Education Matters

Hannah and Lucy talk about teaching through the winter.

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Tuesday · 1 hr
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.
Tuesday · 33 min
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.
Sunday · 58 min
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.
September 20 · 1 hr 4 min
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.
September 18 · 58 min
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.
September 13 · 55 min
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.
September 11 · 1 hr 6 min
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
September 10 · 52 min
In Conversation with John Gibbs | Dr Sinéad McCauley Lambe
John Gibbs is joined by Dr Sinéad McCauley Lambe, Assistant Professor in the Department of Inclusive and Special Education at Dublin City University, for a conversation about handwriting, and why it's far more complicated than pen on page. Sinéad spent eleven years teaching junior primary in an all boys school in Dublin's north inner city before her classroom experience turned into doctoral research, and she's spent the years since trying to answer a question that sounds simple and isn't. Why do so many children arrive at school unable to hold a pencil, line up in a queue or peel an orange? That question became her "problem of practice", and it took her from a single school in an area of lower socioeconomic status to a study across ten classrooms in six schools, comparing DEIS and non-DEIS settings using a standardised motor assessment. What she found was stark. Motor proficiency was significantly lower among children from disadvantaged backgrounds, even once age was accounted for, and the gap showed up long before anyone picked up a pencil. Handwriting, Sinéad explains, was never really the point. It was the most measurable output of something much bigger, gross motor development, postural stability, core strength and visual processing, all of which have to be in place before fine motor skills like handwriting can follow. She traces her own light bulb moment back to an occupational therapist telling her that a struggling pupil needed shoulder strength before he needed a better pencil grip, and to a school principal who had junior infants crawl, roll and shuffle across a hall so he could spot developmental gaps before they became problems. The conversation ranges widely and stays grounded throughout. Sinéad talks John through visual discrimination, why some children see their own letters as a jumble of shapes, the overlap between drawing, art and handwriting instruction, and why a box of good pens and scented markers did more for reluctant writers than any worksheet. She's candid about the limits of technology too. Laptops and tablets have a real place for learners with significant motor or perceptual difficulties, but a study she cites, comparing pupils given laptops for a mock exam, found the attainment gap between groups persisted regardless. Typing isn't a shortcut around a motor difficulty, and for most children, she argues, the effortful, embodied process of learning to write by hand still matters for literacy, memory and comprehension in ways a keyboard simply doesn't replicate. There's also a sharp, honest exchange on school culture, the sedentary bias built into most classrooms, the pressure teachers feel to look like they're teaching even when the most useful thing happening is a child playing on the floor, and the quiet damage done by practices like the pen licence. "It's a really deficit kind of approach and it makes people feel bad about themselves, when that's not the purpose of handwriting," Sinéad says, and she's just as clear that handwriting has to be explicitly taught. Sensory play in sand or Play-Doh won't get a child writing on its own. It has to sit alongside, not instead of, time spent with a pencil in hand. For anyone working in teacher education, initial teacher training, CPD or classroom practice, this episode offers a genuinely fresh lens on a subject most of us assume we already understand. It closes on an image Sinéad can't quite shake, a small boy in a Belgian forest bringing his bike to a stop, climbing a tree, climbing back down and cycling off again, doing without any adult prompting exactly what she spends her working life trying to build back into classrooms. If you care about literacy, inclusive education or the small physical foundations that learning depends on, this one is well worth your time. Subscribe to Education Matters wherever you get your podcasts so you never miss what's coming next.
