Blog

SSAT’s Leadership Legacy Project has been a core part of our membership offer for several years now. It is designed to support teachers who are in the early stages of their career and showing clear leadership potential. As schools start
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Starting your first teaching job in September? Some advice from those who have been there. As we near the end of this term, those teachers preparing to take up their first posts in September will be looking ahead. I think
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Laura Burton, Senior Education Lead at SSAT and head of our Primary Network, reflects upon the key themes from the SSAT Primary Conference – Principled Leadership: reconnect, re-inspire, restore, which took place earlier this term.  Dr Dan Belcher, Senior Education
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Recently, I went back to where I started my teaching career. I met up with a former colleague, Andy. He joined the history team in my second year. We operated within a humanities faculty, and I, as a mature entrant,
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On Tuesday 27 June, we had a drop-in session for MPs – this event was sponsored by Rosie Duffield, MP. We had conversations with MPs from all parties, and it was pleasing to hear how passionate they were about schools in their own constituencies. Conversations varied in length, but we covered the following:

A new partnership between the Chartered College of Teaching and SSAT will support teachers to embed formative assessment practices in their classrooms.

Evidence-informed practice is now a common phrase used across schools in the UK. Teachers and school leaders are actively seeking out research to identify the ‘best bets’ to implement in the classroom.

The embedding formative assessment programme was created following over ten years of research by Dylan Wiliam and Siobhan Leahy. All elements of the programme underwent rapid prototype testing, from the size of teacher learning community groups, the time between workshops and the structure of the sessions. The structure of the session alone is on its approximately thirteenth iteration.

Over the last few years, most schools have revisited their approach to curriculum planning. Rightly or wrongly, the publication of the latest Ofsted framework, particularly one with a very specific focus, tends to redirect people’s energies.

Schools are facing the worst teacher recruitment crisis since the Second World War, but there is little recognition of this in the mainstream media and little comment from the DfE.