Education Matters

Education Matters
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Hannah and Lucy talk about teaching through the winter.

  1. Oct 15

    The Learning Curve with Sandra Patterson | Fiona Sheriff

    Sandra Patterson makes her debut as an Education Matters host in conversation with her friend Fiona Sheriff, a geography teacher and pastoral leader from Northamptonshire. Fiona is a Fawcett Fellow at UCL, a Chartered Geographer with the Royal Geographical Society, a resource writer and Vice President of the Geography Association, where she takes over as President for 2026 to 2027. Both teach geography, both contributed chapters to What Is Geography Teaching Now, and both hold a conviction that fieldwork belongs to every young person, whatever their budget, health, background or confidence. Fiona describes fieldwork as taking what pupils learn in the classroom and setting it in the world around them. It needn’t be a grand, costly trip. Twenty minutes on the school site can turn biodiversity from a vocabulary word into something tangible, and a walk through the town centre can show Year 7 pupils a landmark they’ve passed every day without really seeing it. Sandra is clear about the stakes. Without fieldwork, she says, “everything’s just theory.” Fiona adds that it builds observation, spatial reasoning and teamwork, and a certain bravery too, from pupils who’ve never set foot in a river and discover they won’t be swept away. The conversation explores what stands in the way. Cost comes first, from coach hire and equipment to staff cover and Fiona explains how her school uses grants, fundraising and a geography calendar to protect pupils who attract pupil premium funding. She is also applying to the Royal Society for climate equipment that other schools in her trust could borrow. Sandra’s department runs a kit store and relies on bursaries backed by governors and the principal. Then come the barriers that rarely appear on a risk assessment. Pupils with mobility needs, fatigue, hearing impairment or neurodivergence. Muslim pupils whose prayers, fasting and festivals shape how a day is planned. Young carers who can’t stay away overnight. Anxiety, social and otherwise, and the sensory overload of a noisy town centre. Girls who dread the bright waterproofs, the photograph on the school website and the question of where the toilets are. The answers are practical and often small. Visual stories that walk pupils through the day, an approach Fiona’s colleague Jo Clark has been trialling. Maps and photographs shared well ahead of time, and some say over who works with whom. Seats on the coach kept free for anyone needing time out, an idea Sandra tried on a recent Iceland trip. A quieter site when town is too loud. Virtual fieldwork built from Google Maps and ArcGIS for pupils who can’t attend, alongside 360-degree tools such as VR Glaciers. Fiona starts her planning with the pupil list and the calendar, and her bag carries spare waterproofs and socks. “Just because I can do something doesn’t mean that others can,” she says, and the point runs through everything that follows. Sandra reflects on how this thinking has changed her own planning, treating the risk assessment as an active search for barriers from the very start, and on how younger pupils who feel included arrive at GCSE and A level more confident, which has helped uptake. They look at the Geography Association’s National Festival of Fieldwork, the Fieldwork and Outdoor Learning Special Interest Group and a forthcoming story map of fieldwork venues showing toilets and parking, and Sandra outlines plans for a student panel to shape future trips. For geography teachers, pastoral leaders, heads of department and anyone concerned with inclusive practice, curriculum design and school trips, this is a grounded and generous conversation about making fieldwork work for every child. Follow Education Matters on Spotify for more conversations on teaching, leadership and professional learning across schools and universities.

