Teacher recruitment and retention have been associated with the word ‘crisis’ since I joined the profession thirty years ago. But Daniel Kebede’s idea to give teachers a day each week to work and ‘mark from home’ is not the answer.
Teacher recruitment and retention have been associated with the word ‘crisis’ since I joined the profession thirty years ago. But Daniel Kebede’s idea to give teachers a day each week to work and ‘mark from home’ is not the answer.
Five years ago in March 2020, schools fell silent as Covid-19 swept across the world. At first, there was a tinge of excitement among some students and staff; it was as if, perhaps, we had been told that the whole country was going to be snowed in for six weeks.
For saying that teachers shouldn’t pander to trans pupils, Suella Braverman has found herself in hot water. The Attorney General suggested in an interview with the Times that male pupils should not be able to use girls’ toilets, and that single-sex schools can indeed restrict admission to children of just one sex. These are hardly revolutionary ideas, but they appear to have upset the National Education Union.
A year of disrupted schooling means there are plenty of issues facing our schools right now. But delegates at last week’s National Education Union conference were more interested in another subject: developing a new – and presumably beefed-up – definition of transphobia.