Weekly update 18/1/2014

This week began with Labour announcing plans to introduce re-validation for teachers. The initial reaction was fairly scathing - illustrated by Andrew Old's blog. Over the following few days a wider range of views emerged from John Blake's strong defence to David Weston and Jonathan Simons' more cautious welcomes. Later in the week David Didau illustrated one of the problems with the setting of criteria for teachers with a superb condemnation of the cult of the outstanding lesson.

The second half of the week saw the North of England education conference incongruously held in Nottingham. Tristram Hunt, Michael Wilshaw and David Laws all made speeches on fairly similar themes - the quality of teachers; training and professional development. I enjoyed Tom Bennett's punchy overview of the Hunt and Wilshaw speeches.

The ongoing saga of Wilshaw's battle within Ofsted to prevent inspectors grading schools down because they don't like the style of teaching took another twist when they removed six newly published inspection reports from their website. According to Ofsted this is because of concerns about "poor wording" in light of the new, stronger, guidance on this issue. It will be very interesting to see how the reports change when republished.

But my favourite thing this week was this fantastic quote tweeted by Loic Menzies (@LKMCO) and taken from Charles Payne's "So Much Reform, So Little Change":

"Give them teaching that is determined, energetic and engaging. Hold them to high standards. Expose them to as much as you can most especially the arts. Root the school in the community and take advantage of the culture the children bring with them. Pay attention to their social and ethical development. Recognise the reality of race, poverty and other social barriers but make children understand that barriers don’t have to limit their lives. Above all, no matter where in the social structure children are coming from, act as if their possibilities are boundless."

Amen to that.

Other Highlights:

Michael Tidd has a useful overview of the new primary curriculum.

Tessa Matthews asks: Why doesn't Darren think he'll ever leave the estate? 

Erlend Berg reviews a worrying new study showing summer born children have a significantly greater chance of developing mental health problems.

Andy Jolley continues to make some strong arguments against the introduction of universal free school meals.

Ros McMullan on fiery form re: teaching and leadership. 

Chris Husbands on the lessons of Tower Hamlet's success.

Laura McInerney blogged on all seven of her "touchpaper problems" due to be discussed at an event today (18/1/14).

Rob Coe on the Government's failure to implement Assessment for Learning.

And the EEF have launched a £1.5m fund to improve links between research and practice.

What makes a school exceptional?

At Teach First we partner with a very wide variety of schools -the only factor that connects them is having a large number of pupils living in poverty. Some are struggling or in the early stages of improvement; others are exceptional.

Last year we commissioned a report comparing some of those exceptional schools with those getting results closer to the national average. We wanted to know what kind of support our participants were getting in the very best schools that might be replicable in others.

However the question has significance well beyond Teach First. So, even though this was commissioned as an internal report, I've decided to make it available more widely. Curee - the research agency that produced the report - kindly agreed to edit the findings slightly to make them less Teach First specific.

Before going on to some of the report's key messages it's important to say that this was a qualitative study with a small sample size (six exceptional schools and six others). There are some really interesting themes to reflect on but nothing in the report "proves" anything. This kind of study is perfect at raising questions for further investigation.

The full report can be found here. (The schools getting average results are described as "strong" because getting average results with a high-poverty demographic can't fairly be called "average").

Some of the bits I found most interesting...


The clearest finding is the value of professional development which won't be a surprise to many:

"In particular, the exceptional schools appear to have invested consistently in mentor training, not just for senior teachers and leaders. Several also provided additional mentors for specific purposes or projects. There was less mention of systematic, cross-school mentor training amongst the strong schools. In the exceptional schools group there was more evidence of a two-pronged approach: on the one hand teachers were required to participate in sustained professional learning around whole-school foci such as literacy or marking and assessment and to embed learning into practice; on the other, teachers were encouraged to identify additional and individual priorities as part of a development plan, usually (but not wholly) linked to the performance appraisal system and focused on student achievement targets." 


A focus on subject knowledge was a feature at most of the exceptional schools:

"In at least four of the exceptional schools, subject knowledge was regarded as very important across the school– and the schools consistently used subject specialists to support subject knowledge development: "[We] are a participant in the Princes Teaching Institute’s schools programme...Not many schools are involved in the programme. It’s the only thing that attempts to build subject knowledge"; "Where there are gaps internally, the school uses an external AST...subject teachers are also partnered with teachers in other schools. We have applied for funding to develop English, maths, science subject knowledge and have a partnership with the Institute of Physics to develop subject knowledge"...In other exceptional schools teachers generally felt subject knowledge to be important: "It’s vital to give depth and breadth, if you don’t know your subject how can you teach it?"; "Subject knowledge excellence is imperative. The teacher needs to break down knowledge for someone else." 

