Videos

🧮 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…

Somebody was sick all over a wedding guest book, and by the end of the night half the room was convinced it was Dylan. There were three witnesses. It made no difference. That is how this Q&A episode opens, before the questions start landing. 🎯 Trigger Dylan in the shortest possible time An anonymous listener sets Hayden a challenge. The broken oven, the door handle nobody has fixed, the state of the garden. Dylan takes all of it in good humour until one specific accusation lands, and it is not the one you would expect. 👶 Is leadership compatible with having young children? Following on from the tongue in cheek advice to just quit, a listener asks whether Dylan actually means it. He does, mostly. The answer goes deep on cognitive load at home, why a job designed around a single income household in the 1960s still fills every hour of the day, and why that quietly shapes who feels able to step into leadership. Anyone weighing up a TLR while their child is still a toddler will want to h…

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 household model that stopped existing sixty years ago, and explains why that shows up in exactly who ends up applying for leadership roles. An English lead asks whether English is a bigger subject to lead than maths, and whether the TLR should say so. Lucy wants to know if her PPA actually hits ten per cent, and the maths is worth doing on your own timetable. Harrison asks about Forest School, which turns into something much bigger about school refusers and what school is even for. And James, new…

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app Bridget Phillipson is out, Lucy Powell is in, and if you are anything like most teachers, you know the name and very little else. So this episode is the crash course on the woman now running education in England, and an honest attempt to work out whether any of it will actually change anything. 📋 Who Lucy Powell actually is Born in Moss Side, state educated the whole way, MP for Manchester Central since a 2012 by election. She got into Oxford to read chemistry, lasted a year and left, having spoken since about feeling like a fish out of water as a northern state school girl doing science at Oxbridge. Dylan explains why that detail matters more than it looks. 👩‍🏫 The "her mum was a headteacher" argument It is everywhere online, and Dylan pushes back on it hard. Hayden makes the case for empathy and lived proximity to the job. They do not entirely agree, and the disagreement is the good bit. 🎓 …

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app Seven sessions to get a full Year 6 production from nothing to stage ready, because leadership had ruled that English and maths continue every single day regardless. The team knew it would not be enough. Hayden, who has run these productions for years, explains exactly why something has to give, and why pretending otherwise helps nobody. 🎭 The Year 6 production, properly unpacked Izzy asked what it is really like, how much work goes in, and whether other subjects survive. The answer involves lap books, project based afternoons, and a genuinely useful model for keeping ninety plus children learning while a handful rehearse. Hayden also explains why rigid English and maths sequences fall apart when children are constantly in and out of the room. 😅 The bit nobody puts in the newsletter Someone plans the entire show at home, night after night, choreographing a hundred children scene by scene. Hayde…

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app A second year teacher writes in with a question most of us have asked at some point. When do you actually start to manage everything you have to do in a day? Dylan's answer begins with some bad news, and it sets the tone for an episode about workload, pay and what teaching is genuinely worth. ⏰ When does the workload become manageable? Dylan and Hayden pull apart the difference between getting more efficient at the job and simply deciding to stop doing things. Getting quicker at your slides and your marking helps, but the real shift comes from something harder. There is also a piece of advice from an old assistant head about people who want things immediately that a lot of you are going to want to write down. 📕 The three things Dylan would do as a head teacher A one in one out policy on workload, so nothing gets added unless something comes off. And then the big one, a school with no written …

🧮 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 head teacher, including a one in one out rule on workload and a school with no written marking policy whatsoever. Hayden puts the head teacher's real fear straight back to him. If nothing is written in the books, how do you know any of it is happening? Then the big one, and the one Dylan gets most fired up about. Is it fair that ECTs get paid thousands less for a job that looks almost identical? Dylan thinks the entire pay scale is built on the wrong idea, and he has a full replacement in min…

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app A fully grown adult bellowing at a room of seven-year-olds. Dylan finds the whole idea a bit odd, and across his career the feedback he got most was how calm he was. So this one opens on a meaty three-part question: under what circumstances would you raise your voice, how serious does it have to be, and does it change from child to child or setting to setting? Dylan and Hayden separate proper shouting from simply controlling your voice, make the case for going quieter to win real attention, and keep coming back to the advice that shaped both of them, reserve the shout. Dylan also tells the story of the one time he genuinely lost it, defending a child who was being bullied, and why he'd want to handle it more calmly if he had it again. It turns into a wider chat on parenting too: holding the line, never making empty threats, and the underrated skill of picking your battles instead of fighting twel…

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app You've just been handed your new class, and the teacher passing them over tells you they were the most difficult group they've had in eleven years of teaching. So is that a useful heads up, or a label that's going to sit over the whole class before you've even met them? That's where Dylan and Hayden start this week, after a Father's Day McDonald's story that takes an unexpected turn. The first question comes from a year 1 teacher about to take on their fourth class, and it opens up a proper debate. Why does every class somehow become the trickiest one ever? Is it fair to brand a whole class when you hand it over, or should you just pass on the facts and let the next teacher make up their own mind? And the big one doing the rounds online, do tricky classes even exist, or is it all about the school environment? Dylan has a fairly visceral reaction to that one. Then things heat up. A listener has bee…