classroom teaching – Page 5 – Emma Williams: Latin tutor

The difference between silence and silencing

If you want to witness polarised debate in the education world, then the platform formerly known as Twitter is where to find it. Teachers rarely argue in person, but will quite happily rage at each other in Elon Musk’s rapidly-disintegrating playground. There have been attempts to shift us all onto Threads, but so far the battleground remains in one place. X is where we shout at each other.

This week’s argument has raged around the concept of “silent corridors” – specifically, whether it is necessary, appropriate or desirable to ask students to move between lessons without talking. Schools which elect to do so usually have rules about the way in which students walk and space themselves too: for example, single file, a certain distance apart. Five days ago, Executive and Founding Principal Mouhssin Ismail shared this tweet about an unnamed school:

The moment I saw it, my heart sank. Not because I disagreed with it, but because I knew the response it would get from certain quarters. Despite this, nothing could have prepared me for the level of vitriol this tweet provoked, from the downright nasty to the genuinely unhinged.

“Unnatural, unnecessary and unkind” said Richard Clift, in a masterful tricolon. “I am hoping this is a spoof” said John Cosgrove. “Looks like some kind of dystopian nightmare scenario with cyborgs mechanically marching to hasten humanity’s doom. Hideous apparent absence of personality, life, joy ..” So many assumptions about the entire institution, its educational philosophy and the manner in which it asks its staff to teach, all on the basis of how students are told to move around the school between lessons. “This is seriously disturbing and unnatural”said Lin Holden. “It looks like a scene from Gilead. Under His Eye.” Others have no need of allusions to science fiction or dystopian literature to express their distaste – they find the school’s corridors reminiscent of real and existing totalitarian regimes: it’s “like something from North Korea” said Marc Davenant, who has evidently never been to North Korea.

More personal attacks lined up in the responses too. “This should fill you with shame. Why are you boasting about it?” said Helen Salmon. “Hey Google, show me a school that looks like a prison” said David Smith. More succinctly from Joao Arajuo, “this is SICK”. The comments went on and on, overwhelmingly filled with outrage and all assuming that anyone who asks children to be silent and ordered must hold them in contempt. Perhaps most interesting were the ones which did as we all do, which is draw on our own experiences: “unnecessary and frankly weird,” said Paul Lucas. “I went to a highly disciplined all boys grammar school and it didn’t feel like the army. Ever. Mostly turned out happy young men comfortable in their own skin, including a lot of real eccentrics.” Lucky Paul to have hailed from such privilege.

I too went to a school that many will see as privileged. It was only when the debate started raging about silent corridors that I remembered the fact that the school I attended had them. I had honestly forgotten. I spent seven years in my small, private secondary school for girls and remember all sorts of weird details about it (quite honestly, there are some seriously weird details to remember), but silent corridors was not something that had lodged in my mind. Only when I started to read how grossly oppressive they apparently are did I recall that this was the school rule. In actual fact, lessons were often quite noisy and discipline was not always effective (most of the staff had no training), but silent corridors was a given. Did I find it so terrifying that I have repressed the memory? I don’t think so. I think I didn’t remember it because it didn’t matter.

I would be the last person to defend the school I attended, which at the time (we’re talking the 1980s here) was horrendously old-fashioned and was indeed genuinely oppressive in some ways. The school was deeply religious and was unwilling to tolerate dissent from religious teachings, which was tough for a heathen like myself. There were a great deal of seriously stupid, unjustifiable and pointless rules, some of which detracted from effective learning. Not all staff were kind. Yet out of all of the things I would change about that place, silent corridors would not be one of them. Lesson changeover was, in fact, a blessed relief and an opportunity for down time; a little time in your own head before the next onslaught.

One of beliefs held by people who dislike the concept of silent corridors is that they are not only oppressive but they are unncessary. “The idea that children chatting to each other has to be bedlam or dangerous is ridculous” said Graham Chatterley, whom I engaged in a discussion for a while. He believed that silent corridors are an issue for neurodivergent students who, in his words “have been masking and holding everything in for an hour’s lesson” and “need to have the opportunity to relax for two minutes”. I do not disagree. My own experience, however, is that silent corridors enable this and my own experience of teaching neurodivergent children is that they are most exhausted by the noise and general sensory overwhelm of modern schools. Many of them go home and lie in a darkened room for two hours when they get home, so over-stimulated are they by the lights, the noise and the hubub. Graham told me that I had “an extremely narrow definition of neurodivergent” and maybe he’s right – there may be neurodivergent students that don’t find consistency, quiet and clarity more helpful than noise and excitement, but in 21 years of teaching I have not met one.

Here’s the thing. None of the schools I have worked in had silent corridors. They were rated at least “Good” for behaviour, were oversubscribed and were generally considered to be places where people wanted to send their children. Leadership did not believe in super-strict regimes so silence was not expected, nor was walking in single file. Corridors were, however, supposed to be calm and students were advised to move quietly, swiftly and purposefully between lessons. All sounds well and good, doesn’t it? The problem is, because students were not taught how to do things such as lining up and moving in single file, and because this was not consistently reinforced by all staff, lining up rarely was lining up and moving about the school was something of a rabble without a cause. Students also struggled with order when it mattered, for example during a fire drill.