But in the "strong" schools...

"leaders and teachers firmly believed that it is pedagogic expertise rather than specialist (subject) expertise that matters." 


The exceptional schools were more prescriptive:

"Evidence about teaching and learning from the two groups seems to indicate that most of the exceptional schools were more prescriptive when it came to identifying and promoting effective pedagogy. There was also evidence that some of the strong schools were moving closer to this approach. Teaching and learning policies or frameworks in these exceptional schools explicitly articulated evidence-based good practice and usually contained plenty of suggestions for (e.g.) starters and plenaries, questioning, peer and self assessment etc."


Finally the exceptional schools seemed to have a different attitude towards leadership:

"Attitudes towards leadership seemed to the authors to differ between the two groups of schools. In exceptional schools the development and use of talent at whatever age and stage of development was seen as a major driver of quality and an issue to be pursued and nurtured with care and attention. By contrast, in strong schools attitudes to leadership tended to be more traditionally hierarchical and experience based. These more marked distinctions were rather less expected and development of these approaches in strong schools might require a re-evaluation and refinements to current beliefs and modes of operation." 

 
There's lots more in the report. Definitely worth a read.

Weekly round-up - 11th January 2014

The number of outstanding education blogs has grown exponentially over the last year. It can be pretty hard to keep track of everything. So I've decided to try and collate the best stuff I've seen during the week every Saturday. Obviously this will be subjective - and depend on what I've read - so if your brilliant blog isn't included it's probably just because I've missed it.

This week a major theme has been the validity of lesson observation and the importance of making reliable judgements about teacher performance. Professor Rob Coe wrote a superb piece looking at the statistical reliability of observations and some of the psychological reasons we might have more confidence in our judgement than is justified. He will be speaking about this at an event I'm hosting with the Teacher Development Trust on Monday evening. Tickets have all gone but you can watch via livestream if you sign-up here.

On the same theme Dan Willingham blogged about a fascinating study showing that students perform worse in schools where headteachers do "informal learning walks". However, they perform better when headteachers spend their time coaching teachers.

On Friday evening Labour announced they were looking at re-licensing teachers every five years - if that policy is going to work we will need to find reliable ways to make judgements (Andrew Old isn't keen - I basically agree with David Weston). The same is true of performance related pay. Policy Exchange published a thoughtful report about that at the end of last week. And David Thomas wrote an equally thoughtful blog in response.

This week also saw the launch of Tough Young Teachers. A documentary following six Teach First teachers - five of them in their first year. The programme has been watched by 2 million people - which given BBC3's usual audience is astonishing. As someone tweeted during the programme: teaching is clearly the new rock and roll. My favourite follow-up blogs were Tom Bennett's review and Laura McInerney's five lessons for new teachers.

Other Highlights:

Tom Loveless asking some very difficult questions for the OECD about Shanghai's PISA performance

David Weston's 10 commandments of successful innovation

John Tomsett with a lovely blog about why family comes first.

Tessa Matthews with a super series of blogs about (anonymous) children she's taught. Here's Luke, Emmy and Jay.

Is this plagiarism?

So I noticed some similarities between my earlier blog on today's PISA results and Wednesday morning's Times leader column.

Below I've quoted the leader column followed by the similar line from my blog in italics.

Plagiarism or sloppiness?


"Economies such as Brazil, Indonesia, Mexico and Turkey are starting to educate their populations better too, especially in reading."

"The charts below show the countries that have consistently improved in reading...what stands out is the number of "emerging economies" in this group like Brazil; Indonesia; Mexico and Turkey."


"The same is true of many of the former Warsaw Pact countries such as Estonia, Poland, Russia and Hungary, all of which are improving quickly."

"We can also see big improvements in many of the former USSR/Warsaw Pact countries like Estonia, Poland, Russia and Hungary."


"The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) points out that nations in the Far East do well because they have a cultural fixation with hard work rather than any innate ability."

"The OECD argue that the single biggest reason why the Far East does so well is that they do not have the fixation with innate ability that many Western countries have."


