CPD Picks of The Week


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Holly Gardner

Holly Gardner is TT Editor, as well as a Freelance Publisher. She has been working with @TeacherToolkit for over 6 years - since she published his first book in her role as Senior Commissioning Editor at Bloomsbury Publishing. Since then, she left her day job,...
Read more about Holly Gardner

How can you help your students revise?

As revision season kicks in, our resource of the week will help you start to support your students prepare for their exams. Top blogs include education fads and teaching ideas to bin and we include our education news picks.

Top 5 blogs

  1. 20 Years of Educational Fads – Over the past 20 years, what do you think teachers have wasted their time doing most?
  2. 9 Teaching Ideas to Bin – What teaching ideas would you like to say goodbye to in 2018?
  3. The Teacher and the Ofsted Inspection –  Should teachers shun marking piles and instead plan for a more meaningful work-life balance?
  4. Dear Parents – Do you believe your child’s teacher has lots of free time on their hands?
  5. The 5 Minute Lesson Plan – Success story

Resource of the week

The revision season is coming round again! Over the next few months we’ll be publishing blogposts and resources to help you plan your revision lessons and support your students in their exam preparation. First up, here’s our top 10 revision apps for to recommend to your students for their revision.

CPD Spotlight: International Women’s Day

All round the world International Women’s day is being marked with demonstrations, strikes, events, talks and much more. Here are some blogposts with relevant topics you can discuss with your class to mark the day.

From elsewhere

  • Is studying away from home the preserve of the white middle classes? The Sutton Trust report Home and Away found that disadvantaged students are more than three times as likely to live at home while attending university than their wealthier peers – British Pakistani and British Bangladeshi students are over six times more likely than White students to stay living at home and study locally.
  • A group of doctors and fertility experts has said girls should be taught the best way to get pregnant in compulsory sex education classes which now include lessons on when and how to conceive. They are calling for a more balanced approach to sex education advocating a move away from the current focus on contraception and pregnancy.
  • ASCL launched its Sense and Accountability report, which examines how primary schools are held to account and how this can be done better. They call for a number of changes that could lead to an improvement in the way in which we hold our primary schools to account. These involve:
  1. holding schools to account for a broader range of measures
  2. improving the accuracy of the current accountability measures
  3. promoting ethical leadership and effective curriculum design
  4. using performance measures in a proportionate way
  5. employing the most effective responses to underperformance
  6. crucially, ensuring we continue to build our collective understanding of how accountability works
  • According to Virginia Crompton, chief executive of the Big Ideas Company, in history lessons teachers tend to concentrate on telling pupils about the “heroic” tales of men on the battlefields while women are “pushed to the side”.
  • The House of Commons Public Accounts Committee says Learndirect Ltd has failed to tackle its poor performance, letting thousands of learners down. “The failure of Learndirect in delivering quality training to apprentices whilst receiving millions of pounds of taxpayers’ money—£121 million in the 2016/17 academic year alone—is another stark example of a poorly performing contractor and poor oversight by Government and its regulators.”
  • Appearance based bullying has always been a feature of school life – YMCA spoke to more than 1,000 young people aged 11 to 16 years old as part of its new research report ‘In Your Face’, which is part of the charity’s Be Real Campaign with Dove. Schools can get involved using the campaign’s free Body Confidence Campaign Toolkit. Register here to download the kit.

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