Education Matters

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

  1. 2d ago

    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

  2. 6d ago

    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.

  3. 6d ago

    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.

  4. 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

  5. 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

  6. Sep 18

    The Hannah & Lucy Show | Building Community with SuperKind

    Hannah and Lucy are back on a Wednesday night, broadcasting from Portugal and the UK, with a guest whose organisation is reshaping how schools’ approach PSHE and citizenship. Anoushka joins from Superkind, the social action platform built around the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to talk about what happens when young people are given a genuine voice in their communities. Superkind grew out of a simple observation. Children who take social action become better critical thinkers, better empaths and more confident leaders, yet very few schools manage to embed this consistently. Too often it relies on one passionate teacher carrying the whole initiative, and for everyone else it falls by the wayside. Anoushka explains how Superkind was built from the ground up with teachers, for teachers, to make meaningful social action accessible to every school, whatever their capacity, and why she believes this matters as much for young people themselves as it does for the communities they serve. The conversation moves through real examples that show what this looks like in practice. At Sarre Square Primary School in Southwark, a group of Year Three pupils spoke up about rats and cockroaches in their council housing. They wrote letters shaped like the pests themselves and sent them to the council, and the resulting meeting, with parents invited too, led to pest control being brought in house. In Liverpool, pupils affected by knife crime organised a sponsored walk across five schools to raise funds for bleed kits. Anoushka is clear that it's stories like these, driven by pupils rather than handed down from above, that stick, and that give children a real sense of their own agency. Hannah, who helped build Superkind’s secondary resources over the summer, and Lucy dig into how schools choose which of the seventeen goals to tackle, whether by class, by year group or as a whole school, and why school councils alone often fail to represent the pupils who most need to be heard. They talk through gender equality and something as ordinary as school uniform choices, misinformation and a piece of UCL research linking book access at home to climate literacy, and the safeguarding conversations that inevitably come with letting pupils raise difficult topics in class. Hannah also shares a persuasive writing project that grew into free football kit for a local team, a small reminder of how quickly a well-taught skill can turn into something tangible for a family. There's a lighter side too. Playground mishearings, a Backstreet Boys wristband that refuses to come off, and Lucy's ongoing CrossFit injuries all make an appearance, alongside a genuinely useful breakdown of how Superkind’s six-session structure works, moving from the "what" and the "why" through to the "who", the relatable role models pupils are shown, and finally the "how" that gets them taking action and reflecting on it. Anoushka closes with a striking statistic. Pupils fundraising through their own Superkind pages raise up to ten times more than schools managed before, proof that when young people are trusted to lead, communities respond in kind, whether that's grandparents, parents or someone stopped in a supermarket queue. For anyone teaching PSHE, RSE or citizenship, working on school ethos and community cohesion, or simply looking for practical ways to build pupil voice into the curriculum, this episode is full of ideas that can be picked up and used the following morning. It's a good reminder, too, that pupils rarely see themselves as agents of change until somebody hands them the structure, the confidence and the permission to try. Find out more, or book a free demo, at superkind.org. New episodes of Hannah and Lucy land regularly, so follow the show to catch next week's conversation on teaching, learning and the realities of life in the classroom.