Worse than this, when it comes to every day life working in a school, there were many times when I found the corridors an issue. The problem with loose, liberal guidelines like “move between lessons swiftly and quietly” is they are too vague. One person’s “quiet” is another’s “a little too noisy”. And what does “swift” mean? Racing along? Not dawdling? Both staff and students were unclear what the expectations were and staff (due to their lack of clarity and lack of confidence) were haphazard in enforcing them – you can’t enforce what you’re vague about. All of this leads to wasted time between lessons and sparks arguments between students and staff. Worse than this, however, in a large school where silence is not expected between lessons, the noise level from normal chatting and laughing and the movement created by large numbers of teenagers roaming about is so great that this often leads to exponential increases which can very quickly tip over into chaos. One student starts pushing, one student squeals and the next thing you know the corridor is a heaving, screaming mass of bodies pushing and shouting. I do not exaggerate. This happens regularly in small pockets in all schools at certain pinch points. Staff used to have various ways of managing this. One carried a whistle and used it rather effectively. Tall men with booming voices were useful. We used evasive action, by releasing classes in a staggered order, holding one class back while another was moving past. Finally, it was standard practice in the school that any child (or indeed staff member) with any kind of injury was allowed to leave lessons early “to avoid the hustle and bustle of the corridors”. The message seemed to be that potential chaos in the corridor was unavoidable, therefore evasive action should be taken if an individual was at heightened risk – never mind that the situation itself is risky for all.

My personal view is that order and silence in corridors is highly desirable. I believe that they keep students and staff safer than in the corridors I have experienced during my career. I believe that they prevent less time being wasted. I believe that they help students to prepare for later life, in which there are times when one must switch between silence and vocalisation at the drop of a hat. I do not believe that they are in any way oppressive and am genuinely at a loss to understand those who do. In some school environments, silent corridors are frankly essential and staff are failing in their duty of care if they do not provide them; this is something which Clare Sealy wrote about some time ago and for those of us who have only lived and worked in relatively privileged environments, this blog is essential reading. Please, if you think that the staff who work in these kinds of schools don’t care about the children they are working with, you definitely need to read it.

My hypothesis, for what it’s worth, is that my generation and those coming after us have consistently confused authority with authoritarianism. The worst thing that one can be accused of is being illiberal, and the best way to avoid this is to eschew all forms of authority. Ironically, in some quarters, this mindset is so entrenched it has become undeniably authoritarian – you must believe what I believe, and if you don’t you must be an oppressor. It would do us all good to remind ourselves that we are all on the same side: we all want children to be safe, supported and happy in school and for them to receive the best possible free education. What we differ on is how to achieve this.

Why do we have Mock examinations?

Once again this year I am struck by the huge variation between schools when it comes to handling their Mock examinations. Most interesting perhaps is the variation in date, as some schools have set them in November, some in December, some in January. The timing of mocks is never ideal for anyone involved. A Mock period in November and/or December means that the examinations come rather too early, forcing teachers to cram content in or delay it until afterwards and not examine it; it also means that teachers will have the rather unpleasant Christmas gift of a whole load of exam-marking. Delay the exams until January, however, and the examinations are hanging over the students, potentially putting a strain on them and their family during the short Christmas break; it also means that the results of those Mock examinations will potentially not be circulated until February, which then leaves only three months to take action between the Mock results and the final exams.

One major problem with Mock examinations is the amount of curriculum time that is wiped out by the very process of examining a whole year group in formal conditions, a factor which led directly to the demise of the AS/A2 system at Key Stage 5 – losing most of the summer of Year 12 to an examination period was simply too costly. In Year 11, for practical reasons, the Mock examination period is kept very short (much shorter than the formal examination period in the summer), with schools cramming all of their examinations into a two-week or three-week window. This is absolutely necessary in order to minimise the disruption to the curriculum, but the price is paid by the students and by the staff, who face a very intense time sitting the exams, marking them and analysing the data – all at the darkest and most miserable time of year, when the likelihood of illness is high.

One of the main issues with Mock examinations is that they serve too many conflicting purposes. They are used by schools as an indicator as to whether a student is on target to achieve their predicted grade, and most schools ask their staff to perform some kind of results analysis, with students being flagged in some way as to whether they are on, above or below target. Sometimes this information is passed on to the students. In my experience both students and their families continue to be deeply confused about the difference between a target grade (which will be calculated using a complex algorithm and based on data that does not actually relate to your child’s own performance) and a predicted grade (which is what your teacher thinks you might achieve if you continue working as you are).

Personally, I don’t like either target grades or predictions, as I feel that they categorise children unfairly and set up a mindset that is not always helpful. Students with very high targets and/or predictions can feel overwhelmed by the pressure; students with lower ones can feel like the system doesn’t believe in them or that they have been labelled as incapable so what’s the point of trying? In an ideal world we wouldn’t need them at all. On a training course on raising standards for all, I once met a Headtacher who worked in an outstanding school with outstanding results. They gave every child the same target, which was to get as far above the pass grade as they could. I excitedly shared this radical and evidentially successful approach with my school leadership team and they roundly ignored it; ironic really, as they has sent me on the course and asked me for feedback! The approach jarred so much with what they believed was necessary that they couldn’t even entertain the notion as a way forward.

