Is this you? As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.
Claim your profile
Articles by Stephen Petty
New year, new acronyms: Can the ECT replace the NQT?
“Colleagues, we’ve reached that time in the year when we must sadly offer our thanks and farewells to school titles, acronyms and abbreviations, heading off to pastures new. Though, I’ll be honest with you, I haven’t always been sorry to see them go.
Teachers could deliver Covid catch-up in summer holiday traffic jams
A vast proportion of teachers seem to be heading to Cornwall for their holidays this summer, all of us resigned to being caught up in the supreme mother of South West gridlocks. It’s going to take us many extra hours – days even – to nudge slowly forwards to our destination. The “doing it overnight” option could turn out to be just as frustrating, so often have I heard it suggested.
Disadvantage: Why the system of judging teaching across the country is flawed
Are Yorkshire teachers the best? I can safely assure everybody that the answer to this question is, of course, a plain and unequivocal “yes”. My plain-speaking Yorkshire tongue may be firmly in its cheek when I present the evidence, but doubtless it will still cause upset and indignation in more sensitive regions. All being well. What is true for Yorkshire Tea is even more the case for Yorkshire teachers – “Everything’s done proper.” Everyone else should take a leaf.
Classroom management: How to keep cool in hot-temper season
We could always tell, about two minutes beforehand, whenever our old maths teacher was going to self-combust again. First the neck would redden. Then his towering body would start swaying forwards and back in that buttoned-up suit, rocking on the heels so much that some of the young comedians in the front row would start taking refuge beneath their desks. Finally, he would let out a thunderous “Enough!” Sadly, it rarely was.
Covid and schools: I've found a way to save the 2021 school prom
Hundreds of thousands of disappointed students will be receiving apologetic messages from their schools this week, confirming that the end-of-school prom has had to be cancelled, or at best postponed, because of the government’s decision to prolong restrictions on social gatherings. But there is a way of still staging that ball just as originally planned – and with an additional centrepiece attraction. All that’s needed is for two teachers to get married there that evening.
Euro 2020: How about a GCSE in I Don't Care About Football?
Just as there are some colleagues in school who have been happily whiffling on about the Euro 2020 football tournament for several weeks now, there are others who will be equally happy to display total and utter indifference. And while the former can now enjoy wall-to-wall football and indulge in near-constant debate and discussion, it’s surely time that the proudly ignorant and apathetic got something out of these seemingly endless events, too. How about a GCSE in Couldn’t Care Less?
Teacher job interviews: Please, no more cheesy questions
A friend reports that, during a recent interview for a senior leadership post, the candidates were each asked, “If you were a cheese, which type would best describe you?” Oh please, give it a rest. Not another “If you were a…” interview question. No doubt the person on the panel who thought up that question was hoping to impress the others with their roguish originality: “This will be insightful. They won’t have a prepared answer to this one.” Wrong on both counts.
GCSEs 2021: Why does Ofsted want us to keep Year 11 students in school?
In all fairness, you have to hand it to the government and Ofsted double act. It’s a cunning plan they have devised there. Just when the fury of teachers starts to focus on the one, the other dutifully pops up to divert some of the rage their way instead.
Why I’m thinking about becoming a teacher-influencer
I have been a complete fool. For years I have thought “promotion” in teaching meant getting your foot on the ladder and working your way upwards. But I have recently realised, a little late in the day, that I am stuck halfway up completely the wrong ladder. The big money in teaching is now in self-promotion; it’s about having a video channel on Instagram or YouTube and becoming a “teacher influencer”. Follow me Maybe it’s not too late for me to give this influencing a go.
School life: Headteacher winks at you. What does it mean?
A new headteacher at a previous school had the habit of ending every meeting by giving each departing individual a discreet personal wink. His “wink management” approach then spread rapidly to the entire senior leadership team. Within a couple of terms, they were all at it. As one former colleague put it, fresh out of a meeting with the new incumbent: “I went in there to push for my pay threshold but at the end it felt more like friggin’ Casablanca.
