effective model in the first place? There are probably many such models in English-speaking countries but I am most familiar with the one that has formed the basis of phonics teaching in England for the last 20 years – systematic synthetic phonics. It’s certainly known to some US educators because I note that it is referenced frequently in the newish Teach Like a Champion Guide to the Science of Reading but every time I read an article like this, I worry that educators are still not connecting the dots across the Atlantic. You really don’t need to build a phonics programme from scratch when there are many out there in England already which you could use!

With that in mind, below is a slightly revised version of a piece I wrote for Holly Korbey’s Bell Ringer newsletter last month which explains the approach to phonics in England for an American audience. The revisions are mainly me putting back English spellings (sorry!) and taking account of some helpful comments received on the first version.

INSIDE ENGLAND’S PHONICS REVOLUTION

The 2oth March 2026 marked the 20^th anniversary of the Independent review of the teaching of early reading written by Jim Rose, also known as the Rose Report, which was the catalyst for the current approach to phonics in England’s schools.2 Other than my own piece for Holly Korbey’s The Bell Ringer newsletter, this anniversary was little marked despite the Rose Report being a rare example of a educational report that had a clear and dramatic impact.

This essay is a look back over those 20 years at the English approach to phonics and considers what it looks like now and how successful it has been. It is primarily intended as an outline for those outside England who are curious to know about the approach.

A bit of history

The Rose Review recommended that schools follow a systematic synthetic phonics approach in teaching children to read. This was a very significant shift in the approach to teaching early reading which had previously been much more mixed.

Although there was controversy at the time about whether the evidence really showed that systematic synthetic phonics (SSP) was more beneficial than other forms of phonics teaching, Jim Rose was convinced, his report was accepted by the government and the approach has survived several changes of government.

At the time, the Labour government (on the left of British politics) made a strong push both in schools to use SSP and for teachers to be trained in its use. The main instrument used was an extremely detailed and influential piece of guidance called Letters and Sounds. Although this guidance was eventually withdrawn in 2022 as part of a revamp of validated programmes (more on that below), it has cast a long shadow in the approach to SSP in England and is an excellent place to start for anyone seeking to get a good understanding of the approach. Even now, many of the validated programmes have a link back to Letters and Sounds because its phases are widely understood by teachers and leaders.

Although the Labour government was keen on SSP, it is fair to say that the opposition right-wing Conservative party was even more enthusiastic, and after they came to power as a part of a coalition in May 2010, the SSP approach was ramped up further. The 2 big ratchets both came in 2012 and were (a) making it a part of the mandatory Teaching Standards for any teachers who were teaching early reading and (b) creating a mandatory phonics screening check at the end of Year 1 (equivalent to kindergarten in the USA).

The phonics check consists of 40 words for students to read, with section 1 containing simple word structures and section 2 more complex structures. A score of 32 or above is a pass, and scores have gradually increased over time. In the first check, only 58% passed and then it gradually rose to a peak of 82% passing, dipping back down during COVID and then recovering to 80%.

Although there was another change of government last year back to Labour, the new government is also committed to the phonics check and has announced a new target of 90% of children passing it.

The phonics check was controversial when introduced for a variety of reasons, including the presence of pseudo-words making up half of the 40 words tested as a “pure” test of phonics (the children are given little monsters to name in the hope that this stops them from trying to match a pseudo-word to real words in their vocabulary).

The other 2012 change was also highly significant – by including SSP in the Teachers’ Standards, it effectively became a mandatory part of all initial teacher training for primary teachers. My own experience was that it was taught in a fairly high level of detail with a quiz that you had to pass to continue with the course.

What is SSP?

Having covered that history, US readers may be wondering what SSP actually is, both in theory and practice. The “systematic” element requires that the approach follows a defined order rather than a more ad hoc approach to word reading. The more important element is “synthetic” which can be contrasted to “analytic” approaches to teaching phonics.

Analytic approaches break down words into their constituent elements. In contrast, synthetic phonics builds up from individual phonemes into words and therefore is often characterised as “sound to print” or what Americans might call “speech to print” – in other words, learners learn /sh/ /i/ /p/ and blend them together to make “ship.” However, it was pointed out to me by Jenny Chew that when Americans talk about “speech to print”, they may often be referring to segmenting a word such as “mat” into its components sounds and then teaching them. This is the other way around from the approach in England which initially focuses on blending the sounds into words (although segmenting follows soon after).

At this point, US readers may well be thinking that sounds like “linguistic phonics” and it is true that the approach used in English schools would, as I understand it, come within that umbrella although it looks very different to the approach that was recently featured on The Bell Ringer.3

In the example there, the teacher taught flexible ways in which the long /ee/ sound could be taught. However, SSP programmes would typically teach the /ee/ grapheme first with children getting plenty of practice on that with decodable texts and books before moving on to the flexible patterns at a later stage. I discuss this difference between “simple code” and “complex code” below.

That’s a brief overview of the theory. In practice, English schools moved from Letters and Sounds to increasingly detailed SSP programmes. Currently, there is an extensive range of 45 validated SSP programmes to choose from. Americans might think of these as approved curricula, but they usually go into a very high level of detail on the teaching sequence both at a macro level (the order of phonemes and graphemes to be taught) and a micro level (how a lesson should look). English schools aren’t required to use a validated programme, although Teacher Tapp data suggests that the vast majority of schools do. According to Teacher Tapp surveys in 2023 and 2025, over 50% of schools use one of 2 schemes – Read Write Inc and Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised and 80% use one of the top 6.

The Department for Education guidance with the list of approved programmes states:

“What’s important is that schools take an approach that is rigorous, systematic and used with fidelity (any resources used should exactly match the Grapheme Phoneme Correspondence (GPC) progression of their chosen SSP approach), and that achieves strong results for all pupils, including the most disadvantaged.”

This statement from the DFE gives some guidance on how schools should use their SSP programme but doesn’t tell the whole story. In my experience, the key features are:

• The programmes are systematic and “used with fidelity,” as the DFE puts it. If you spend any time around phonics teaching in an English school, you will hear references to “fidelity” a lot. In practice, this means following the GPC sequence set out in the chosen programme without deviation. This can be annoying for teachers who may object to a particular part of the programme, wondering why they are, for example, teaching the trigraph “igh” at an earlier point than in another programme they have used. However, the reason that the schemes and DFE are so insistent on this is because of the great stress on phonically decodable books and materials.4 The effect of this is that this is probably the most structured part of education in England. For example, if you have two Year 1 classes (kindergarten) in a school, they will make great efforts to ensure that children are learning the same GPCs at the same time. Texts and books follow the GPC progression so that children get plenty of practice with the GPCs that they have learned. The SSP programmes are largely consistent with each other at the beginning and then branch off in slightly different directions – but ultimately end up in a similar place, not least because of the phonics check.

• These sequences are often split up into various “phases” (a terminology that began with Letters and Sounds). Although the exact sequence and terminology will vary, the programmes also make a distinction between “simple code” and “complex code.”5 The children will start with a simple code of learning a one-to-one correspondence on GPCs, beginning with single letters and gradually proceeding to digraphs and trigraphs. However, because there are many more graphemes than phonemes, children will gradually be introduced to alternative spellings. The phonics check will examine children against all the simple code and the most common graphemes in the complex code.

• There is a strong emphasis in keeping phonics sessions short so that children don’t lose focus. Most schools have a short phonics session either separate to English or as part of a longer English lesson. Sometimes schools will have a couple of phonics sessions in a day – adding another short review session in the afternoon. Phonics sessions can and often are taught whole-class but there are also schools who use groupings of children.

• There tends to be a typical teaching sequence within these whole class lessons as well. Letters and Sounds described a teaching sequence in Phases 2-5 as follows:

  Introduction → Revisit and Review → Teach → Practise → Apply → Assess

• My experience with various validated programmes is that they broadly follow this approach. Children start with a review of previous learned GPCs, then learn a new one and then get plenty of practice in using it, both in terms of reading and often in writing as well. Despite this being a lot of phonics, debates about “over-teaching” phonics seem to be more much more live in the USA than in England.

As a result of the points above, the teaching of phonics in Reception and Year One in England, roughly equivalent to pre-K and kindergarten in the States, tends to be very structured with everyone conscious of the phonics check at the end of Year One (kindergarten). In addition to the whole-class teaching outlined above, there will often be interventions for students at risk of falling behind (often linked to “failing” the phonics check).

From Year 2 (first grade) onwards, practice varies a lot more. All schools are obliged to put in place a programme of support for those children who failed the phonics check and they will retake it at the end of Year 2. There are no further retakes after that, although schools are expected to continue support for children who fail again. Some schools only teach phonics in Year 2 to those who failed the phonics check whilst others continue to offer some whole class phonics teaching as part of their English teaching.