So, schools require Mock examinations in order to number-crunch and take a reading in terms of how a cohort is likely to perform that year. Like it or not, this is unlikely to stop happening when we are demanding that schools raise standards all the time and we base this judgement on exam performance. Yet there are other important reasons for the Mock examinations, and these do not always sit confortably with a school’s need to data-crunch and predict outcomes. In many schools, Mock examinations are the one and only time that students experience a practice run of what it will be like to sit their final papers in the summer. Most schools don’t have the physical space to facilitate formal examinations for all year groups, so it’s really important for Year 11 to get this one real chance at experiencing what it is like to line up as a year group according to a designated seating plan, file into the room in examination conditions (which begin outside the room) and sit a series of examinations, one after the other. Students experience what it’s like to receive formal instructions from the Examinations Officer, to be told to hand in their mobile phones and check their pockets for banned materials (pretty much everything), to have to have their equipment in an appropriate clear container and to surrender any equipment that is more modern than an analogue timepiece. All of these things can create tension for anxious students, but it is hugely important for them to experience the process so that they know what to expect in the summer. It can be a real balancing act for schools to create the right atmosphere – just the right amount of gravitas so that students experience the seriousness of the real thing, without sending the entire year group into a state of controlled (or, even worse, uncontrolled) panic.

Crucially, Mock examinations are (or should be) an opportunity to make mistakes and learn from them. Teachers expect some students to read the paper wrong, to answer the wrong section, to tackle too many questions or not enough. The very point is that they get to experience the impact of this and learn how important it is to approach each paper in the right way. Beyond that, they also get to dissect their performance in detail and (in an ideal world) receive thorough, individualised feedback from their teacher. The mock examinations should highlight areas of weakness and shine a light on the skills which need honing and improvement. When students are very upset by their performance in a Mock examination, it can be particularly difficult; students may receive news of their mark in the same lesson as when they have to go through the paper and in my experience this means that they are not in a fit state to take anything in; as a tutor, I am grateful to schools who are happy to release the papers and let students take them home, as this means I can look at the paper myself and go through it again with the student when they are calmer.

One of the things which students struggle the most with when it comes to their first experience of examinations is timing, and this is indeed one of the many reasons why Mocks are so important. There’s nothing like the full experience of being in a large exam hall and having to work to timed conditions to make you realise that this is something that you need to practise, practise and practise again. There is no point in astudent working on exam-style questions if they are not doing so in timed conditions – in fact, I would argue that doing so could potentially be damaging in the long-run; if a student gets used to tackling a question over a longer period of time, they’re going to struggle to adjust their performance to what is required in the final paper. This is why it’s important to practise things under time pressure from the very beginning.

If a student truly bombs in their Mock it is not a disaster. I have seen students turn things around in a manner that I might not have believed possible had I not seen it with my own eyes; a really poor performance in an examination can even be the catalyst that some students need to get them focused – if no amount of their teachers or their parents telling them to buck their ideas up has worked, then sometimes totally crashing down to earth with truly disastrous grade can be the ticket. For the more anxiously minded, the important thing is to convince them that Mocks are quite literally there to be failed; their job is to defy the algorithm and smash it out of the park in May. Believe me, it can be done.

Embracing your Latin roots

On my reading list for some time has been Alex Quigley’s Closing the Vocabulary Gap. Quigley is an English teacher, a blogger and the author of several books on how schools should go about closing the literacy gap between “word rich” and “word poor” students – those with high levels of literacy and a huge mental word bank compared to those without. His work ties in with other reading I have done about the literacy crisis in the USA and the debates that have raged in this country and in America about how we teach children to read.

I didn’t necessarily expect to find an empassioned defence of my subject embedded in a modern book about the wider and more fundamental issue of children’s literacy, but find it I did. Quigley, it seems, is a believer in Latin (and Greek!) for all. In the third chapter of his book he outlines precisely the ways in which children who already struggle with reading are further impoverished by the difficulties that they face when presented with texts of an increasingly academic nature. He explores the fact that technical and scientific terminology is so dominated by Latinate words that there really does become a case for teaching these word-patterns explicitly in the classroom: “teaching with etymology in mind is therefore a reliable and helpful tool, not just for English teachers, but also for every classroom teacher. In fact, it may prove more valuable for teachers of maths, science and geography, given the narrower roots of their subject specific language.” To find the case for this being made in such a book was exciting enough, but I nearly fell out of my chair when I read the next paragraph:

“You could rightly ask, why aren’t ancient languages like Latin on the curriculum for all? Why do we still perceive the powerful roots of our language as exclusive to the few who already prove word rich? Here, we could also speculate about how useful it would prove for English teachers to learn an ancient language as part of their professional development and enrichment.”

Not only is Quigley suggesting that ancient languages have a valuable place in a modern curriculum, he is even suggesting that teachers of English would all benefit from studying an ancient language. This is music to my ears and if I’m honest (sorry, English teachers) I have never understood how anyone goes on to study English literature at a higher level without such knowledge. I’ll take just one example: if you think you understand Milton, but you haven’t read Virgil in the original Latin, then – I hate to break this to you – but you don’t fully understand Milton; you’re missing out on the richness of what he is attempting to do, because you lack that frame of reference.

Quigley goes on to argue that children who are not taught explicitly about etymology are being shut out of “a wealth of intriguing knowledge”. He also points out that the kind of cultural capital afforded to children with a knowledge of Latin and Greek is one of the fundamental divides between the advantaged and the disadvantaged.

