🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app

An ECT one week in, a class sat well below the expected level, and a head already spinning with schemes, planning and new information. What do you actually say to them?

Season 5 opens with a full back to school Q&A. Hayden defends the horseshoe seating plan, and Dylan has to break it to him that what he ran for years was, in fact, a staple. From there it turns properly useful: mixed attainment seating, whether pairing your high attainers with your low attainers every single day is really helping either of them, and the moment a child offered to hand out the support sheets and reeled off exactly the right six names.

Then the ideal INSET day, which mostly means giving staff the time and putting the sugar paper away. When normal lessons should resume. Icebreakers and register games that genuinely work. And a new senior leader asking how to deliver the SIP in September without flattening everyone, which leads to a change policy most schools should probably steal.

Honest, funny, and timed for the walk in on Tuesday morning.

🎧 New episodes every week. Leave us a review if you enjoy the show!
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🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app

Five weeks of rehearsals. Year Six production. Opening night a few hours away. And then the head teacher decides the children cannot stand on the benches, for health and safety reasons. The same benches the school uses for bench ball.

Before that, a cracking question from a newly qualified teacher whose university swapped the 5,000 word essay for a shorter portfolio and a recorded presentation. Could schools do something similar? Dylan and Hayden get into timed reading comprehension, why pace is weighted so heavily, and the trap of fixing assessment for one group by quietly breaking it for another.

There is also a listener asking whether they would have a Reform politician on the show. That one turns into an honest conversation about platforming, accountability and where the line actually sits.

Honest, funny, and a gentle way back in before September.

🎧 New episodes every week. Leave us a review if you enjoy the show!
🔢 Want to boost maths fluency in your school? Book a free Maths Zoo trial at www.mathszoo.org
💬 Join our completely free WhatsApp community and connect with teachers from across the UK: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HB7n1PNGdGL5STACssEH1s

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app

A Year 1 teacher has been told her school is bringing in continuous provision from September, and she is quietly worried her class will not be where they should be by July. Dylan and Hayden take that worry seriously, because badly implemented provision is a real risk. Then they ask the harder question. Where does "where they should be" actually come from, and who decided it?

That spirals into knives and forks, shoelaces and shared responsibility, and where the line sits between what a school should help with and what it genuinely cannot take on.

Hayden also gets asked when Halloween is. It goes about as well as you would expect, and there is now a poll.

Elsewhere, honest assembly tips including the one thing their old head did every single day without fail, and a straight answer on why Wednesday episodes disappeared.

Then the big one. Andy Burnham's new technical routes for Year 10, and why both hosts want it to work but are braced for schools to game it.

Honest, funny, and a proper end of summer listen.

🎧 New episodes every week. Leave us a review if you enjoy the show!
🔢 Want to boost maths fluency in your school? Book a free Maths Zoo trial at www.mathszoo.org
💬 Join our completely free WhatsApp community and connect with teachers from across the UK: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HB7n1PNGdGL5STACssEH1s