September 10 · 1 hr 1 min
Teaching Matters | NEETS, Quiets & The Rich Exit
Teaching Matters returns for the new school year. It’s your weekly panel show from Education Matters, hosted by Paul Hazzard who this week is joined by John Gibbs. We help you unwind, not wind you up. The first conversation is based on The Guardian's article by Richard Partington which explores the major review led by Alan Milburn. A chief recommendation is that primary schools in England identify children as young as pre-school who are at risk of future youth worklessness. Paul asks whether a ten-year-old can really be marked out for a life of unemployment, education or training gaps, and John doesn't shy away from the tension at the heart of it. "The child is father to the man," he says, borrowing from Wordsworth, before warning that pushing determinism too far "would negate education" altogether. Their exchange ranges across nature and nurture, the anti-educational risk of writing children off early and the loaded vocabulary of policy reviews, where words like "upstream failure" reveal more values than their authors perhaps intend. John's line that teachers "have to behave as though everything was possible for every child, even though we must also know that can't be true" sits right at the centre of this discussion, and it's one that will resonate with anyone working in teacher education or school leadership. Next, we turn to quieter classrooms and quieter children. We're drawing on Sean Sutton's writing on inclusive classroom practice. John and I talk through what it actually means to make space for shy or introverted learners without forcing them into performative moments they dread. John remembers teaching a boy who stumbled through reading aloud in front of the class and reflects on how far schools have come since then, and I share a memory of a Lego club that unlocked confidence in children who were otherwise painfully quiet. It's a warm, practical stretch of the conversation if you're thinking about classroom culture, pastoral care or CPD around pupil wellbeing, and a reminder that rapport often does more than curriculum ever could. John puts it simply, "it's a relationship profession," and we both agree that knowing a child well enough to spot their quiet strengths matters just as much as any lesson plan. Our last story looks at high earning parents, largely in the United States, who are ditching traditional schools in favour of personalised, entrepreneurial and AI driven alternatives, as reported by Katherine Bindley in the Wall Street Journal. John's sceptical of parents trying to future proof their children with skills that will likely be redundant by the time they're grown, and he doesn't hold back: "privilege will buy privilege for their kids, and that definitely works," whether that's elite schooling, tutoring or simply access to galleries and dinner table conversation. It leaves us asking something I think every listener will recognise, wherever you're teaching, from the UK and Ireland to the United States, Australia, New Zealand and Canada: what does a genuinely well-educated young person actually look like now, and can any single system deliver it? And of course we finish with Banana Time. I share a short video from Andy Hargreaves on the quiet teacher, and John tells me the story of stumbling across Richard Dadd's extraordinary painting The Fairy Feller's Master-Stroke decades ago, and his plans to finally see it in person at the Royal Academy this September.
August 12 · 54 min
The Hannah & Lucy Show | Teachable Moments
Fresh back from Las Vegas and with the World Cup 26 behind them Hannah and Lucy take to the airwaves in the summer heat to tell us all about teachable moments. They start with the World Cup and Team Algeria's host city assignment in Lawrence, Kansas. A famously conservative American town adopted a North African football team with open arms, flags and genuine affection, and Lucy holds it up as proof that solidarity can outrun geography and politics. Hannah connects this straight back to her own classroom practice, describing feedback from a pilot she has been running for One World in Schools, where pupils encountered the Bristol Bike Project's work with asylum seekers and, in her words, discovered that "they're in a really horrible situation because they want to be part of society but they can't be." From there Hannah and Lucy turn to masculinity and to what football got right this summer. Hannah and Lucy spend real time on the friendship between Jude Bellingham and Erling Haaland, the shirt swaps, the affectionate teasing and the very public hugs, arguing that visible tenderness between men is exactly the modelling boys need and rarely see. Nico Williams handing his World Cup medal straight to his mother becomes a way into talking about migration and gratitude, while Bellingham crediting his mother's insistence that he keep his temper under control offers a neat parallel with teacher to pupil relationships. There is a detour into female friendship too, with Hannah reflecting that women can be quick to undermine each other and arguing instead that "it should never be pulling each other down to try and get further up." Not everything from the tournament earns praise. The pair are unflinching about the violence that followed the third place match, and about what they see as a troubling silence from football's governing bodies since. Lucy is particularly direct, arguing that inaction from FIFA amounts to tacit approval and that "by not doing anything, you're saying, well, that's fine." Both hosts talk through how they would actually teach this in an assembly or PSHE lesson, using the gap between what happened on the pitch and what would happen to a PE teacher who did the same thing to make consequences and fairness concrete for pupils. There is lighter chat too. Curaçao's joyful, hopeless run through the tournament becomes an argument for celebrating effort over outcome, the Viking Row banter between Norway and England shows pupils what good natured rivalry looks like without cruelty and Japan and Mexico's fans quietly clearing the stadiums after their matches earns its own small tribute to community pride. Hannah shares a moment with her own son that captures the episode in miniature, recalling him telling her he prefers watching football with her because "you don't get angry and don't say bad words." This is less a football episode than an education episode that happens to use football as its case study. Hannah and Lucy talk with the warmth, self-deprecation and occasional chaos that regular listeners will recognise, jet lag and all, while circling back to what actually lands with pupils and how to turn a viral clip into a genuine opening assembly or classroom discussion. Teachers looking for ready-made material on inclusion, respect, friendship and accountability will find plenty here, in a conversation that never feels like a lecture. Subscribe to Education Matters and follow The Hannah and Lucy Show for more of their blend of policy, pastoral insight and classroom practice, delivered with the honesty and humour that has made it a firm favourite among teachers, teacher educators and anyone who cares about what actually happens in schools.
