“Parrots sit on carrots,” said the cat. “Lions sit on irons and parrots sit on carrots.” “Doesn’t sound very comfortable,” said the frog. “It’s not about being comfortable,” said the …

What a small poem. Ozymandias is tiny, really. Neatly condensed and deceptively packed into sonnet form, it’s densely crammed with narrators, images, hubris, and the devastating, eternal nothingness at the …

Last week, a friend forwarded me an email from her SLT. My stomach lurched as I read the content. I thought we were over this era of creating documents for …

Some of the improvement drives that we’ve seen in teaching have been an absolute waste of time. None of these comments in this blog are new; they’ve been blogged about …

When some students leave school at 16, barely able to read and write, or with an identical literacy profile to the one that they had at the age of 11, …

This post has been agreed by several teachers and is shared across several blog sites. In the last couple of years, we have openly expressed concern at the approaches taken …

While physical and mental conflict spills from every blood-drenched line in Remains, there’s another conflict underpinning the poem; the internal and institutional conflict that surfaces when soldiers are required to …

A fundamental problem with the book scrutiny is that it’s impossible to judge whether learning has taken place. A book scrutiny can tell us a lot – but it can’t …

I blogged a while back about handwriting (here), and what I was doing to support my students with it. David Didau has also written about it here. What you’re reading …

A few thoughts on pronouns, context, the ’blunder’, and the language of hell and death in Tennyson’s Charge of the Light Brigade. They’re tiny little words, pronouns – often overlooked, …