  2. Oct 14

    The Hannah & Lucy Show | School Closures - More Than Just Numbers

    Closing Primary Schools in Runcorn. Birth rates are falling, costs are rising and Halton Borough Council has ranked its schools on a matrix of numbers, finances and building condition. Eight made the first list. None of them did anything wrong. Paul, a primary school teacher in Runcorn, and Lian Potter of the teaching union NASUWT are fighting the proposals, and they bring the case to Education Matters hosts Hannah and Lucy with a council meeting days away. The damage starts before any decision is made. Parents hesitate to enrol reception children in schools that might not exist in a year. Families move pupils out early. Staff weigh loyalty against a mortgage. Paul’s own school has between 25 and 30 colleagues, and across the schools on the list it’s close to 300 people. Yet when Lian met his team, she heard almost nothing about jobs. They talked about where the children would go. As Paul puts it, “there’s no good way to close a school.” Hannah adds the view of a parent, with a deaf son whose teaching assistant and intervention teacher move up with him each year, and asks what two transitions would do to children like him. Others face a two-mile walk to the nearest school with a space, in a town where attendance is already a worry. The wider policy picture gets a hard look. The council says there are over 1,200 surplus places across 31 schools, roughly 30 per cent. Closing three or four small schools won’t dent that, and Paul argues the problem belongs to the whole district. Lian points to £10 million spent sending SEND pupils out of the borough, money she says could build provision locally. Both she and Hannah make the case for smaller classes while the rolls fall. Then there’s the informal consultation, which keeps unions out by law and, Lian says, loses their scrutiny and expertise. Hannah calls it “a slap in the face” if the decision is already made and the consultation is theatre. Hannah shares what happened when her own school closed its sixth form after students had already made their choices, leaving GCSE business studies taught by geography and PE teachers. Paul walks through the process itself, an advisory board, then a smaller schools forum, then the councillors, and says doing nothing was ruled out early. Academy trusts sit in the background. Council schools may be merged into trusts as a supposed safety net, and Lian sees it as “basically privatisation, isn’t it, through the back door.” Hannah and Lucy bring their own experience of trusts that move money into whichever school is facing Ofsted and pay heavily at the top. Competition between schools funded per pupil comes up again and again, along with a plain question. Why do neighbouring schools, half a mile apart, end up one oversubscribed and the other struggling? Then there’s the cost of an empty building. Paul describes a derelict site in the middle of a housing estate and Hannah recalls an abandoned primary near her that was burnt down. Parents at the consultations spoke of attending the schools themselves fifty years ago, and Paul says staff felt genuinely valued by that support. For teacher educators, school leaders, governors and anyone watching falling rolls arrive in their own area, this is a live case study in how local authorities, dioceses and trusts pull in different directions. It also shows how a community can organise. The dates matter. The strategic advisory board meets on 15 October. Supporters gather at 5pm on 21 October at Runcorn Town Hall ahead of the 6pm council meeting, with signs and a clear message that schools are more than a number. A formal six-week consultation is expected in spring, with changes landing from September 2027 or 2028. Follow Education Matters for more conversations with the people shaping teaching, learning and school life.

    The Hannah & Lucy Show | School Closures - More Than Just Numbers

  3. Oct 11

    Teaching Matters | Bullying, Politics & Jumpers

    Teaching Matters, the weekly panel show from Education Matters, asks who gets noticed in school, who gets heard and who gets looked after when money runs short. Hosts Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs, explore bullying in schools, the irrelevance of politics and the contempt of an education authority in telling teachers and pupils to “put on layers” when it’s cold. Our first story starts with a headline that doesn’t quite match its own evidence. A UCL and Anna Freud Centre tracking study for the Department for Education reports that most students feel school staff don’t know about bullying, yet the opening line says fewer than a third of bullied students said so, but the findings still matter. More than a third of students say none or hardly any of their teachers talk to them about their progress, and one in four has a probable mental health disorder. John argues that schools simply aren’t built for personal contact. Timetables, large cohorts and crammed days push teachers into delivering, supervising and managing, and he recalls the advice handed to new teachers, “Don’t smile till Christmas.” Approachability, the principal’s red light that never went off and the need to know and be known all come into play, along with parents’ evenings that revealed a quiet pupil’s hidden life, from a champion boxer to a young carer looking after his grandfather. John’s verdict is blunt. “Schools are very unnatural places.” For anyone in teacher education, school leadership or pastoral care, it’s a conversation about what rapport really does for children. Today’s second conversation turns to politics and citizenship. Professor Bryony Hoskins, University of Roehampton, writing in the TES warns that the way we teach the subject could be undermining girls’ confidence. Young people care deeply about climate and animal rights yet insist that isn’t politics, and John explains why that alienation is no surprise. He believes in teaching politics honestly, which means admitting that your voice generally won’t be heard. A school trip to Westminster Hall produces a pupil’s verdict, “They should sell it.” David Runciman’s case for votes at six, the way cynicism sets in around thirteen, the quiet voices in classrooms where boys dominate and what Plato’s Gorgias says about persuasion beating principle all follow. Paul wonders whether debate and disagreement across the whole school would serve students better than another examined subject. The last conversation is about the cold. The Education Authority in Northern Ireland has written to head teachers suggesting schools cut heating by an hour a day, switch off lights in daylight and encourage layered clothing, ahead of an expected £8 million rise in energy costs by next March. Paul asks whether a modern Marie Antoinette has emerged. John recalls his mum telling him to put a jumper on while his father quietly switched on the second bar of the fire, and he points out that sitting still in a jumper doesn’t work. Both back the principals who are refusing, and they weigh the effect on uniform in a place where colour carries weight, on Maslow’s baseline of feeling safe and comfortable, and on a crumbling school estate and a merger agenda that John says comes down to the bottom line. The bananas close the programme. Paul shares news of a Northern Ireland tree crowned Tree of the Year. John turns to Helen Lewis and her book The Genius Myth, and imagines Shakespeare working in an insurance office in Woking today. His challenge is a good one. “Produce a society that produces Shakespeare.” If you’re in Northern Ireland, the Teacher Wellbeing Conference takes place on Friday 23 October at St Mary’s University College Belfast, with keynotes from Professor Noel Purdy and Professor Catherine Furlong. Tickets are going quickly. Follow Teaching Matters wherever you listen and leave a comment to tell the team what belongs on the agenda next.