This is genuinely exciting. It is widely accepted (and not incorrect) that the traditional arguments from the past that “Latin makes you clever” are simply not evidence-based; studying Latin and Greek makes you good at Latin and Greek, it doesn’t necessarily gift you with transferrable skills beyond that knowledge-base. However, Quigley presents the case for ancient languages by highlighting the importance of the academic vocabulary which is required in order to access all subjects beyond the very basics; it is something of a clincher for those of us who still believe in the value of ancient languages, and really does make the case for the academic advantage that Latin and Greek affords its students.

Quigley explores further the fact that Latin remains the preserve of the elite and is still considered by many to be appropriate only for high-attaining students, despite the evidence gathered by Arlene Holmes-Henderson from Classics for All that an exposure to Latin in fact has a greater impact on students with low literacy levels than it does on those who are already highly literate. When you think about it, this makes perfect sense. Children who are already highly literate, who are exposed to a wide range of reading at home and who have articulate discussion modelled for them from a young age will always be fine; it is for those students for whom this is not the norm that we should be concerned, and the teaching of Latin absolutely has a place in our quest to close this advantage gap.

I picked up Quigley’s book with the intention of enriching and updating my knowledge of how children acquire vocabulary, and I still expect to learn much in this area as I work through the second half. It has been a lovely surprise and an added bonus to find the case for Latin as a subject made so clearly in a book that has been hailed as essential in education’s work towards opening the doors of opportunity for our most vulnerable and disadvantaged students. I am very glad to have spent 21 years in the state sector, building up the numbers of students for whom an exposure to this valuable subject was an opportunity and a right. Until Latin is a normalised part of the curriculum in a greater number of state schools than the current dismal figures, it and all of its advantages will remain the preserve of the elite.

Is it really too easy?

One of the many joys of tutoring is the time and space it affords you to check out whether a student understands basic concepts. This does not only mean basic academic concepts, such as the differnce between the subject and the object; it also means looking at some of the ostensibly simplest sorts of questions on the exam papers and making sure that they know how to go about them.

Teachers of Latin GCSE are under enormous pressure to get through the syllabus content in the time they have available. Latin classes – certainly in state schools – often start from a position of disadvantage, having already had a limited number of teaching hours at Key Stage 3; some GCSE classes even start ab initio. The exam board then demands that a huge amount of complex material is covered, including a ludicrous amount of real Latin literature. The reality of this means that class minutes are at a premium, and teachers will move rapidly over basic concepts and may even assume that simple questions are understood and do not require practice. Often, as a direct result of this, key marks are lost due to small misconceptions or a lack of clarity in a student’s mind when it comes to how to approach such questions.

This week I finally got around to reading the Examiners’ Report from 2023 and their comment on the derivatives question really leapt out at me. It said, “this question is designed to be accessible to candidates of all abilities, and most scored at least 2 marks.” Personally, I find this utterly delusional on the part of the examiners. How, pray tell, is a question accessible to all candidates when it relies on a breadth of literacy and general knowledge not covered in the syllabus itself? And how is a score by many of 50% on this question indicative that it was indeed accessible? The comment is simply astonishing and I’m afraid it betrays yet again how out of touch the world of Classics is with reality. I have worked with a variety of students who have been scuppered by the derivatives question and their struggle is due to one or more of the following reasons:

Students do not know their Latin vocabulary well enough to be able to access the question. You can’t come up with a viable derivative if you don’t know what the Latin word means. This is more complex than it perhaps sounds, as the word is often presented in a form that is different from the one they have learnt e.g. dabat from the verb do), meaning that candidates who find the subject challenging will probably struggle to recognise it.
Students are EAL (English as an Acquired Language) and lack the breadth of English necessary to succeed in this question. They may be performing outstandingly well in the subject, but they have not yet come across the word regal or sedentary.
Students do have English as their first language but are not widely read, meaning that they struggle to come up with derivatives; they might recognise one when it’s pointed out to them, but they find it difficult to reach for one. This means that students for whom reading is modelled and encouraged at home are at a huge advantage, which is one of the main reasons why the examiners’ assertion that this question is “accessible” really grinds my gears.
Students have simply not been taught how to approach this question, or if they have been shown how they have not practised it at length. Teachers rarely spend a significant amount of time doing so because they assume (like the examiners do) that the question is easy. Plus, as I mentioned earlier, it may be time they do not have. In my experience to date, the best schools practise deivations from the very beginning of Key Stage 3, and this is certainly the best way to embed the knowledge for GCSE.

Some students really do have no problem with the derivatives question, and when that’s the case I leave them to it. These students are always highly literate and usually well-read. Unlike them, many students need to be shown multiple examples of derivatives and time needs to be invested in guiding them through the vocabulary list looking for such derivatives – the examiners even recommend this in their notes, yet still cling to the delusion that this question is highly accessible. Believe me, any question that cannot be done without detailed, explicit, one-to-one guidance from an expert is not accessible; teachers do not have time on the curriculum to prep for this question adequately.

