This episode offers practical advice to those taking on new leadership roles in the secondary school, with dos and don'ts, useful tips, and lessons learned from our experienced panel.

If you are a teacher taking on a new leadership role in school – whether that be a headteacher, senior leadership or middle leadership post – then this episode is for you.

Three experienced school leaders offer us some golden rules for taking on a leadership role and discuss how we should start out in our new post, including how we should approach the first half-term in post and what missteps we should avoid.

We ask what the biggest misconceptions of leadership are and what surprised our panelists most when they first stepped up.

We discuss how new leaders can establish credibility and ask our panellists what they would do differently if they could go back to their first term as a leader.

We look at how leaders can prioritise and at people management skills, offering tips for managing difficult conversations. We also advise on managing workload and work/life balance as a leader. We touch on the power of mentoring and coaching for leaders and hear about some of the early leadership experiences of our three panelists.

It's a discussion with lots of practical tips and powerful ideas.

This episode offers practical insights for teachers on how best we can support our high-attaining students in the secondary school classroom.

Our panel discusses the language we use when referring to this cohort of students and how we might define what "high-attaining" means.

We then move on to outline a number of classroom strategies for teachers to help them teach and support these learners as well as some common mistakes to avoid.

We discuss how we can create a culture of scholarly ambition in our classrooms and approach the curriculum challenges faced by high-attaining students. We also offer tips for making a success of extension activities.

We ask, too, how we can help learners to become increasingly independent and to stay motivated and engaged – even in the face of challenges and set-backs.

The panel includes an English and a maths specialist but many of the strategies discussed apply across the curriculum.

In this episode we offer practical tips and ideas for how teachers can support the communication skills of students as they make the step-up to the year 7 classroom and key stage 3 study.

An experienced panel – including a speech and language therapist – discuss how we can help those students who struggle with communication needs, including oracy and vocabulary.

We consider the increase in academic rigour that students transitioning into year 7 encounter, including increasingly complex language and vocabulary.

We then outline some adaptive teaching techniques as well as tips for developing oracy and speaking skills, vocabulary and academic language, and literacy and reading skills – with lots of ideas for the year 7 classroom.

We also explore general lesson planning and teaching tips that support SLCN in the secondary classroom with examples of practice from our guests' schools. And we talk briefly about effective interventions to support these learners.

This episode has been supported by our friends at Speech and Language Link. Visit www.speechandlanguage.link