Mark Enser
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Articles by Mark Enser
The Questions That Teach Geography
Much has been written about the importance of questioning in classrooms, and rightly so. Questions direct attention, reveal understanding, test memory and structure discussion. Yet in geography, questioning serves an additional and particularly significant purpose: it helps communicate the nature of the discipline itself. This matters because geography is not simply a body of information to be transmitted. It is not reducible to capitals, rivers, population figures or definitions of erosion.
Five questions to ask about quality assurance in your school - SecEd
Quality assurance systems often focus on the wrong things. Mark Enser and Zoe Enser offer five questions school leaders can ask to ensure QA processes are effective and raise pupil outcomes “Too often QA reduces classrooms to simple checklists: was the lesson objective displayed, was there a starter task, was peer assessment visible?
5 curriculum priorities for 2026
Curriculum has dominated education conversations in recent years. With the curriculum and assessment review now published and a national curriculum rewrite coming, leaders face a familiar dilemma in 2026: what to do next, and when to move. The next 12 months will not be about rewriting everything, but making sensible choices while we wait for clarity. Below are five areas it would be wise to consider in the coming year. 1.
How to decide on school improvement priorities: Three guiding principles - SecEd
School improvement is a balancing act and every senior leadership team needs to decide what their priorities are. Mark and Zoe Enser set out three guiding principles for how we can make those decisions Schools are busy, noisy places. In any given week, leaders juggle lesson visits, conversations with staff and pupils, assessment data, behaviour and attendance records, plus a steady stream of external messages that often point in conflicting directions.
How to decide on school improvement priorities: Three guiding principles - Headteacher Update
School improvement is a balancing act and every senior leadership team needs to decide what their priorities are. Mark and Zoe Enser set out three guiding principles for how we can make those decisions Schools are busy, noisy places. In any given week, leaders juggle lesson visits, conversations with staff and pupils, assessment data, behaviour and attendance records, plus a steady stream of external messages that often point in conflicting directions.
7 books every school leader should read
There’s a comforting myth in school leadership: that with the right strategy, the right systems and enough vision, everything will just work. But schools are messy, human places. Leading them well requires not just action, but reflection. For me, reading has always been one of the best tools to make sense of the chaos. Not because books hand us a script, but because they help us to ask better questions. And that process can help to remind us why we decided to work in education in the first place.
7 books every new teacher should read
Starting out in teaching is both exhilarating and overwhelming. You’re managing a classroom, planning lessons and navigating school culture, all while learning how to teach. During this time the right books can offer not just practical strategies, but clarity, inspiration and that comforting feeling of, “Ah, so it’s not just me.” Here are seven books I’d recommend to any new teacher. These are books that offer guidance without gimmicks, and theory that earns its place on your shelf.
How to help pupils ask good questions in the classroom
There are few better experiences as a teacher than when pupils ask interesting and meaningful questions about the lesson: the kind of questions that show they are genuinely engaged with the subject and that they want to know more. The problem is, these kinds of questions get asked so rarely. Research by Andrew Whittaker suggests that the vast majority of classroom questions are asked by teachers and that when pupils do ask questions they are almost always procedural questions.
How can you tell if your CPD is working?
As someone who spends a lot of time working with school leaders to design and deliver CPD, one of my favourite questions to ask is: “How do you know if your CPD is having an impact?” It is a question that is rarely given as much thought as it deserves. Evaluations of CPD tend to rely on feedback from those attending the session, which is gathered straight after it has been delivered.
How to use book looks for school improvement
Work scrutinies, or “book looks”, are commonly used for quality assurance in schools. But how effective are they? Both middle and senior leaders are often asked to carry out work scrutinies without any specific training on how to do this. That means the approach is rarely well used. The biggest problem with most work scrutinies is that leaders hope to see the impact of the curriculum in students’ books. However, the impact of the curriculum should be learning.
5 tips to avoid the pitfalls of pupil voice
Imagine that you are out for a hike somewhere unfamiliar. Automatically, you look out for something to tell you that you are on the right route: a signpost, a landmark or a traveller coming up the path who can confirm that you’re heading in the right direction. We all need these signs of reassurance. The same is true in schools. Whatever our role, we are all looking for signs that we are on the right path, and that what we are doing is making a difference.
How to design better subject-specific CPD
When you talk to secondary school teachers about education, one thing that comes up time and again is the desire for more subject-specific professional development. However, “subject-specific CPD” is a broad term that covers a wide range of possible outcomes. So, how can leaders ensure that their subject-specific offering is up to scratch? It helps to think of subject-specific CPD in three broad categories.
