Videos

🐘 Free Maths Zoo arithmetic worksheet generator: https://tools.mathszoo.app Hayden’s in charge this week. That gets you a bogey story, the return of Blind Rank, a chat about parents vaping on the school run, and a listener asking what maths resources to buy for a brand new school. 🤢 THE BOGEY STORY A sweet bedtime cuddle takes a revolting turn. It’s Hayden’s follow-up to last week’s “kids are gross” chat, and this one’s worse. 🎲 BLIND RANK IS BACK You asked for it. Dylan ranks five parts of the teaching job, best to worst, without seeing what’s coming: playground duty, parents’ evening, teaching art, the staffroom, and one more that Hayden saved for the end. It doesn’t go well. There’s also an honest moment about why they don’t actually hate parents’ evening. 💨 VAPING ON THE SCHOOL RUN On one drive past two primary schools, Dylan counted 14 or 15 parents vaping while walking their kids in. Is this the new normal? They cover what primary kids absorb, vaping in secondary toilets and…

Hayden plans the episode this week, which means you get a game. He opens with a bedtime story about his nearly-three-year-old that ends with the question no parent wants to hear: “Dad, where am I going to put my bogey?” Then Blind Rank is back by listener request. Dylan has to rank playground duty, parents’ evening, teaching art, the staffroom and one more mystery job without knowing what’s coming next. He gets badly stitched up at number one. Next, Dylan drove past two primary schools on the way to the new office and counted more than a dozen parents vaping on the school run. Is that just normal now? The boys get into what kids pick up from it, vaping in secondary toilets, the generational smoking ban and whether it’s a nanny state, and vapes made to look like highlighters. In the Q&A, a listener asks what you’d buy if you had to stock a brand new school with maths resources from scratch. Dienes, Cuisenaire rods, multilink cubes, real clock faces, plenty of 3D shapes, and the pla…

🐘 Free Maths Zoo arithmetic worksheet generator: https://tools.mathszoo.app Hayden's back with a newborn, Dylan's gagging over snot, and a listener's SLT has crammed a twilight, a parents evening AND an open evening into one week. Plus: would Lucy Powell ever sit down with us after the Bridget Phillipson interview? 🍼 HAYDEN'S BACK (WITH A 10-DAY-OLD) One week of paternity leave and he's back in the studio. Meet Albie, aka Albatross, aka Albuquerque. Big sister River tries to wake him up the only way she knows how: a drum, right in his face. 😌 SECOND BABY, WAY MORE CHILLED Why second time round is so much calmer, the advice we wish we'd ignored first time, and where Dylan pushes back: your choices do matter, there are just lots of good ways to do it. Safe sleep rules are non-negotiable. Reading to your kid is never wrong. 🤢 ARE KIDS JUST GROSS? Doctor Dog, worms and a licked finger. An itchy bum announced to a queue of 30 people at the zoo. Constant snot bubbles (and why Dylan coul…

Hayden is back after one whole week of paternity leave, with a 10-day-old son called Albie (who Dylan has already renamed Albatross). We talk about how much calmer you are second time round, which parenting "rules" turn out not to matter and which ones really do, then get properly stuck into why children are so gross: snot bubbles in Reception, the Year 6 residential room nobody wants to open on day three, and a crisp eaten straight out of the bin. Then your questions. One listener's school has put a twilight, a parents evening and an open evening in the same week. Is that unreasonable? Short answer: yes. We get into directed time, why an open evening should replace something rather than just be added on, and whether teaching really is harder than other jobs. Plus, after our Bridget Phillipson interview, would new Education Secretary Lucy Powell ever come on the show? Lucy, the invite is open. 🐘 Free Maths Zoo arithmetic worksheet generator: tools.mathszoo.app Join the T…

We asked for your school's biggest red flags and got nearly a thousand comments on Facebook and hundreds more on Instagram. These are the ones that made us stop and read them twice. ☕ "Ground coffee may only be consumed by members of SLT" An actual memo, sent after a colleague was discovered with a filter mug. We try to work out what the person writing it thought was rational, and land on two possible answers, neither of them good. 🗣️ "Do you know what professional means?" The most reacted-to comment of the lot. Why "unprofessional" has become a stick to beat people with, whether calling something out is ever the unprofessional bit, and the time Dylan got pulled up for huffing his way through a staff meeting. 👗 "It's a skirts-only school" An NQT told at interview that if she wanted to wear trousers she could leave there and then. She left. Thirty-four years ago, and it still starts an argument about who tends to write these rules. 🪑 Open plan, hot desking, no staff room No fixed c…