    Teaching Matters | Bullying, Politics & Jumpers

  4. Oct 4

    Teaching Matters | PS Work, French Protests & Influencer Degrees

    Influencer Degrees, French School Riots and Careers for Four-Year-Olds. That's the ground Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs cover on Teaching Matters, the weekly panel show from Education Matters, the digital platform bringing outstanding practice and ideas to a global audience. Would you let your child study social media influencing? Nottingham Trent University has launched a three-year BA in content creation and the headlines didn't hold back. John, who once taught A level communication studies, says the label misleads. Underneath sits marketing, business and technology, and he'd back a vocational degree that speaks to young people. His sharper target is British snobbery. Anything with "studies" on the front draws pearl-clutching, and the real scandal for John is students paying top fees for crowded lecture halls and workbooks. Paul wonders whether a degree built on today's platforms will age well, recalling an IT qualification that dated within years. Teachers are influencers too, John reminds him, and not always for the better. Paul counters that teachers at least work under regulation, inspection and line management, so perhaps Nottingham Trent is quietly bringing ethics to the wild west of online media. Then to France, where pupils are protesting over overcrowded classes, staff shortages and unfit school buildings. Paul reports 1,949 arrests and more than 3,700 schools blockaded. John sets the unrest beside the 2011 riots in Britain and senses an older anger finding a target, while Paul reaches for the psychotherapist's language of repression and projection. John recalls a friend who joined the 1968 student sit-ins in London, then travelled to Northern Ireland to back the civil rights marchers and was beaten for it. Paul also brings in Impossible City and the French tradition of the manifestation as a rite of passage. John's verdict on the young protesters is clear. "I think there's nothing wrong with being young and led by your heart." Schools that treat children as problems to be managed, he argues, deserve the anger. What should a UK system learn from it? Listen to young people, and build schools of joy, creativity and challenge rather than filters. The last story asks what education is for. Former minister Alan Milburn wants four-year-olds introduced to future careers and compulsory work placements for 14 to 16 year olds. John loves the idea of a postman visiting the classroom but rejects any suggestion that primary school exists to produce future workers, recalling a visit from a policeman with handcuffs and a whistle. He predicts two kinds of work experience, one built on discipline for some pupils and one on opportunity and choice for others, and he doubts a postman ever visits Eton College. Paul, a firm believer in placements, argues they change a child's self-concept and bring a maturity no week in school can match. John concedes the point. Along the way they ask why every social problem lands on schools and whether Westminster thinks education can be mobilised like an army. For anyone working in teacher education, school leadership, curriculum design or careers guidance, it's a conversation with real bite. Then the bananas. Paul tells of a Danish soldier in the Second Schleswig War of 1864 who received a paper outline of his newborn daughter's hand, and reflects that "love finds a way around many things, including distance and war". John offers the word palimpsest, an old text scrubbed out and written over yet still showing through, and finds it all along the high street if you look above the shopfronts, as he did on a walk across London with his daughter. Follow Teaching Matters wherever you listen and share it with a colleague who likes education debate with some heart. A new episode arrives every week.

