Episodes

🧮 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 schoo...

🧮 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 fo...

Hayden turns up in a Nike sweatband, insists it is not cosplay, and claims his paddle sponsorship money is not far off Tiger Woods territory. It goes downhill from there. Dylan sets a test to work out exactly which decade Hayden's sports knowledge stopped in, then gives listeners a guided tour of the podcast room, recently tidied in the loosest possible sense of the word. Five things you can see, including a box from a school Dylan left roughly eight years ago. There is also a confession invol...

Dylan spent half a wedding being blamed for something he definitely did not do, and there were witnesses. It is a strong opening to a Q&A that gets serious surprisingly fast. A listener kicks things off by challenging Hayden to trigger Dylan in the shortest possible time. The broken oven, the door handle, the garden. Only one line actually lands. Then the big one. Is school leadership genuinely incompatible with having young children? Dylan makes the case that the job was built around a househ...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app Bridget Phillipson is out, Lucy Powell is in, and most teachers could not pick her out of a lineup. So this is the crash course. Moss Side, state educated all the way, a year reading chemistry at Oxford before she walked away from it, a family full of teachers, and her own children at the primary she went to herself. Then the harder question. Does "her mum was a headteacher" actually count as experience in...

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🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app A second year teacher writes in wanting to know when everything you have to do in a day finally becomes manageable. Dylan opens with some news she probably did not want to hear, and then turns it into something genuinely useful about the difference between getting faster at your job and quietly deciding what is no longer worth doing at all. That leads into what Dylan would actually bring in if he were a he...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app Under what circumstances would you actually raise your voice at a class? Dylan reckons he can count his genuine, lost-it shouts on one hand, and the single time he did it properly, defending a child who was being bullied, still sits with him years later. He and Hayden pull apart the difference between shouting and simply being heard, why going quieter can land harder, and the old staffroom wisdom to reserve...

You've just been handed your new class, and the previous teacher's parting words are that they were the most difficult group they've taught in eleven years. Helpful heads up, or a curse you carry all summer? Dylan and Hayden open with the tricky class handover, why every class somehow becomes the trickiest one ever, and whether tricky classes even exist or it's all down to the school. Then it gets spicier. A listener is made joint subject lead with no TLR, no extra time and no choice, and Dylan...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app The government have announced plans for all children on free school meals to be given access to an AI tutor, which begs the question, are we already on the way to humans being replaced by robots? "Am I cut out for this?" Ellie's message is the one that might hit hardest. She moved from TA into a Year 6 class as a trainee, was promised regular meetings and observations that never materialised, has had prais...

Use our FREE worksheet arithmetic generator here: tools.mathszoo.app Twenty-five years in KS2, and Kathy says teaching now feels like a battle. Her message kicks off this listener mailbag: a rise in SEND needs, behaviour, apathy and shaky basics since COVID, and a class where the majority aren't equipped for year group expectations. She's gone more child-led to meet them where they are, but that collides with what the curriculum demands. So she asks the big one. Do the people making the decisio...

So you sit a sitting Education Secretary down, ask the questions teachers actually want answered, follow up when the first answer wobbles, and then the verdict comes back from you, the listeners. This week Dylan and Hayden go through the feedback from the Bridget Phillipson episode, and it was overwhelmingly kind. Listeners said the questions were clear and fair, that the follow ups kept coming, and that the show genuinely tried to hold her to account rather than rolling out the red carpet. Bu...

Two hundred episodes in, and somehow we ended up across the table from the person who runs the whole system. For the TSR 200th, Dylan and Hayden sit down with Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, and waste none of it on small talk. First, the SEND white paper. The move from EHCPs to the new Individual Support Plans sounds tidy, but it could leave families without the right to appeal at a tribunal. What happens to children with complex needs when the funding does not follow? Then the part th...

"What's the biggest thing you two actually disagree on?" One listener has clocked the I agree, I agree tic and wants a proper scrap, so Dylan and Hayden dig into the teaching vs non-teaching divide and find it's spikier than either expected. Then a brave question lands. Should politics be explicitly taught in KS2? The boys weigh up whether ten year olds can handle it, who gets to decide what counts as balanced, and what happens when a kid asks the question you really didn't want them to ask. N...

