sign in subscribe help upload home 

There was a good quote yesterday from Sir Terry Leahy, chief executive of Tesco, on efficiency in schools. He’s not running education, and has no say on how budgets are spent, but as one of the largest employers of school leavers his views should count for something.

“One thing that government could do is to simplify the structure of our education system. From my perspective there are too many agencies and bodies, often issuing reams of instructions to teachers, who then get distracted from the task at hand: teaching children.
“At Tesco we try to keep paperwork to a minimum; instructions simple; structures flat; and – above all – we trust the people on the ground. I am not saying that retail is like education, merely that my experience tells me that when it comes to the number of people you have in the back office, ‘less is more’,” he said.

Whatever you think about Tesco’s takeover of British retailing, you have to admit they know something about efficient organisation and lean management. For a company like Tesco, every unnecessary form-filler in the back office is an extra few pence on your loaf of bread. The same is true in schools; it just isn’t so obvious. Every extra pound spent by central government on ‘initiatives’ and advisors is one less pound going into teaching and teaching resources.

At Teachable we simply believe that every pound of the billions spent on schools each year should count, and that procuring teaching resources from teachers directly is by far the most efficient way spending this bit of the budget.

There’s lots in the news today picking up a survey by the Local Government Association showing a shortage of state school places, supposedly because the recession is forcing privately-educated pupils into the state sector.

We don’t think that’s true.

The reality, and contrary to what we predicted last autumn, is that private schools in the UK are doing OK. An Economist report pointed out that numbers of pupils at independent schools is steady this year. Parents try hard not to change schools if they possibly can … but may think twice about starting pre-school children in a fee-paying school. So, in the 1990s, the number of independent school places didn’t drop until 3 years AFTER the recession, and then only by around 3%.

What is happening is that the demographics of the UK are changing. Only one fifth of councils in the LGA survey reported a shortage of places, and these are likely to be in central London. More immigration of young adults into London over the last 10 years had lead to a boom in pre-school children, which will rapidly increase inner-city demand for primary places. Visa versa, schools in Merseyside have up to 25% surplus places as the population ages and young families move out the area.

The upshot is that more provision needs to be made for schools to expand and grow in areas of demand (London and the South East), and merge and shrink in areas of lower demand. This may mean some disruption for teachers, but the alternative is unacceptably high class sizes in already crowded schools in the inner-cities.

We’ve always thought textbooks have had their day, but this view has now been endorsed by no less than Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger.

From the beginning of the next school year in August, maths and science students in California’s high schools will have access to online texts that have passed an academic standards review, rather than buy any new textbooks.

‘Online teaching resources for maths and science texts that have passed an academic standards review’ … that sounds a bit like Teachable; and we include interactive whiteboard content as well.

The key reason is that textbooks are no longer thought to be good value for money. California spends approximately $350m on teaching resources, and is facing a big budget deficit – a bit like the UK. If education authorities are forced to cut either staff or textbooks, then most schools and parents would rather keep the staff. And that choice may soon come to the UK, which spends around £350m on equivalent materials.

So, although not all schools are equipped to make best use of fully online resources, the move towards Quality Assured online content is speeding up.

Textbooks are going. And no, they won’t Be Back.

Working weekends, heaps of paperwork… really needing a drink when you get home.  That’s not what you got into teaching for.  So have a read of our top tips from teachers who have got on top of their work load, and have found ways to beat the stress without compromising their careers.

1. Be organised

What stresses teachers out most is the feeling of not knowing where to start on a long list of overdue work.  Planning out what needs to be done well in advance will help you give time to the things that you are really judged on (e.g. coursework and assessments for your class).

“Try and stick to marking and planning routines and create a to-do list for the next day every evening. That way you can visualise each day and week as achievable parts rather than looking at it as an insurmountable term ahead of you.” (George Burrell, a former geography teacher in London)

“Get a wall planner and map out when you have assessments for your classes and department, and when the crunch points in the year are going to be.  Make sure you can free up time over those peak periods.” (Paul O’Dwyer, an english teacher in London)

2. Plan properly but efficiently

Planning well may eat into your evenings, but it will reduce your stress levels on the day.  Well prepared, fun, and interesting lessons are the best way to avoid poor behavior in class. Engaged students are much less likely to act out than bored ones.  The trick is to find efficient ways to prepare.