July 14 · 46 min
Education Matters | Virginia Kerr
Virginia Kerr has been a TV reporter, a news anchor, a social media strategist with a TikTok following approaching a million and a YouTube educator who built a seven year business teaching storytelling from a converted laundry room … and so much more … . At fifty-two, with that career already stacked high with achievement, she has decided to become a full time high school teacher, taking on audio and video production classes for teenagers who mostly have no idea who she is or what she used to do. Virginia is candid about walking into a school where nobody knows her despite decades in front of a camera and a level of local recognition most people spend a career chasing. She talks Paul through the discomfort of becoming a first year teacher, "I feel like a rookie who's gonna get hazed," she admits, before adding the line that anchors the episode, that the twenty two year old version of her could never have made this move, but the fifty two year old finally can. Chat moves through why Virginia left television, the exhaustion of chasing numbers on social media and the moment she realised constant reinvention had been leading somewhere all along. She reflects honestly on an old instinct to prove herself through titles and promotions, and how none of it ever brought the purpose she was chasing. "Our stories are our superpower," she says, describing why she stopped trying to sound like an expert and started sounding like herself. Paul and Virginia talk at length about authenticity in front of a class and how the skills of building an audience translate, or fail to translate, into building rapport with fifteen to seventeen year olds. Virginia describes the balance new teachers are told to strike early on, projecting enough authority that pupils take instructions seriously, while still being recognisably human once trust is established. She is candid that she is holding some of her natural openness in check in the first weeks, partly because her own son is in one of her classes. There is a strong thread centred on wellbeing running throughout the episode. Virginia describes cutting news and social media scrolling from her routine and the surprising effect that had on her cortisol levels according to her doctor. She credits a teacher she admires online, CJ Reynolds, for the idea of protecting your mindset before you walk into a room full of teenagers and cites the writer and career changer Lucy Kellaway on the particular humility required when decades of professional respect count for nothing on day one in teaching. Paul draws out the practical realities too, five classes of up to thirty pupils, projects built around storytelling rather than technical process and the logistics of pupils leaving the classroom to film unsupervised around the school site. Virginia explains why she is flipping the traditional curriculum for the subject, leading with narrative and purpose before technical editing skills, and how she plans to use video from pupils she already knows from her time as a substitute teacher and school social media coordinator to bring lessons to life. This is a conversation about courage, about starting again in public and about what it actually takes to move from high visibility work into a classroom of thirty teenagers who, in some cases, could not care less how many followers you once had. Anyone thinking about a late career change into teaching, or already living through one, will find plenty here that’s valuable, informative and just plain absorbing. New episodes of Education Matters land regularly, so subscribe and follow wherever you listen to make sure you never miss a conversation like this one.
July 13 · 56 min
Education Matters | Katrina Bradley
Paul Hazzard is joined by Katrina Bradley, a former music teacher turned numeracy specialist, resource designer and entrepreneur, for a conversation that ranges across curiosity, confidence and what it actually takes to make maths click. Katrina traces her own path from a music degree and eight years as a peripatetic music teacher to retraining as a primary school teacher, and explains how the skills she used teaching rhythm, notation and metre turned out to be exactly the skills she now uses teaching mathematics. She talks about her love of "puzzle solving" over "problem solving," a deliberate reframing that removes the anxiety many children attach to the word problem before they've even attempted it. Katrina shares a lovely workshop story about asking primary pupils whether there's maths in the supermarket and watching the thumbs-down paddles slowly turn to thumbs-up once they realise maths is already everywhere in their daily lives, including, inevitably, in their maths homework. The conversation moves into early years practice, where Katrina describes auditing nursery outdoor spaces to build mathematically rich environments, the kind where children naturally sort, measure and pattern without being taught a formal lesson, and argues that primary schools could learn a great deal from what nurseries already do so well. Paul and Katrina discuss the deep link between self-belief and mathematical ability, with Paul sharing his own lifelong sense of not being "a maths person" despite a natural knack for estimation, and Katrina makes the case that maths should be broken into smaller components rather than treated as a single subject you're either good or bad at. She talks candidly about how maths can "annihilate confidence" in a way few other subjects do, and why celebrating different routes to the same answer, not just the right answer, matters so much in the classroom. Conversation moves to mathematical talk and vocabulary, including the striking example of a resource that couldn't be translated into Polish because English has so many different words for multiplication and why children without the language to explain their thinking often stay silent or overuse whatever words they do have. Katrina explains the origins of her business, born out of the pandemic when parents were crying out for the manipulatives and visual resources schools use but families didn't have at home and how that grew into Connectrio and a full suite of tools now used everywhere from nursery classrooms to regional colleges teaching essential skills. Katrina is refreshingly honest about the tension between being pushed towards "ed tech" framing by investors and staying true to her belief that children need concrete, physical resources rather than more screens. There's a brilliant moment where Katrina explains how modern times tables teaching uses mathematical reasoning, working from a secure fact like ten sixes to reach a trickier one like nine sixes, and recalls a parent in one of her sessions accusing her of "cheating" for teaching it that way rather than by rote. Paul and Katrina also get into the pressures of running a business built on a teacher's instincts, from product compliance and manufacturing to social media and the guilt of never quite switching off, and draw some sharp parallels between burnout in teaching and burnout in entrepreneurship. The episode closes on a genuinely important question for anyone involved in maths education: at what point does teaching to the test start working against a child's ability to use maths for life? Katrina's answer, rooted in years of classroom and boardroom experience, is that children need to understand the why of mathematics, not just the how. This is an essential conversation for teachers, parents and anyone who has ever doubted their own mathematical ability. Follow Education Matters wherever you get your podcasts for more conversations shaping teaching and learning across the UK.