🔢 Sign up for a free Maths Zoo demo right now and get your school using it before the end of term. Boost maths fluency and arithmetic across every year group, completely free trial, no strings. Book it at www.mathszoo.org A teacher writes in asking if it is genuinely acceptable to eat biscuits and drink sugary drinks in front of children. Are teachers supposed to be role models when it comes to lunch, or can you have whatever you want in your packed lunch and not feel bad about it? Dylan and Hay...

For about twenty-five years, the dominant message in teacher training has been clear. The research says mixed attainment is better. Setting damages confidence, harms low attainers, and widens the gap. Then in April 2026, the EEF published a study that complicates all of that. Nine thousand pupils, 97 schools, two years of data. The finding: pupils in mixed attainment classes made roughly one month less progress in maths than pupils in sets. High prior attainers made two months less progress. An...

A teacher is getting emails from a parent at 10pm most nights with an expectation of a reply before school the next morning. Their SLT's advice? Just manage the relationship. Dylan and Hayden have slightly stronger thoughts on that. Then unannounced learning walks, two-line feedback emails with no right of reply, and the working wall that was too busy one week and lacking evidence of learning the next. How is anyone supposed to win? Dylan and Hayden get into why this kind of observation culture...

England just made the school phone ban statutory. From this autumn, banning phones during the school day is not just guidance schools can choose to follow. It is the law. So why are so many headteachers saying it does not really change anything? Dylan and Hayden get into what the new law actually means in practice, why 99.8% of primaries already had a phone policy before this legislation existed, and whether the legal change makes any real difference to what happens in a classroom on a Monday m...

A wellbeing lead has introduced a shout-out wall and free fruit in the staffroom. The teacher who wrote in knows exactly why staff morale is low, and it has nothing to do with bananas. Dylan and Hayden are firmly on their side. Then a Year 8 student tells a teacher to f*** off and is back in their classroom grinning thirty minutes later. Every other kid in that room clocked exactly what just happened. Dylan and Hayden get into why pretending that is an acceptable behaviour response is damaging ...

The government just announced the biggest shake-up of school food standards in over a decade. Ice cream is gone. Fruit juice is gone. Deep-frying is banned outright. And every single main meal now has to come with vegetables. Dylan and Hayden get into what has actually changed, what the old rules really said versus what people think they said, and whether any of this will make a blind bit of difference if schools do not have the kitchens, the funding or the enforcement to back it up. The free ...

A teacher writes in saying she had to be talked out of going into work while ill by her own partner. Not because she wanted to be there, but because calling in sick felt worse than just turning up. Dylan and Hayden know exactly what that feels like, and this one opens a conversation about why sick days in teaching are genuinely broken. Then a headteacher has announced that all staff are being moved to different year groups in September, nobody wants it, nobody was consulted, and the latest anyo...

It's the summer term in school and that means one thing if you're working in primary... The SATs take over! Teachers forced to do booster sessions, afternoon lessons ruined, cheating galore... It all goes on. Join us for a chat about it! Sign up for a completely FREE trial of Maths Zoo in your school to help smash arithmetic fluency! www.mathszoo.org

It's a new term (for most of you!) and we are back with another Q&A! Join our free WhatsApp community for Q&A submissions, polls on future episodes & links to the podcast first: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HB7n1PNGdGL5STACssEH1s Leave us a review and share this episode with someone you think might enjoy it! It really helps us out. Book a free demo for MathsZoo now and see how we can help your school smash maths! www.mathszoo.org Follow us on Instagram: www.instagram.com/teachsleeprepeatpodcast...

Join our free WhatsApp community for Q&A submissions,polls on future episodes & links to the podcast first: ⁠https://chat.whatsapp.com/HB7n1PNGdGL5STACssEH1s Leave us a review and share this episode with someone youthink might enjoy it! It really helps us out. Book a free demo for MathsZoo now and see how we can helpyour school smash maths! www.mathszoo.org Follow us on Instagram: www.instagram.com/teachsleeprepeatpodcast Follow us on TikTok: www.tiktok.com/teachsleeprepeatpodcast