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How can we better support male students with their mental health?
April is stress awareness month. We all experience stress at some point in our lives, and hopefully have support we can access through friends, family, the workplace or our communities. But there is a perception that men should be invulnerable and therefore not be in need of support, and this can exacerbate stress for our […]
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Let’s go round again: reforming 16-19 qualifications
‘We need our 16-19 education system to be the best in the world. We need to make sure that every young person – no matter their circumstances or where they live – can reach their potential and leave education with the knowledge and skills to thrive in a world-leading economy.’ (DfE 2023, p.5) If the […]
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No end and no beginning; race equity in higher education
Some years ago, through a pedagogy of the oppressed approach and by teaching with love, I embarked on using co-creation to explore racialised experiences raised by our students within our Race Equality Charter (REC) survey. I was compelled to act and so much so that my doctorate study explores using co-created decolonised pedagogy and curriculum […]
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Flexible working in teaching: what’s good for the goose is good for the gander
‘ Teacher supply in England remains in a perilous state.’ (NFER, 2023) Whilst effective flexible working in schools has traditionally been a part-time working pattern associated with women teachers with caring responsibilities, this can be stigmatising. But, new legislation means a request to work flexibly is now an option for all, and from the first […]
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Leading by accident and design
“Thanks love, is the vet coming now?” When I started out as a new graduate vet, I rapidly got used to hearing this phrase at the end of consultations. I’m not sure if this was an assumption related to my gender or my age, to be fair it was probably a bit of both, but […]
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Why the new transgender children school’s guidance is life threatening and what you can do about it
Just days before Christmas, the government published new draft guidance advising schools how to deal with transgender children and young people. Responses from the LGBT sector have highlighted that this guidance – including instructions for schools to ‘out’ pupils to their parents, ignore pronoun choice, and restrict access to toilets and sports – endangers the lives […]
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Learning through outdoor adventure today helps young people adapt to the challenges of tomorrow
Within a world which currently resembles a moving target, an enormous amount of unmitigated information is at young people’s fingertips. Consequently, the measure of their knowledge is not the amount of this information which can be retained (cognitive skills). Rather, it is their ability to curate (filter and process) material coupled with an understanding of […]
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England’s Pisa is decidedly lop-sided
This year’s PISA results were launched in the offices of Policy Exchange. It was a fitting choice – according to Nick Gibb the former schools minister, given that of all the think tanks, Policy Exchange is one of those which has had the greatest influence over the direction of England’s education policy since the election […]
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Minimising harm in research with multilingual parents – protecting participants through creating translanguaging space
Research ethics in higher education institutions are increasingly led by the mantra: protect the institution, protect the participants, protect yourself. Mostly this is quality assured through increasingly bureaucratic processes involving form filling and standardised risk assessments. As ethics representative for SIOE this has caused me many sleepless nights thinking about whether the multiple ethics forms […]
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COP28: Opportunities for the education sector
We are now nearly halfway through the 28th Conference of the Parties (COP28) in Dubai. The COP conferences are intended for governments to agree policies to limit global temperature rises and adapt to impacts associated with climate change.Later this week, Friday 8th and Saturday 9th December, the first annual meeting of the Greening Education Partnership […]
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