"Many of the most improved nations, such as Estonia, Mexico and Israel, have recently been making their entry criteria to the teaching profession tougher."

"Many of the most improved countries like Estonia, Mexico and Israel have been toughening entry criteria to the profession"


"The countries that do well have, without exception, what the OECD calls “system stability”.

"Most [successful countries] have "system stability"


That last one's a bit of a giveaway - I use the phrase "system stability" but it doesn't appear anywhere in the OECD report...

10 Things You Should Know About PISA

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1. PISA isn't precise but isn't useless either. No methodology designed to compare countries with completely different cultures and education systems will ever be perfect. The OECD acknowledge that their rankings aren't exact and it makes more sense to look at buckets of countries who have similar scores:

It may be that they're underplaying the statistical issues with the tests (see Professor David Spiegelhalter's concerns here). But that doesn't mean that PISA is worthless. In fact it's far more reliable (along with the other global tests - TIMSS and PIRLS) than any other method of comparison. While we shouldn't rely on the exact rankings we can look at broad trends - especially over time.


2. PISA tests something quite specific. The questions PISA uses are applied - i.e. are focused on using literacy and numeracy in "everyday" situations. Some education systems focus their curriculum more on this type of learning than others. By contrast TIMSS tests whether pupils have mastered specific knowledge and skills which, again, some systems focus on more than others. The UK and US do much better in TIMSS than PISA - and always have.

So with those caveats...

3. The UK is very very average. In Maths and Reading there's no statistically significant difference between the UK and the OECD average. Even on each individual question type (subscales) in Maths the UK is bang on average. Only in Science is the UK slightly above average - as it was last time. There is also no real change from the previous round of PISA. The UK's science score is exactly the same as last time; while Maths and Reading have seen a fractional but not significant improvement. As the graph below shows the UK is one of fairly large group of countries that have seen no meaningful change over the past ten years. All those policies; all those rows and  - at least on what PISA measures - no change.

4. The Far East is dominant. Far Eastern countries have always done well in PISA but they are moving away from everyone else. The top seven jurisdictions in Maths are all Far Eastern (though four of the seven are cities or city-states). Shanghai's 15 year olds are now a full three years ahead of the OECD average - and thus the UK - in Maths (40 points translates roughly into one year of learning). Also look, in the table below, at the number of "top performers" in Shanghai compared to the OECD average:

It's worth noting that there are some question marks about Shanghai's performance. For instance they exclude the children of migrant workers. And of course Shanghai is not China. If you plucked London out of the UK it would almost certainly do better than the country average.


5. Scandinavia is in decline. One of the big stories from this PISA dataset is Finland's significant drop - especially in Maths. They've actually been declining over the past few iterations but the drop this time is much bigger. In fact they're one of only four countries where Maths scores are falling at an accelerating pace (see chart below on the left). But something broader is happening in Scandinavia. If you look at the chart on the right you can see Denmark, Sweden and Iceland have been falling steadily over the past ten years too. Norway has remained static over the same period. Given these countries have fairly different policy environments there may be demographic factors at play here - for instance increasing immigration could be making these countries less socially homogenous.

6. The emerging economies are on the rise. The charts below show the countries that have consistently improved in reading since 2000. While there's a mix of different countries; what stands out is the number of "emerging economies" in this group like Brazil; Indonesia; Mexico and Turkey. These countries are starting from a low base and still do considerably worse than the UK and other developed nations but their rapid improvement is encouraging from the perspective of global prosperity. Often the improvement in these countries is a result of getting more children into school and keeping them their longer. Between 2000 and 2011 the number of children not in school, globally, fell by almost half. We can also see big improvements in many of the former USSR/Warsaw Pact countries like Estonia, Poland, Russia and Hungary. The former two are now among the best performers in Europe.

7. National scores hide huge regional variations. Some countries run the tests in such a way as to allow sub-regions to be given separate scores. The differences are often startling. For instance the Trento region in the north of Italy would be in the top ten globally for Maths if it was a country but pupils in Calabria in the south are around two and half years behind. Likewise in Australia pupils in the Capital Territory (i.e. Canberra) are almost two years ahead of those in the Northern Territory (where many indigenous Australians live). And Flemish Belgium does miles better than French Belgium. In the next PISA we'll be able to see England by region and we can expect to see London and the South-East outperforming other areas. We can already see Wales significantly underperforming the rest of the United Kingdom - the gap's got fractionally larger since last time.

