Mrs P

Every teacher should spend a term in eyfs: the thoughts behind the tweet. #edutwitter #teachertwitter #EYFS #education tes.com/news/why-every…

@veg_plotter Such a great way to keep track of my allotment!

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Traditional Sports Days are ruining sports and exercise for many children. It needs to change. #edutwitter #TinyVoiceTalks #earlyyears #ks1 #ks2

Hhmm 223 views and the likes but no answers. I'm guessing that means there's nothing. Is x dead?

Recommendations needed! OK #edchat #edutwitter I miss the old slt chat events back when X was called twitter 😂 what is out there to fill the void?

@Headteacherchat You've just described me a year ago. I left the classroom because of the 'it is what it is and can't be changed' attitude. Gave up the salary and job security to get rid of the working conditions! Don't assume it's just moaning. My story is not unique!

Anon post: Anyone else completely exhausted trying to please all staff? Workload IS high across the profession - we do a lot to ease it but I’m getting so tired of the almost martyrdom of a small number of younger staff who constantly moan about how late they’ve worked, yet spend a lot of time chatting in the staff room during the day. We are all working hard. We get paid a good salary and have job security. Rant over.

@DavidNautilus1 Wales allows 2 weeks discretionary allowance for in school time holidays in Primary school. Why can’t England?

@gublet @CrowtherSim Ditto this. The number of children attending who wear nappies on starting school or have significant toileting issues has been creeping up for years!

Sorry. What? Pardon? One in four school-starters in England and Wales not toilet-trained, say teachers theguardian.com/education/2024…

It means you think carefully about the prerequisite skills the children need to develop at the stage they’re in. We’re obsessed with “readiness” but children are human beings not human becomings (Qvortrup) and we need to respect, acknowledge and meet their current needs, not

Having high expectations and ambitions doesn’t mean you have to take stuff from the curriculum in the next key stage and do it earlier. It means you give children rich, deep meaningful and appropriate learning experiences with challenge appropriate to their stage of development.

@MrBoothY6 Haha oh the pain! 😂

This has absolutely seen me off on the Year 5/6 teachers group on Facebook. Properly cracked up.

Whenever I talk about the effects that school can have on some children’s mental health, I’m told that there are many other reasons why our young people are distressed. Family problems, social media, inequality, substance misuse, trauma, poverty. It’s true, I couldn’t be a psychologist and be unaware of how difficult the lives of some young people are. However, school is different to those things. It’s provided for young people by the state. It’s a deliberate intervention into childhood. It is designed to prepare young people for adult life. That means that it’s an opportunity for young people to experience something different. It can be something which counter balances the other stuff going on in their lives. Somewhere where they can learn to feel capable and valued, even if that isn’t what they get at home. Somewhere where they can learn that relationships can be supportive and that others care about them. Some schools are like this for some young people. They prioritise relationships and well-being. Others are not, particularly for the young people who don’t comply with school expectations. They get into a cycle of increasingly heavy sanctions which don’t address their difficulties but make them feel worse about themselves and their capacity to do well. Those young people are seen as disruptive and non-compliant, as difficult. I’m sometimes told not to waste my sympathy on them, better to focus on the others whose education they are disrupting. The thing is, those young people are not going anywhere. They are here with us and they have their whole lives ahead of them. They might be excluded from one school, but they’ll turn up in another. School can make all the difference to them, either way. So when I hear about the distress which school causes some young people in the therapy room, I don’t think it’s the same as inequality, or poverty, or all the other things which go on in a teenager’s life. It’s a deliberate intervention into children’s lives, and it’s an opportunity to make a difference. Especially for those who aren’t going to be the academic successes. Those young people will always exist, the challenge is to work out how they can emerge from school without having learnt to think about themselves as failures. For if we’re going to make them go to school, so the least we owe them is to make it somewhere that they can thrive.

@aelfrea @MichaelRosenYes Would 🙃

@aelfrea @MichaelRosenYes Wouldn't work unless the current overburdened, pressured and rushed curriculum changes. The books wild be there, the time and culture would not.

We need to work backwards from a child reading a book. How does the book get to the child? How do we help and pay people to get the book to the child? What places do we need to do that? What conversations help? How do we remove obstacles that hinder getting books to children?

@little_mavis @SwailesRuth @Dr_Pam_Jarvis @educationgovuk THIS! I thought this was madness.

1/5 people working in the EY sector don’t hold suitable and relevant qualifications. > half of LAs don’t have sufficient child care places to meet current demand, the number of childminders has halved since 2010. The sector is in absolute crisis. @educationgovuk response?

@JTavassolyMarsh Should say 'tough' not 'tight'. Predictive got me.

@JTavassolyMarsh I suspect this might have a lot to do with the changes in education. Since covid workload is up, pay is a constant dispute, funding is dire, pupils and families want a more nurturing and supportive environment and teachers are stuck with an increasingly heavy timetable...

I really miss the EduTwitter of 2014 to 2020. For me, that was when people shared freely their ideas, resources, tips etc. People were respectful and kind. Now it just feels like people are gunning for each other. Just scroll by if it doesn't fit you or your context.

@JTavassolyMarsh In short, it's been a tight few years with many of us jumping ship and this stress is reflected on #edutwitter. Happy teachers are all about L&D. Stressed teachers are all about venting!

@naomicfisher Not saying it's right by the way 😊 but the teens are unhappy, the staff are unhappy and change requires some proper leadership at the top (which our entire country lacks). It's a pressure cooker situation and the strict rules are the lid being jammed on top.

@naomicfisher In England, we are still following a Victorian model of education & the behaviour systems you are talking about are there to make that model work. Without them, it does become difficult to teach. I suspect that that is why you get teacher backlash. The system needs to change.

I’m sometimes told that the high control behaviour strategies which are used in schools are necessary, because otherwise children won’t learn.  Some will say that the best way for children to learn is for their behaviour to be tightly controlled at all times – silent corridors, eyes following the teacher, strict routines, punishments for minor infractions like forgetting a pen. This leads to quiet calm classrooms with no distractions from learning.  Isn’t that better for everyone, they say?    The teachers talk uninterrupted, the children learn. This only makes sense if you see learning as a passive process for children. They submit, they listen, they remember, they repeat.  Learning from this perspective is essentially a process of information transfer from the teacher to the child – a highly controlled classroom makes that transfer more efficient, goes the logic. This is not the only way to see learning.  Children are active participants in learning, right from babyhood.  They ask questions, they test out their ideas. They explore and make discoveries. Their play mimics the world they see around them.  They are born to learn – but only when they are empowered to do so.  When we clip their wings by controlling every aspect of their behaviour, their capacity to learn is reduced.  For we’ve now made learning about listening and doing what you are told. These are rarely where children’s strengths lie. We have to look underneath.  For under the peace of that quiet classroom can be fear.  I know this because young people tell me. Fear of saying a word out of place. Fear of forgetting your homework.  Fear of asking your neighbour for help and being heard.   Fear that this time you’ll get it wrong and you’ll be shamed for it.  And being afraid is never a good way to learn. (illustration Eliza Fricker @_MissingTheMark)

@_MrLevick Been shouting this for a long time about the phonics. Lovely to hear it reported in real life 😊 I still can't believe that the training in phonics is so rudimentary in teacher training and non existent in secondary!