July 12 · 52 min
Teaching Matters | Shuffling Numbers, Boom n Bust & Primary Languages
John and Paul co-host the weekly panel show Teaching Matters and explore the Guardian investigation into a school inquiry, led by Estelle Morris and backed by the Department for Education, that recommends high-performing schools admit more disadvantaged white working-class pupils. This story reads like a cautionary tale about school privatisation. Durham High School, owned by the China-linked Galaxy Global Education Group, has closed its doors with almost no warning, leaving pupils mid-exam and a whole community reeling. John makes the point that once a school becomes an asset rather than an institution, closure is only ever a spreadsheet decision away. It's a wide-ranging conversation about school leadership, trust governance, marketisation and what happens when market capitalism collides with the classroom, made sharper by the irony that Durham had been named Sunday Times Independent School of the Year for the North East barely a year earlier. Paul and John ask what accountability, if any, should follow decades of privatisation policy. New research from the British Council finds that nearly half of primary schools in England struggle to find curriculum time for languages, and Paul and John use it to interrogate the whole idea of a knowledge-rich curriculum. If primary timetables are already bursting at the seams, what gets squeezed out, and what does that mean for language learning further down the line into secondary education? Paul draws on his own experience of Irish medium education in Northern Ireland to make the case for early language immersion and its impact on children's confidence, while John wonders whether curriculum design has simply forgotten what primary school is actually for. Banana time closes the episode on a properly reflective note. Paul borrows from Albert Camus, quoting the philosopher's claim that "what I know most surely about morality and duty, I owe to football," and draws out the parallels between the pitch and the classroom, from unpredictability to shared rules regardless of background to the constant demand to react in the moment, before bringing in Paulo Freire's idea of radical, dialogic education. John's banana this week is a fascinating tale about pigeons. Behavioural experiments show that even pigeons, having found a food strategy that reliably works, will abandon it just to see what else might happen, and John makes the case that this same appetite for chaos explains a good deal of classroom behaviour, and probably deserves a little more patience and curiosity from teachers than it usually gets. Teaching Matters will be back in late August or early September with more stories, more debate and more banana time. Until then, subscribe or follow wherever you get your podcasts so you don't miss the return.
July 11 · 1 hr 1 min
The Hannah & Lucy Show | Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't!
Lucy and Hannah are back on The Hannah and Lucy Show with the episode teachers have been quietly nodding along to since the last bell of summer term rang, Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't. Recorded in that strange, sun-baked, brain-fried week between the end of exams and the actual holidays, this one takes on everything the summer term throws at teachers, parents and pupils alike, and asks why so much of it feels like a trap with no right answer. It starts with the calendar itself. Sports days, summer fairs, end-of-year assemblies, all crammed into the hottest, busiest weeks of the year and scheduled as though every parent has nothing else on. Lucy pulls apart a recent Independent piece on exactly this tension, with figures showing that seventy four percent of families with school-aged children now have two parents in work, over half of them full-time. Hannah, a working mother juggling shifting after-school care and a co-parenting arrangement, brings the lived reality of trying to be in two places at once. As Hannah puts it, "I think all teachers should be prescribed a bit of water," a line that lands somewhere between joke and genuine plea after a term that has taken it out of everyone. From there the conversation moves to the heatwave school closures that made headlines this summer, and the government messaging around attendance that Lucy and Hannah both find maddening in its refusal to offer practical alternatives. That leads naturally into the World Cup, where more than three hundred thousand pupils were recorded absent the morning after England's win over Mexico. Rather than simply tutting at the numbers, the pair dig into the teachable moments buried in major tournaments, from conversations about patriotism versus nationalism to the idea that racism is learned rather than innate, and the missed opportunity schools have to use football as a way into difficult, honest classroom discussion. School uniform gets a proper airing too, from the case for PE kit as an all-day option to the absurdity of ties, blazers and socks becoming disciplinary flashpoints. Lucy is unambiguous on the subject, offering one of the episode's sharpest lines: "school is meant to be a great leveller," and both hosts agree the current system too often achieves the opposite. The conversation widens further into the attainment and attendance gap facing working-class white boys, a topic that rarely gets serious airtime, alongside the wider question of how schools communicate expectations to parents when home-school relationships still bear the scars of the pandemic. There is space too for the Department for Education's £700,000 spend on influencers, a detail both hosts find hard to let go of, and a genuinely useful detour into a token-based strategy for managing screen time at home, swapping telly minutes for reading time without a single raised voice. Detentions come under scrutiny as well, weighing the relationship-building value of teacher-led sanctions against the efficiency of centralised systems, with a nod to using film and documentary in the dying days of term when everyone, staff included, is simply trying to get to the finish line. Underneath the jokes about friendship bracelets, sea swims and Elvis wigs sits a genuinely thoughtful hour on teacher wellbeing, school leadership, parental engagement and the realities of classroom practice at the sharpest end of the school year. It is Education Matters at its most human: two experienced teachers thinking out loud about the profession they love, the pupils they worry about and the policies that make their jobs harder than they need to be. If you work in education, parent a school-aged child, or just want an honest, funny, occasionally furious take on what the summer term is really like, this one is for you. Subscribe to Education Matters and follow The Hannah and Lucy Show so you never miss an episode, and do let us know which side of the detention debate you land on.