How successful has it been?

If you speak to Nick Gibb (former Member of Parliament and schools minister for much of this period), he will say that it has been a huge success. It is also fair to say that the broad principles are widely accepted across the political divide, and there probably isn’t any appetite for a major course correction.

The percentage of students passing the phonics check has gradually increased over time and, as mentioned above, the government has a target to further raise this to 90% of students passing. Looking at international reading tests, England has performed increasingly well on the influential Progress in International Reading Literacy (PIRLS) reading test for 4^th grade readers (aged 9-10) rising to 4^th in the rankings in the 2021/2022 study.6

However, much like recent mediocre US 8th grade scores of states that adopted early reading reforms like Mississippi, England’s performance in the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) reading tests at age 15 is less impressive, finishing 13^th and behind several other English-speaking countries, including the USA. It might be that those children had not really benefitted from the 2012 second wave of reforms and so we should wait for the next iteration of PISA. In terms of reading tests at the end of primary school taken when most children are 11, there has been gradual improvement but still approximately 25% of children not meeting the expected standard.

The best evidence could be to compare England with the other nations of the UK – Scotland and Wales – to see their reading performance. Unfortunately, neither has participated in PIRLS in recent years (although both should be back in the 2026 round), so there is currently little that can be said with certainty about early reading performance. For what it’s worth, teachers I have spoken to generally think that England’s early reading performance has improved.

My personal view is that the strong adoption of SSP as the basis for phonics instruction has likely been successful in improving early reading. Children generally come out of what is effectively a two-year programme with a good understanding of GPCs, blending and segmenting which they can use to decode unfamiliar words. That said, there are improvements which I think could be made.

Although I am generally supportive of the phonics check, I think the idea of a pass mark (or what Americans would call a “cut score”) is unhelpful and can lead to bad practice in a couple of ways. First, it creates an incentive to push children who are close to the pass mark, possibly at the expense of the weakest readers. I think most schools do well in resisting this temptation, but it would be surprising if it had no effect at all. Simply looking at the average would encourage schools to improve outcomes for all learners (incidentally, this is the approach later adopted with England’s Year 4 Multiplication Tables Check).7

Secondly, I think that the existence of the phonics check causes some schools to think that phonics is “done” at that point, at least for those children who passed. This can sometimes lead to phonics being ignored from then on, even though there are benefits for children to be tracked in Year 2 and perhaps beyond, especially as there is likely to be some regression during the summer holidays. There are also benefits in continuing to have a limited bout of phonics instruction (not least in helping with spelling).8 If anything, I think that schools in England may slightly “under-teach” phonics by having a hard cut-off at the end of Year 1.

However, I think the biggest problem in reading is not related to phonics instruction itself, but that not enough attention is given to continuous practice of decoding once children can accurately decode. In other words, not enough reading is done in school. This means that some children (particularly those who do little or no reading at home) fail to build up automaticity and therefore fluency. I have written about this previously and consider that it could be a cause of the weaker reading performance at age 15.

Could US schools use one of the validated programmes successfully?

I can’t see any reason why not. The early phases which cover the “simple code” could likely be used with no adjustment, other than possibly removing some specifically British words which might not be considered useful. A few more adjustments would need to be made for “complex code” because US accents will pronounce some of the graphemes differently to that set out in the schemes. Nonetheless, this is also sometimes true of some regional English accents so it should not be a huge problem. Finally, differences in spelling will also have an impact when looking at complex code – for example, If I understand American spellings correctly, you won’t need to bother with the grapheme /our/ making an /or/ sound! I note that one of the most popular schemes - Read, Write Inc - already claim on their website to have US schools using their programme. [https://www.ruthmiskin.com/international/]

If US educators are interested and want to learn more, I would suggest starting with Letters and Sounds (mentioned above). It offers a good mix of the theory behind SSP and how you might put it into practice although note that Phase 4 emphasises consonant blends – an approach that the validated programmes have moved away from in terms of teaching although usually building in some practice. Before the validated programmes became dominant, it was used a lot by primary schools in developing their phonics program. For an example of a full phonics program, you could take a look at the validated programme Phonics International because their core materials are free – you just need to register on their website. You can also check out the scope and sequence of two most popular validated programmes (Read Write Inc and Little Wandle) on their website or by an internet search. Alternatively, Sounds-Write (another one of the top 6 most popular validated programmes with a strong focus on sound to print) has a detailed summary of its scope and sequence here and they have also published on their website a short case study of Lynbrook Union Free School District, NY which gives an idea of how it could be used in the US.

Concluding thoughts

The English approach to phonics won’t be the only way that phonics can be taught well. However, the approach has been scaled successfully across a large number of schools.

In my view, this is largely because the validated programmes do a lot of the work for the teacher. Primary teachers in England are not trying to figure out how best to teach phonics from first principles – rather, they are using a very structured scheme where they can put effort into the actual teaching, with most of the planning taken care of.

Since Scotland and Wales will participate in the next round of PIRLS testing, the 2026 results should offer some more concrete evidence of whether the approach in England is more effective.

Despite the apparent success of SSP in England, the failure to convert the success in early reading to reading in higher grades is a concern. However, as noted above, my view is that this is not so much a fault with early phonics instruction but more linked to a failure to fully bridge from decoding to fluency practice in the middle primary years meaning that too many children are leaving primary as dysfluent readers.

[Edited on 1 May 2026 to fix a broken link and add in a US case study of a school using an SSP programme]

Try this brief thought experiment. Imagine if Teacher Tapp had polled teachers on social media use 5 years ago and asked the following question:

“Would you use a social media platform that allows conspiracy theorists to post without restriction, allows far-right users to monetise hate posts, suppresses links to your blog, is in breach of the law and is owned by a billionaire who pays court costs for Tommy Robinson?”

You would expect a 95% negative answer, wouldn’t you?1 Let’s say Teacher Tapp tried to make it harder and added a preamble.

“You have used a social media platform for several years. You have lots of followers there and many good memories; it’s still the biggest platform used by teachers although there are competitors; and there is no guarantee that your followers would move to the competitor platform even if you did. However……”

Makes it a bit harder, doesn’t it? However, I still think an overwhelming majority would have said that they wouldn’t stick around on the platform outlined above. However, here we are at the end of 2025 and there are still a whole load of teachers and teacher-adjacent people still merrily firing off tweets. As I will show in this blog, X is as I have described it above.

Given that it is New Year’s Eve…. if you are still active on X, I would like to suggest a New Year’s Resolution of quitting it. The arguments below are primarily aimed at UK teachers but I think that some points will apply more widely to professionals, university educators and commentators.

Professional obligations

My primary argument is that teachers are professionals and it is a matter of professional ethics to avoid participating actively in a platform that is active in spreading disinformation and misinformation online. Furthermore, uniquely amongst social media platforms, it has made a positive decision not to take any steps to counter it. It is not demonstrating “consistently high standards of personal and professional conduct”2 or maintaining “high standards of ethics and behaviour”3 to be actively participating in such a platform. This is particularly so given that the latest edition of KCSIE makes it clear that online safety includes safeguarding children from potentially harmful online material including “racism….extremism, misinformation, disinformation….and conspiracy theories” (yes, the sort of things that X specialises in).4 Furthermore, the Curriculum and Assessment Review and the government’s response to it make it clear that teaching children to avoid disinformation and misinformation will be a responsibility of teachers. How can a teacher credibly do this whilst participating in a platform which monetises such disinformation?

Not only is X spreading misinformation and disinformation; it is paying a small minority of extreme right-wing influencers very well. We know this because of Rupert Lowe being required to report his earnings under parliamentary rules. Lowe earned nearly £40,000 in his first 13 months as an MP. Lowe is a relatively minor player in the online extreme right compared to Tommy Robinson so his earnings from X will be much larger. This is a design choice by Musk to monetise these people based on interaction from “Premium” accounts (which containing many extremist and grifter accounts). Again, I don’t see how being complicit in monetising these people is compatible with professional ethics.

Furthermore, this extremism feeds a level of racist and other abuse which X complaints’ system just waves through. If you think I am overstating this, follow Sunder Katwala on Bluesky where he regularly posts the racial abuse he receives and the complete failure of the X complaints system. If you can read through a few of the threads where he has detailed this, I will be amazed if you can go back to actively posting on X.

It goes further still. X’s abdication of any responsibility is illegal. If you have been following the news, you will have seen that one aspect of X’s approach has already been found illegal under EU law (allowing people to buy blue ticks to imply they are verified). Other aspects of X’s behaviour are also under investigation as breaching EU laws and the Irish regulator has also launched a formal investigation for X’s failures in relation to its complaints procedures. The failure to run a proper complaints procedure would also put X in breach of the Online Safety Act 2023 and its failures in relation to racist abuse are also likely a breach of long-standing legislation under the Equality Act 2010 - see Q147 of evidence given to the Women and Equalities Committee.