Beware! Pupils ahead: A Highway Code for schools
Jobs My jobs Job alerts My CV Career preferences Resources Downloads Saved resources Author dashboard Add resource My shop Tes Elements Courses Access courses News Magazine Subscriptions Payments About us My products Tes for schools Work for Tes Is your class a 30-only zone? Are there Inset roundabouts ahead?
Teacher mental health: How can Ofsted protect our wellbeing?
Many were a bit shaken this week to hear Ofsted pledging to do all that it can to “protect and enhance” our mental and physical health. In the latest charter committed to helping those of us working in education, it declares that it is going to “take staff wellbeing into account in coming to judgements”. It will also consider “whether the [inspection] framework is having inadvertent impacts” on that wellbeing. Some might regard such a statement as shameless, disingenuous hypocrisy.
GCSE 2021: Forget stag weekends - we have TAG weekends
Many of us will have some slightly disturbing memories of a stag or hen weekend, where we ended up in situations that we would not wish to share with our class. Perhaps you recall, with a wince, that drinking game, the night out on the town where you all dressed as nuns, that other drinking game, perhaps a small intervention from the local Prague police, another drinking game, the incident in the nightclub.
Covid in school: A mask-slang to English translation guide
Even at the best of times, many of our pupils tend to mumble or make no sense. We teachers are not always that much better. So the current wearing of masks by all pupils, as well as by the teacher in many cases, can mean that several minutes in a lesson can pass without anyone having much of a clue about what anyone else is saying. Don’t get me wrong. I am all in favour of masks in classrooms. But they can cause many a consonant to change or disappear entirely.
Collective worship? We need to talk rubbish in schools
With a theatrical display of disgust, a former head of year always used to begin his customary assembly on litter by showing the young audience a discarded Mars Bar wrapper. He would stretch out an arm and dangle it disdainfully between thumb and forefinger. “Look at this! I’ve just picked this up off the playground on my way over here,” he always claimed, even though colleagues around the hall had just seen him happily scoffing it down in the staffroom. How we used to mock that litter assembly.
Does any teacher know how to work classroom blinds?
Online teaching may have had its moments of minor calamity, but there is surely nothing so publicly humiliating as being in a real classroom when the projector screen starts to play up. When pulling down the dangling handle to unfurl the spring-loaded screen, the advised “count to five” for holding and then releasing usually works perfectly well. But I know never to count my chickens. I breathe a quiet sigh of relief each time.
Does teaching make you feel more youthful?
“Clerks, operatives and teachers are the shortest-lived of all,” according to a report in Scientific American. This breaking news is, admittedly, from an 1858 edition of the magazine. It was further revealed that teachers tended to set off for the great staffroom in the sky at the ripe old age of around 30 to 35. Many teachers today might well feel a connection with those predecessors.
Learning styles: What teaching fads will the DfE resurrect next?
Many school and union leaders have claimed, with noises of exasperation, that the Department for Education never seems to learn anything about what goes on in schools. But maybe they are to blame. Following the DfE’s recent startling resurrection of the widely debunked “learning styles” theory in its newsletter to prospective new teachers, those outspoken critics of the DfE need to ask a few questions of themselves.
What if Gavin and Wilshaw aren't pantomime villains?
We should surely applaud any organisation that has raised more than £10 million this year to help provide free laptops for children. But what if it is, in fact, a news organisation inclined to the union-thwacking right, and even more inclined to display surplus quantities of celebrity thigh and cleavage at every available opportunity? Aren’t we teachers supposed to condemn everything about that sort of organisation? This doesn’t fit the narrative at all. So how do I react to such news?
Why being married to a science teacher is the best
The world’s richest woman, MacKenzie Scott, divorced the boss of Amazon and has now gone and married a science teacher, of all things. There is no mistaking the thinly disguised subtext in most reporting of this match, though the truth is that she is the one who has struck gold. Reader, I married a science teacher, and I can confirm that Scott's decision is more than a mere upgrade. This isn’t just moving on from Amazon to Amazon Prime.