Teacher job interviews: education research you could mention
When preparing for an interview for a teaching job, you can predict many of the things that you will be asked. You will almost certainly be asked why you want to work at this particular school, how you would deal with specific behaviour issues and something about responding to safeguarding concerns. Everyone knows these questions are coming and can have their answers prepared in such a way as to communicate exactly what they want about themselves.
How can we teach students to be hopeful in today’s troubled world?
It is hard to be upbeat at the moment. Turn on the news, scroll through social media or walk down your high street and you will be bombarded by the world’s problems. We see conflict on the front pages of newspapers and feel uneasy about still more conflicts that are being overlooked. Public infrastructure is crumbling after decades of neglect and vulnerable people are suffering.
Teaching geography: overcoming the challenges for the subject
It was with a slight sense of trepidation that I embarked on the research for the geography subject report. According to some, primary school education is dominated by reading, writing and mathematics, with subjects like geography being squeezed out of the curriculum. Some said secondary schools were a hotbed of left-wing activism, with students being taught nothing in geography but protest and propaganda.
Teaching geography: overcoming the challenges for the subject
It was with a slight sense of trepidation that I embarked on the research for the geography subject report. According to some, primary school education is dominated by reading, writing and mathematics, with subjects like geography being squeezed out of the curriculum. Some said secondary schools were a hotbed of left-wing activism, with students being taught nothing in geography but protest and propaganda.
5 strategies to support students who aren’t ready for exams
It is that time of year. The clocks have gone forward, the days are getting longer and those exams that once seemed to be far in the distance are now hurtling towards us. By now I expect you know which students are almost certainly going to be fine. The ones who have worked hard over the years, revised for mock exams and practice papers, and have that quiet confidence that comes from knowing your stuff. But then there are those other students.
How to end the dependence on sentence starters
One thing that always strikes me about successful schools is how precise they are. Everything is done in a very deliberate way. Care and attention are given to choosing the exact right questions for a quiz at the start of a lesson, school policies and practices make sure that everyone is in class and ready to learn on time and each activity is designed with a clearly defined learning goal in mind. Nothing is left to chance.
How does revision actually work in the brain?
Picture the scene. It is the mid 1990s. Oasis are on tour and there is conflict in Eastern Europe. In a classroom, students are packing away when the teacher calls out: “Don’t forget, we have a test next week. Make sure you take your books with you and revise for it.” Cue groans from the class, who start shoving their exercise books into their bags as they push out of the door. One student hangs back. “Sir…” he begins. “How should I revise?” The teacher looks momentarily confused.
Teaching outside of your subject is hard. But does it have to be?
Throughout my years of teaching, I often found myself teaching outside of my own subject. Alongside geography, I also taught history, RE, science, information technology and, for one term, GCSE English. No matter when in my career, in which school or which of these subjects I was teaching, teaching outside of my specialism was always more exhausting. And as a head of department, I often had non-specialists teaching geography. One year, I had 14 of them teaching a few lessons here or there.
5 common revision mistakes (and how to avoid them)
Working with schools around the country has revealed a common concern among teachers and leaders: they want to know how they can ensure that students revise properly. We know that revision can make a huge difference to student outcomes (in fact, there is some evidence that it could help to close the persistent gender gap) but getting it right is tricky, and filled with hidden pitfalls for both schools and their students.
How teachers can avoid accidentally distracting students
In my previous column I discussed the importance of Daniel T Willingham’s phrase “memory is the residue of thought”. It reminds us that students remember the thing they are thinking about. If they are thinking about the nature of the task, they remember the nature of the task, not necessarily the content of the task. Now I would like to explore the implications of the phrase for what we do in the classroom.
7 exam revision techniques backed by research
Most people are familiar with the idea of revision long before they actually attempt to do it for themselves. Children’s TV and coming-of-age films are littered with scenes of stressed-out teens cramming for tests, meeting for study sessions or ducking out for adventures when they should be hitting the books. In fact, revision can seem so ubiquitous that it appears it is just something that we innately do.
Ofsted getting rid of deep dives is a mistake
We often run the risk in education of allowing the pursuit of perfection to be the enemy of good. I worry that this is what we are seeing with today’s announcement from Ofsted that subject deep dives are going to be removed from the inspection process. It worries me both as a former Ofsted inspector and, more importantly, a former head of department. Deep dives may not have been perfect but I’d argue that they are better than the alternative.
What I got wrong about my students' learning
I don’t suppose that anyone sits down intending to create a cliché. Whoever first noted that someone was “as cool as a cucumber” must have sat back delighted at their alliteration. Shakespeare may have taken the rest of the day off when he had Polonius suggest that his son “neither a borrower nor a lender be”. The problem is that what seems startlingly fresh at first soon becomes linguistic white noise through overfamiliarity.