Another question that many teachers lack the time to focus on and tend to assume the students will cope with just fine is the 10-marker in the literature papers. Because the question is open-ended and requires no knowledge of the Latin, this question really is accessible in the sense that even students who have struggled with the material should be able to do it; I say “should” because once again there is some guidance required. Students tend to apply what they have been taught about answering other types of questions (even in other subjects) to the 10-marker and this can lead them down the wrong path; answers need to be full of quotations/references but not to the Latin, to the text in translation. There is also no requirement for detailed analysis. I have written about this in more detail here. The 10-mark question makes up 20% of each literature exam: that means it makes up 10% of a student’s entire result – way more than the difference between two grades. It’s definitely worth spending some time on!

It’s a real joy as a tutor to be able to dive into the basics and make sure that students are well-prepared for what they face when it comes to exam time. Questions that the examiners and teachers assume are easy usually are so once you know how to approach them, but it’s that assumed knowledge that I’m interested in. Once a student has been gifted with said knowledge, that’s when they can start to fly.

Invested in Education?

“It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends on his not understanding it.”
Upton Sinclair

Full disclosure: I’d never heard of Upton Sinclair until I read this quotation. I first came across the remark when reading about the literacy crisis in America. I had already listened to the eye-opening podcast Sold a Story and was appalled at what I had heard. I then started looking at some of the debates happening online around how reading is taught in the US and how this has been dominated for so long by methods that don’t work effectively, but which make certain authors and publishers a great deal of money. The notion that anyone could push an idea in education purely for monetary gain seemed so appalling that I found myself wondering whether it could possibly be true.

Spolier alert: it is entirely possible. However, like most things in life, I think it’s a little more complicated than pure greed. Sinclair is absolutely right that people will continue to advocate for a bad idea to sustain their income, but I do cling to the notion that they probably have a personal investment in the idea that goes beyond the financial. Their self-worth, their self-belief and sometimes their very identity can be at stake. It’s jolly difficult to admit that you might have been mistaken about something that you’ve made your life’s work. Add to this the fact that – as Sinclair puts it – your “salary depends” on not being mistaken, then the process of enlightenment becomes close to impossible.

I have changed my mind about a range of things during my 21 years as a classroom teacher. What I believed to be the case when I started turned out to be wrong, and this is not because I became a cynic or “gave up on my principles” – quite the opposite. Changing your mind is challenging. The principles I have stuck to have been to follow the evidence of what is best for the majority of children. When I have been presented with overwhelming evidence that my approach towards doing something is less effective than someone else’s, then I have been willing to change my approach. I let go of my beliefs in the face of the evidence and I am a better teacher for it. Sadly, this seems to be an unusual attitude and I am constantly disappointed by how determindly people hold onto their beliefs against all the evidence. It seems to me that a lot of people care more about following their ideology than they do about genuinely doing what’s right; anything that seems to jar with their worldview frightens them so much that they’d genuinely rather avoid it, even when the evidence suggests that it helps learners more, or lifts a greater number of people out of poverty.

Even Andrew Wakefield, the disgraced and now struck-off consultant paediatrician, who first penned the now-discredited studies claiming a potential link between autism and the MMR vaccine, believed in what he was doing at the outset. Since then, having moved to America and been welcomed with open arms by the “anti-vax” lobbyists across the pond, doubling down on his beliefs rather than accepting the overwhelming scientific evidence that they were incorrect is by far the more attractive path for him to take. Why roll back on a position that’s making you a fortune? He will never change his mind – why would he?

It would probably shock most people to know just how much the education system has been at the mercy of snake-oil sellers and woo-merchants over the last 30 years. Some of it is still ongoing. In my time in schools I have sat through talks on such unscientific nonsense as Brain Gym, learning styles and the left-brain-right-brain “theory”. All of these sessions were run by “educational advisors” that the school had paid to train us. The waste of tax-payers’ money paying these people – whether they were well-meaning and deluded or outright fraudsters – makes me want to weep. Worse than this, however, is the thought that this money has not just been wasted, it has actively harmed the education of hundreds of thousands of children; teachers have been directly taught misinformation about how the brain works and about how children learn, at the expense of the wealth of genuine information that there is out there through cognitive science. If I think about it too much, it’s not good for my blood pressure.

I would love to think, with the advent of grassroots movements such as ResearchED giving ordinary teachers the confidence to push back against the tide of quackery, that the days of such cynical peddling are over. Sadly, we are not quite there yet. Just this week, with examination boards purportedly considering a shift to examinations being done on computers instead of by hand, there are the usual string of ed-tech salesmen rubbing their hands with glee. The amount of money that schools have wasted on tech over the years makes me feel quite ill. In the 21 years I spent in the classroom, I saw the arrival of the first interactive SmartBoard in one, lived through their proliferation in every classroom in every school, and lasted long enough to see the majority of them ripped out again, replaced by ordinary whiteboards. Each one of those SmartBoards originally cost a couple of thousand pounds and they all ended up in a skip – not because they were replaced by superior technology, but because most teachers realised that they were unncessary, unwieldy and impractical to use in the classroom.

There isn’t a week that goes by when I don’t think of Sinclair and his insightful observation. In terms of education, all we can do is continue to empower teachers to question everything that they are asked to do. My mantra in my last few years was “show me the evidence”. I know he’s a controversial figure for many, but Richard Dawkins writes so well and has a talent for wordsmithery that far exceeds mine. In his wonderful letter to his 10-year-old daughter, he concludes as follows: “What can we do about all this? It is not easy for you to do anything, because you are only ten. But you could try this. Next time somebody tells you something that sounds important, think to yourself: ‘Is this the kind of thing that people probably know because of evidence? Or is it the kind of thing that people only believe because of tradition, authority or revelation?’ And, next time somebody tells you that something is true, why not say to them: ‘What kind of evidence is there for that?’ And if they can’t give you a good answer, I hope you’ll think very carefully before you believe a word they say.“

Poking and fussing

Do you ever wonder whether we’ve somewhat lost our way when it comes to the purpose of education?

