Category Archives: education

APP for teaching assistants

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Whilst APP isn’t perfect, it does provide a useful framework of outcomes for teaching assistants to use with the students they are supporting.

Teaching assistants working with individuals or small groups of students could use the APP criteria to ask appropriate questions with the intention of moving individuals on.  Using the APP gives a structure to this process and allows the TA to select appropriate questions.

I wrote a short document for teaching assistants in my local authority.  Feel free to download it and distribute it to your own teaching assistants.

APP For Teaching Assistants (PDF)

APP For Teaching Assistants (.doc format)

Health and Safety – whatever happened to common sense? (Local authority advice)

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snow I was forwarded a copy of the email sent to site managers/heads across my local authority.   It seems we live in an age when no-one can take risks, and common sense cannot be left to the individual.

These are some of the pearls of wisdom offered to site managers and heads:

  • Details should be drawn to the attention of all employees working on the premises so they are aware of the safest ways of entering and leaving the premises.
  • Arrangements should be made for access routes to be inspected regularly following the salting and gritting to monitor its effectiveness. It is recommended that this is done before the end of each session. PLEASE NOTE: TEMPORARY SIGNS DENOTING SAFE ROUTES MAY BE NECESSARY.
  • All staff should be reminded of the need to wear appropriate footwear when coming to work in severe weather conditions as it will seldom be possible to clear all snow and ice from a site. In particular, walking from a parked car to the nearest access path may be hazardous.
  • In the past, there has been at least one instance of pupils in a first school picking some crystalline salt granules off the playground and tasting them, thinking they were snow or ice particles. Heads of Establishments with young children are therefore advised to purchase salt/grit mixture rather than pure crystalline salt for treating icy surfaces. Children should be warned accordingly.
  • Suitable clothing, particularly for caretakers who will be working outside, should be used
  • Ensure that there is a suitable and sufficient risk assessment for snow and ice clearing activities

Do we live in a society where individuals have no common sense?  Do we live in a society where we want to remove each and every risk, no matter how small?  Do we live in a society where school managers (and the LA) are frightened of being sued?  I suspect the answer to all these questions is yes – and until there is a change of culture we will continue to be treated like a nation of children.

Examination fees – really a good use of public money?

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Writing ExamsImage © ccarlstead @ Flickr CC BY 2.0

I work in a special school, with a small number of pupils.  This means we enter a relatively small number of pupils for examinations etc.  Earlier in the year my bursar came to find me with an invoice for well over £1000.  “Is this yours?” she asked me.  Being a stickler for financial protocols in school, I was sure I hadn’t spent that much money, until I noticed the logo on the top of the invoice.  The logo belonged to Edexcel, and the invoice was BTEC Science fees for the 18 students I had just entered.  Scale that ten times or more, and across multiple subjects, you start to get an idea of some of scale of examination spending by schools, but is this really value for money?

On the day we broke up for the Christmas vacation I received a message from a copyright officer at AQA concerning copyrighted materials on my blog.  Immediately my mind jumped to the science resources I had put online.  Did any of these contain examination questions or materials from AQA that shouldn’t have been there.  I have been extremely careful which of my resources I share, so I decided to investigate further.  A quick search of the logs revealed that someone with an IP address belonging to the Northern Examination And Assessment Board in Manchester had been following links from Google Images to my site.  In fact they had visited my site over a period of an hour and forty-five minutes so they clearly had nothing better to do a few days before Christmas.   Yes I had been very naughty indeed, I had linked to an AQA logo in a blog post of two years ago offering free resources to support the AQA exam.  Of course I removed the offending link from my blog, requested that Google re-index the page, and emailed the copyright officer to let them know.  It is strange that they didn’t have time to acknowledge my email given that they had an hour and forty five minutes of free time to keep looking at it!  If only AQA would invest more money in the format of their (atrocious) multiple choice core science exam and less money on red tape and copyright, our children might perform better in their examinations.  I’m glad to see they are putting our huge examination fees to good use.

In a press release on the 7th January (and reported in the TES on Friday 8th Jan) the National Education Trust questions the spending of millions of pounds of pounds of taxpayers money on examination fees.  With the current huge levels of public debt we should be asking ourselves if it is still best value for money to pour money into the pockets of the examination boards’ shareholders.  Perhaps it is time to look at examinations at 16 (and their fees) afresh!

Comments welcome :)

It’s teacher bashing time

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Image © Rob Gould @ Flickr CC BY-NC 2.0

As snow falls across the country, schools have closed for a variety of reasons.  Frustrated parents are quick to blame the teachers (we all need a scapegoat) and discussion forums fill up with comments about lazy teachers.  Too soon the conversation changes from “why can’t they get to school?” to don’t they have enough holidays already.  I’ve even seen suggestions about teachers having inset days in their holidays (which is ironic since inset days did originally come out of teachers holidays).

The press feel the need to join in with this teacher bashing, after all appealing to the public sentiment is what sells papers.  As I sat reading the Times today I read an article that made the hairs on the back of my neck bristle.  Not because of the subject of the article but the tone, and the glaring inaccuracies in the article that the times included.

The article in question was a small ‘filler’ by their education correspondent Nicola Woolcock.  I managed to track down an online copy of the article here.  Apparently it is far too hard to dismiss incompetent teachers and so-called experts suggest that there could be 24,000 inadequate teachers, although Ms Woolcock declines to say which hat she pulled these figures out of.

According to the article heads must give notice before entering the classroom for a formal observation, and can only do so for three times a year.  Of course Ms Woolcock is reporting the current agreed arrangements for performance management, many observations for which are not actually carried out by head teachers.  There is no limit on quality assurance observations which I am aware of, and I know of many heads who walk around schools and pop into lessons to see what is going on without giving notice.

Of course there are teachers who experience difficulties.  One of my roles as an AST is to work with some of these teachers in my local authority.  It could be argued that it is difficult to sack incompetent teachers, although I suggest the true story should read it is far too hard to dismiss any incompetent public sector worker.

However when I read I was struck by the lack of balance, and the emphasis on bashing teachers rather than on a balance discussion, but a balanced discussion doesn’t sell newspapers does it?