Personal information environment

My secondary argument is that active participation in X degrades your own personal information environment in ways that are likely to be bad for your brain. We live in an incredibly information-rich society which would have been unimaginable to those in the pre-internet age. This may be a niche reason for many people to be on social media but a key point for me (and I believe many teachers) is to be better informed about the world. When I first went on Twitter, it was an incredible way to get better informed about the world and even though I caught the tail-end of the golden age after my career change, it was still incredibly useful to me as an ECT.

However carefully curate your feed now, you are swimming in a sea of misinformation and disinformation and I do not believe that it is possible to prevent it seeping into your mind. Oddly, I recently saw a post on Bluesky asking progressive voices to come back to X in an attempt to stop people’s brains being cooked by relentless extreme right-wing propaganda. The example the user gave was a well-respected assistant headteacher. Of course, this is not going to happen to everyone but I have seen enough examples of Katherine Birbalsingh engaging with out and out racists to know that it is not possible to prevent disinformation and misinformation seeping in.

The reason that X is now a terrible information environment is because it is set up that way. It is designed to encourage extreme positions and avoid careful in-depth discussions. An early sign of the way that things were going was suppression of links – if you put a link in your tweet to your blog or something else you read that you think others should read, the X algorithm will make it hard for people to see it. Similarly, Elon Musk has overhauled the algorithm to promote his extreme worldview as has been exhaustively demonstrated by investigative journalists. He has even biased his AI tool, Grok, to such an extent that it will suggest that Auschwitz wasn’t a death camp. Your chances of seeing offensive and extreme content are extremely high on X; your chances of finding enlightening and useful information are decreasing.

At the same time, Bluesky has been steadily increasing its numbers of academics and quality journalists. You will now find most academics have a presence there and so do the journalists of the Financial Times, The Guardian and The Economist. If you use X for staying informed about the world outside the education space, you will have a much better experience there. In my early days of quitting Twitter, I would go back fairly regularly to see if I was missing things that I hadn’t picked up from Bluesky or Substack. I stopped bothering when it got to the point that I wasn’t seeing anything important that I hadn’t already seen.

Staying on X is a collective-action problem

As shown in the chart above, the proportion of teachers using X is decreasing rapidly but it is still the largest social media app for work-related purposes. Given what I have outlined above, I doubt that any teacher (other than those on the far right) would actively choose X as their preferred method to connect with other teachers at this point. Teachers remain active there for the very simple reason that it is still the biggest platform for teachers despite the dramatic declines over the last couple of years. Big social media platforms are now deeply entrenched in our lives and it is almost impossible to kill one off. It is now over 17 years since Facebook overtook MySpace and although new social media spaces have sprung up, there hasn’t been another case of one social-media platform replacing an existing one since then. The reason is simple – moving to a new social media platform is a lot of work, you will lose followers and it will be hard to recrate the same experience. If everyone moved to a new platform, everyone would be better off but if people look at it from an individual point of view, it’s rational to stay on X (if you ignore the points I made above).

It’s usually reckoned that there are three ways to solve a collective action problem. One is by making an initial move and hoping that others reciprocate. This was a lot of people’s approach to Bluesky when it launched but because not enough people shifted consistently over there, it sputtered and a moment for potential change was lost. The second is an upheaval to change the whole system – this could happen if the UK government and regulators got serious about upholding the laws and/or the UK government simply shifted its communications away from X (the BBC and the media ecosystem would surely follow). This needs to happen but it’s not something teachers can create on their own. The third option is motivational / prosocial action to change the game. This means individuals prioritising the collective good over their own narrow self-interest or as Gandhi didn’t put it – “Be the Change you want to see in the World”.5 New Year seems like the time to pitch such a solution to the great and good of the education world so I am putting this out there in the hope it gets some traction.

What I am asking people to do

A motivational / prosocial appeal needs to be clear in what it is asking people to do. My request is that teachers stop actively posting on X in 2026. If you agree to that, what you choose to do thereafter is very much up to you. You might decide that you are better off without text-based social media in your life; you might decide to become more active on another platform like Bluesky, Substack or (*shudders*) LinkedIn. You might delete your account or you might keep it to stop it being reallocated. It doesn’t really matter. Whatever you decide, if you stop posting on X. you will be doing your bit to reduce its influence in the world. If you publicise what you are doing, you will be supporting the prosocial movement to solve the collective action problem.

That sounds a bit much to commit to up front – any easier options?

Sure, if you don’t feel ready to ditch X completely, try staying off for a shorter period – like a month. You might find that you don’t really miss it that much. Alternatively, you could change your default. If you have X on your phone and Bluesky on your computer, it’s inevitable that you will communicate more on X. Try switching it round – can you be motivated enough to power up your computer to go onto X.

Possible responses

Below I have tried to deal with some possible responses to what I have written. Feel free to leave a comment or contact me on Bluesky if you have another response which I haven’t considered.

“You need to stay on X to fight”

This argument is generally used more against left-wingers who have left X for Bluesky than for teachers. I try to take arguments seriously but this one is so lazy / uninformed that I just can’t. The site is owned by a right-wing extremist billionaire who has paid Tommy Robinson’s legal fees, biases his own AI to the extent that it has denied the reality of Auschwitz and controls the algorithm which dictates most of what people see. This is not a fight that can be won.

I have alluded the latest bizarre twist on that above – stay on X to help stop other people’s brains being cooked. If you are reduced to arguing this, you really need to give your head a wobble. The answer is to build an alternative: not to prop up the social media site which is doing that.

“I need to be on there for my business / people contacting me”

I have a lot more sympathy with this argument. However, do you need to be regularly posting there for people to contact you? This is a great case for switching the default – taking X off your phone and putting up a notice on your account of other places that people can contact you more quickly.

Ultimately, I would query whether your business needs X more than The Guardian. Media companies / personalities have been huge users of X but The Guardian quit X and seems to be doing fine although I have no doubt they took a hit. Have confidence in your product – if it’s good, people will find you without X.

“I can still have an OK experience with a heavily curated feed”

Again, I have more sympathy with this argument but if you are having to take a lot of steps in terms of blocks and restrictions, it’s a sure sign that you are on a bad site. This one really points up the collective action problem. Individually, these people are managing to get some value out of X but would be a lot happier if they could get all the people they are interested in to move to a new platform. New Year is a great time to try this.

“I have lots of followers there which I spent years building up”

There is a big element of sunk cost fallacy in this one. If people genuinely value what you say, they will follow you to a new platform. On the other hand, if you have noticed engagement trailing off on X, there is a good chance that a lot of your followers are like me – dormant accounts kept there for a variety of reasons. One thing that does frustrate me is a lot of the big education accounts who opened up on Bluesky, did a few posts but carried on posting actively on X. That isn’t going to get anyone to move over with you. Announcing that you no longer actively posting on X and will now be posting on a new platform would be a different case. I haven’t seen a single large education account (say over 30K followers on X) that has taken this approach but there are plenty of huge accounts that have stopped posting on X and started on Bluesky (e.g. James O’Brien).

“I already quit X and am posting on Bluesky / Substack”

Great – you are my kind of person! Unfortunately, we still have a lot of teachers active on X. What can you do to help them switch? Although some people might be influenced by posts like this one, preaching is not going to be the key to switching everyone. I have come to the view that for most people, they derive most personal value from social media by engagement. Zoe Enser has posted about how a lack of engagement on Bluesky causes people to go back to X and although I wish this wasn’t the case, I have concluded that she is right. So if you see people that you know on Bluesky (or your other platform of choice), make sure you welcome them and engage with them by commenting, reposting or quote-tweeting. If you just like their posts, it’s not going to help many other people to see them but will at least mean that they know someone read and appreciated it so it’s lots better than nothing.

More importantly, create something which causes engagement / gets people to look at the platform. There are plenty of great examples already:

· #MathsToday is one of the most effective education-themed tags on Bluesky which has got lots of maths teachers contributing;

· Ben Newmark has got his #FridayFive as a light-hearted way for teachers to connect over music;

· Marianne Doherty has done wonders in getting kids book chat going with #KidsBookFriday;

· I have got my #Saturday3 which rounds up 3 of the most interesting blogs I have read that week.

If there are others out there, let me know! There is scope for much much more so if you have an idea, just give it a go and tag a few people that you think will be supportive. Don’t worry if it starts small – if it is a useful or fun thing, people will come. I still believe there is a market for teachers to connect over a text-based social media platform. It just can’t be X.