Want a pay rise? Become an artisan teacher
As the recent pay freeze confirmed, there’s no extra money in becoming a modernised “blended” teacher. No matter that most of us now have the technological skills to teach our classes at any time of the day or night, from just about anywhere in our home that you’d care to mention. No matter, either, that many of us can now strut as confidently around Google Classroom as we can a real classroom, or that we have brought the mighty Microsoft Teams to its knees, often in a good way.
Schools reopening: How to ensure everywhere's Covid-safe?
If schools are deemed so miraculously safe that they can resume at full capacity, then surely the obvious thing to do is to call everywhere else a “school”, too? By relaunching as “school cinemas”, “school pubs”, “school hairdressers”, “school nightclubs”, the whole country would gain similar divine status and be able to reopen as normal.
Do we really need so many tsars in education?
I worry about the number of “tsars” now roaming around the educational realm. We now have a new “school catch-up tsar”, a “children’s tsar” and a “youth mental health tsar” – not to mention the once-untouchable “school behaviour tsar”, former night-club bouncer Tom Bennett. We can only speculate on how Bennett may now be planning his response to the rise of all these upstart tsars on his manor.
How I overcame the odds and learned to mark online work
After a year of online teaching, it gets increasingly embarrassing to own up to having problems, still, with some of the absolute basics. In my case, the issue has been over how, when, on my laptop, I can tick students’ work. There, it’s out there. While other colleagues are now advancing to second screens, breakout rooms and making names for themselves as YouTube teacher-presenters, it doesn’t get any easier to own up to these local difficulties.
Why doesn't Ofsted inspect schools of fish instead?
“Stuart from Ofsted is in the online lobby, requesting to attend your lesson.” Oh, bless. At least you have to admire the resolve there. Given the seemingly robotic inclination to carry on inspecting schools whatever the circumstance, I have begun to wonder what Ofsted’s initial reaction might be in the aftermath of a nuclear strike or a Martian invasion.
Online learning: Live lessons? I need a glass of wine
I suspect dry January hasn’t featured strongly in too many teaching households this time around. Certainly not in this one. I don’t hold out much hope for a frugal February, either. For some, a day of live online teaching calls for a calming glass or two during the relative peace of the evening. Others might prefer a weekly Friday night of hedonism with friends on Zoom, while some like to meet up virtually for a Google Classroom grog-fest some time on a Saturday.
Coronavirus: A pandemic, pay cuts and hungry pupils - it's like 1921
I was recently looking at a school photograph from exactly a hundred years ago. My goodness, there are some grim expressions on the teachers in that line-up, even allowing for the contemporary custom of posing solemnly before a camera. But when we begin to reflect on what it must have felt like to be a teacher in 1921, perhaps we can understand the apparent sorrow and torment behind some of those eyes.
If Gavin Williamson had been at Agincourt or Dunkirk...
Compared with other leaders’ celebrated speeches in times of crisis, Gavin Williamson’s on Wednesday was one of the most pioneering of them all.
Is Gavin Williamson just a wayward algorithm?
One name has come to dominate those typically brief and masked exchanges between colleagues this week – and it’s not Baby Jesus. Some have speculated that Gavin Williamson is perhaps ill. Many others in schools have been offering blunter and less charitable assessments of the education secretary. But I know one colleague with a different Gavin theory altogether.
Where have all the maths and science Susans gone?
This challenging little primary school question is currently doing the rounds on social media: “Jane has 12 crayons and Kim has 7 crayons. How many more crayons does Susan have than Kim?” In the space provided for the answer, one child has naturally written: “Who is Susan?” “Who is Susan?” is indeed a good question – and where on earth has she gone? I was quite surprised even to see her name mentioned at all in such a question, though perhaps it’s fitting that she only appears in ghost form.
Coronavirus: Donkeys are furious at being compared to the DfE
My family and I have been proud, loyal domesticated donkeys for thousands of years, and would like to make the loudest possible “hee-haw” at our being likened to the here-today, gone-tomorrow bipeds currently ruling the roost at Education Farm. Our main role on that farm may be limited to slow and simple fetching and carrying, but at least we know where we are going, and we always deliver.