8. There are some policies that many of the "rising" countries seem to share. One of the trickiest things about PISA is making causal links between specific policies and changes in countries' scores. It's very hard to not just cherry-pick examples that support one's existing views. There do seem to be, though, some strong themes around the most successful and most improved countries. One is selection - Germany and Poland are both reducing selection in their systems and have seen improvements and a reduction in the impact of socio-economic status on performance. Singapore is really the only high-performing country to have any selection in their system. A focus on the status of teaching does also seem to be important. This has always been true in the Far East but many of the most improved countries like Estonia, Mexico and Israel have been toughening entry criteria to the profession; raising teacher pay and improving access to professional development. Most successful countries also seem to give a reasonable amount of autonomy to schools. And most have "system stability" - i.e. they have planned reforms backed by much of the system taking place over an extended period of time; rather than constant, uncoordinated, changes.

9. High expectations are absolutely key. The OECD argue that the single biggest reason why the Far East does so well is that they do not have the fixation with innate ability that many Western countries have (yes I'm looking at you Boris). As they put it:

"The PISA 2012 assessment dispels the widespread notion that mathematics achievement is mainly
a product of innate ability rather than hard work. On average across all countries, 32% of 15-year-olds do not reach the baseline Level 2 on the PISA mathematics scale (24% across OECD countries), meaning that those students can perform –at best – routine mathematical procedures following direct instructions. But in Japan and Korea, fewer than 10% of students – and in Shanghai-China, fewer than 4% of students – do not reach this level of proficiency. In these education systems, high expectations for all students are not a mantra but a reality; students who start to fall behind are identified quickly, their problems are promptly and accurately diagnosed, and the appropriate course of action for improvement is quickly taken."
 
10. There's loads more interesting stuff. The above points are all taken from Volume 1 of the PISA report. There are another five volumes that will need to be trawled for further insights. Volume 2 is particularly important because it looks at the impact of socio-economic status (SES) on performance. Again SES seems to explain an average amount of the UK's variation but in the most successful countries it plays much less of a role.


Here's the link to the full report: bit.ly/PISA2012

What next for Ofsted?

Ofsted isn't going to be abolished (nor should it be)

A few weeks ago Old Andrew wrote a typically incisive, and popular, post explaining why he felt Ofsted are now beyond redemption and should be abolished.

That isn't going to happen. Ofsted is absolutely essential to the regulatory model the coalition Government have constructed. Failing academies and free schools can only be shut down on the basis of a poor inspection - there's no other legal mechanism (unless they mess up their finances or do something illegal). Likewise the Teaching School / National Leader of Education processes rely on Ofsted identifying outstanding schools.

And as Andrew notes in this post there's no indication that Labour would behave differently. If anything they envisage a bigger role - in recent weeks Tristram Hunt has argued for separate inspection of academy chains.

But even if the politicians were arguing in favour of abolition - and some way was found to deal with all the structural problems that would create - I'd be opposed. One of the OECD's clearest findings from PISA is that the worst type of education systems are those with high autonomy and low accountability (conversely the best are high autonomy and high accountability). While it may not feel like it to classroom teachers we have one of the highest autonomy systems in the world. Most secondary schools now have control of their own curriculum; nearly all funding in the system is passed directly to schools; teacher training is increasingly run through schools too.

So while I think there are lots of ways we can make our accountability system smarter I don't think we should be removing a key mechanism for holding schools to account. If we did then we'd be left with exam data as the only basis for accountability. Yet we know that schools can game test-based accountability by choosing easier options; focusing on certain pupils; or simply spending a lot of time cramming. While I've never been to a great school getting bad exam results; I have been to bad schools that get decent results. We have to have a way to check the quality of education on offer that goes beyond gameable data. There's a reason that most countries have some form of school inspection (and many of those that didn't have introduced inspectorates over the past decade).

That doesn't mean there isn't a problem

Although I think Ofsted needs to be an important component of our regulatory system I recognise the validity of many of the criticisms (and wrote about them here). This is not just the standard whinging you'd expect from any profession about its regulator.

There are two separate but related issues.

