School improvement update - November

Sensible stuff, no quick fixes

Dear colleague

I hope things are well with you.

Here are some links that I hope you find helpful:

I’ll be speaking at DiverseEd Cymru conference on Saturday 2nd March 2024 in Newport. The theme is ‘Be where you are celebrated, not tolerated.’

Joanna Grace is running the PMLD Conference IV on Sunday 14th January online.

I’ll be speaking at Bradley Busch’s Teaching and Learning Summit conference Friday 9th and Saturday 10th February. The conference will be live at Eton College and also available online.

I’m looking forward to working with Tom Sherrington and John Tomsett for the Christmas Curriculum Celebration conference on Thursday 14th December, 09.00 – 15:30 London.

The IncludEd Conference 2024 organised by The Difference is returning after a sell-out affair in January 2023. The biggest conference for school inclusion, Saturday 13th January at IOE, UCL's Faculty of Education and Society. I’ll be speaking and further details here.

I’ll also be speaking about the curriculum and school improvement at the Teacher Development Trust conference on Tuesday 30th January in London

The Racial Equity Network Dinner in Birmingham on Friday 28th June will be a fantastic professional development event for anyone who believes in social equity.

Historic Royal Palaces are producing some excellent resources, based on their collections, for example filter the range of stories to add value to history programmes of study. And we have just published History Knowledge Bites on Myatt & Co. These provide teachers with key information and background knowledge, and they’ve been prepared by Glen Carter of History Rocks.

Peps McCrea writes a really helpful series of posts on making learning memorable, for example this, on warming up prior knowledge.

If you have colleagues new to curriculum leadership, we’ve created the Curriculum Leaders self-paced course. We cover the principles of curriculum design, draw on some of the insights from research and follow the curriculum journey from intent through to impact. There’s 8 hours of recordings and resources, live check-ins with John Tomsett and me plus subscriptions to the Myatt & Co platform.

Cohort 2 of the Leadership Lobby is now open. I’m running this with Andrew Morrish and it’s suitable for new and experienced leaders: ‘Wow there is SO much leadership gold here. Loved the session on leading trustfully and hearing Mary and Andrew discuss the ‘messy middle’ of getting this right.’

We’re developing the scope of our online courses and we’ll be launching some brilliant new material early 2024 on the Huh Academy.

The Teachers’ Collection is going from strength to strength! The team have uploaded more resources to the library with texts, draft plans and vocabulary lists as a way to support curriculum planning with high quality texts. It now has its own Twitter profile, where we’re updating new book suggestions and planning resources.

We are continuing to add to the faster reading collection and the impact that just reading can have on reading progress for all pupils and students and particularly those with lower starting points. You can find out how colleagues at St Michael’s C of E Primary School have applied the ‘Faster Read’ research approach by reading challenging texts, at pace, in whole class reading. In this film they discuss their approach and the exceptional outcomes. As with all the ‘Faster Read’ conversations, this is free to access.

If you think there’s someone who would appreciate this update, you can forward the link here.

Until next time

Mary