When I decided to become a teacher, it was made clear to me back in 1999 that my role would be complex. Given the trend back then for group work and making lessons fun, the role of the teacher had become somewhat synonymous with the purported aims of the BBC: to educate, inform and entertain, not necessarily in that order. Beyond that, it was also made clear to me in 1999 that I would have numerous responsibilities that blurred the line between education and social work, and none of them were unreasonable. Teachers – particularly primary school teachers – spend a huge amount of time with a large number of individual children every day; as a result, teachers are without question some of the best-placed adults to notice when there are concerns to be had, when a child’s demeanour changes or their health declines. I took my duty of care very seriously and regularly reported safeguarding concerns; the ability to raise such concerns anonymously, with more experienced experts who took me seriously and followed up on them, is something I miss greatly about being in a school.

The overwhelming majority of teachers take their safeguarding responsibilities extremely seriously. Nobody goes into teaching with the belief that they will be nothing but an academe, pouring knowledge into the minds of the young with no thought given to their health, their personality, their family situation or what might be going on inside their head. Teaching is a constant dialogue between adults and the young, and our empathy with and understanding of a wide variety of issues that may be holding a child back in their learning is crucial. But let us remind ourselves that what we are there to do is to impart learning. We are not there to solve all of society’s problems, from knife crime to nutrition.

In the last decade or so, and most particularly during and after the pandemic, schools have been expected to take up the slack for every single failing in society: for the failings of government, for the failings of under-funded health services, for the failings of over-stretched social services and sometimes – let’s not be afraid to say it – for the failings of parents. Parenthood is hard – incredibly hard – and not everybody is acing it; but teachers are not parents to the children in their care and they cannot – nor should they be asked to – replace that role.

I hesitate to make political predictions as I am notoriously bad at it and if the last few years have taught us anything it should be to prepare for surprise. That said, it seems likely that we will have a change of government at the next General Election, and it seems likely that the new ruling party will be Labour. This means that what the Labour party said about education at its recent conference becomes potentially more important and relevant than the Conversatives’ blustering about mobile phones (already banned in most decent schools) and maths up to the age of 18 (where they will find the teachers yet to be confirmed). But the Labour party’s pledge to bring in “supervised tooth brushing” for primary school children aged 3 to 5 caught my attention and got me wondering about what they think teachers are for. It also got me wondering whether any of them have ever set foot in a primary school, never mind stayed there for any length of time.

As one primary school teacher on the platform formerly known as Twitter pointed out, teachers have already experienced what it is like when they are asked to supervise hand-washing on a massive scale, when there was a big focus on this during the pandemic. “I remember getting the children to wash their hands at the sink during covid. It took an hour and they missed learning … My TA had to supervise them instead of support children. And that was a class of Y6 children. I can’t imagine how long it would take to shepherd 4 & 5 year olds through the process. This policy has not been suggested by anyone with experience of primary.” Her comments were in answer to someone who claimed that supervised tooth-brushing “would only take a few minutes”. Several primary school teachers responded, with comments like “30 very young children. Probably only one sink. Cleaning the cup after each child. Making sure each child has their toothbrush. At least 50% won’t like the toothpaste … I could go on and on.” My personal favourite was the one who pointed out the problems that would arise from all the spitting. Covid hygiene? Whatever. All in all, the discussion was (or should have been) an eye-opener for anyone who does not work with large groups of children on a daily basis, especially the little ones. You may (I hope) have supervised your own child’s toothbrushing at home. This is not the same as trying to do it with a class of 30.

The British Dental Association has stated that it is “encouraged” by Labour’s proposal, but I feel more than a little despair. As one teacher put it “it’s a sticking plaster for a gaping wound. Babies have teeth. We need NHS dentists, breastfeeding support groups at doctors surgeries, 0-4 family centres. Teachers have an educational role but they’re outsourcing it to us because they don’t want to fund the real support needed.” Absolutely. And it has to stop. Given the amount of time that every primary school teacher knows realistically that this tooth-brushing regime will take, what would people like those teachers to do less of to make it happen? Less supervised play? Fewer handwriting skills? Ditch basic numeracy? You choose.

For me, the suggestion sums up the tangible lack of respect that politicians have for the teaching profession. Teachers are treated as punching bags by all the major parties, belittled and taken for granted across the board. The profession is haemorraghing staff at an alarming rate and to this date not one single political party has taken any kind of frank look at this. Any pledge to “recruit more teachers” falls far short of what’s required, when we know that currently one third of teachers are quitting the profession within five years. It costs a lot of money to train a teacher, so a proper focus on how we retain them – not recruit them – would save the country a fortune.

Readers around my age may recognise the title of this post as a quotation from Pam Ayres’ I Wish I’d Looked After Me Teeth, a poem which pretty much every child my age was told to learn off by heart at some point during their time in primary school. “Poking and fussing” (or – more accurately – “pokin’ and fussin'”) is how tooth-brushing seemed to Ayres as a young child. For me, it’s a rather good description of the approach taken by politicians towards education.