Concluding thoughts

I have tried to make this as civil and professional as possible even though I sometimes just want to howl with frustration that it has proved so hard to move teachers from such a toxic platform. If you support this call, please get behind it by reposting on your platform of choice - we need a critical mass if we are going to crack the collective action problem. I am going to put it out on X as well since that is ultimately the people I am trying to reach. If you have an account on there, I would be grateful for whatever your can do to push it.

It’s a cliché to say that schools are a microcosm of society but like most clichés, it contains a real truth. As I travelled around Japan, I wondered whether the way Japan ordered society could teach us something about how to run schools. One quirk about Japan is that they love a “Big 3” – 3 best waterfalls, 3 best views, 3 best night-views and so on. In that spirit, I offer the Big 3 things that Japan society can teach us about running schools.

You have to sweat the small stuff

In all the years I have been there, Japan has never been at all relaxed in its approach to making sure things run smoothly. Some of this is about making sure that people follow rules and internalise norms (which I will cover below) but it goes much wider than this. There is an incredible amount of thought which goes into minor operational decisions such as how to line up for a train, how to count out change in a shop and how to deliver a steaming hot bowl of ramen within minutes of you ordering. Similarly, interior design is full of touches to make life run more smoothly: a shelf for your bag and a hook for your umbrella in a toilet; automatic doors where you are likely to have your hands full and ingenious use of storage space to make places look uncluttered.

Some of this focus on details likely comes from traditional Japanese arts such as the tea ceremony, garden design, martial arts and calligraphy where there is huge emphasis on the correct form. Nobody would ever dismiss tiny details as insignificant in that context.

Another factor is a strong desire to have things run smoothly and avoid uncomfortable friction / awkwardness. The change-giving ritual is my favourite example of this. To minimise any possible chances of customers being given the wrong change or thinking that they have been given the wrong change, the shop employee will orally record the money being received (“10,000 yen received), going in the till (“10,000 yen going in) and the change coming back (“first of all, 5000 yen…then 260 yen”). Notes will be handed to the customer first so they can put them away before giving the coins, making life easier for them. Rather sadly for human interaction, this has now been replaced by automatic cash-counting and change-giving machines in many convenience stores and restaurants but, of course, this is an even more friction-free and reliable process.

It might be thought that as an ex-lawyer, I would be obsessively focused on details but this wasn’t the case. However, after my career change, I began to realise that this kind of thinking about details is vital for teachers in their classrooms and for school leaders in their schools. For novice teachers, this kind of detail-orientated focus is hard because you don’t have the experience to understand where the problems are going to arise in the classroom so school leaders should do lots of this thinking for them. One of the things that really impressed me on my visit to Stanley Road Primary is that leaders had clearly obsessed about lots of details than many schools are just a bit woolly about. In schools, this would involve thinking about how we design and supervise our common spaces so that students “naturally” do the right thing? What whole school routines are the most important to support novice teachers and keep the school running smoothly? For a recent UK example of how this might look, see this blog on use of mini-whiteboards.

Needless to say, Japanese schools also have a focus on details. As Lucy Crehan notes in Cleverlands,2 a Japanese lesson study is a very different thing to a UK lesson observation. The focus is very much on the components of the lesson rather than the teacher teaching it and will often get into tiny details of the specifics of the questioning used. A central bank of lesson plans and less contact hours means that teachers have a lot of opportunity to tweak lessons for greater effectiveness.3

Rules and norms

As well as lots of thinking about designing away problems before they arise, Japan is not shy at all about plastering everywhere with lists of rules and warnings.4 These days, many of them will be in English and other languages and often accompanied by lots of images just to make sure you get the message (dual-coding is well understood in Japan!). However, the fact that they are so overt these days is really a sign of Japan struggling to preserve their norms in the face of mass tourism. Whilst having a slightly uneasy relationship with the waves of tourists now descending, the Japanese authorities are nonetheless determined that nothing unfortunate should happen to the them.

Most of the “rules” in Japan are actually internalised norms and posting a sign is usually an indication that somebody thinks this rule is perhaps not internalised enough. When most tourists in Kyoto were Japanese, I didn’t see signs telling people not to photograph geisha because that was well understood. Now, it’s a norm that the authorities feel that people need to be actively reminded of and so the spots where geisha might be seen are littered with these signs.

Japan spends a lot of time making sure that norms are internalised from a young age. In fact, Japanese nurseries and primary / elementary schools can actually look a bit chaotic without the strict discipline that one would expect.5 The emphasis with young children is guiding them to make good decisions and getting them to internalise the correct norms of behaviour.6 In particular, Japan employs the power of group norms to an extent which would be uncomfortable in a British or American classroom. In nursery or elementary school, children are in little groups who often get praised or scolded together.7 By junior high school (middle school), the important group becomes the class which is more significant than a form group in the UK because of the absence of setting or streaming. Rules are more strictly enforced at this stage as well with students expected to fully conform both in terms of uniform and behaviour.8 In wider society, the extent to which Japanese people have internalised many norms is striking; chaos often ensues when a formal rule is introduced which conflicts with a deeply internalised norm.9

The right internalised norms make a school better in every way. Discipline is smoother and easier and the time saved in not having to remind children of the rules really adds up. There must be some but I have never met a teacher who actually enjoys dishing out consequences and some of the problems in schools arise precisely because teachers don’t enjoy it and therefore let things slide. Who wouldn’t want to work in a school where pupils had internalised how they should behave to such an extent that discipline could fade into the background? However, you won’t achieve this by wishing it alone which brings me to the 3rd of my big three - relentless consistency.

Consistency

One of the powerful ways that rules and norms are institutionalised in Japan is through relentless consistency demonstrated by a feeling that this is everyone’s job. When I lived in Japan, I had a re-entry permit entitling me to line up in the Japanese line. Without fail, every time I did this, a Japanese person would pluck up the courage to come and speak to me in English to tell me that I was in the wrong line. This wouldn’t have been easy for them since talking to strangers in English is well outside the average Japanese person’s comfort zone. However, they felt it was their duty to make sure that the rules were upheld and that I was corrected before getting to the front of the line.10

It’s like when you go around a school and you notice that a teacher can’t go past a piece of litter without picking it up or pass a uniform infraction without correcting it. This kind of relentless consistency is hard to maintain because constantly correcting children is exhausting. However, it is the consistency that enables the norm to be upheld and deepened. Certainty that the norm will be upheld is way more important than the severity of any sanction.11

In Japan, it’s also important that these norms are upheld with a level of politeness that can often make you more ashamed of the minor offence you have just committed than if you were dealt with brusquely. Children don’t quite get the level of politeness that the hapless foreigner receives but it’s still noticeable that raised voices are unusual and compliance is achieved by the strong shared commitment that a rule must be upheld (and if there is a consequence that will be applied). Earlier this week, Jonathan Mountstevens shared an interaction on Bluesky where he politely and rather reluctantly gave a student (who was rarely in trouble) a consequence and the student politely accepted it and wished him a good day. To my mind, there was something wonderfully Japanese about that interaction and whilst he mentioned that it left him feeling a bit bad, I would personally much rather have interactions like that with students than anger and raised voices on both sides.

This certainty of norms and rules being applied can look and feel like rigidity when you have to live in Japanese society but there’s no doubt that it comes with huge positive externalities from the fact that people end up following all the rules and norms. It’s the same in school; you might feel awkward enforcing minor corridor infringements but consistency is what makes corridors safe and pleasant for everyone.

Conclusion

Schools being a microcosm of society is a cliché that contains a truth but also a flattening distortion. We don’t want schools to be a replica of society with all its problems. Rather, we should strive to create more ordered and safer places where children, whatever their background, can feel safe, learn and thrive. Seeing the way that Japan creates this order in modern and highly densely populated areas is a fascinating example of how we can shape behaviour more than we often realise.

As I hope I have indicated, this isn’t easy work because it requires incredible dedication and persistence. There is a Japanese virtue which perhaps explains how they are so good at it. “Gaman suru” is usually translated as “to endure” or “to persevere” but that doesn’t fully capture the feeling which conveys a strong sense of bearing the unbearable with patience and dignity. It’s central to Japanese culture.12 As teachers approach the end of the hardest term, I wish that you may all “gaman” and find it within you to continue upholding the highest standards in your schools.

Photographs

All the author’s own.

Obviously, this is very early on in my teaching journey but I don’t think I have changed my mind that the amount we ask class teachers in primary to do is *mind-blowing* compared with the average job!]

After nearly 25 years as a lawyer (and nearly 13 years as a partner), lockdown gave me the chance to reflect on what I wanted to do with my remaining working life. Whilst my time as lawyer had been a successful and fulfilling career, I had a nagging sense that I wanted to give something back to society. I had seen the Now Teach initiative that had been launched to give career changers a helping hand into teaching and the actions of its founder, Lucy Kellaway, had given me the idea that teaching could be an option. Starting a new career at the age of 48 is a fairly daunting experience but I realised that it would only get more difficult to make a move….