“After a year of teaching I had a bank of PowerPoint templates and resources for every lesson. These could be easily adjusted and improved on the following year and this saved loads of time. I think there are a lot of teachers who are perfectionists. Apply the 80 – 20 rule. Get most lessons 80% right. The last 20% is where you can waste most of the time.” (George)

Sometimes, preparation has got to give to allow for other school commitments.  You need to have some backup ideas for when you just have not had time to prepare for the class.

“I did became reasonably adept at the ‘50 yard lesson’ (aka preparing while walking the distance from office to classroom door), but I really think there is no excuse for having nothing prepared. Always have some general backup material, quizes or ‘research’ tasks that you can just hand out.” (David, a former science teacher)

3. Share resources with others
   

Stressed teachers are increasingly turning to curriculum resource sharing sites to get fresh ideas for their classes, and saving time on sourcing images and interactive material for the whiteboard.  Downloading a resource template can enable you to spend the time on actual teaching, rather than aligning PowerPoint slides.

“There is great classroom-proven material already being shared by savvy teachers on Teachable.net.  We think it makes perfect sense for these files to be download and adapted by other teachers, rather than being created from scratch every time.  Of course, it is possible to waste many hours searching on Google, so we pride ourselves on a  quick and reliable way to find what you need, when you need.”  (Edward Upton, Teachable.net)

“The challenge is finding the time to trawl through resource sites… although it usually pays off when you do develop the habit- greater variety is always a boon to my poor bored classes!  I have found sites such as Teachable.net a real life saver at times.” (Charlie, a science teacher in Oxfordshire)
 

4. Delegate where you can
   

When you start taking on extra duties outside of teaching, try to be realistic about what you do not need to do personally.  Most classroom assistants would happily take on more of the lesson preparation, providing you agree on a clear plan to follow.

“Being able to tell colourful stories using makeshift props lying about in the classroom is a great skill, but it is no substitute for real preparation. Good lesson plans and activities can be passed to an assistant in advance, and it is great to arrive in the room to find a pile of exciting bits-and-pieces on the desk, along well as good pre-printed worksheets.” (David, a former science teacher)

It is even possible to delegate a bit of task back to the students themselves, and actually up engagement into the bargain.

“Homework setting is a bane of the teachers life.  If you just can’t cope with more marking, try setting a ‘revision task’.  There is no way to measure if the students have completed it, and thus no need for the customary ten phone calls home chasing the work and then a further hour in their company at detention.  The clever bit:  use the joyous two words “peer assessment” to get the class to mark their own answers and see learning through the eyes of the teacher.” (Doug, a former business studies teacher)

5. Learn to say no!

Most teachers have plenty of work to do just with teaching and preparation, so the quality of their lessons can drop when they take on management responsibilities. Even if you are very ambitious, make sure you do not take on more responsibilities than you can manage.

Paul O’Dwyer, who has been teaching for 6 years, thinks the biggest problem for younger teachers is getting roped into too many extra duties; “You can’t say yes to everything.” 

“You need to work out from day one what responsibilities you can fit in alongside your teaching.  Make sure you volunteer up front, even in your first interview with the head, for the areas you would like to be involved in, and that this becomes reality in your first few weeks.  It is much harder to say no if you wait to be volunteered.”

6. Get a life / work balance

It is a myth that successful careers demand that you sacrifice all other aspects of your life.  Successful people are generally busy making sure they get their work done early so they can get on and enjoy other activities.  Make sure you carve out time for hobbies, exercise and family & friends.  There is only so much work you can do in a day;  get away from school on a regular basis, not just in holiday time, otherwise your work stresses will become all consuming.

“I rarely worked at home. I would prefer to stay late at school rather than take work home. Some people prefer to take marking home, but make sure that work doesn’t hang over you;  assign a specific time for working. If you don’t unwind properly you will find lack of sleep and little niggles quickly get you down!” (George)

For more time saving resource ideas, take a look around our site.

Teaching is more than just educating; sadly, government directives, tests and endless new ‘frameworks’ also fill up the working day.

Creativity though, is what makes every day rewarding for pupils and teachers alike. At Teachable we realise that blue-skies thinking and time for creativity is often squeezed out; by sharing excellent resource files in the online ‘cloud’, teachers harness creative ideas from around the country and save themselves time in creating lessons.

However, we still find scepticism surrounds sharing resource files; it is often seen as cheating or plagiarism. Yet using established, creative, interactive resources crafted by other teachers is the essence of many of the Governments directives. Our resources are edited by professionals and fully adaptable by the teacher.

