WELCOME

Every October / November, when I choose the first set of mock papers for our students, I ask myself whether it's still fit for purpose. This year the answer is genuinely different. For the first time since we started to teach the new specification, we have something real to check our assessment material against: the first set of results under the new Edexcel / AQA GCSE specification landed in the summer, and that changes what mock season looks like this term. As I wrote back

There is a particular kind of exhaustion that belongs only to new teachers. Bone-deep, relentless, the kind that comes from caring enormously, trying everything, and still feeling like you are somehow getting it wrong. I remember it clearly. And I remember wishing, more than once, that someone would sit down next to me and say: here is what actually matters. So this post is that conversation. Not a how-to guide, not a research summary, just the things I genuinely wish someone

Picture this. You have planned what you consider to be a rich, communicative lesson, a new grammar structure or language introduced with examples, a task to practise it, a class questioning to bring it to life, and a spoken or written activity to consolidate. You have scaffolded, you have thought about pace, you have prepared a slide for every stage. And for a significant chunk of the class, it still does not land. The students are capable. They are engaged. But somewhere bet

This post is a follow-up to the Linguascope Adaptive Teaching Webinar, which Jennifer Wozniak-Rush and I run on Tuesday 2nd June. A lot of the conversation in our recent webinar centred on how we support students better: how we scaffold, adapt, and respond to where learners are in the moment. And that conversation matters enormously. But several of you came back afterwards with the same question, and it is a good one: 'If we are always scaffolding, always supporting, always a

Let me be honest about something. I spent years setting writing tasks that were, in hindsight, busywork dressed up as learning. Fill in the gaps. Copy the model answer. Write five sentences about your family using the sentence starters on the board. Students were writing. Pens were moving. The room was quiet. It looked like learning. It wasn't. The problem only became clear when I started reading the new GCSE German specification carefully - not just skimming it, but actually