Field Report – Festival of Education, Day 2, PM
Helen Mulley's report from the 2017 Festival of Education concludes with a heads-up from Sean Harford and a close-up on vocabulary acquisition…
- by Helen Mulley
During her speech this morning, Amanda Spielman told everyone in the marquee that they must go and listen to Sean Harford at 2.10 – and frankly, she’s not the kind of person it’s wise to disregard.
So that’s what I did – although I was seemingly in a minority with my obedience. He was presenting in a much smaller space than Spielman, and there were plenty of empty seats. Harford’s session was about the Ofsted research on curriculum to which the Chief Inspector had referred earlier, from which reports will start coming through next term. It’s going to be interesting stuff, covering intent, implementation and impact at national, school and classroom levels – watch this space.
My next stop was the Old Gym, where another Teach Secondary columnist, Alex Quigley, was speaking about ‘Closing the vocabulary gap in every classroom’. Once again, extra chairs were required to accommodate the audience; this is an important issue that’s all too easily overlooked, so it was great to see how many people had turned up.
Weaving in research, his own experience and contributions from teachers in the room, Quigley deftly and engagingly took us through why vocabulary acquisition is so crucial for successful outcomes, and suggested strategies to help develop it right across the curriculum. I reckon that in CPD terms, this might well have been the single most useful session I witnessed over the course of the Festival.
Enlightening and heartbreaking
The Good Immigrant – a collection of 15 essays edited by Nikesh Shukla – was recently described in a review for Teach Secondary as a must-read for educators. I was therefore looking forward to hearing one of its contributors, teacher Darren Chetty, reading an extract from his piece about how hard it is for children of colour to see their reality reflected in the books, TV shows and other cultural media to which they’re exposed in this country.
He was then interviewed by another Good Immigrant contributor, journalist Kieran Yates, and what followed was a session that was enlightening, thought-provoking and at times heartbreaking. If you haven’t yet read the book, please do. And if you’re an English teacher, next time you ask everyone in the class to write a story, count up how many characters appear in the kids’ work who don’t have white skin and a British-sounding name.
And that’s more or less it for this year. I’ve had a great couple of days, listening, learning and soaking up the atmosphere of this beautiful space. (Mind you, I’ve done that whilst trying not to think too hard about how a good deal of this talk of ‘what we should and shouldn’t be doing in education’ would almost certainly be redundant if every child in the country were able to access the kind of experience that Wellington students enjoy).
I’m going to finish off by going back to the main marquee to hear Gyles Brandreth be witty, erudite and quite possibly naughty, before facing the grim reality of the M25. I wonder what’s been happening at Glastonbury…?
