News in brief
- Low pay means young teachers are struggling to afford mortgages and sharing bedrooms, the National Union of Teachers’ (NUT) annual conference heard. A member from Ealing in London, Stefan Simms, told the conference that he knew of teachers who live “in a house with eight other teachers and they share two to a room, and if it’s a big room it’s three to a room.”
- Children who fail exams at the end of primary school will have to resit them the following year under Conservative plans. The idea is to ensure all students are “secondary ready”. The party announced the proposal as part their general election campaign push on education.
- NUT delegates supported a vote on industrial action if the incoming government fails to increase funding for schools in England and Wales. They overwhelmingly supported a motion for a ballot on potential strike action at the union’s annual conference in Harrogate.
- Headteachers are being urged to recruit more black and ethnic minority teachers after figures show few are joining the profession. The NUT is to write to every headteacher in England and Wales asking them to make sure their staff reflect their communities. This comes after a motion backed by delegates at the NUT conference warned the current state of recruitment was “disturbing”.
Research of the week
Poorer children who fall behind in reading at an early age earn about 20% an hour less in later life, a new study has found. The research was commissioned as part of the Read On. Get on. campaign to ensure every child in the UK is reading well by the age of 11.
The study, carried out by the Institute for Fiscal Studies, found that half of England’s privately run nurseries do not employ a single graduate teacher. This is contributing to literacy problems among children, the report said.
Dame Julia Cleverdon, the chair of the campaign, said: “By providing quality and qualified teaching in every nursery, we can ensure every child arrives at school with the building blocks in place to learn to read and succeed.”
It used data from the British Cohort Study – which followed the lives of 17,000 people born in England, Scotland and Wales in a single week of 1970 – to see how children have fared in later life.
Read the full report here.
Weekly snapshot
We couldn’t help but giggle when we saw this picture – and we enjoyed your captions even more. A particular favourite came from Jim Crawley who suggested “requires improvement”. Share your captions via @GuardianTeach.
Send us your picture captions... pic.twitter.com/NJcNzYZOrk
— GuardianTeach (@GuardianTeach) April 8, 2015
The week in numbers
The pledge that all children globally would have primary education by 2015 – a central millenium development goal – has not been achieved. Unesco says there are 58 million children without access to primary school, while 100 million do not complete a primary education.
Labour has pledged to give Britain’s careers advice service in schools an extra £50m to guarantee face-to-face help from trained advisers. The money would come from a proportion of universities’ existing access and outreach spending.
Dates to remember
World Heritage Day, to raise awareness about the diversity and vulnerability of the world’s heritage sites and monuments, takes place on Saturday 18 April. It’s conservationist John Muir’s birthday on Tuesday 21 April.
Teaching resources
-
What is a monument or a memorial? encourages students to identify structures in their local area and discover their history.
-
April always starts on the same day of the week as July and ends on the same day of the week as December. Help younger pupils learn the calendar order with this simple presentation.
- Learn about the importance of biodiversity and the economic benefits ecosystems provide by designing your own conservation programme.
- Let pupils know what they’ll be learning this term, month or week with these display posters.
Latest blogs and comments
• Almost 90% of Ghana’s children are now in school
• Should we be worrying about unqualified teachers?
• 21 important life lessons you learned from teachers
• How to design the Googleplex of schools
