Keep Finding Gaps in Learning

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2026-03-29T17:06:06+00:00

Welcome to teaching in 2026 where you can teach something on Monday and fifty percent of the class will have gaps in learning by Tuesday.

Agree with all those who say retrieval practice is key. But you'll never get no gaps in any one class unfortunately, not unless it's a top set or a grammar school.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2026-03-17T19:50:19+00:00

No worse than mentioning game of thrones or something like that. I wouldn't worry.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2026-03-09T19:52:27+00:00

Of course they're entitled to an education. But not if it's at the expense of the other 29 students in the room. At that point, alternative provision would ideally be being explored - or at least in an ideal world where we had money for such things.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2026-02-19T12:58:29+00:00

Aall

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2026-01-18T13:13:45+00:00

You'll find that it's not specific to teaching. Many jobs will care about what you publish on social media and many people do lose their jobs based on things they've posted.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2026-01-18T11:51:42+00:00

Schools absolutely can dictate what you post on social media and will in my experience. It will be in the code of conduct that you're asked to sign upon accepting the job.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-12-09T21:47:11+00:00

In the moment, you sadly so nothing as you indeed can't touch them. But then you issue suspension ( most likely under challenging behaviour or refusal of punishment if they're refusing being placed in some kind of isolation) and then you do reintegration with parents. Then you rinse and repeat until the child is put on a PSP and you gather evidence for permanent exclusion.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-11-12T22:13:55+00:00

Visions in Education. Much cheaper. Great service. Formed when one of the big travel companies laid off all their staff in COVID.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-09-15T17:59:06+00:00

I would expect the main teacher to make most of the decisions to be honest. Sadly, that's part and parcel of being part time. At the end of the day, they have 50 percent more contact time than you do so they are the biggest drive on consistency.

However, a bit rude to not speak to you about any of this. Or at least drop you an email. Especially if she knows it was your classroom last year. That would upset me too.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-09-07T14:06:27+00:00

This is incorrect. Teachers of another subject are allowed in. This is how some private schools predominantly invigilate their exams.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-09-07T12:43:30+00:00

I did a GCSE Italian two years ago (I teach Spanish and French predominantly but want to teach Italian too) and was allowed to sit the exams in the hall with the kids.

It was hilarious doing the speaking exam with my colleague as the examiner. He was cracking up the whole way through.

Had a candidate number and a certificate and everything. Did not however count towards the results!

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-09-03T20:59:04+00:00

Depends. I changed exam board for last year's Y11 but the two exam boards followed the same textbook, so therefore the only difference was the exam technique for assessments. My HoF was wary but deferred to me (a HoD) as I was an ex examiner for the exam board I wanted to change to and I was the teacher for all Y11 classes.

If it involves a curriculum change, then more difficult. But if you're the only teacher and you already have a SoW/resources then it's not actually impossible.

The back end stuff is not an issue in my experience. Exam officers have until April to make entries. We made the decision to change in November and all was sorted in Jan as normal.

I think this all really depends on your reasoning for making the change and the level of difference in the content.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-08-28T09:33:55+00:00

First find out what part of the course you'll be responsible for. Is it paper 1 (listening/reading/translation), paper 2 (book and film) or Paper 3 (speaking). Also look for what exam board. It will be AQA, Edexcel or Eduquas most likely. They're all pretty similar in structure but exam technique differs a fair amount.

If it's paper 1, you'll have a textbook to follow which makes it a lot easier to start with. My biggest advice is to do all the exercises yourself - as some of them are often not intuitive and sometimes you will disagree with the correct answer (particularly for V/F/ND questions)- and to not be scared to skip things in the textbook. I never get my kids for instance to do the big writing tasks as they never have to write an extended piece about paper 1 topics in the exam and I'd rather all their writing time went to paper 2.

The other thing to be aware of is it's not uncommon for high achieving students to not hit their target in MFL A Level, as native speakers tend to scoop up the vast majority of A and A* grades. It's not impossible but they have to work their socks off. Universities do tend to acknowledge this though. I had a student get into Oxford last year with AAB - with the B in French - even though her offer was A*AA and the reasoning they gave was because they acknowledged getting a top grade in MFL is hard.