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One of the early decisions I had to make was whether to go into primary or secondary teaching. As someone who had studied Law as a first degree and Politics as a second, there wasn’t an obvious secondary subject for me to teach. Maths and English were both possibilities but I would have not felt comfortable teaching Maths at A Level when that was my own highest qualification. With primary, I also had the advantage of lots of experience with my own children! In the end, I decided on teaching Primary with a Maths specialism, both because of the bursary and because of the extra support it would give me in teaching maths. Discussions with friends in the teaching profession also made me realise that maths was highly valued everywhere and would be a useful specialism to have. This usefully narrowed down the overwhelming number of courses and I eventually took up a School Direct place on the UCL IOE Maths Pathway course.

I had hoped to spend the summer doing lots of advance reading but the expected drop off in legal work never really materialised so I arrived on the course with a lot of catching up to do compared with some of the more diligent students. That said, my main teaching group of 25 has been very supportive and the range of backgrounds means that there are lots of diverse perspectives to learn from (as well as our lecturers who seem desperately disappointed not to meet us in person!). As a result, my learning has gone well despite the inevitable fatigue of so much teaching online. However, my workload dramatically increased after half-term when I took on my first school placement…

I always knew that teachers worked hard but nothing quite prepares you for the reality of life in a busy primary school. It is both daunting and awe-inspiring to see the amount of work undertaken by the class teachers. They have to be masters of the full range of subjects, plan the lessons and be the primary point of contact for their pupils for everything school-related. The UCL course starts with you mainly teaching groups so that you don’t have to try to manage behaviour in a full class at the start of the placement. Nonetheless, I did manage to progress to quite a bit of full-class teaching by the final week of the placement and will be doing much more of it after February half-term (Covid permitting). In the meantime, I am learning about online teaching and trying to progress some of the academic components. It’s been a fascinating journey – as tough and fulfilling as I thought it would be.

Any gripes? Just the perpetual one of paperwork. In my opinion, the Teachers’ Standards are a good framework but the amount of paper generated to demonstrate compliance could really do with some streamlining.

As Christopher Such explains in his Introduction, the reason for creating Primary Reading Simplified was to offer more than the evidence-informed principles of reading found in Art & Science and to set out his preferred path to create a reading programme in primary schools. Accordingly, it goes into much more detail about certain reading lesson structures that were only sketched out briefly in Art & Science. These reading lesson structures are the heart of Primary Reading Simplified and covered in Part III. In my experience, these kind of structures are still unusual in placing whole-class engagement with text at the forefront of reading rather than the futile attempt to build transferable reading skills which is still followed by many primary schools. Chapter 2 of Primary Reading Simplified demolishes this and explains why it is so damaging:

Many teachers who might otherwise spend precious classroom developing pupils’ understanding and appreciation of written language - something that genuinely would support improved outcomes - instead target illusory skills. They inadvertently replace meaningful instruction with years of unnecessary test preparation…. (p.21 of Primary Reading Simplified)

Chapter 2 develops this point which was made briefly on p.56 (and elsewhere) in Art & Science. If you weren’t convinced there that the VIPERs-style approach to reading was a waste of time, you surely will be by reading Primary Reading Simplified.

Moving on to the various reading structures,1 these are covered in bite-sized chapters which will be familiar to readers of Art and Science. There are 3 core structures - Fluency Reading, Extended Reading and Close Reading but also an introductory structure - Scaffolded Reading. In addition, Extended Reading comes in two versions - simple read-aloud by the teacher (before 80% of children are fluent) and a version involving mixed read-aloud by the teacher and independent reading by children.#

The three core structures each target one reading aim as follows:

Fluency Reading - building fluency through practice.

Extended Reading - read plenty of thoughtfully chosen texts.

Close Reading - discuss texts in depth.

Scaffolded Reading

This lesson structure is a useful bridge between phonics and whole-class reading. In very short summary, it involves some teacher reading, some echo reading of a text, some paired reading and a brief discussion. You could use with a decodable text but also some simple non-decodable books (I can see it being both fun and useful with quality picture books). Personally, I think it would also be a great end to a phonics lesson as a 5-10 minute bringing together of a class after independent practice.

Fluency Reading

This structure is basically repeated oral reading in pairs and is a development of a structure introduced in pp. 41-47 of Art & Science. That makes it sound simple and in some ways it is but it requires strong routines and (in my experience) a level of understanding from the children of why it is useful.2 Based on limited experience, my teacher training (on a very well-regarded PGCE) and the data I discuss here, I think this is widely neglected in primary schools. It might be one of the most important things we can do for struggling readers and this chapter explains it fully and deals with likely problems in implementing it. Although I had created something very similar based on Art & Science, there are some valuable tweaks here.

Extended Reading - less developed reader version

In a class where less than 80% are fluent readers, this structure is suggested. It involves the teacher reading the text aloud with children following in their own copy. The teacher pauses occasionally to discuss the text but these are focusing on comprehension rather than analysis. Similarly, the teacher might model how to tackle a particularly challenging part. There are some modifications suggested if it isn’t possible to give children their own copy. It is noted that this is passive rather than active decoding and research on its effectiveness is rather meagre.

Extended Reading - more developed reader version

In a class with 80% or more fluent readers, the same structure is suggested but with teacher reading interspersed with children reading short pieces of the text independently, making a one-sentence summary and re-reading to check they understood correctly.

Although it is not stated, these two structures seem to me to be aimed at what I think of as the “class reader conundrum”. The conundrum is that we can be reasonably sure that there are large benefits to reading whole texts with a class (usually a novel but also non-fiction or poetry). It creates a valuable piece of shared cultural capital and the Faster Read project suggests that it also pays huge benefits in terms of reading comprehension. However, it’s not exactly clear what is the best way of actually reading the text with a class in terms of developing their reading. This is certainly one sensible way of tackling it but I can see some issues. For example, if this FFT data is consistent across UK primary schools, you might never get to 80% fluency even in a Year 6 class. Of course, if you are consistently using the fluency reading structure, you would hope and expect to have much better fluency than the average but it points up the need to think carefully about the context. I think this area is the trickiest part of teaching reading and hope to return to it in a future blog.

Close Reading

The final structure is a deeper investigation of a text or extract. The basic structure is that the text or extract is read and then discussed in detail using a variety of techniques outlined. It’s an excellent guide to tackling this kind of a lesson which can often feel daunting to a non-English specialist.

Although the heart of the book is these structures, there is lots of other useful material in there. In particular Parts IV, V and VI on implementing change, building a reading curriculum & culture and looking at reading development across the curriculum will be invaluable to any reading leads or members of SLT who have wider responsibilities for developing reading. This isn’t something you get in anything like this level of detail in Art & Science.

Conclusion

As you can see, I am a great admirer of this book. I think it sets out a coherent plan for improving reading across the school. I anticipate that lots of my readers will already have a copy of Art & Science. However, for those who don’t - should they buy that or Primary Reading Simplified? I think the correct answer to this is “both” because although there is some overlap, they are two different books with different emphases. Art & Science is more about the “why” of teaching reading and Primary Reading Simplified more about the “how”.

If you can only buy one, I confess a bias in favour of Art & Science because it was so influential for me in my early career but there are a couple of reasons why I still think it is the best of all time even though Christopher Such disagrees with me.

a) It is so incredibly informative about the science of reading in a very short book. It’s just 153 pages long plus a glossary and some very useful appendices. ( I later read Seidenberg’s Reading at the Speed of Sight and learnt very little from that which I hadn’t already learned from Art & Science).3

b) Ultimately, I think it’s important to have a good grounding in “why” we should teach in a particular way before looking at the “how” if we are to avoid lethal mutations. There’s probably enough on the “why” in Primary Reading Simplified for most people but if you really want to get into the details, Art & Science explains it all with superb references that you can follow up.

Trying to take my bias out of it, two other factors in choosing which one of these books to buy are (a) your personal disposition and (b) where you are in your career. If you want to know all about the research and some short indicators of what to do in the classroom whilst you find your own way, buy Art & Science. If you would rather have a guide to how run reading lessons, buy Primary Reading Simplified. Similarly, if you are a classroom teacher early in your career, my recommendation would still be for Art & Science - it will help you understand what you are doing and make tweaks to improve it even if you are in structures designed by others that you have little influence over. On the other hand, if you are a reading lead, buy Primary Reading Simplified because of its practical advice and useful guide to whole school implementation. Either way, you won’t regret the investment.

This is my idiosyncratic list based on two years in Year 4. KS1 might feature more bodily functions to cope with and I am sure Year 6 would have SATs-specific things to add.

