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Twenty-five years in KS2, and Kathy says teaching now feels like a battle she's fighting every single day. Her message opens this listener mailbag episode, and it's the one a lot of you will nod along to. Since COVID she's seen a sharp rise in SEND needs, behaviour, general apathy and gaps in the basics: reading, core writing rules, maths. On a tough week, around three quarters of her class aren't equipped for year group expectations. She's made big changes, leaning into more child-led approaches to actually meet the children in front of her, but that pulls hard against a curriculum that expects something else entirely. So she puts the question straight to Dylan and Hayden. What is the future of primary? Do the big decision makers genuinely understand the situation in classrooms right now, what information are they using, and are they ever talking to experienced, grass-roots teachers at the coalface? It's the conversation that anchors the whole episode, and the lads give it the honesty it deserves.
After that the mood lifts. Phil points out that the show has now interviewed the Education Secretary, so who would be the dream guest next? The list of names thrown around is wonderfully all over the place, and the picks say a lot about Dylan and Hayden.
Luke raises something every early career teacher should think about. With centrally planned schemes of work on the rise, lesson planning gets quicker, but do new teachers miss out on learning the craft of building an excellent lesson from scratch? Is it a time-saver, a deskiller, or both? Dylan has a view on what that costs in the long run.
And Tom rounds things off with the bits that keep a staffroom honest. Have they had any good kebabs lately. If you had to teach in an infant school, which year would you actually pick. And the question that divides every staffroom in the country: are you for or against class assemblies?
Honest, funny, and a properly good airing of the stuff teachers actually worry about.
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