At what age do you hit your peak as a teacher?
One retired teacher from East Anglia recently told me that she never sensed that she was ever at a peak stage in her career, even though there must logically have been such a time. So perhaps it happened on her very last day of teaching, I suggested – that she just got better and better with age – but she rather doubted it. She felt instead as if she had passed seamlessly from being at the “young and raw” stage to the slightly “past it” point, without any intervening period at all.
Coronavirus: Is 72-hour marking policy good for teachers?
While the relationship between me and my life partner, the marking pile, has always been mutually hostile, things have reached a new low of late. I’ve long resented the way it constantly follows me around, forever lurking alongside me in my classroom, teamroom and passenger seat. It even has its own chair at home and its own permanent nagging place inside my head. Sometimes, I’ve tried sitting the pile down and having a heart-to-heart chat, just to try to clear the air.
Coronavirus: How we can put Ofsted inspectors to good use
I think we are all agreed that school inspectors can normally play a valuable role in schools. If laid out across a classroom doorway or unfurled carefully along a windowsill, they make very good draught excluders. However, with ventilation in the classroom now so paramount – whatever Ofsted chief inspector Amanda Spielman may think – this option is sadly no longer available. So everyone is now complaining about how pointless, time-wasting and burdensome inspections are going to be this year.
Coronavirus: Are new teaching ideas being lost?
For a while, it was a blissful autumn scene. I was walking through a forest of beech trees and the blaze of yellow, crimson and orange leaf could never have looked more magnificent. Such a welcome half-term escape from all that confronts us at school right now. The only drawback was that the foliage underfoot was even more impressively dense and colourful than the canopy above. The path soon vanished, and I spent at least half an hour heading hopefully but hopelessly in the wrong direction.
Why the way you park your car says a lot about you as a teacher
If you want to climb the ladder in this job, it is not particularly helpful to drive into your school car park with "I’m a Barbie Girl" booming through your music system. Our former head – very much a Classic FM man – paused by his car, looking bewildered. The windows of my car were visibly shaking to “You can brush my hair, undress me anywhere,” as I swiftly nipped into the bay next to him, keen to get out and explain myself.
Do we really need teachers to be male role models?
It’s been odd to hear so much concern at the news that the proportion of male teachers has fallen to its lowest-ever level. The truth, of course, is that the vanishing male teacher should not worry anyone. Quite the reverse. Most of us are quite annoying in some way or another, and too many of us combine this with being at the wrong end of the useless spectrum – though not all, in fairness.
Teacher appraisals, performance management and confusing software
At last, I think I have discovered the real reason why so many schools saddle themselves with cumbersome “specialist” software for their staff’s annual performance-management interviews. As most of us are painfully aware, it obviously has nothing to do with making the interview process any easier to run. But nor – contrary to what I once assumed – does it have anything to do with ensuring consistency and robustness.
Is Williamson right – are we indoctrinating our pupils?
The case against: This is just another stick to beat teachers with At such an easy time in schools, it is reassuring to find those at the very top taking a firm line and telling us all to get a grip and do our jobs properly. There must be no more preaching in schools about a communist revolution. There must be no more laziness. No more teachers too lazy even to preach about a communist revolution. We have all been brought to heel, at last, by the new rule of sticks.
School funding: Let's scrap HS2, and spend the money on education
One half of our school is at the other end of town from the other, going back to a time when one site was the grammar school and the other the secondary modern. Over the past 50 years of its being a single comprehensive school, several solutions have been proposed to try to ease the pressure on staff rushing between the two. One of the more fanciful visions was the idea of an elevated train or cable car, with cabins of teachers and TAs passing smoothly above the high street after each lesson.
Coronavirus: 'The 10pm pub curfew sounds rather nice for teachers'
News that pubs are going to close early each night has, of course, come as a devastating blow to teachers everywhere – well, in some parallel, Gavin Williamson-imagined world of dissolute teachers it has, anyway. In this world, we are the pub’s most regular regulars, particularly after 10pm. The new cut-off feels personal. So the mood late last night at The Red Lion was predictably sombre.