    The Hannah & Lucy Show | Building Community with SuperKind

  7. Sep 13

    Teaching Matters | Promotions, Attendance & Anthems

    On Teaching Matters this week Paul Hazzard is joined by John Gibbs for an in-depth look at leadership, attendance and a genuinely strange proposal from Reform UK. The first story is inspired by John Severs piece in the TES on the handover between education secretaries Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell. The conversation asks what happens when someone new is promoted to a position of responsibility. Paul and John explore the idea that continuity in leadership is weak and that real courage means sweeping change. John is blunt about where that idea comes from, describing a culture borrowed from Silicon Valley entrepreneurs he refers to as the world of "gamblers and spivs”. Paul raises the idea of the "custodianship" model of headship described by a retired super head, John Tomsett, who has been a guest on a previous show. John reminds us of Chris Mullin's political memoir View from the Foothills and its unlikely lesson about Leylandii hedges and small, achievable change. Paul's advice to newly promoted staff is to make the job their own but treat change like climbing a mountain, "slow, slow, quick, quick, slow", pausing occasionally to look back at how far they have come rather than trying to prove themselves by tearing everything up. Today’s second conversation draws on a Guardian report by Alexandra Topping on teachers who disagree with hardline school attendance policies and the fines used to enforce them. Paul and John ask a harder question lying underneath the headline figures, ‘is every day of school absence equally significant, and what does relentless measurement of attendance actually protect?’ John shares a personal story about taking his daughters out of school for European art trips during his wife's work travel and a memory of snow days that taught him more than most lessons did. The pair are candid about over-testing, over-measuring and over-disciplining in English schools and how fear of falling numbers on a spreadsheet can crowd out any real thinking about why children disengage from school in the first place. It is a conversation that touches on curriculum reform, progress eight and the narrowing of the sixth form curriculum and asks whether attendance figures tell us anything meaningful about the quality of teaching and learning going on inside a school. The last conversation looks at Reform UK's suggestion, reported by John Dyson in Schools Week, that schools should face consequences from Ofsted for not singing the national anthem, with Suella Braverman leading the charge. Paul and John treat the idea with the seriousness it deserves, which is not much, working through the history of manufactured patriotism, the oddities of monarchy as a unifying symbol and a detour via the Likely Lads into just how narrow a shared national identity can become once you start defining who belongs and who does not belong. They discuss why teaching children to think critically rather than obediently is a significant aim of education. John argues for pupils who show "a decent disrespect" rather than blind loyalty, a phrase that sums up the episode's argument rather neatly and says something about the whole purpose of schooling, pedagogy and citizenship education. As always there is ‘a banana’ to finish, this week a look back at the game of conkers, its surprising history in wartime Britain when children were paid to collect them and the enduring myth of a health and safety ban that never actually existed. John shares his banana on the merits and benefits of school drama and plays. Whether your interest is teacher education, initial teacher training, CPD, school leadership, curriculum policy or classroom practice, Teaching Matters has something to make you think and probably something to make you laugh along the way. Subscribe to Teaching Matters and Education Matters wherever you get your podcasts, and keep sending your comments in, Paul and John read every one.

    Teaching Matters | Promotions, Attendance & Anthems

  8. Sep 11

    The Hannah & Lucy Show | New Year New Start

    The Hannah and Lucy Show is back for the new school year. Live conversation and super chat with JBL & Fozzie. This week they cover: The start of the school year, inset days and the case against filler CPD and icebreakers Teacher wellbeing, "working smarter not harder" (referencing Greg McKeown's Effortless) burnout and unfilled posts A new head teacher's strong introduction and staff buy-in Children's Commissioner Dame Rachel de Souza and the erosion of after-school clubs and enrichment The academic value of extra-curricular activities and the widening advantage gap for less advantaged pupils English/maths dominance on the timetable versus other subjects, careers advice access A new push on PSHE and community action, with a shout-out to the Superkind resource (16 UN Sustainable Development Goals framework) The case for more "analogue" and hands-on learning (art, drawing, fine motor skills) alongside digital literacy gaps in secondary schools Using AI (including Claude) for lesson planning, staff meeting efficiency, and reading interventions, with a discussion of prompt-editing as an emerging skill Reaction to Andy Burnham's plan for technical subjects from age 14 A lighter closing segment on reading habits, audiobooks, and self-development versus escapist reading

    The Hannah & Lucy Show | New Year New Start
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About

Hannah and Lucy talk about teaching through the winter.

Information

  • Creator
    Education Matters
  • Years Active
    2025 - 2026
  • Episodes
    137
  • Rating
    Explicit
  • Copyright
    © Education Matters
  • Show Website
    Education Matters