Thinking back to my PGCE, we had plenty on the importance of phonics, a check on accuracy of reading via reading records and also lots of interesting discussions on the usefulness of picture books and the need to encourage reading for pleasure. However, I don’t think we studied anything seriously on reading fluency and neither did my placement schools draw it to my attention. Perhaps this is not surprising because reading fluency is barely mentioned in the National Curriculum either.[1] However, in my first year as an ECT in Year 4, it became clear that whilst nearly all of my class had mastered phonics fairly well, there were many who couldn’t read fluently.[2] At some point during that year, I read The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading by Christopher Such and was blown away by what I had been missing. In particular, Chapter 5 on fluency made me realise the importance of this element of reading as a bridge from phonics to children enjoying their reading.

In the last few weeks, there have been 2 important pieces of research published on children's reading. The one that gathered all the media attention was the National Literacy Trust’s Annual Literacy Survey showed that the percentage of children who said that they enjoyed reading had dropped to the lowest level since the survey started in 2005. This rightly caused a lot of soul searching about what is definitely an unwelcome trend given the clear links between reading enjoyment and academic success. A lot of the speculation as to the reasons why seemed dubious especially those focusing on curriculum since this isn’t limited to England - see here for discussion of similar trends in the USA.

Also published, to considerably less media attention, was data from FFT Education Data Lab’s Reading Assessment Programme (“RAP”) on reading fluency. This showed that the average fluency of the children taking the RAP at the end of Year 6 was 114 words a minute. However, this headline figure does not give the whole story of the huge range in fluency. Split into quartiles, the averages looked like this.

This prompts the obvious question – what level of reading fluency should children have by the end of primary school? There doesn’t seem to be a straightforward answer to this question. However, it seems clear that below a certain level, reading fluency clearly impacts comprehension because so much of the reader’s attention is devoted to simply reading the words. In the Art and Science of Primary Reading, Christopher Such suggests that this level is likely to be around 110 WPM, a figure that FFT endorse in their report, noting that accuracy and prosody are also required.

Since the RAP is a programme that schools have to sign up to and the reading fluency assessment is entirely optional, the cohorts taking these assessments are at schools may well have more focus on reading fluency than the average. Accordingly, it is unlikely that these figures will be understating the overall level of reading fluency in England’s schools. They may be overstating them somewhat.

If we accept 110 WPM as a rough benchmark for fluency and assume that the RAP results are representative (or better) than England’s schools as a whole, then close to 50% of pupils are leaving primary school dysfluent. Unsurprisingly, this lack of fluency affects results in KS2 reading comprehension SATs. FFT found that approximately half the gap between girls and boys and between disadvantaged and not disadvantaged pupils here can be explained by the differences in reading fluency.

However, the problems go well beyond an exam taken at the end of primary school. Every single subject in secondary school is going to required reading to some extent. To what extent are secondary schools aware of this as problem and how many are set up well to develop reading fluency? I don’t claim any expertise on this but it feels to me like something which might often be neglected because it isn’t clearly anyone’s responsibility.

This brings us back to reading for pleasure. In their They Behave For Me podcast, Adam Boxer and Amy Forrester discussed how “reading for pleasure” is a bit of a misnomer because it isn’t reading itself which brings pleasure but reading things that you are interested in or entertain you. True enough but reading fluently is probably close to a necessary condition for enjoying reading anything at all (at least outside graphic novels).[3] I got a certain grim satisfaction in plodding through the original German of the The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum during my A Level but I certainly couldn’t describe the experience as enjoyable.[4]

So while the steady drop in children reading for pleasure is likely caused mainly by wider societal changes, there must be some benefit in trying to increase the pool of children able to enjoy reading by ensuring that the vast majority leave primary school able to read fluently. It seems that we are still some way from that goal. Achieving near universal fluency would also likely boost reading comprehension much more effectively than the fruitless attempts to teach “inference” skills and the like.

If you are convinced by this argument, you may be wondering what exactly you should be doing to develop reading fluency. Again, on this, I would refer you to Christopher Such’s book and his blog, Primary Colour, where he goes into more detail on developing fluency and also gives some further reading. What worked for me was continuing to regularly read aloud as a class but adding in regular short sessions of paired oral reading where a short passage is read and then re-read in mixed-attainment pairs. A potentially tricky part of a novel you are reading, relevant non-fiction and poetry all work really well for this. In terms of monitoring your children’s fluency, you could obviously use the RAP but if your school doesn’t subscribe, the materials from DIBELS also work well coupled with some teacher judgment on prosody.

In short, I am passionate about children reading for pleasure but no amount of wonderful displays and passionate teachers are going to do it if children are functionally dysfluent. The range of children’s books out there are better than they have ever been. We need to make sure that all children have the opportunity to enjoy them.

[1] There are some references to fluency of word reading in connection with phonics but other than that there is a single reference in Year 5 and 6 stating that, “Pupils’ knowledge of language, gained from stories, plays, poetry, non-fiction and textbooks, will support their increasing fluency as readers.” Not very helpful.

[2] My school had a strong emphasis on teachers and TAs reading one to one with children and I also did a lot of FASE Reading (as described in Teach Like a Champion). Both of these flagged up the lack of fluency.

[3] I found zero research on this point. Let me know if there is any.

[4] I realise that reading a foreign language novel isn’t a perfect analogy for not being fluent in reading a book in one’s native language but it is probably the closet that a literate adult can get to the feeling of being dysfluent.

The section arose out of a Teacher Tapp survey which showed a worryingly high percentage of teachers choosing not to escalate a behaviour issue because of concern about parent pushback. Adam and Amy discussed how this was a symptom of wider changing attitude of parents to schools and the issues that it causes.

It was summed up as follows:

Adam: Every school, I go to says the same - huge uptick in unsupportive parents.

…..

Amy: The thing is - it’s becoming such a drain on schools nationally and we haven't got an infinite amount of time. And the more parents are unsupportive, the more school time that absorbs. And I like, I often think about some of the time that's spent with some parents and not others. And I think just because of parents behaving and, you know, they're kicking off about something, they're getting more bang for their buck, so to speak, in terms of like taxpayer money. And I think about kids whose parents couldn't give two hoots what happens in schools, who would actually really benefit from some one to one time from a professional.

From my limited experience, what they said here rings true and fits with Teacher Tapp and, for example, this recent NFER survey on issues with teacher retention.

However, I was a bit disappointed by what they thought should be done.

Adam: I think this is a big problem. I think we need, we urgently need some kind of national policy type approach here.

Amy: Yeah

Adam: We need serious communication stuff from central government.

Amy: Yeah

Adam: We need clear guidance about what we can and can't do and how interact with parents.

Is government guidance really the answer to improving how parents interact with school? Essentially, there is a cultural issue that parents don’t have the same respect for schools, their teachers and leadership that they once had.

My initial two thoughts on this are:

1. These kinds of changing attitudes can’t be easily fixed by central government guidance. In fairness, Adam was probably referring more to government guidance helping to give schools some backbone when dealing with difficult parents but I think that is only going to help at the margins.

2. Declining respect for institutions isn’t unique to schools but plays out across the board in our public institutions.1 Whilst this is an issue for our society, it isn’t wholly negative that people are increasingly willing to question authority (even if it feels that way when you are on the end of it).

So, if there is a major uptick in unsupportive parents and you share my scepticism that government guidance is likely to achieve much, then what is the answer? My particular perspective on this comes from being a parent of school-age children long before I was a teacher and my reading of Citizens by Jon Alexander, I have thought that his framework of “subject, consumer, citizen” is a very useful way for thinking about the history of schools.2

For a long time, schools followed what he calls the “Subject” story. This is the authoritarian model that we might perhaps associate with Victorian schools but actually persisted until relatively recently. School leadership and teachers would say what was happening and parents would largely accept. This didn’t necessarily mean that parents had no input but they would respect the school’s decision and comply. They may not have thought much about them and they may have disagreed with some of the decisions but they would go along with them. There were no school league tables and schools could probably get away with quite mediocre performance without it becoming an issue for them.

As a child growing up in the Thatcher era, I was aware of the Subject story gradually being replaced over time with what Jon Alexander calls the “Consumer” story. So, in education, parents were encouraged to think of themselves as consumers of education (even though it was their children who were actually the consumers). SATs, league tables, academies and free schools were all part of this market-orientated approach which was seen as a way of driving up standards. This is still very much the model today.

This is the story which parents hear and respond to. Consumers are encouraged to focus on their own individual circumstances and getting the best deal for themselves (or in the case of schools, their children). So, I would argue that it is hardly surprising that parents sometime have the “selfishness of my issue is the most important thing” as Amy put it. The Consumer story doesn’t encourage any wider thinking about the community or institution as a whole.