University admissions: What would Shakespeare’s Ucas statement look like?
The leaves may be starting to turn, the face mask beginning to whiff a bit, and the memories of my shy new September classes starting to fade. But – for me – none of these developments truly defines the onset of autumn. I only know we are properly into the new season when I hear the first familiar call of the Ucas student: “Please can you read the first draft of my personal statement?” Similarly, their final, final draft often heralds the beginning of winter.
The hardest adjustment this school term? Wearing shoes again
When I played Beyoncé in the village pantomime last year, the biggest challenge was not the learning of tight dance routines, nor the fishnet tights, nor the short shorts, nor the singing of “Put a ring on it”. The hardest thing – as a significant proportion of the readership here will already know – was the relentless physical commitment needed to live in high-heeled shoes for three hours each evening.
It's time we stopped using the full stop. Period
Some of us working in schools were perhaps a little disturbed to hear recently that our students now consider the full stop to be a rather cold way of ending a message. This news inevitably led to more media hammering of the so-called “snowflake generation”. For what it’s worth, however, I am on the side of youth on this one. Perhaps the time has come for us all to give the full stop the big heave. What has it ever done for anyone? The clue is surely in the name.
Beware dangerous quicksand - and other teacher myths
When he was about eight years old, our son suddenly began behaving very oddly whenever we came to a beach. Having previously rushed ahead of us on arrival, he took to hovering on the steps down, waiting for us to lead the way. He then followed on cautiously behind. Why? Because of his blessed teacher, of course, who had apparently gone off on one in class.
Let's rekindle the romance of school cruises
The slow, end-of-disco song had just begun – I’m Not in Love, probably – and, before I knew it, Liz from one of the many other schools on board had drawn me into a close dance and was kissing me on the lips, seemingly for the duration. I was a 16-year-old grammar school boy from a small village; nothing remotely like this had ever happened to me before.
Coronavirus: Pubs or schools? Perhaps the policy is flawed
It’s an issue that has begun to divide a nation more than anything else since Brexit: which one of these two great national institutions should we keep open in September, the school or the pub? Professor Medley from the Sage group kicked it all off by arguing that we cannot sensibly serve both beer and education on tap, given the need to retain some limit to mass social interaction. So, which of the two should stay?
Coronavirus: Schools with no parent complaints in lockdown
My impression is that most schools during lockdown experienced at least a few parents complaining that the online provision was better at some other place nearby. There would invariably be “a friend” whose daughter or son at another local school “absolutely loved” the range and quality of the online teaching and learning being offered there – it was so much more imaginative, challenging, stimulating, or whatever.
'Nobody misses me': Ofsted as an Alan Bennett character
I’ve been stuck here at home for months. No swooping visits. No deep-diving. No grading. And nobody seems to have missed me at all. Not a bit. Stuart, my eldest – very big in logistic consultancy in Ashby-de-la-Zouch – thinks that I’ve been going through what he describes as an existential crisis ever since March. “Existential crisis, indeed!” I said. “Look at you, with your fancy new words.” But maybe he’s right. Maybe I have begun to wonder if there’s any real point to my role in life.
What your choice of online learning platform- from Google Classroom to Zoom says about you
Where do you prefer to work online – in Teams, Google Classroom, Show My Homework (Satchel) or somewhere wilder still? And what does that favourite online platform reveal about our personality? Maybe nothing, but then again...maybe everything. 1. The Show My Homework Traditionalist Cautious and conservative, the Show My Homework Traditionalist resists all pressure from school to add a second online teaching platform to their repertoire.
Show More
loading
Actions
Is this you?
As a journalist, you can create a free Muck Rack account to customize your profile, list your contact preferences, and upload a portfolio of your best work.Get in touch with Stephen
Contact Stephen, search articles and posts on X, monitor coverage, and track replies from one place.
Learn more about Muck Rack