How to tell if your lessons are having an impact
We all want to make a difference. This must be true in just about any job, I think. It is disheartening to do something and feel that you are getting nowhere. But I suspect this desire to make a difference must be greater in education. Most teachers I’ve known have had the sneaking suspicion that they could find a better-paid job outside of the classroom and have been certain they could find a less stressful one.
3 ways to build useful retrieval practice into your lessons
In my previous two columns, I explored how the retrieval quizzes forming Do It Now tasks were sometimes backfiring and then some principles to put them right. Both of these articles considered retrieval practice in the form of a quiz. There is something to be said for the consistency of a well-designed quiz at the start of each lesson, but it isn’t the only place where we can see the benefits of asking pupils to retrieve knowledge from their memories. 1.
6 ways to make your retrieval quiz more effective
In my previous column, I explored how a very popular form of lesson starter, the quiz as a “do it now” task, was often going wrong. In this column, I’d like to propose a few principles that I found helpful in sharpening my own practice in this area. Firstly, form should follow the function. Be very clear in your own mind what you want the quiz to achieve. Is it a form of formative assessment to find out what pupils know and don’t know before the lesson begins so that you can adapt accordingly?
Why your retrieval quizzes are probably not fit for purpose
When I started teaching, back in the mists of time, the three-part lesson was king. You began with a starter, then came the main part (broken up into different activities) and finally a plenary to check what had been learned. I still remember an early CPD session, in my very first year of teaching, on how to begin a lesson. We were told that the aim of the starter task was just to get pupils in and settled and that the activity here could be divorced from the rest of the lesson.
Is the oracy focus just another 'next big thing'?
Can we take a moment to talk about oracy? If you’re a teacher in England, I’m sure that you’ve done your fair share of listening about oracy. It would appear that it risks being the next big thing in education. This is a problem. Not because oracy isn’t important, but because it is. And the “next big things” in education have a habit of ending up dead and buried. If you get a scheme of work for a subject in your school, you can have great fun playing archeologist.
What does 'ambition' really mean in schools?
Are you ambitious for your pupils? There are few people working in education who would say that they are not. Even those few people who say, “This is the best we can expect from these kinds of pupils” (and sadly they are still out there) believe themselves to be ambitious; they just need to recalibrate what their pupils can achieve. And this is the central problem with talking about ambition.
Do schools actually need teaching and learning policies?
As someone who is starting again as a head of department in a school, my mind has been turning to the way we, as a department and as teachers across the school, work together in a coherent way. I have read a lot of different policies, both departmental and whole-school, and the necessity of some of them is very clear. Without a behaviour policy setting out how rewards and sanctions will be used, pupils could end up being treated very differently from place to place and chaos could ensue.
How much teacher autonomy is too much?
I don’t remember many assemblies from my childhood (I would be surprised if anyone did), but there is one that sticks in my mind. It was a story about a school where the playground was on the roof. Every day the children would go out to the roof and happily play their games, skipping, kicking a ball around and eating their lunch on the fence-lined playground with views over the city. Then, one day, a new headteacher arrived. He was aghast at the playground.
Starting at a new school? Here are my 4 key rules
When I was younger, in my pre-teaching days, I changed jobs a lot. Flitting between cafe and shop work, warehouse and bar work as I moved location or got bored. I didn’t find starting a new job especially stressful. I’d just think, “How hard can it be?” and then turn up and crack on. However, as I have been preparing to go back to teaching after two and a half years out, I’ve felt a unfamiliar sense of trepidation. I can’t ask how hard can it be because I remember how hard it can be.
Directed improvement and reflection time: does it work?
New initiatives don’t seem to emerge in schools so much as they burst upon us fully formed. You just look around one day and realise that everyone has suddenly started speaking about something as though you will know what on Earth they are talking about. We saw it with the term “wave one intervention” (which essentially just means inclusive teaching) and “tier two vocabulary” (tricky words, the kind you always had to explain) and then we saw it with “Dirt”. What is Dirt?
How to introduce curriculum sequencing - think of it as like baking sourdough
Ofsted’s latest Education Inspection Framework has increased the focus on curriculum sequencing. It states that inspectors will make a judgement based on the extent to which “the provider’s curriculum is coherently planned and sequenced towards cumulatively sufficient knowledge and skills for future learning and employment”.
#GLTBookClub podcast #18 with special guests Zoe & Mark Enser, Generative Learning in Action by Greenshaw Learning Trust & Friends Book Club
The Greenshaw Learning Trust & Friends Book Club is a podcast in which teachers discuss the ideas and concepts in a leading education book with the author themselves. Join Rhiannon Rainbow (@Noni_Rainbow) and Dave Tushingham (@DaveTushingham) for a long form discussion about educational literature!
