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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 one and two
The honest answer first, then the serious one. Dylan makes the case that one full day should be given to staff as their time, because if you do not give it to them you are quietly expecting them to have done it in August. Plus what should never be introduced in week one, and a firm public service announcement about sugar paper, coloured felt tips and being asked your why.

🍎 Advice for an overwhelmed ECT
Do not spin seventeen plates. Prioritise ruthlessly, and take the help that is sitting right next to you. Then Dylan says the thing that gets him called a Scrooge, about the limit to your influence, and Hayden tells the story of a teacher told they made no progress with a class who had, in fact, made exactly a year of it.

🎲 First days, icebreakers and register games
When normal lessons should resume, whether gimmicky first lessons are worth it, the 21 game for lining up, the alliteration name trick, and racing the afternoon register.

🏫 New to SLT with a packed school improvement plan
Share the whole thing or drip feed it? This leads into a change policy every school could implement tomorrow, including the hardest sentence a leader ever has to say to their own staff.

⚡ Rapid fire
When the first day nerves finally stop. Advice for supply teachers starting in September. And how to tell a new staff team about your ADHD without feeling like you have overshared.

Honest, funny, and right on time for the walk into school.

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