    Teaching Matters | PS Work, French Protests & Influencer Degrees

  5. Sep 29

    Education Matters | Sam Strickland, Behaviour & Belonging

    Once again Education Matters has invited Sam Strickland onto a show. This time he’s on to talk about his fabulous latest book, Behaviour and Belonging: Creating School Cultures Where Every Child Thrives. Sam chose the order of his title deliberately, and he makes a persuasive case for it in conversation with Paul Hazzard, even after Paul admits he'd have swapped the words round. Sam is the principal of Duston School, a giant all-through school with 2,100 pupils aged four to 19 and more than 200 staff. His book distils years of school leadership into something short, direct and easy to dip into. It speaks to teachers, senior leaders, trust colleagues and anyone shaping school culture and classroom practice. This is Sam's third appearance on the show. Sam explains how behaviour and belonging feed each other, why clear institutional expectations give relationships the ground to grow and how both connect to learning through what he calls learning behaviours. Consistency runs through everything he says. "Consistency can be your greatest weakness if you're not, and it can be your superpower if you are." He means far more than rigid routines. Children need to know a teacher's mood won't decide the response, and pupils with special educational needs feel that certainty most. Paul makes a gentle plea for wriggle room, the humour and personality that make a teacher a human being rather than a script, and Sam agrees. Culture gets close scrutiny and, as Sam puts it, "We are a people-centric industry." It's built from thousands of ordinary moments, the front gate at half past eight, the good morning that goes unanswered, the walk along a corridor during lessons. Sam describes the difference between inheriting a deeply entrenched culture and turning one around, why a head's personality matters and how inconsistency from leaders erodes staff trust fast. His "all roads lead to Rome" chapter shows how behaviour, character values and community pride converge on a shared identity, and why the line "this is not who we are or how we do things here" works so well. It depersonalises correction, sets the pupil a quiet inner challenge and leaves their dignity intact. Each key stage at Duston owns a value, with respect at Key Stage 3 reaching from self and peers out to family and the wider community. Sam also talks candidly about the curse of knowledge, and why a pupil joining in Year 9 hasn't yet heard what everyone else has heard many times. The practical sections will interest anyone working on behaviour policy. Sam argues against one-size-fits-all systems, pointing to national surveys that put time lost to disruption at seven to nine minutes in every half hour, and explains how a three strikes model can let that loss build. He's equally clear on entry and exit routines, which calm classrooms, check understanding and give newer or quieter teachers a firm footing. Effective teaching, he insists, doesn't depend on being loud or larger than life. Expectations, he says, create emotional and psychological security, and that security has to reach staff too, who need to know leaders have their backs when things go wrong. The conversation also covers staying calm under provocation, curriculum as a source of belonging, a live issue as Northern Ireland undergoes major curriculum change, and how Sam finds time to write while running a school, including his view that anyone in leadership needs something they do for themselves, which for him means exercise. Paul closes with a favourite Harry Potter line about teachers and magic, “We teachers are rather good at magic, you know.” Professor McGonagall For anyone working in teacher education, initial teacher training, school leadership or continuing professional development, this is a warm, thoughtful and usable conversation. If it helps your thinking, follow Education Matters, leave a comment and share it with a colleague.

