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.