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app 🏢 First episode from the new office Dylan and Hayden have moved. It looks almost identical to the old set-up, there is a metal works over the road, and the sound is a work in progress. Feedback welcome. Blinds are on the way. 🚂 The sleeper train to Edinburgh Dylan went to see The Rest Is Football live, then hopped on the sleeper train to Scotland with a six foot three friend. Bunk beds, a corridor you edge down sideways, and a bathroom arrangement nobody should have to describe. Plus a retro bar with a game that turned out to unite an entire generation. Hayden, meanwhile, was holding the fort during the busiest week of the tutoring year. 💷 That Scottish teacher pay post Dylan recently compared what teachers earn in Scotland with England, and some people took it the wrong way. He sets the record straight on tax, house prices, student loans and the actual point he was making: pay is a political c…

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app England has just landed in the world's top ten for reading, maths and science. Good news, surely? Dylan and Hayden are not so sure, because the same PISA results show reading ability falling off a cliff worldwide, and the countries where children use AI the most are falling behind the fastest. Here's the article: https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cvgy6n0l4rdo First, though, it is episode one from the new office, complete with a slight echo and a metal works next door. Dylan is fresh off a sleeper train to Edinburgh (think bunk beds, a shower that doubles as the toilet, and a mate who is six foot three), and he has some explaining to do about that Scottish teacher pay post that got a few people worked up. Then two listener questions. With AI able to manipulate images, should schools stop publishing pupil photos altogether? And which subject did each of them love teaching far more than th…

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app "I've had my class for one day and I already feel so drained." A listener has picked up a class with a reputation, and the whispering, the fiddling and the constant low-level interruptions are already wearing her down. She doesn't want to spend the year moaning. Dylan and Hayden think she might have to, and they explain why that isn't the failure it feels like. This is the first episode of the new weekly format: a bit of news, the best of what they've seen online, and then your questions from the WhatsApp community. (Jingle pending. Applications open.) 🏢 The big news Teach Sleep Repeat is getting an office. Not a flat, not a house, despite what the comments section concluded. Dylan and Hayden explain why, after nearly ten years of running their tutoring business from home offices, a full year out of the classroom pushed them into it. Cabin fever, motivation, the "grass is greener" trap, and an …

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app A teacher spent months quietly avoiding any pattern in who got the extra support sheets. Then a child offered to hand them out and named exactly the right six names. So how much of the seating plan agonising actually matters? Season 5 starts with your questions on going back to school, and there are a lot of them. 🪑 Seating plans, horseshoes and mixed attainment Hayden makes the case for the horseshoe, because obviously the teacher is the font of all knowledge and needs eyes on him at all times. Dylan gently explains that four tables long with a flick on each end is not a horseshoe, it is a staple. Underneath the joking there is a genuinely good conversation about rows getting an unfair reputation, why a fluid classroom beats a fixed one, and whether always sitting a high attainer next to a low attainer is stretching anyone or just covering for a lack of adult support. 📋 The ideal INSET days o…

🧮 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 everyon…

This week is a listener questions episode, and you sent in some good ones. 📝 Summative assessment, AI and who gets left behind A newly qualified teacher writes in after finishing their PGCE and QTS, where the university replaced the usual 5,000 plus word essay with a portfolio, a shorter essay and a recorded presentation. Partly to head off AI, partly so neurodivergent and less academically articulate students could still show what they know. Is there a version of that for schools? Dylan and Hayden go deep on this one. Why a timer on a SATs reading comprehension paper might be measuring the wrong thing entirely. How two children can get very different scores while knowing exactly the same amount. And a fairly candid admission from one of them about cramming a history degree while classmates who read ten times as many books came out with the same grade. The really interesting bit is the warning at the end, because if you rebuild the whole system around oracy, the quiet, deeply academi…

🧮 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 …

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app A Year 1 teacher writes in to say her school has never done continuous provision, she has been told she is doing it from September, and she is worried her children will not be where they should be by the end of the year. It is one of the most common worries in primary right now, and it deserves a proper answer rather than a slogan. 🧱 Continuous provision in Year 1, honestly Dylan and Hayden start by validating the fear, because provision implemented badly, with no training and no plan, absolutely can leave children worse off. But they push back hard on the second half of the worry. Number bonds, fact families and phonics do not vanish because a child is learning at a sand tray. The bigger question is whether our idea of "behind" is just an old benchmark we never thought to question. 🍴 Knives, forks and where the line is The conversation takes a turn into what schools should and should not be pi…

🧮 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 …

Hayden turns up in a Nike sweatband, insists it is not cosplay, and claims his padel 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 involving a games controller, a pair of scissors and a level of competitiveness that arguably should have flagged on a DBS check. Then it turns properly honest. A year on from leaving the classroom, the lads are weighing up renting an office space, with a baby six weeks away and a decision needed that day. They are genuinely split, and they want your take. Daft, honest, and a proper break from the to do list. 🎧 New episodes every week. Leave us a review if you enjoy the show! 🔢 Want to boost maths…