We do exactly what it says on the tin; helping teachers share resources. And that is why our membership has risen 10 fold over the last year.

Not much was said, apart from the usual line about how much has ALREADY been spent on education over the last 10 years. But my nasty suspicion is that schools funding in the UK over the next 5 years could be in for a big shock. Pencilled-in spending for 2010 is the same for 2009, but this could well change.

Let’s explain why.

Firstly, the government, even by their own estimation, will have borrowed an extra £175bn this year (or over four times what is spent on schools) to fund their shortfall in tax receipts and bank bailouts. Currently, their plans to create a new top rate of tax at 50% will raise only £1bn extra a year… a drop in the ocean. And it is HIGHLY likely without spending cuts now, this debt mountain will grow to over £250bn by 2011.

To really make a dent in paying back this money (let’s say over 10 years), the next government will have to cut some spending. The splurge in government spending over the last 10 years (of which schools were a big beneficiary) was bankrolled by tax on financial companies and their employees. That has gone for good.

Let’s assume the government tries to pay back £25bn a year, and can’t do so by raising taxes. That is a lot of efficiency gains; around 5% of government spending. We are told Building Schools for the Future is sacrosanct, so that leaves a £37bn schools budget to play with, which is mainly teacher salaries.

There is a little footnote that foretells what is in store:

Unit costs for post-16 learners will be subject to a 1 per cent efficiency assumption in 2010-11. (Page 119, Budget report)

And it doesn’t take much imagination to see what that means: either cut staff or freeze pay. There is still plenty of scope to trim some of the quangos that abound in education, but I’m afraid that mainstream schools might share some of the brunt as well.

We can’t all party like its 1999 any more.

The release of Sir Alan Steer’s report into behaviour in schools has sparked debate on two counts.

Firstly, many teachers really do not agree that behavioural standards in school are improving. It’s probably impossible to generalise, but at least in some schools behaviour has got worse.

Secondly, there has been some derision at the idea of improving behaviour using ‘quiz show’ style games, such as Who Wants to be a Millionaire lessons. At Teachable we believe this is already a popular strategy with teachers across the country, judging from our lesson downloads, and could be extended to liven up lessons everywhere.

The most disruptive children will always need some (metaphorical) ‘stick’, but we believe that engaging lessons are a crucial ‘carrot’ the encourage better behaviour.

Many of the examples Sir Alan uses in his report have already been put into practice by Teachable contributors:

Class Bingo

Students play ‘word bingo’. Words in English
are numbered on the board. Students have
a grid of random numbers on paper. The
teacher speaks the words in French and the
students mark them off on their grids. The
winner is the first with a ‘full house’.

Blockbusters

pupils travel across a grid containing initial letters to answers.

And our favourite idea, demonstrated with science concepts, doesn’t need digital resources at all – just post-it notes!

Students are studying ‘refraction and colour’.
Each student sticks an unseen word onto their
forehead, for example dispersion, spectrum,
dye, filter, optical fibre. They have to ask a
partner questions in order to work out what
the word is.

We hope teachers everywhere can boost enthusiasm for their subjects by using these simple, adaptable resources. Teachable.net already has over 200 teachers who have downloaded Who Wants to be a Millionaire, and nearly 1,000 teachers who have made use of our free and exclusive Bubblesplat resource.

Our most recent contribution was a series of whiteboard quizzes based on Battleships, Frogger and that classic 80s quiz show, Bullseye. We encourage teachers to contribute their best examples of fun and interactive lessons, and our collection of 3,000+ files is growing daily.

It is also quite possible to miss, within the 200 page tome of Sir Alan’s report (where ‘achievement’ and ‘development’ are mentioned over 60 times each), that there are some good and practical ideas for starters – both subject specific and general. You can download the 5 page excerpt by clicking on the icon.

It’s the ethical conundrum of our times – do you keep you social and work lives separate on social networks? For teachers, there’s the added problem of getting too close to pupils and letting down your guard. Everyone needs a some kind of work-life separation, and Facebook can seriously erode that.

We’ve been reading about one US teacher who was tracked down by the Washington Post:

Erin Jane Webster, 22, a long-term substitute teacher in Prince William, keeps a page similar to other teachers’. Portions are professional … but click “View Photos of Erin,” and you can see her lying on her back, eyes closed, with a bottle of tequila between her head and shoulder. Or click on her “summertime” photo album and see a close-up of two young men flashing serious-looking middle fingers.