July 5 · 1 hr 4 min
Teaching Matters | Heat, Awards & Bad Language
Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs co-host Teaching Matters. The first story explores Richard Adams and Fiona Harvey's report in The Guardian that our school estate, much of it built well past its intended lifespan, simply isn't ready for the extremes we're now living through. Paul and John talk through the astonishing case of Matford Brook Academy in Exeter, a brand new school demolished before a single pupil ever sat in it, and ask why so much school architecture chases cheapness and modernist minimalism over comfort, craftsmanship and durability. John argues that huts, damp classrooms and stifling summer heat have been a feature of school life for decades, and that the real question isn't why this heatwave caught us out, but why we've never properly fixed our buildings. There's a sharp aside on the Japanese concept of 'attendancism', the idea that simply turning up is treated as a virtue in itself. For story two, they turn to the TES Schools Awards 2026, reported by Cerys Turner, and ask whether education needs its own version of the Oscars. Both Paul and John are self-confessed sceptics of awards culture, not because recognition doesn't matter, but because, as John puts it, teaching is "surprisingly more teamwork than it is anything else." They explore the cult of the super head, the quiet, unglamorous graft of teachers who never get near a stage or a statuette, and whether celebrating individual brilliance risks obscuring the collective effort that actually makes schools work. John makes the memorable point that a teacher can only be as good as the school that lets them be that teacher, and that timetabling, workload and support matter far more than any individual gift for the job. It's a properly provocative discussion, and Paul admits from the outset it might get him into a bit of trouble, asserting that "teaching isn't a sport". The third story takes them into Westminster, where Alexandra Topping's Guardian report on a fractious PMQs, featuring Kemi Badenock's fiery exchange with Keir Starmer and a swipe at Bridget Phillipson, prompts a wider conversation about political rhetoric, performative anger and what all of it models for young people watching, however indirectly, from the classroom. John makes the case that rage has become shorthand for authenticity in modern discourse, and that the more baffled people feel by the world, the angrier they tend to sound. They discuss whether chamber language is genuinely protected, why the Speaker intervened over Badenock's choice of words, and what Farage and Trump's brand of populist grievance owes to the same performative instincts. It's sharp, funny and unafraid to name what's really going on. As always, the episode closes with the bananas, Paul and John's weekly offering of something genuinely worth thinking about. Paul's is the Pygmalion Effect, drawn from Robert Rosenthal and Lenore Jacobson's 1965 Oak School Experiment, the study that showed how the words we use to describe a child's potential can directly shape what that child becomes. John's is a lovely, meandering reflection on tidying bookshelves, and what the books we keep, the ones we'll never read again and the ones we can't quite let go of, reveal about who we are. Teaching Matters continues to do what it does best, taking the week's education stories seriously without ever taking itself too seriously. Expect genuine warmth, proper disagreement where it counts and the kind of conversation that will have you nodding along on the school run. If you care about teacher education, school leadership, educational policy or simply want smart, human conversation about the state of our schools, this episode delivers. Follow Teaching Matters wherever you get your podcasts, and join Paul, John and guests next week for more stories shaping classroom practice, pedagogy and professional life across the world.