First a percentage of inspectors are not following the framework. They are insisting on seeing certain types of teaching in lesson inspections. It's unclear how large this percentage is but there are enough "rogue" inspectors to leave school leaders uncertain about how to prepare for inspections. That means many schools are doing things that are not required by the framework - and go against the spirit of that framework's intentions - because they don't know what "type" of inspector they are going to get.

Secondly lesson observations have limited validity - even if being done properly. Professor Rob Coe gives the technical details in these slides. But it's actually pretty obvious that in most cases it won't be possible to accurately tell how good a teacher is from a single 20 minute observation - even if it's done well. It's also hard not to let prejudices slip into judgements.

Katie Ashford explained here how teachers should approach an inspection of their lesson - and a good inspector like Mary Myatt will respond well to that. But it's understandable that many feel this is a risky strategy and end up teaching to what they think Ofsted wants to see rather than what's in the best interest of their class.

So what needs to change?

The first, fairly obvious thing, is to stop grading individual lessons. It's not clear at all what the benefit of doing this is given the lack of validity.  It would be possible to build greater validity around observations but would require multiple observations by people rigorously trained in the same scoring system. And that's too expensive and complex for Ofsted to introduce.

Scrapping individual lesson judgements would significantly reduce the problems Ofsted causes. Teachers would feel under less pressure to deliver a specific type of "outstanding" lesson; they wouldn't feel unfairly judged when their lesson gets a grade 3 or 4; and schools wouldn't feel so bound to using Ofsted grades in their own lesson inspections (and could move away from scored observations all together).

It wouldn't reduce the validity of the overall inspection as the lesson judgements aren't particularly valid anyway.

Instead inspections should focus more on systems. Essentially Ofsted should be looking at what the school is doing to ensure consistent good teaching. They should be inspecting the school's quality assurance not trying to do the quality assurance themselves in the space of two days (good inspectors will see this as their role already - but it's nowhere near explicit enough).

In their observations of lessons they should be checking the leadership know their teachers and understand how best to support their future development. They should be checking that they have thought about professional development and about performance management (which shouldn't have to involve performance-related pay). They should be seeing if the behaviour policy is being enforced; and if the school curriculum is actually being used. This blog does a good job of showing how that might work in practice.

I'm not sure there even needs to be an overall grade for teaching. After all if the leadership's good (because there's consistent practice across the school) and the attainment is good then the teaching will, almost by default, be good too. Likewise if the leadership is poor then the school isn't good even if there are pockets of excellent teaching (as there nearly always are in bad schools).

In addition to this simple, if bold, change Ofsted should make use of their new regional structure to announce a full reset so that everyone in the system - inspectors and schools - have a shared understanding of the purpose of inspection. This could involve, for example, retraining all inspectors alongside representatives from local schools; licensing inspectors through published exams; banning lead inspectors from acting as consultants and, as Rob Coe suggests, introducing transparent and independent processes for quality assuring inspections. This would need to be communicated via a major campaign from Ofsted, DfE, and, ideally, Head's associations.

Perhaps this wouldn't be enough to restore everyone's confidence in inspection but I'd much rather try to improve what we have than push the system into total reliance on test data.

 

75 education people you should follow

One of the most frequent conversations I have is people asking me who they should follow on twitter. This is my attempt to answer. It is, of course, a highly subjective list based on people I enjoy following. But the people here represent a wide range of views / opinions. Follow this lot and you'll get a feel for the debate; as well as a good stream of useful links and some great blogs.

The list is ordered alphabetically in categories. The * indicates they also have a blog that's worth reading.

 

Academics and Writers

Annie Murphy Paul: Author of the forthcoming book Brilliant: The Science of How We Get Smarter

Becky Allen*: Reader in Economics of Education at Institute of Education. Quant wizard.

Becky Francis: Professor of Education and Social Justice at King's College.

Chris Husbands*: Director of the Institute of Education

Dan Willingham: Cognitive Psychologist and Author of Why Don't Students Like School?

Daisy Christodolou*: Research and Development manager at ARK, Author, super-smart.

David Weston*: Former teacher, Chief Executive of the Teacher Development Trust

Dylan William: Professor, expert in assessment and curriculum

Gifted Phoenix: (Not his real name) Education policy analyst specialising gifted and talented

Graham Birrell: Senior Lecturer in Education at Christchurch Canterbury

Laura McInerney*: Former teacher, blogger, columnist, complete genius if a bit too Fabian.

Loic Menzies*: Researcher, Author, Blogger, Teacher Trainer.