It was a point that Adam himself nailed when discussing Michaela Community School in the previous episode.

[Katherine Birbalsingh’s] a big believer in school choice. She says, well, look, if our school isn't for you, just choose somewhere else. And I'm like, well, that's not really how state infrastructure should actually work. Schools belong to their communities. They belong to the state. They're not just for themselves, to just make up whatever the hell they want. So there's always going to be a limit to that. But more importantly, the child hasn't chosen right. The child has not chosen, their parents have chosen.

The Consumer story simply isn’t the right one for schools and, I would argue, actively encourages unhelpful behaviour from parents. So, how do we get away from it? The answer isn’t to go back to the Subject story - you can’t simply expect parents to go back to the level of passivity of previously (and it wouldn’t be desirable anyway). The answer, Jon Alexander suggests is the “Citizen” story. His brief description:

people who actively shape the world around us, who cultivate meaningful connections to their community and institutions, who can imagine a different and better life, who care and take responsibility, and who create opportunities for others to do the same. Crucially, our institutions must also see people as Citizens, and treat us as such. When they do, everything changes.3

How many of our schools see their parent body in this way? It’s perhaps not surprising that schools focus more on the day to day issues of ensuring that their environments are safe and welcoming and that children are learning what they need to. However, I think we are missing a trick in not investing more in our parent body and seeing them as a source of positive change rather than a problem to be managed. Ultimately, I believe that the vast majority of parents want the best for their child but don’t always understand what that would be in a school context and with the Consumer story in their heads, often think it may mean standing up for their child by challenging the school.

I don’t pretend to have thought deeply about what a “Citizen school” would look like but here are five ideas that come to mind.

1. Actively involving parents in what you are trying to teach their children, especially if it is new and unfamiliar to them. How many parents of primary age school children really understand phonics? Yet we ask the children to read with them every night. As a parent, the school that did this best was the international school in Seoul that my children attended for 3 years. I do not know whether this spontaneously came from leadership or was a response to a parent body that was highly demanding4 but I remember attending sessions that the school ran on growth mindset, mental health, the use of interleaving in maths and comparative marking. Most memorably, they ran an “open morning” where parents were invited in to see what their children were doing in class.

2. Linking the school in more closely to the community that it serves. The school where I spent my 2 years as an ECT did a great job at being involved with local community organisations and getting them into school as well. Think about what would really embed a school into the community, giving parents a chance to shape what kind of school their children will be going to.

3. Almost every school has a parent teacher association (PTA) - the name clearly suggests a Citizen approach of linking up the teachers and parents. However, this too often becomes primarily a means to fundraise for the school (and so the Consumer story writ large). Could we revitalise PTAs so they truly become a means of linking parents, teachers and the wider community?

4. Along with unsupportive parents, another common theme among early years teachers is the increase in children joining school but not “school-ready”. There’s a huge mismatch between parents who think their child is ready and the views of teachers. Closing this gap is going to require parents to start appreciating the wider needs of a school rather than their own individual child and, in turn, that means outreach before children start school.

5. Amy’s words about the time dealing with certain parents to the neglect of others really resonated with me. It’s easier said than done but carving time out to see parents proactively (especially those hard to reach /engage) should be a priority for everyone at the start of the school year. Rather than a conversation about what the teacher wants, it’s good to flip it to a conversation about the parent wants for their child that year.

This way of thinking about schools and community also made me realise why I felt uncomfortable about the idea of teeth brushing in schools discussed in the same episode. This just seems to me a continuation of the Consumer story rather than treating parents as Citizens who should (and almost always will) care about their children’s teeth. Even under Labout’s plan, the support would stop at 5 years old so how are we going to support and empower parents to ensure that their children practise good dental hygiene all the way to their teenage years? That’s where money and resources should be going. Ironically, Labour had a better answer back in the Blair years with the Sure Start centres whose positive effects on health and education are still being felt to this day.

I found Sophie Bartlett’s site to be a really useful sane guide to starting work as a teacher. Unfortunately, the links to her historic blogs are now broken (I’ve mentioned to her) but there is still lots to read here (and you will see I have linked to more of her stuff below).

As Sophie says, your mentor will also be really important. I was lucky enough to have a superb mentor working in my year group which is as good as it gets. However, if there are issues, try to get them resolved early on - it isn’t something that you can live with for 2 years.

Teach Like A Champion

Now on version 3, I have a very well-thumbed copy of version 2. Full of useful advice, it also uses phrases which have passed into the way teachers speak (Cold Call, Do Now) so you will want to be familiar with it! Plus useful video content on the website.

Behaviour

If you are anything like me, behaviour will be your biggest worry on going into the classroom. It probably won’t be as bad as you expect and there is a huge (positive) difference between being the class teacher and a student teacher in someone else’s class. However, you will want to be prepared and these should help you get there.

Running the Room by Tom Bennett

An absolute classic from the government’s behaviour tsar. Should be required reading before setting foot in the classroom. Practical and comprehensive.

When the Adults Change, Everything Changes by Paul Dix

Eh? What’s this? Isn’t Paul Dix the complete opposite to Tom Bennett. If you believe this common view, you may not have read either carefully enough. I was recommended this book in an early student placement and found lots of use for it. (It’s instructive to see both when Dix and Bennett agree and when they don’t).

Adam Boxer’s blog

Everything Adam writes about behaviour is solid gold but I would particularly highlight his Front Loading the Means of Participation with a particular focus on the potential nightmare end of the day and the second in his new series of Most Common Actions on calling out. If you are a new teacher, dealing with calling out might be your most frequent challenge and these two entries are your best at getting it under control.

Dynamic Deputies podcast on behaviour with Andrew Percival

I don’t always find time to listen to podcasts so I want them to be really worth it when I do tune in and this certainly was! Thinking about behaviour as a curriculum is a really productive way to address it. Focus is whole school but there is lots for the classroom teacher as well.

Craig Barton and Pritesh Raichura on Poor Proxies for Listening

Another game-changer. I didn’t realise quite how much children weren’t listening until I introduced more regular checks for listening. Craig has lots more on this topic but this post and the video with Pritesh Raichura is my number 1 recommendation.

Reading

The Art and Science of Teaching Primary Reading by Christopher Such

If you read one thing on this list, make it this one - concise and filled with useful advice on all aspects of primary reading from phonics to comprehension. Busts myths and full of practical evidence-based approaches for the classroom. It even raises money for charity.

Spelling

Teeching speling yousing fonix in Kee Stayj Too – Missie Bee

When I started in Yr 4, I quickly realised that I was doing spelling wrong but this blog from Sophie Bartlett and Rebecca Buckland showed me what I should be doing. Bases spelling on phonics rather than “rules”. I see it has been updated again and it’s well worth the £5 Amazon voucher to get the full resources.

Writing and Grammar

I am not a fan of how much grammar is required to be taught in primary schools (and then completely forgotten in secondary schools) but your best hope of navigating your way through it is:

The Grammar Book by Zoë Paramour and Timothy Paramour

I also found the Englicious site very useful in coming up with teaching ideas and approaches.

Compared with maths, I found improving writing very hard work. It’s much easier to see tangible progress in maths and science. You can confidently say that they didn’t know something and now they do whereas in writing, children appear to progress much more haphazardly. I found part of the answer through The Writing Revolution in LKS2, a blog by Rebecca Buckland. The book that the ideas are based on is also well worth a read although it’s pricey and Rebecca explains a lot of the key concepts so well that you can action them without it.

Maths

Craig Barton - How I wish I Had Taught Maths

Although more focused on secondary maths, this is an incredibly useful book on the best approaches to teaching maths.

Science

I don’t have a go-to book or even a blog for science, probably because I was a bit more confident with this and also because the curriculum is quite realistic and sensible. However, both Stem Learning and Explorify were really useful and free websites.

Free / low-cost resources

A few years old now and some of these sites have started more charging but still really useful! And you should know about the TES site as well.

Free lesson planning resources for primary teachers | Teaching Resources (tes.com)

Late in the day, I became aware of Canva which is already very useful for templates and will become more so as more educators make things available.

I joined one of Stanley Road’s regular open mornings aimed at educators where I joined 5 other teachers at various levels for a briefing and tour hosted by deputy head, Andrew Percival. The tone was set the moment I walked inside the school gates – my presence was picked up by one of the staff on the gate within seconds who then radioed ahead and took me where I should be, walking past  groups of children in the corridors all with their hands behind their backs (more on that later).  A varied group of educational professionals assembled to be briefed by Andrew before starting the tour. We had mainly found out about Stanley Road on Twitter although I had also listened to Andrew’s appearance on the Dynamic Deputies podcast (well worth a listen to understand more about Stanley Road’s approach to behaviour). Andrew explained that the school had been on quite a journey since he started (and almost quit immediately) nearly 20 years ago. Stanley Road’s current reputation was built on 3 pillars – exemplary behaviour, knowledge-rich curriculum and explicit teaching.