June 21 · 1 hr 8 min
Teaching Matters | Boys Are Different, Good Leader – Good Parent & Smacking Shock
John and Paul examine three stories that shed light on crucial matters in education. John and Paul trace Gareth Southgate's claim that boys need to be taught differently from girls back through generations of changing attitudes, from segregated school entrances to suppressed aspirations for girls, before asking the harder question. Are differences between boys and girls down to nature, nurture or something more performed than either? John brings in the case of Clever Hans, the horse who appeared to do arithmetic but was really just reading tiny human cues, as a way into how early children learn to seek parental approval. John reminds us of psychologist Timothy Wilson's 2014 study in which he investigated human aversion to boredom and solitude. The experiment found that when left alone with their thoughts for 15 minutes, 67% of men and 25% of women chose to administer themselves a mild electric shock rather than simply sit in silence. They also discuss an experiment in which most men, but far fewer women, chose to give themselves a mild electric shock rather than sit with their own boredom. But where do boys find expressions of masculinity now that manual labour and competitive sport offer fewer outlets than before? John and Paul connect this to recent unrest on the streets of Northern Ireland, with Paul describing the violence as "a twisted, warped and dangerous expression" of a masculinity young men have no safe way to channel. They consider how figures like Andrew Tate fill that vacuum for some, while Southgate models a quieter, more reassuring kind of leadership instead. They argue schools should do more to help pupils manage frustration and setback, pointing to Southgate's own missed penalty as a case study in resilience. The second story examines a TES piece by Sam Gibbs, Trust Curriculum and Development Lead at Greater Manchester Education Trust, who argues that leadership and parenting need not be incompatible. Paul and John discuss whether flexible working can suit teaching given fixed timetables, and debate whether someone who has never been a head teacher can credibly support one. John draws a parallel with football management, noting that "some of the best football managers weren't the best football players", while Paul invokes an old line about not needing to be a horse to judge a pony show. They return to Sam's point about small workplace indignities too, the broken photocopier and the grim staffroom kettle, and what these say about whether teachers are treated as professionals. The final story looks at the continuing legality of smacking children in England and Northern Ireland, despite it already being banned in Scotland and Wales. A UCL study links the practice to lower GCSE grades and riskier teenage behaviour. John is unequivocal that legislation is needed, recalling his own experience of corporal punishment at school and arguing that children are not their parents' property. Paul and John discuss what happens when children from households where smacking is normal meet the calmer expectations of school, and whether schemes like Sure Start should be revived for struggling parents. The episode closes with two bananas. Paul shares Carol Dweck's research on praise, showing how praising effort rather than talent shapes whether children grow up willing to take on challenges. John brings a story from the Dutch tradition of avondvierdaagse, an evening neighbourhood walk credited with giving Dutch children some of the happiest childhoods in Europe. A super show that brings insight to many aspects of education and a 'must listen' for everyone who is involved and interested in education.
June 15 · 1 hr 12 min
Education Matters | Andrew Young
What does it really mean to teach adaptively? Not as a buzzword, not as a policy tick-box, but as a living, breathing practice that changes outcomes for real children in real classrooms? That's the question at the heart of our conversation with Andrew Young. Paul is joined by Andrew Young, social sciences teacher, co-director of a Teaching School Hub in York, and author of Adaptive Teaching: Culture to the Classroom, published by Crown House Publishing. With 14 years in the classroom and experience spanning pastoral leadership, curriculum design and large-scale teacher professional development, Andrew brings a grounded, practitioner-led perspective that cuts through a lot of the noise currently surrounding adaptive teaching. They begin with the fundamentals. What is adaptive teaching, and why does Andrew bristle at the phrase "it's just good teaching"? His answer is characteristically direct: "What we know teachers need is what children need. Really concrete language to operationalise and spell out sequences and ideas of what practice should be delivered and when." Vague platitudes, he argues, leave too many children behind. The conversation moves into the neuroscience and child development that underpins effective adaptive practice, cognitive load, executive function and working memory. Andrew explains why these three factors are the connective tissue running beneath the full diversity of SEND conditions, and why understanding them transforms the way teachers approach planning, explanation and assessment. He also tackles the thorny question of diagnostic labels, weighing their genuine usefulness