Nothing lets the government off the hook for social disadvantage and poverty quite like the teaching profession blaming each other for the academic underachievement of disadvantaged pupils. While people stand on either side of the prog/trad debate shouting at each other for the perceived failure or torture of the innocents, the government can relax, knowing that everyone is too distracted to turn the fire on them for the fact that there are now 4 million children living in poverty.

Poverty, we know, creates stress. In the UK, the 6th richest nation on earth, 400,000 children don’t have a bed of their own. At least 120,000 of them are homeless and living in temporary accommodation. Even those with beds and homes live with uncertainty. A cross party group of MPs in April, led by Frank Field, found that as many as 3,000,000 children were going hungry in the school holidays and…

Last week I blogged Five Things I Wish I Knew When I Started Teaching, inspired by Carl Hendrick.  It led me inevitably to think about five things I wish I had known when I started leading.

Today marked the end of 4 short days of testing. For Year 6 pupils everywhere, they’ll have spent less than 5 hours on tests – probably not for the first time this year – and later in the year we’ll find out how they did.

Now, I’m the first to complain when assessment isn’t working, and there are lots of problems with KS2 assessment. Statutory Teacher Assessment is a joke; the stakes for schools – and especially headteachers – are ridiculously high; the grammar test is unnecessary for accountability and unnecessarily prescriptive. I certainly couldn’t be seen as an apologist for the DfE. And yet…

For some reason it appears that many primary teachers (particularly in Facebook groups, it seems) are cross that some of the tests contained hard questions. I’ve genuinely seen someone complain that their low-ability children can’t reach the expected standard. Surely that’s the very reason they’re defining them…

Over the years I’ve done a fair bit of decorating; a tub of polyfilla, bit of sanding and you’re ready to paper over the cracks.  However, when it comes to structural damage and a huge crack up the wall you can’t paper over it and pretend it’s not there.  I sense we are hitting the educational equivalent; the cracks are too big to continue papering over. 

Is it possible to have a work life balance when leading a school or for that matter when teaching in one?  #SLTchat produces a frenetic thirty minutes of tweets, re-tweets, likes and comments.  Maybe the people who give up a Sunday evening to be part of it are not best placed to comment; it’s a lovely irony.