Classroom practice: how to know when learning is happening
In a recent poll of more than 7,700 teachers on Teacher Tapp, three-quarters agreed with this statement: “I don’t mind pupils chatting in my classroom, as long as they get the work done”. The discussions which followed were interesting. Many of those who agreed assumed that those who didn’t agree had silent classrooms with no time for pupils to discuss their ideas or seek help from each other.
Disciplinary knowledge: an Ofsted obsession, but what is it?
Since spring 2021, Ofsted has been publishing research reviews into different subjects. These research reviews draw upon writing on curriculum and pedagogy from within subject communities and input from teachers in the classroom. It’s been refreshing to see the differences between subjects acknowledged and explored. For example, the research review in history focuses on the use of substantive concepts, something highly relevant to this discipline but of less utility elsewhere.
20 Educational Leadership Podcasts to listen to! All of our favourites.
Headteacherchat Has Been Collecting Podcasts For Leaders/Teachers. Hope You Find This Helpful. This Is A Work In Progress. Please Email Me For Additions Or Changes: Admin@Headteacherchat.Com 1.
Why I avoid using booklets in my lessons
The use of booklets in classes seems to be growing in popularity. They have been a phenomenon in secondary schools for some time and I have recently started seeing them in primary schools as well. A booklet is a cross between a textbook and a workbook. They contain the key information that pupils need for a lesson along with the room to complete the planned and prepared related tasks. It is a seductive idea.
Powerful knowledge: what teachers need to understand
This article was originally published on 17 September 2021 Back at the beginning of 2020, I made a prediction that Michael Young’s ideas on Powerful Knowledge in the curriculum would be the next big thing that we in classrooms would be hearing all about. It turns out, I wasn’t wrong.
How teachers can get to grips with powerful knowledge
Back at the beginning of 2020, I made a prediction that Michael Young’s ideas on Powerful Knowledge in the curriculum would be the next big thing that we in classrooms would be hearing all about. It turns out, I wasn’t wrong. In June of this year, schools minister Nick Gibb gave a speech on the importance of the knowledge-rich curriculum in which he cited Michael Young’s work, and Young has also made appearances in speeches from Ofsted’s chief inspector, Amanda Spielman.
What everyone is getting wrong about CPD – and how to fix it
In an ideal world, continuing professional development, or CPD, would be something that every teacher looked forward to and embraced as an opportunity to become better at the exciting and complex job of teaching. Something tells me we are not in that ideal world.
Online learning: How teachers can prepare for remote teaching next term
Another term flies, or crawls, towards the end and so the next batch of government guidance on Covid for schools to digest and plan for arrives – of course it does. One of the big changes is that close contacts of pupils who have tested positive for Covid will no longer need to isolate, only those who have tested positive will.
Are there any new ideas in teaching?
I think I had been in a school for about five minutes before the first person told me that if you stay still long enough in education the same ideas will come around again. In the following 18 years, I have heard variations on this theme countless times: every new idea is just an old one being repacked and sold to people. One minute we are told to stop doing something and then we are told to start doing it again. We have heard it all before.
What is teaching? Let's settle the centuries-old debate
Teaching was doomed, to begin with. Some of the earliest writing we have on the practice of teaching comes from Socrates (or at least Plato writing what he thought Socrates would have written) and in this, we find the idea that the teacher’s role was not to transmit knowledge but to draw out what was already there in the student. The teacher in this process had nothing to offer but a pedagogy designed to lead people to realise what they already knew.
Why do we need a curriculum for CPD?
Our new book, The CPD Curriculum, explores a knotty problem in education. Why, despite countless hours of what is called CPD, do teachers not continue to improve in many schools? The research that we explore in our book points to the same conclusion – that teachers make rapid progress in the first few years of teaching but then, regardless of continuing professional development, they plateau.
What TAGs taught me about managing assessment workload
Not all assessments are created equal. In his final blog post on assessment, Mark Enser explains how crafting the right kind of assessment can actually save teachers time Teachers assess constantly. As we ask pupils questions in the classroom, we listen to their response and work out whether we think they have fully grasped something so that we know whether to move on. We glance at their work as we circulate the room and identify misconceptions that need addressing.
Middle leaders: How to survive as a school head of department
I have been a head of department for eight years now and, for the most part, it is a role that I love. I enjoy thinking about the curriculum and planning lessons, considering where the department can improve and what we want to focus on next. I enjoy the department meetings and I enjoy going shopping with the department budget. All of this is wonderful. But… There is clearly a problem in middle leadership that needs addressing.
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