against the risk of what he calls the nocebo effect, where a diagnosis can, through entirely real psychosomatic processes, constrain a child's self-concept and limit their sense of possibility. Modelling gets its own focused treatment. Andrew is candid about how rarely he sees it done well, particularly for newer teachers still building subject knowledge and pedagogical confidence. The I Do, We Do, You Do framework is a sound structure, he says, but dangerously misapplied when schools insist on it in every lesson regardless of where pupils are in their learning journey. Paul and Andrew explore the reactive and proactive dimensions of adaptive teaching, the practical differences between responding to Josie struggling at the back of the room right now and designing a curriculum sequence that anticipated her difficulties weeks in advance. That upstream-versus-downstream distinction is one of the book's sharpest ideas and it is explored clearly here. They examine the role of teaching assistants, professional development, lesson observation and the pressure of a curriculum that Andrew acknowledges can favour what he calls "the cognitive elite." He's not interested in lowering standards. He's interested in building systems that allow more children to meet them. One of the most thought-provoking moments comes near the end, when Andrew's single practical takeaway isn't a strategy or a resource. It's a call to examine the language used around SEND and disadvantage every day in schools, in staffrooms, in planning meetings. "What we say about people comes from how we're feeling, and what we're saying and feeling is impacting how we're behaving." This episode will resonate with classroom teachers, heads of department, SENCOs, school leaders, teacher educators and anyone working in initial teacher training or early career teacher support. It's a conversation that takes inclusion and adaptive pedagogy seriously without resorting to jargon or empty optimism. Adaptive Teaching: Culture to the Classroom by Andrew Young is published by Crown House Publishing and is available now. Mention is made of The Age of Diagnosis: Are Medical Labels Doing Us More Harm Than Good? by Suzanne O'Sullivan
June 12 · 1 hr 3 min
The Hannah & Lucy Show | Avoiding Criminality
What happens when the systems meant to protect children aren't talking to each other, the consequences aren't landing, and teachers are left holding responsibilities that stretch far beyond the classroom? Hannah Wilson and Lucy Neuburger don't pull their punches on this one. The trigger for this episode is a Home Office report revealing that police wrote off thousands of crimes last year, including rapes, violent assaults and drug offences, because the culprits were under 10. Primary age. That figure lands alongside government proposals to raise the age of criminal responsibility in England from 10 to 12, a threshold that has sat unchanged since the 1960s and is now under serious scrutiny. Hannah and Lucy dig into what that actually means in schools. Not in policy terms, but in classrooms, corridors and staffrooms where teachers are already navigating rising violence, gang dynamics, the Manosphere and a cohort of young people consuming content online that normalises behaviour that the law is only just beginning to catch up with. The conversation is frank and wide-ranging. They talk about the recent high-profile rape cases involving teenage boys, the absence of custodial sentences and what that signals to other young people watching. "Kids aren't stupid," Lucy says. "They're going to see they got away with it." Hannah's response is direct: the inconsistency of consequence in the justice system mirrors what she sees in schools, where exclusion and isolation become a revolving door rather than a turning point. They raise serious questions about safeguarding, multi-agency working and the recurring failure of schools, police and social services to communicate effectively. Hannah reflects on teaching students caught up in county lines without ever being told, and on the toll carried by safeguarding leads who hold the full picture in near-total isolation from classroom teachers. "We're not trusted to do our jobs properly," she says, "and it really upsets me." There's a push, too, for something more preventative. Both Hannah and Lucy argue that curriculum time devoted to consent, digital citizenship, online safety law and the real-world consequences of criminal records is not a nice-to-have. It is urgent, it needs to start younger than it currently does, and a twenty-minute slot once a half term isn't close to sufficient. The noise outside school is louder than the voice inside it, and the gap is widening. They also make a case for universal pastoral support, not just for students already in crisis, but for the quiet ones, the ones making jokes to fill the silence, the ones nobody is listening to at home. A proper, qualified presence in every school. Not a tick-box exercise. The episode ends on a note that is, characteristically, equal parts exasperation and hope. A clip of a young person delivering an impromptu, clear-eyed speech about immigration and belonging gets a moment it deserves. As Hannah puts it: "Whoever taught you should be so proud." 🚩 This is The Hannah and Lucy Show doing what it does best, taking the news that everyone else is reporting and asking what it actually looks like from inside a school.