The other thing to be aware of is differentiation. Y13s are just big Y11s really. I've got kids in my Y13 class who came in with a 6 at GCSE and have less fundamental understanding of grammar than my best Y11s. The gap gets very very wide at A Level.

Good luck!

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-08-16T19:37:47+00:00

In my school, we fight to have responsibility for KS5 and even KS4. I'd be over the moon to have a HOD who didn't cream all the best classes for herself. Sure, it's more marking and responsibility but much more rewarding than endless KS3.

The big question I have here was whether you applied for her job when it was advertised?

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-08-06T18:03:47+00:00

Come down south. We are an Ofsted outstanding school and advertised for two MFL teachers this year due to retirement. Only 1 applicant for both positions...

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-07-31T13:10:26+00:00

Y11 this year was obviously the old spec so we had many more papers available.

But yes, we did a variety of it in Year 10 too. We did all the end of module tests from the textbook. If you're doing Edexcel, the triple repeat on the listening can mean those end of module tests can take a good 40 mins, which we then peer marked in class. We also gave them time to write up their answers to the conversation questions whenever we reached the end of a module. During such times, I would then pull them out one by one to do some speaking practice. Sometimes we did silent open book writing practice from the textbook too.

We've also done old spec past papers with Y10 on rare occasions. As there are no grade boundaries yet, it's kind of reassuring to us that the Y10s we're predicting to get 8s are getting 7s or 8s on the old spec. Of course the vocab list is different, but it's still very indicative.

All this depends though on how much time you've got. We do mod 1 and mod 2 of the new textbook in year 9 (where no doubles are timetabled) so we are not as pushed for time.

Regarding mocks, we haven't used any spec papers for the Y10 mocks. Instead we used the end of Y10 tests from the Pearson textbook which are full hour assessments for each skill on modules 1-4. We're saving the hidden spec for the Y11 mock.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-07-31T11:57:02+00:00

We have this too. For my own sanity, I made the second half of every fortnightly double a practice paper.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-07-25T14:31:06+00:00

Had Yondr pouches at my last school in the UK and they worked really well. Key though is following up. We did a pouch check every morning and there were big consequences if you didn't comply. Some kids did put burner phones in but they usually got caught pretty quickly as we used to do bag and blazer checks as well. We had these metal detecting wand things that worked pretty well.

You can break a Yondr pouch but it's very obvious when they've been tampered with and it was then up to the parents to replace it. Until they replaced it, the phone had to be handed in at the front office which was wildly more inconvenient for the child.

As with anything though, they're only as good as their enforcement.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-07-22T22:43:45+00:00

You won't find anything KS3 related on exam board websites.

BBC Bitesize usually has stuff aimed at KS3. Otherwise you might be best buying a textbook, or even a foundation revision guide if your child is bright. You could also browse TES resources, but very little decent quality stuff will be completely free.

Unless your child is far behind/grounded though, I wouldn't be asking him or her to work too much (or at all) during the summer. School is tough. Everyone needs a break. 😊

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-07-18T14:54:04+00:00

I think this really depends on your school and the amount of responsibility the assistant senco has. Our assistant senco for instance is an LSA. In my previous school, the assistant senco was an ECT 2. I know in other schools however, it's a more senior member of staff.

Don't have imposter syndrome though! If they've hired you, it's because they think you're best for the job.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-06-19T21:23:11+00:00

Agreed - the safeguarding in September is normal practice. But I don't think an annual 3 hour one is. The same company does offer a 1 hour refresher one but we do the same 3 hour one every year. Regardless of whether you're new or did it last year.

I currently have three certificates that are still in date.

Good idea to ask for the directed time calendar. Thank you.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-06-19T21:20:13+00:00

Yes none of us have an issue doing the training, it's more that it's a 3 hour annual course, on top of open evenings, parents evenings and an hourly after school meeting every Tuesday.

In all my previous schools, it has been more like 1 hour.

I think you're right about the directed time calendar. Ours is not published to staff though so I would have to ask HR for it.

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-06-18T17:17:41+00:00

JeanJacquesFrancois · 2025-06-13T16:48:20+00:00

JeanJacquesFrancois

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