The school is in a challenging area with proportions of children on free school meals and for whom English is not the first language well above national levels. As Andrew described the school when he started, there were fights in classrooms, constant misbehaviour and the worst results in the local authority. That experience and the population served by the school must have informed the approach that they have developed over the years.

As Andrew tells it, this level of order and calm isn’t achieved by draconian punishments but by explicit teaching of behaviour as a curriculum plus constant reinforcement. It’s also based on an incredible attention to detail and a rationale for every behaviour – that walking with hands behind backs may look a bit draconian and even unnerving to some. However, Andrew’s rationale is clear – it reduces the ambiguity or grey zone of what is and isn’t acceptable in the corridors. If a hand has touched another pupil, it’s clearly a breach of the rule. Another example which I saw in action was “chin it” for holding up mini-whiteboards – all the children know to hold their whiteboards just under the chin, looking at the teacher. (I shamelessly stole this idea after hearing it on the podcast mentioned above and it’s so useful). Overall, the level of calm and focus might make you rethink what is possible in a primary school.

The other “wow” moment for me in the classrooms was the handwriting. I had always implicitly assumed that you would always get a large discrepancy between levels of neatness in handwriting because it is such a difficult skill for many children (myself included). After seeing book after book with neat and legible handwriting, I had to ask how it was achieved. In short, lots of explicit teaching of the skill and using a scheme called Kinetic Letters which breaks all aspects of handwriting down into small steps.  It doesn’t just look nice but that it makes it so much more efficient to review the quality of the writing if you can easily read everything. An investment made lower down the school which really pays benefits at the higher end.

The same attention to detail has gone into the curriculum, fully accessible on the Stanley Road website. When we got back from the tour, lots of questions were fired at Andrew  - and, if they were curriculum-based, he simply looked them up so he could be precise rather than speak in generalities. He demonstrated how Stanley Road would revisit and expand knowledge throughout the primary by reference to the highly detailed subject curriculums.

Even the lunch break showed meticulous planning – with children not outside for more than 30 minutes and led by adults known to the particular children. Andrew explained that this minimised lunchtime incidents and hence wasted time on coming back to class in the afternoon sorting them out (a familiar issue in my time teaching Year 4). Making this happen must be a logistical nightmare and several in the group were surprised that they could get it to work.

Before I came, I wondered if it would be incredibly hard work as a teacher in Stanley Road Primary given the level of detail they put into everything. Whilst the subject knowledge required could be daunting, I came away with quite a different view. A lot of the thought which had gone into details would likely reduce teacher workload. Examples included “no comments in book” with a focus on whole class feedback (originally based on a template and now a more general teacher feedback book), simple and uniform displays in classrooms. Most importantly, the relentless focus on behaviour made it so much easier for teachers to teach rather than constantly correcting behaviour (and then dealing with the consequences of that).

It’s a cliché to refer to a good organisation as a “well-oiled machine” but that was the phrase that came to mind repeatedly as I went round the school. This school might not be for everyone because some would find the teaching required over-restrictive but it’s clear that this has had major success.  The restrictiveness is the flip-side of the incredible consistency they have achieved. I felt it would be a wonderful place to train as a teacher and wasn’t surprised to hear that many of the staff had trained with the school. Did I have any doubts about what they were doing? I did occasionally wonder if the Stanley Road leadership had almost been too successful in removing friction around the school. Do children need the occasional failure, whether in the classroom or on the playground, to fully grow and develop? That is, however, a nice problem to have.

Perhaps the most impressive thing of all is that Stanley Road Primary have made so much of this available publicly for the benefit of the teaching profession as a whole. The curriculum they use is available in full detail on their website - this includes their behaviour curriculum as well as the full range of subjects (an 88-page art and design curriculum, anyone?). The open mornings are a wonderful opportunity to look at things in even more detail and ask any follow-up questions. It is a refreshing display of openness and commitment to raising standards for all in an era when it often feels that schools must compete against each other.

[1] It’s fair to say that the common usage these days is somewhat divorced from the actual book which was more focused on creating balance in your life by prioritising what was most important to you rather than how the phrase has come to be used.

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When I set out to be a primary teacher late in life, I had an expectation or self-image of myself in the classroom. I would be a firm but fair teacher, committed to rigour, discipline, learning and perhaps a bit distant from the children. I wasn’t in school to be their friend but to teach them what they needed to know. Unlike some of my peers, I didn’t really find children “cute” but I was convinced that I could make a difference to them.

Looking back at the end of two years, I realised that I was a very different teacher to how I imagined myself at the start of the journey. The things I thought I would be good at were often a real struggle whereas the area I thought I would struggle (relationships with small children) turned out to be an unexpected strength. In the day to day grind of teaching, it’s easy to see what is going wrong – that lesson where the children didn’t get the concept at all, the times when they wouldn’t listen or brought their arguments and fights from the playground back into class. It’s a lot harder to see what you are doing well and I only noticed a real positive about my teaching once I started getting comments from parents like:

“Thank you for everything you have done for [X] this year. You have transformed his attitude to school.”

“…and I would also like to say how wonderfully kind, caring and supportive Mr Goodrich has been to [Y] this school year. He’s always so positive and encouraging and I know it has helped her to feel happy, comfortable and able to come to school every day despite the big changes at home.” (This one was sent to the headteacher which is my top tip for parents if you really want to get a teacher on your side!).

“…you’ve got her through her fears of coming to school.”

In my second year, the kids also started bombarding me with homemade cards usually proclaiming that I was the “best teacher ever”. Although 8 and 9 year olds are not the best judge of such things, it was a lot nicer than being harangued for my failings. So, what was I doing right? With apologies to Tony Blair, I can offer the three following priorities.

1.      Be positive.

2.      Be positive.

3.      Be positive.

However, to elaborate, I think there were three different aspects to my positivity in the classroom.

Positive about the child

There can’t be anything more dispiriting than hearing criticism after you have tried your best and yet still done badly. I experienced this personally during teacher training when one of my mentors seemed to always pick out the many ways in which I had failed during my attempts to teach the class. It wasn’t an experience I was used to from school or university and I realised that it did absolutely nothing to improve my teaching. It is simply impossible to successfully respond successfully when you are hit with a wave of criticism. Not only does the emotion make it difficult to process but if you have a list of 10 things you have done wrong, it’s a clear example of the cognitive overload that my university course was warning that we had to avoide. If that is true for a professionally successful middle-aged man, how much more so must it be for a child?

So, although this experience was terrible for improving my classroom teaching, it did give me a valuable personal experience about getting the best out of a child. I always tried to be positive about the child in front of me, especially if they were often hearing negative comments from others around them. Of course, you have to help them improve their work but that comes much more easily if they are feeling better about themselves.

Positive framing of correction

In my second year, my school adopted the Walkthrus book as a core part of our CPD. We would pick a particular Walkthru and try to implement it in our teaching. On one occasion, I picked “positive framing” and it was both incredibly difficult to do and transformative for my teaching. The basic idea is to reframe negative phrases into a positive expectation (so “stop talking” becomes “I need voices away”). If you find it easy to do this consistently, then I take my hat off to you because for me it was a constant struggle to use positive language when we are so conditioned to give instruction on what not to do. However, trying constantly made me so much aware of how easy it was to slide back into negative language. However, frequent use of positive language really improved the atmosphere in the classroom.

Positive attitude to learning

This one came a bit more easily to me because I genuinely like to learn new things. I remember reading early in my teaching career that saying something was “boring” or “just something we had to get through” was a sure-fire way for your lesson to go badly. So, no matter how I was feeling about what I was feeling about the lesson, I tried my best to be upbeat (even if teaching some obscure piece of grammar that is inexplicably required in Year 4).

It’s important to be positive about the process too. In my second year, my class seemed to contain a lot of children who would give up / have a meltdown when they hit difficulties (or maybe I was just more aware of the problem). So, I found myself constantly talking about struggle, hard work and embracing difficulty and failure. I was helped here by my own children who were a rich source of anecdotes from their own time in primary school.

Final thoughts

If you are starting your ECT journey, I wish you well. If you are like me, you will be constantly surprised by what you can’t do well but be prepared to be surprised by what you can do as well.

One final tip for primary school teachers– really try to listen and resolve problems when a child comes to you with an issue or you have a group who have fallen out. For most of the children in your class, you will quickly become their most trusted adult in the school and so you must try your best to help even if you would rather get on with teaching. As Maya Angelou probably didn’t say “people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.” It might be a fake quote but it rings true based on my experience.

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