  6. Sep 29

    WomenEd NI Autumn 26 Unconference

    Education Matters host Sandra Patterson sits down with three of her colleagues, Jackie Hill, Nicole O'Connor and Laura McAleer, the Network Leader team behind WomenEd Northern Ireland. Together they trace the story of a global grassroots movement that began in 2017, when a handful of women reacted to the release of pay gap statistics on social media and ended up building face to face events, ‘unconferences’, that have since spread across more than thirty networks worldwide. Jackie, who has spent a career spanning further education, secondary teaching, teacher training and inspection and now sits on the Chartered College of Teaching Ethics Committee, explains how the group's four campaigns, diversity of representation, women in leadership, flexible working and the gender pay gap, took shape. Nicole, a Belfast-based digital learning strategist, remembers being an early career teacher who assumed pay gaps couldn't exist in a banded profession, until a keynote from Vivian Porritt changed her mind entirely. And Laura, head of science in Ballymena with more than twenty years in teaching, talks candidly about being asked to join the network leader team and what it feels like preparing for her first unconference from the organising side rather than the audience, nervous, she admits, but leaning into the same mantra that pulled her in. The conversation keeps returning to that very WomenEd's mantra, "10% braver", and what it has actually given each of them, the confidence to change career direction, to write for the first time, to walk into a room and introduce yourself to a stranger. Jackie sets that against the movement's eight values, clarity, communication, connection, confidence, collaboration, community, challenge and change and they discuss the tangible change the Northern Ireland network has driven, from growing Chartered College membership from a handful of members to a thriving community, to contributing directly to the Northern Ireland Executive's end violence against women and girls strategy, to helping launch sister networks including one now getting started in North Africa. This show is full of warmth, and humour, with reflections on Orla Sally's sessions, on hearing secondary school pupils speak about where women's voices are missing from the curriculum, and on partnerships with organisations like Beyond Skin, CCE and the International Professional Development Association that have taken the network as far as Dublin and the Festival of Education. Nicole talks openly about how the network gave her the push to leave full-time permanent teaching and start writing, describing WomenEd's four campaigns as something she never expected would shape her own career. Laura reflects on the friendships and allyship that make the community feel bigger than any single school or setting. They close by looking ahead to this October's unconference at St Cecilia's College in Derry / Londonderry, with breakout sessions ranging from a Beyond Skin drumming workshop to panels on Black history and culture in Northern Ireland, a Chartered College panel and a session on allyship with Gen Z alongside Patrick Otley-O'Connor and his son Quinlan, plus a closing panel with political representatives and students. Tickets are £15 for professionals and entry is free for student teachers and classroom assistants, with all the details at linktr.ee/womenedni. This is a generous, funny and genuinely moving conversation about what happens when women in education choose to back each other, essential listening for teachers, teacher educators, school leaders and anyone curious about how a small grassroots network can quietly reshape a whole profession. Subscribe to Education Matters so you never miss an episode.

  7. Sep 27

    Teaching Matters | AI, Singapore & Snowflakes

    This week's Teaching Matters finds Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs turning over three stories that all circle back to the same question, what is school actually for. First up is the report from Sir Anthony Seldon and Tim Bunting on artificial intelligence in schools, which has already reached the Commons Education Select Committee and prompted calls for urgent guidance for teachers. Paul and John ask whether AI needs regulation or just professional common sense, and John is candid about being torn. He calls it "a remarkable opportunity but beset with dangers" and argues that some of its disruption might be welcome. The two dig into cognitive offloading, the astonishing rise in pupils who already rate their own AI skills above their teachers' and Seldon's OECD-inspired case for human flourishing in the classroom, understanding, appreciating, acting, adapting and behaving ethically. John pushes back on the idea that difficulty is automatically virtuous, recalling hours lost to microfiche research that taught him nothing except patience, and offers a properly grim story from a Welsh slate mine to explain how every generation reinvents ways of filtering people out of opportunity. It's a conversation about assessment, humanity and what teachers can offer that no algorithm can, and it lands on the hope that AI might finally force schools to rethink what they examine and how, rather than tightening the same old exam system around a new tool. From there the pair turn to Singapore, where a government scheme pays citizens to read, a story flagged by Ella Kramer in The Guardian. Is it bribery, manipulation or a clumsy attempt at building better habits? John compares it with a school rewards scheme he watched collapse years ago and argues that extrinsic incentives rarely outlast the novelty, while Paul wonders whether gamifying a reading streak might tap into something more intrinsic. The conversation widens into whether reading is provably good for you at all, how much of any benefit is really about modelling behaviour at home and why book sales are climbing even as reading itself declines. John admits he's never quite been able to prove that reading made him or his own children better readers or better people, though he still believes it, and the pair land on a shared conviction that seeing parents and teachers read matters more than any scheme built on 59p a day. The final story looks at youth mental health, prompted by Professor Peter Fonagy's official review and reporting from the BBC's Catherine Burns, Nick Triggle and Vicki Young. Paul and John question whether researchers can ever reliably compare one generation's struggles with another's, then talk through social comparison, the pressures of social media, belonging and Jonathan Haidt's work on the anxious generation. John shares a memory of growing up in a new town in Sussex, where every house looked the same and the world felt safely small, and how differently that sense of security sits against a childhood spent comparing yourself to strangers and influencers online. There's a detour too, into a Chinese professor telling packed lecture halls that community, not achievement, is what young people need, and into the harder economic truth that many young people today can no longer expect the improvement in living standards their parents once took for granted. Paul's banana closes things out with the Japanese practice of kintsugi, repairing broken pottery so the break itself becomes the most valuable part of the piece, while John offers the Rat Park experiment as a lesson in how the right environment, not willpower, shapes behaviour, in rats and in schools alike. Thoughtful and unafraid of a tangent, this episode of Teaching Matters is essential listening for teachers, teacher educators, school leaders and anyone thinking about AI, reading and wellbeing in education. Subscribe to Teaching Matters so you never miss a conversation.