June 10 · 1 hr 8 min
Teaching Matters | NEETs, Sport & Design
This week on Teaching Matters we explore why young people are leaving school with strong exam results but without the practical life skills they need for adulthood. The panel tackles a damning government review by former minister Alan Milburn. The report suggests that institutions built to support young people are no longer fit for purpose, leaving too many school leavers as NEETs (not in employment, education, or training). Together John, Shane and Paul unpack what this means for teachers, student teachers, and school leaders globally. The panel explores whether schools focus too heavily on high-stakes testing and university entry at the expense of genuine career readiness and modern survival skills.Is this crisis unique to the UK, or is it a growing international trend? Shane shares insights on the global nature of youth unemployment, noting that even in China, the challenges feel remarkably similar. Crucially, the team defends frontline educators, arguing against traditional teacher bashing. Teachers often know their students deeply on a local level, yet they are forced to work against systemic, policy-driven obstacles. John highlights how the system has historically ignored a vital thirty per cent of pupils, leaving a huge chunk of young people with a negative experience of formal education. Beyond the curriculum crisis, the panel discusses the future of learning environments and school funding. They debate how a hypothetical one billion pounds should be spent on school sport and physical education. They also question the physical infrastructure of modern schools, asking if classrooms resemble military-style, fluorescent-lit echo chambers rather than inspiring learning spaces for twenty-first-century students. Whether you are a classroom teacher, a teacher educator, a university lecturer or an education student, this episode offers a deep, ethical analysis of modern educational policy, personal narratives, and systemic reform. Episode Chapters 00:00 – Paul opens the studio session with Shane and John, introducing an international perspective on the week's biggest talking points and outlining the three major stories on the agenda. 02:58 – The Alan Milburn Report and the Exam Crisis A deep dive into the government review showing that schools are failing to prepare children for adulthood by overemphasising academic testing. 11:45 – The Global Picture of Youth Unemployment Shane explains how the rise of NEETs is not just a British issue, looking at how the youth employment landscape is shifting internationally. 19:20 – Systemic Failures vs frontline Teachers The panel addresses the danger of teacher bashing, examining how policy challenges restrict educators who genuinely care about student outcomes. 26:10 – The Forgotten Thirty Per Cent of School Leavers John explores why a massive proportion of students leave the school system having had a poor experience, and how to fix this structural issue. 32:40 – How to Spend One Billion Pounds on School Sport An analysis of funding priorities for physical education and the logistical headaches of managing massive resource allocation. 41:15 – Designing the Twenty-First-Century Classroom Moving away from military-style, fluorescent-lit rooms towards modern learning spaces that support collaboration and student wellbeing. 51:30 – Weekly Bananas and Final Insights The team wrap up the show with their signature reflections and a look at the week ahead in global education. Memorable Moments "Young people are more unemployed than ever, everywhere, including here in China... we've got to be very careful when we talk about the system." — Shane "There's a proportion of students who leave school having had a bad experience in school, not having enjoyed education." — John This podcast is brought to you by Education Matters, the premier digital platform bringing outstanding people, innovative practice and big educational ideas to a global audience.
June 1 · 48 min
The Hannah & Lucy Show | The Human Classroom
This week Hannah & Lucy explore the human side of the classroom, the joy of the school holidays and the profound impact of early childhood nurture on lifelong brain development. Teaching is a demanding profession that frequently takes a toll on health and personal lives. Hannah shares her recent battle with tonsillitis and the realities of maintaining business as usual when you are a single mum and a dedicated educator. The heart of discussion turns to the powerful ways we raise the next generation. Hannah reflects on a heartwarming family moment, prompting a deeper look into how we model kindness and empathy. Hannah & Lucy address the unfair labels often given to passionate educators and highlight the living proof that children can be raised to be wonderful, supportive humans. Lucy shares stories from her early years classroom, celebrating the daily hugs and genuine connections with her young students that remind her why she fell in love with teaching in the first place. There’s a deep look into the neuroscience of love and maternal bonding. Hannah & Lucy discuss the structural differences seen in brain scans, comparing the well-connected pathways of nurtured children with the distinct lack of receptors in individuals who experience neglect or severe trauma. These spider-web networks of receptors develop heavily between birth and sixteen years old. Without a safe, loving space, children risk growing up emotionally numb, lacking a true understanding of love or empathy. This scientific reality opens up a vital conversation about modern workforce dynamics and parenthood. While the right of women to enter the workforce is essential, the resulting exhaustion can sometimes crowd out crucial nurturing time. When parents return home tired from demanding jobs to cook, clean and manage households, the space for quiet connection shrinks. They emphasise the critical need to protect these moments of nurture, ensuring our children are not forced to grow up too quickly. Whether you are a classroom teacher, student teacher, teacher educator or lecturer, this episode offers a refreshing blend of policy critique and personal reflection. We examine how educational systems can better support the emotional well-being of both staff and pupils. Our expert panel discusses how embedding emotional literacy into early years policy can create healthier classroom environments and foster long-term academic success. Key Moments in This Episode 00:00 - Introduction and the pursuit of professional grace 01:05 - The radio wife partnership and communication mishaps 02:10 - Battling tonsillitis and the single mum work ethic 03:45 - Bringing back joy to education and everyday life 04:15 - Half-term relief and a heartwarming gift from a son 05:10 - Challenging misconceptions about modern educators 06:20 - The neuroscience of childhood hugs and brain development 07:15 - Balancing workforce participation with family nurture 08:20 - Closing thoughts on protecting childhood boundaries Connect With the Show Education Matters is a dedicated platform for educators, lecturers, teacher educators and anyone passionate about the future of learning. We combine deep policy analysis with real, raw stories from everyday school life to spark meaningful change in the educational landscape. • Subscribe to Education Matters for episodes, expert panel discussions and deep insights into educational policy. • Leave a comment below with your thoughts on early years nurture and how you balance teaching with your personal life. • Share this episode with a colleague, student teacher or friend who needs a reminder of the joy in education. Thank you for listening, supporting our platform and keeping the conversation about authentic education alive.

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