Teaching
Career
Plus:
I was Visiting Tutor at York University for three years, working on the initial teacher training programme. I have contributed to the Cambridge University initial teacher training programme (School of Education) and the Essex University ITT scheme. I have spoken at occasional conferences about teaching English, literacy, school leadership and behaviour management. Over the years, I have also worked as a consultant with QCA, the DfE and TDA, and given talks to a range of audiences on literacy, leadership and education issues. I am proud to be a Patron of the English & Media Centre
I have written for the Times Educational Supplement, East Anglian Daily Times, Bury Free Press, and contribute occasional articles to various other publications such as The Use of English.
A few years ago I was invited to become a Founding Fellow of the English Association. In 2006 I became a 'Leading Thinker' for the National Education Trust. I have been a national representative for Association of School & College Leaders and chair of their Pedagogy Committee.
My areas of special interest are:
Actually, I didn't start off wanting to be a teacher, as I explained on 7 April 2017 to Lesley Dolphin in this BBC Radio Suffolk
interview.
You can hear more about my childhood and career in this podcast interview for Evidence Based Education in December 2017.
Similarly, the article below (originally written for a monthly Longman column I used to write) shows the influence of great teachers to change our lives. That's what happened to me:
BACK IN THE BEGINNING ...
Many of us became English teachers because of a particular teacher who had a real impact on us. That was certainly the case with me. I was a fairly unimpressive student at school and the last thing I thought I'd end up as was an English teacher. I knew what I wanted to be: a disc-jockey. I'd discovered pop radio when I was around 14, got hooked on the Noel Edmonds Radio One breakfast Show, and knew this was the career for me. Unfortunately, in the late seventies, the route from Walton Comprehensive School, Stafford, to Broadcasting House was not direct.
I got a late-night slot on Hospital Radio Stafford and played a motley mix of songs to insomniac patients whom I imagined sipping Horlicks and clambering on and off bedpans. When I sent off my first audition tape, it was quickly rejected, without even so much as an acknowledgement slip. It became clear to me that even the fledgling commercial radio industry was not going to be fighting over my talents. Time for a rethink.
So I drifted into the Sixth Form and started English Lit. I hadn't been a big reader before that. I'd read George Orwell and James Herbert, but I wasn't addicted to books in the way people said you needed to be to study English.
The key ingredient, however, wasn't the literature; it was the teacher. Roy Samson had been at the school for fifteen years or so. He was Head of English and had a reputation as an eccentric. It was rumoured that to demonstrate to a class the drama of the Spanish Armada he had once set the biology pond on fire. Certainly he made previously unreadable books seem fascinating. Suddenly I knew what I wanted to be. It wasn't just that I wanted to be an English teacher. I wanted to be Roy Samson. I wanted to be able to dissect texts like he did, to have that kind of knowledge, that capacity to simplify, enthuse and inspire. So the path to English teaching began.
Many of us have Roy Samsons in our past - the skilful, often self-effacing English teacher who kick-starts our passion for the subject.
Since then I've taught English in Leicester, Leeds, York and now Suffolk. I've moved from the classroom to Head of English and now to headship. Along the way I've written the kind of textbooks I've wanted to use myself.
They are also rooted in a central belief that it's not just the texts you use that make a difference in the classroom. It's the teacher. Roy Samson demonstrated tangibly that teachers can shape their students' lives. Everything I've written since then has been guided by that spirit: texts to enhance the teacher's role, not to subvert or replace it.