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Calling all Secondary English PGCE Trainees! The ‘Verses of Hope’ National Peace Poetry Prize is a great opportunity to get your students writing poetry. Students can submit poems up to 25 lines commemorating the 80th anniversary of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. This competition could work well as a classroom activity or lunchtime poetry club project. Poet […]

News via The University of West of England: Five Black British teachers (backgrounds in English and PSHE/Citizenship), with support from Black community leaders and young people, are currently creating a rich and authentic 6-week SOW for Chinonyerem Odimba’s Princess & The Hustler which now appears on AQA’s English Literature ‘Modern texts’ list. Camille London-Miyo, a Head of […]

The UKLA International Conference – focused on the teaching of writing – is being held at Exeter on 23rd-25th June. Keynotes are available here and the full programme will be announced shortly International Conference 2023 Keynotes – UKLA Find out more here: International Conference 2023 – UKLA

In spring 2022, Ofsted led research visits to 6 secondary schools in which a higher-than-expected proportion of poor readers got a grade 4 or above in English language at GCSE. The findings illustrate how these secondary schools identify specific reading weaknesses, and how they provide targeted support for struggling readers. The report describes how these […]

Perspectives on A Level English – a NATE survey For all post-16 English teachers It is now 7 years since new A Level English specifications were introduced and NATE is keen to find out about how teachers feel about these specifications. NATE also continues to be deeply concerned with the decline in A Level English entry and […]

Research conducted by a team in the South West (including the University of Exeter) has examined what literature is taught to students in Key Stage 3. You can see some of the open-access academic outputs here: Teaching Key Stage 3 literature: the challenges of accountability, gender and diversity – Kneen – 2022 – Literacy – […]

Research by Dr Alison Pearson at the University of Exeter has investigated the factors that support teachers to stay in the profession long term. Below are key headlines, but if you want to know more about each one, please take a look at this guide for schools, where there are examples of how each recommendation […]

Secondary English teachers, do you have Primary / Early Years Literacy contacts? Dr Clare Dowdall, Dr Judith Kleine Staarman, Assan Ali, School of Education, University of Exeter Invitation to participate in a NEW research project:• Are you a Primary School/ Early Years Educator?• Are you looking for ways to develop your children’s enjoyment and engagement […]

ESRC Festival of Social Sciences 2022Talking to write: using metalinguistic talk to develop children’s writing2nd November 2022, 2.30-5.30pmCustom House, Exeter Quay What’s on offer? This workshop will provide insights into ongoing research which explores how metalinguistic talk – talk about language – can be used in the classroom to support the development of children’s writing. […]

Can you help us with a 5-minute survey about the ‘Faster Read’? Have you ever used the ‘Faster Read’ (also called the ‘Immersive Faster/Fast Read’, the ‘Rapid Read’ and the ‘Hot Read’), an approach to reading whole texts originated by the University of Sussex (Sutherland and Westbrook) in 2014-2015? Many teachers have adopted the ‘Faster […]