Martin Robinson: Author and teacher trainer

Rob Coe: Professor of Education at Durham

 

Headteachers

Duncan Spalding: Norfolk Headteacher

John Tomsett*: Headteacher in York

Geoff Barton: Head in Suffolk. Frequent tweeter, occasional blogger, not a big fan of Ofqual.

Liam Collins: Head in East Sussex

Rachel de Souza: CEO of the Inspiration Trust; a forward thinking academy chain in East Anglia

Ros McMullen: Principal of David Young Community Academy in Leeds.

Tom Sherrington*: One of the best blogging heads

Journalists

Ann Mroz: Editor of the Times Education Supplement

Greg Hurst: Education Editor at The Times

Helen Warrell: Covers education for the Financial Times

Jonn Elledge: Editor of Education Investor Magazine. More left wing than that makes him sound.

Michael Shaw: Director of TESPro

Nick Linford: Editor of FE Week

Reeta Chakrabati: BBC Education Correspondent

Richard Adams: Education Editor at the Guardian

Sanchia Berg: BBC education specialist; currently on Newsnight

Sean Coughlan: BBC online education correspondent

Sian Griffiths: Education Editor at the Sunday Times

Toby Young: Free School Founder, columnist, provocateur.

Warwick Mansell*: Guardian Education Diarist, freelancer, blogger.

William Stewart: Reporter at the Times Education Supplement

Policy and Politics 

Andrew Adonis: Former education Minister and Author

Brett Wigdortz: CEO of Teach First and my boss.

Conor Ryan: Former adviser to David Blunkett and Tony Blair. Now at Sutton Trust.

Dominic Cummings: Former Special Adviser to Michael Gove

Fiona Millar: Columnist and campaigner for comprehensives; former adviser to Cherie Blair.

Gabriel Sahlgren: Research Director at the Centre for Market Reform of Education.

Gerard Kelly: Former Editor of the Times Education Supplement.

Graham Stuart: Chair of the Education Select Committee

Jonathan Clifton: Senior Research Fellow at IPPR, working on education and youth policy.

Jonathan Simons: Head of Education at Policy Exchange. Ex-cabinet office.

Michael Barber: Chief Education Advisor at Pearson. Former Head of the PM’s Delivery Unit.

Pasi Sahlberg: Finnish education expert - author of Finnish Lessons

Robert Hill*: Former adviser to Charles Clarke and Tony Blair. Currently advising Welsh Govt.

Stephen Tall*: Development Director at the Education Endowment Foundation

Tim Leunig: DfE Director of Research

Tom Richmond: Policy Adviser to Nick Boles

Tristram Hunt: Shadow Secretary of State for Education

Teachers

Alex Quigley*: Subject Leader of English & Assistant Head. One of my favourite bloggers.

Alex Weatherall: Science / Computer Science teacher

Andrew Old*: Anonymous teacher; caustic, brilliant, blogger and Man of Mystery

David Didau*: Teacher, Author and one of the most popular teacher bloggers.

Debra Kidd*: AST for Pedagogy, formerly Senior Lecturer in Education, MMU.

Harry Fletcher-Wood*: History teacher and CPD leader at Greenwich Free School.

Harry Webb*: Ex-pat Brit teaching in Australia. Great, analytic, blogger.

Katie Ashford*: Secondary English teacher

Keven Bartle*: Senior Leader and entertaining blogger

Kristopher Boulton*: Maths teacher at ARK King Solomon Academy

James Theobold: English teacher. Funny.

Jo (readingthebooks)*: Head of English in a London school.

Joe Kirby*: English teacher + prolific blogger

John Blake*: History teacher and Editor of Labour Teachers

Lee Donaghy*: Senior Leader at Parkview school, Birmingham.

Michael Merrick*: Teacher of many subjects and professional contrarian.

Michael Tidd*: Sussex middle school teacher (KS2) and blogger

Micon Metcalfe: Business Manager at Dunraven School. Edu-finance queen.

Red or Green Pen?*: Anonymous Maths teacher and great blogger

Stuart Lock*: Deputy Headteacher

Tessa Matthews*: Pseudonym for a English teacher + super blogger.

Thomas Starkey*: FE English teacher

Tom Bennett*: Teacher, Blogger, Author, ResearchED Founder, Scot.

And of course...

SchoolDuggery: Queen of Education on twitter; unclassifiable. Must follow.