The problem with homework

Self-directed study remains one of the most insurmountable barriers to success for most young people. For many of them, their first introduction to this process is homework. The very concept of homework in state schools is quite modern and seems to have been an expectation pushed in grammar schools rather than in secondary moderns. According to a survey of male pupils carried out by the Central Advisory Council for Education in 1947, 98% of boys in grammar schools received homework regularly, compared to a figure of just 29% of boys in a secondary modern setting. (The fact that this research was carried out into boys only tells you even more about the attitudes towards education at the time – liberals were starting to care about what happened to boys from lower-income backgrounds, but girls didn’t matter full stop). A fascinating booklet published in 1937 by the Board of Education reveals that the government were looking into the issue of homework and evidences firstly that it was on the increase in state schools and secondly that this was not popular; there is notable evidence that homework was used as a punishment rather than as something which was designed to support learning.

Homework remains a controversial issue in modern school settings and some teachers eschew its usage altogether; some educationalists believe that homework advantages those students with greater support at home and puts unnecessary pressure on those without the resources to facilitate it. Certainly, if a child is sharing a room with younger siblings or is in a multiple-occupancy household, and/or if that child has caring responsibilities, committing to any kind of study outside of their compulsory schooling can be a huge challenge. Interestingly, however, I have become increasingly aware of just how unsupported even the most affluent children can be when it comes to self-directed study. They may have all the facilities in the world, but they may not have any idea of how to go about their work. Unless the adults at home have a wealth of time and patience to offer their children, homework and self-directed study can become a real pinch point for families and can severely impair a child’s educational performance.

If I could convince parents of one thing that would make a difference to their child’s educational outcomes it would be this: most people drastically overestimate their child’s maturity when it comes to self-directed study. This includes their child’s ability to self-regulate, their capacity to self-motivate and their fundamental understanding of how to learn. None of this should be surprising given that most adults still have a very poor knowledge and understanding of how humans learn. Many people are still influenced by long-since debunked research on “learning styles” or similiar dangerous mutations and edu-myths that simply will not die; they remain wedded to the idea that the way their child learns is somehow unique, and that the child must discover the best ways of doing so for thesmelves. The reality is that we know more than we ever did about how humans learn things, and there is a wealth of advice out there about how to do so; most people simply don’t take it on board. With this in mind, what follows is a summative reminder of the advice that I give on a regular basis and provide for all parents who wish to support their child with learning.

1. Testing:

Even if your child thinks that they don’t know something, the first thing you should do is test them. I know that might seem strange, but the process of testing forces the brain to concentrate. Just staring at a word and its meaning won’t work; to succeed at memorisation, your child needs to engage with the process and the easiest way to make them do so is to start testing them. This is because memory is the residue of thought (Daniel T. Willingham): in other words, to remember something you have to think about it actively on muptiple occasions.

2. Small amounts, little and often:
This is absolutely crucial. If your child’s Latin teacher has set 30 words for them to learn over one week, they will need to tackle the task repeatedly. While for most homeworks they may be able to sit down and tick them off as done after an hour’s blitz, vocabulary learning should be done in short bursts: take 5-10 minutes once or twice a day and spend that time testing. Start with 10 words. Then later that day or on the next day, return to those 10, adding another 5 words on top. Then repeat those 15 words, adding another 5 and so on. By the end of the week they should be confident. Why so much repetition? There is a reason, and here it is …

3. Spaced learning:
When you rote-learn something quickly, you forget it pretty quickly too. But do not despair! The process of well-spaced repetition strengthens the links your brain has made with what it is learning and lengthens the retention. If a child does their vocabulary homework in one sitting, one week later they will have completely wasted their time. Instead, they should do it in short, spaced-out bursts, with “forgetting time” in between; this way they will spend around the same amount of time in total but their recall will be close to perfect. As a child gains confidence, you should extend the length of the spaces and ultimately you should revisit material that has not been covered for quite some time – days, weeks, months later.

4. Make intelligent use of flashcards:
Flashcards are an outstanding tool when it comes to vocabulary learning. You can use the traditional method of physical cards or an online version, which has the advantage of speed and efficiency. Personally, I am a huge fan of Quizlet, and your child already has access to my flashcards on there. What do I mean by intelligent use of them? Well …

Firstly, do not let your child spend hours making them look pretty, especially not drawing lovely pictures all over them. The use of images on flashcards actually has close to zero impact on students’ ability to learn vocabulary, which can turn into a ridiculous game of “say what you see.” For example, if I showed you the Latin word “femina” with a cartoon picture of a woman next to it, I’ll place a bet you’d be able to tell me that the word means “woman”. But what have you learned? Frankly, nothing. You’ve recognised a picture of a woman, which a two-year-old can do. Much better to discuss the meaning of the word “feminine” with your child and fix the Latin word in their head through the understanding of derivatives (of which more below).

Secondly, make sure that your child is definitely using the flashcards to test themselves (a process called retrieval), not to reassure themselves through recognition. Research shows that one of the most common mistakes students tend to make is to turn the cards over too swiftly; this way, students become convinced that they know the meanings of the words when in fact they are merely recognising the answers – and it can be surprisingly difficult for students to discipline themselves out of this habit, which is why you should help them. Make sure that you’re supporting them at least some of the time by controlling the turnover of the cards. Talk to them about flipping the cards too swiftly and make sure they’re aware of this tendency.