Like several other teachers interviewed, Webster said she thought her page could be seen only by people she accepted as “friends.” But like those of many teachers on Facebook, Webster’s profile was accessible by the more than 525,000 members of the Washington, D.C., network. Anyone can join any geographic network.

The simple motto here is don’t join the open networks on Facebook – but even friends-of-friends can amount to a lot of people.

It gets worse: teachers get fired for derogatory comments on Facebook:

Superintendent Peter Gorman has recommended firing a teacher who listed “teaching chitlins in the ghetto of Charlotte” as one of her activities and drinking as one of her hobbies.

But, as an article in Teacher magazine in the US illustrates, there can be great reasons to link up with former pupils. Locking down all the security settings may be too restrictive for some.

My teaching friends seem to take two different approaches. They can both work, but don’t mix them. Personally, I would go with the first option.

1. Keep Facebook for your personal life
One of the most positive uses of Facebook is to share the fun stuff that goes on in your life, even if it does involve some riske jokes or slightly embarrassing images. If you’re sharing it with your friends, they’ll see it for what it is. So this only works if you change the privacy settings so that only your friends can see any of the photos or messages, and that you can only invite former pupils who are over 18.

• Don’t join any networks
• Lock down your security settings
• Think carefully about including anyone with links to your school / employer in your ‘friends’ list (parents, friends of parents, governors etc)

2. Use Facebook in a limited, controlled way in school
It is possible to run a completely sanitised Facebook page, without links to the rest of your life, that you can allow your older pupils to link to. However, there are two big risks are: you may find out more than you really want to know about our class, and visa versa. Most teenagers are over-relaxed about what they chat publicly about on Facebook, and reading about their dabbling in drink, drugs or sex could open up a whole can of worms. That said, like in real live, it is possible to filter out what you want to hear.

The caveat is that your friends can post photos / comments about you that you can’t control – so opening your Facebook account up to your school depends upon the respectability of your friends as well.

In the long term, the theory goes that we’ll all become so used to personal revelations online, that it won’t cause a problem any more. But for now, you’re much safer being careful with what people see about you online.

Can you really do a Teaching Certificate in 6 months and come out as a decent teacher?

Many feel that teaching is not a profession that can be learned easily, in some cases it doesn’t come naturally, so the argument we are hearing is that nurturing your class to get the best from them may not be a natural skill for the City ‘victims of the credit crunch’ for which the fast track scheme is being created to help.

These people are highly intelligent and commercially astute, but does this mean that their experience will transfer easily to teaching topics in a more rigid national curriculum, and engaging classes. Will this role really suit them?

The other obvious question is ‘are they being given extra privileges’? According to some reports some of these very people will be given bonus payments ‘ golden halos’ for taking headteacher positions in deprived areas. Sure, there are many headteachers who have worked incredibly hard to turn their schools around and some of these new ‘supercharged’ teachers’ may well bring some new skills to the table. But will any of these skills be a substitute for years of toil getting to grips with how to engage and motivate difficult pupils, who need more than a lesson in ‘playing the game’.

Update 16/3/09: it seems that we aren’t the only skeptics on this bit of spin. This columnist has strong views on just how the finance types will fit in:

Ah, do come in, Mr Blue-Chips, come in and serve us all your days. Let me take your BlackBerry and your cocaine spoon. You won’t be needing those. You’ll find a mortarboard and gown hanging up on the door and a sense of dignity and self-esteem waiting on your desk, along with a copy of The Guardian. Buttered crumpet? Crème de la crème? One stereotype or two?

One of the headaches of running an interactive file sharing site is that there are two major file types for whiteboards.

You may well have had the frustrating experience of developing material for Promethean ActivBoard and then finding your new school has Smart, or visa versa.  That’s exactly why we encourage Powerpoint – because almost everyone can read and edit the same files.

However, it looks like a solution might finally be in sight in the form of a common whiteboard file standard.  Becta in the UK is trying to push all the main whiteboard manufacturers into allowing import and export of a standard type of file (a bit like the interactive version of Rich Text Format).  If you are responsible for buying equipment for a school, then you can do your bit by asking the supplier if they will support a common file format.

If this gets off the ground we’ll be able to offer convertors to take your existing Smart / Promethean / other files and convert that to something everyone can use.

In the meantime, do email us any whiteboard files you think you could contribute.  We are seriously considering supporting Flipchart and Smart files in the near future.