I am off to fresh woods and pastures new. I am in my eighteenth and final year as a secondary school head teacher. Tomorrow I begin my last half-term, having already completed 197 since my career began in 1988. In September, for the first time in over three decades, I…
I always wanted to be a professional golfer. In 1979 I had a week off school to caddy for my brother’s mate, Trevor, at the British Open Golf Championship at Royal Lytham & St Anne’s, just outside Blackpool. Trevor was playing in the qualifying rounds more than a…
This is my fourth and final post on curriculum development. Here I propose a way of developing the curriculum which takes everyone with you, is user-friendly, is based upon sound principles, is academically aspirational and is focused upon developing teachers’ expertise. It is not just Adam Boxer who doubts whether…
In this short series of posts I am exploring the issues surrounding curriculum design. In the first post I began with the role of the senior leader in the process of shaping the school curriculum and in the second post, I collected in one place the terms currently used to…
I have been thinking for some time about how senior leaders support our subject leaders in curriculum development. For instance, I line manage Modern Foreign Languages at Huntington School and we have a Subject Leader, Cherry Bailey, with a pretty sparkling degree from Cambridge in German and Russian. I, on…
In this short series of posts I am exploring the issues surrounding curriculum design. In the first post I began with the role of the senior leader in the process of shaping the school curriculum: “So, when it comes to the curriculum, if you have chosen to be a school…
In 33 years of teaching I have taught subjects way outside my English literature specialism. I think the most challenging was attempting to teach the Level 2 GNVQ in Leisure & Tourism. I was, metaphorically, only ever one page ahead of the students in the text book. I say metaphorically,…
Last year I published An Angler's Journal, my first foray into writing about fishing. You can buy a copy on Amazon by clicking the image below. A few weeks ago The Economist magazine advertised for a writer for their "Britain" section. All you had to do…