Thirdly, another temptation for students is to keep testing themselves on the familiar words (we all like to feel comfortable!) Remember, flashcards are a tool to help someone to learn the words they don’t know, so separate out the ones that your child has gained confidence with and spend longer on the ones they are struggling to recognise. This can be done on Quizlet by marking up cards with a yellow star (top right-hand corner of each card). That said, another mistake students make is to overestimate their level of confidence with words they have recently learned, so make sure you revisit the “no problem” pile a couple of times before you decide that the words have really stuck in your child’s longterm memory.

Finally, shuffle the deck. This is hugely important. The brain works by mapping links between the things that it is learning; as a result, it has a strong tendency to remember things in order, so the danger with learning several words at once is your child will remember them only in order. You should constantly shuffle the deck to ensure that this isn’t happening, or your child will never recognise the words out of context. On Quizlet this can be done by hitting the “shuffle” button in the bottom right-hand corner of the flashcard deck.

5. Focus on derivatives.
Not only does this help with vocabulary learning, it will develop your child’s knowledge and understanding of their own language and any other language(s) that they are learning. Furthermore, it will consolidate their learning because their brain will be linking its newfound knowledge to prior and future learning – and this all helps with its innate mapping skills.

All of the above requires time, energy and effort from a caring adult. I am acutely aware that this is a lot to ask and that for some people it will simply be too much for them. However, if you are able to dedicate yourself to the process, your child’s learning journey will be made infinitely easier and they will develop the habits and routines that will set them up for success in their studies later in life.

Why all teachers should tutor

Many trained teachers try their hand at tutoring: demand is high and the money is useful. I tutored consistently throughout my first few years in teaching, then returned to it when my husband gave up work to re-train. As time went on, however, I found myself bound to it by more than just financial necessity; I came to realise that private tutoring has was having a profoundly positive impact on my work as a classroom teacher.

It may sound absurd, but it’s easy to lose sight of what you’re paid to do in the frenetic world of mainstream education; marking and administrative tasks – not to mention the ever-shifting sands of expectations – can overwhelm you to the point where you lose perspective on what’s actually important. Tutoring reignited my passion for teaching on a fundamental level; not only did it take me back to some essential skills, it made me question the value of some other things that were taking up too much of my time. It made me better at saying “no” to things that impacted upon my ability to perform my teaching role to the best of my ability and – as a direct result – I stepped aside from roles and responsibilities that were in danger of doing so.

Tutoring exposed me to a wider range of specifications and teaching methodologies that were outside of my range of experience. Habits inevitably become entrenched when you teach the same subject in the same system to the same age-group for a number of years: tutoring forced me to think again. When I started tutoring face-to-face in my area, local demand was highest for Common Entrance coaching, so – despite the fact that I was a secondary school teacher – this became a specialism. Finding out what some 10-year-olds were being exposed to and could cope with made me question where I was setting the bar in secondary school; it also made me ask myself some fundamental questions about what, when and why I was teaching the core principles to older students. All of this came at would could not have been a more useful time: a few years prior to OfSted’s new framework and the huge shift towards a focus on curriculum coherence. When all other departments were running around in a panic, asking themselves why they were teaching what they were teaching and in what order they were teaching it, I had already been through that process and had totally refreshed my curriculum from bottom to top.

Perhaps the biggest impact that tutoring had on me while I was still teaching was a powerful shift in mind-set that is hard to quantify. When I started working with some local prep school students, I took several of them from the bottom of their class to the top. What this felt like is hard to convey, but suffice to say it was emphatically empowering. This positivity then filtered into my classroom practice and somehow made me feel as if anything were possible. This is not to say that I was naïve about the fundamental differences between what can be achieved through one-to-one tutoring and what can be realised in the mainstream classroom; but experiencing the irreplaceable value of one-to-one attention forced me to think of ways in which I could provide more of that magic in the classroom, particularly for the school’s Pupil Premium students (those who are defined by the government as coming from disadvantaged backgrounds). Blessed with an excellent trainee teacher most years, I began to take every opportunity to act as an expert Teaching Assistant to our Pupil Premium students in the trainee’s classes, coaching and guiding them to make more progress than they otherwise could.

Tutoring also opened my eyes to the phenomenal value of spaced learning and retrieval practice, as well as to the stark truth about just how much information children will forget once they have been taught it – a topic I have written on many times. That harsh reality fed through into my classroom teaching and fundamentally changed my approach to the basics of whole-class tuition. I introduced some of the exercises that I had created for the one-to-one setting and incorporated them into my classroom practice; I never took for granted that the students would have remembered what I had taught them the day, the week or the month before – I tested them repeatedly on basic knowledge. Once again, this all happened shortly before there was an explosion of this kind of practice in schools. I feel hugely grateful that tutoring gave me a bit of a heads-up.

As a full-time tutor now, with my own business, it seems obvious to say that tutoring has been a major influence in my life. But I would recommend it to any classroom teacher, not necessarily as a potential career shift but as a way of gaining access to new ideas, new experiences and new ways of informing your current classroom practice. If my experience is anything to go by, your performance in the classroom will benefit enormously.

Photo by Element5 Digital on Unsplash