    Teaching Matters | AI, Singapore & Snowflakes

  8. Sep 20

    Teaching Matters | Deep-fried, Student Council, Death Spiral

    This week's episode of Teaching Matters, the weekly panel show from Education Matters, brings together host Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs for three stories that circle back again and again to a single question, what is school actually for. They start with student voice, prompted by an article of Christopher Byrne’s, a primary teacher at Malvern College in Egypt, who set out to learn how his pupils experience teacher feedback rather than simply telling them what they should think of it. Paul and John trade decades of school council memories, from tuck shop negotiations to uniform referendums, and land on a shared wariness of consultation that never changes anything. As John puts it, "any time you hear the words consultation exercise, beware that it is purely a paper exercise." What made Byrne's project different, they agree, is that the staff ended up learning something themselves. The conversation widens out to David Runciman's proposal to lower the voting age to six, and to the strange comfort of being in loco parentis, the idea that schools stand in for parents and therefore have to draw a line somewhere, however uncomfortable that line is to defend, and however much it clashes with the language of student autonomy schools like to use. From there they turn to a think tank's warning that language learning in England is in what one headline called a death spiral, with GCSE uptake falling unevenly across the country. John is candid about failing his own attempt to learn Spanish before a trip to Barcelona, and the two of them dig into why English speakers find languages so hard to commit to. "We speak the language of the world," John says, and that, more than the difficulty of grammar or exam pressure, might explain why so few students choose to bother. Paul pushes back gently, arguing that language learning is really about self-esteem, respect and connection with other people rather than exam results, and the pair swap stories about idiom, translation and a memorable tale of Cold War interpreters wrestling with Russian proverbs. A useful listen for anyone involved in modern languages or curriculum reform. Their last story is the deep-fried food ban due to land in English school dinners, alongside new rules on fibre, whole grains and breakfast club nutrition. Both agree it will not solve an obesity crisis on its own. "Governments can do things," John argues, "and schools are used to appear to do something about something you'd rather not do the thing you really should do, which is regulate the food industry." Paul wonders aloud whether schools are being handed the soft option while advertising and the food industry escape scrutiny altogether, and the pair debate whether the better long-term investment is not canteen policy at all but teaching children to understand food and make their own choices. They close, as always, with their bananas. Paul's is thigmomorphogenesis, the botanical term for how plants grow stronger in response to touch, wind or disturbance, which he offers as a quiet metaphor for how teachers and pupils grow through resistance rather than in spite of it. John's is Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, a first century BCE poem that somehow anticipated atomic theory, natural selection and even a version of quantum uncertainty, and survived the centuries by the narrowest of margins. It's a rich, wide-ranging hour that moves from school councils to Cold War translators to Roman philosophy without ever losing its thread. Whether you're a classroom teacher, a teacher educator or simply someone who cares about what schools are really teaching children beyond the timetable, this one is worth your time. Follow Teaching Matters to catch every new episode, and leave a comment, Paul and John read every one and reply to them all.

    Teaching Matters | Deep-fried, Student Council, Death Spiral
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About

Hannah and Lucy talk about teaching through the winter.

Information

  • Creator
    Education Matters
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    140
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Education Matters
  • Show Website
    Education Matters