Tes Podagogy

Dr Alice Jones explores the causes, symptoms and impact of social and emotional difficulties in young people, and looks at how schools can create environments that best support them.

“There is a perception from top to bottom that doing things on paper, doing conceptual thinking, is at the apex of everything, that this is where you want to be,” muses Trevor H J Marchand, Emeritus Professor in the Department of Anthropology and Sociology at SOAS London. “Working with your hands is seen as something for kids who did not quite make it in the classroom."

Speaking on this episode, he explains that this needs to change, urgently. 

“We need to broaden our understanding of what knowledge and what intelligence is,” argues Marchand. “Until we establish a new values system, we are going to struggle to get the hands on learning into the curriculum and have respect for it.”

He and Kester Brewin discuss why this is, taking in everything from building Minarets in Yemen to 2.6m tall people in the classroom.

Do we know enough about the early signs of mental health problems that emerge in childhood? And how best can schools support young people with mental health issues? Dr Wendy Sims-Schouten, associate professor in childhood studies at the University of Portsmouth and head of the mental health in childhood and education research group, discusses these issues and more.

Are we born with an innate sense of number? Or is it something we develop? And how best should we be teaching young children to count? Daniel Ansari is Professor in the Department of Psychology at the University of Western Ontario in London, Ontario, where he heads the Numerical Cognition Laboratory, and in this episode he answers these questions and more.

“The notion of an unteachable child, that is nonsense,” says Dr Simon Edwards, senior lecturer at youth studies at the University of Portsmouth. “There is no such thing.”

Edwards’ view comes from extensive experience: he has worked across the education spectrum, from mainstream teacher, to being a teacher in AP and now as a researcher working with children deemed even too tough for pupil referral units. Speaking on this week’s Tes Podagogy, he talks at length about why children get excluded, why he thinks no child is unteachable, and how we can best support these young people.

Every teacher knows transition is an issue. Not just between primary and secondary but between phases, sectors or even year groups.  And the research is clear that there is an issue, too. Problems of transition can completely derail a child’s education, according to Stan Tucker and Dave Trotman, both professors of education policy at Newman University and the guests on this week’s Tes Podagogy. 

Both academics believe the problem is not down to schools not trying to bridge the gap, or not understanding the issue. They speak of the “great practice” many schools have adopted.  But what these schools cannot change, they argue, is the fact that primary and secondary are fundamentally different systems of education. And it is that, they say, that causes the issues. 

In every classroom, there are likely to be at least three children who were born pre-term. And according to Professor Samantha Johnson, those children may be missing out on vital support, due to a dearth of knowledge in schools about the challenges these pupils might face and a lack of identification of the children who may be affected.

The shift away from modular exams was hailed as a move towards higher standards and an end of gaming the system. But did it work? We talk to Professor Jo-Anne Baird, director of the University of Oxford’s Department of Education and expert in educational assessment.

One of the world's leading experts on the teaching of inference and comprehension explains why schools need to take a fresh look at what they do, moving from a simplistic way of teaching knowledge and vocabulary to also supporting the development of skills.

“Once you get to real academic learning, the child discovery approach is just not going to work,” explains David C Geary, Curators' Professor in the Department of Psychological Sciences at the University of Missouri, keeping alight the eternal flame of the debate about the best way to teach.

Geary’s statement is based on what is really his secondary research focus: much of his career has been spent looking at how we learn maths, but his surety on how best we should teach in general is based on his theory of primary and secondary knowledge.  

In this Tes Podagogy podcast, he explains the theory and what impact it should have on teaching.