Secondary English

What can be done in Year 9 to ease students into the new demands they will face? The Collins GCSE Core book includes a suggested scheme of work for the year which highlights three different phases over the school year. The Teacher’s Guide spells out a range of ideas, but I want to deal with elaborating on one from the first term in the scheme - ‘Building skills and sharing stories’ Read More

The re-introduction of the 19th century novel onto the GCSE English Literature syllabus is one of the greatest challenges for teachers today. This isn’t because we haven’t taught it before, or because we don’t believe that students will benefit from reading novels from the Literary canon. It is because, all students, of all abilities will now be tested on their knowledge of these novels in exam conditions. They will not only need to have read, understood and analysed these texts, but remember them well enough to refer to them, unaided, in the exam. As I see it, there are five key challenges facing teachers. Here are my ideas on how to overcome them. Read More

Here are our top tips on how to get your students engaged in nineteenth-century literature and excited for every lesson! Read More

The re-introduction of the 19th century novel onto the GCSE English Literature syllabus is one of the greatest challenges for teachers today. This isn’t because we haven’t taught it before, or because we don’t believe that students will benefit from reading novels from the Literary canon. Read More

So, inspections or 'reviews' seems to be becoming more and more common. Whether it is internal inspections by your school's Senior Leadership Team, your Academy Sponsor's annual/termly/weekly review or the dreaded visit from Ofsted, we are all under more scrutiny than ever. Here are eight lessons that I have learned from speaking to HMI inspectors and reading their review documents over the last year. Read More

The world is a wonderful place; there is so much beauty and so many good things being done. I’ve seen a lot of this goodness and beauty, but I have also seen much that is ugly. In a lot of my writing I try to explore the darker side… Read More

When you read a mystery story, part of you is desperate to know what the answer is, but part of you doesn’t want to know YET. This is because there is pleasure in finding the clues, experiencing the tension and enjoying the build-up to the TTWJend. Read More

How do you solve the problem of reading for pleasure? Drop everything and read? Books in bags? Form-time reading?  Reading lesson? Reading ambassadors? Get caught reading?  There is, of course, no one magic answer and it will be the combined impact of a number of these strategies (and many more)… Read More

Work by Malorie Blackman never disappoints. Pig-heart Boy engages the reader from the first page. The first person narrative draws us into the world of thirteen-year-old Cameron Kelsey who has a serious heart condition, which means he will die unless a suitable donor is found. There are no human donors… Read More

Science fiction stories work best when they are rooted in reality. That may sound like a strange thing to say, but, if you examine the best sci-fi tales out there, you’re likely to discover that the ones that seem almost plausible are often the most memorable. Read More