Episodes

This half term, we're bringing you a triple-bill of episodes recorded at ResearchEd Cymru Bach. The event was convened to discuss where Wales goes now at this important moment for education. A new Plaid Cymru government coincided with yet another poor set of results in the international PISA results for Wales, and this has brought questions about the last decade of education reforms to a head. The event heard from a range of speakers, all of them well-known here in the country. Today we'll hea...

Half term rolls around at last, and it's our tradition here on the podcast to do something a little different. Emma and Tom have each hunted down three interesting things with which to amuse, intrigue and/or torment the other, with no advance warning of the contents. Emma's got a blog by the almighty guru of teaching and learning, Tom Sherrington, and she has some feedback... Tom has a cautionary tale of why our instincts to run a mile from purveyors of corporate waffle are bang on the money. P...

Wales has an increasingly popular Welsh medium sector and, in secondary at least, an increasing problem finding enough teachers to staff the classrooms! With a government policy to reach a million Welsh speakers by 2050, it’s clear that the target won’t be met without thinking beyond those people whose families have spoken Welsh at home for generations. Sporting a fresh new title of Dr, our friend and colleague Sioned Dafydd joins us in the studio to talk about her doctoral research, which seek...

Planning - a huge part of the working life of any student teacher, and (in the opinion of many of us who work in ITE) the key to all sorts of aspects of the process of learning to teach. We spend hours banging on about it, our student teachers spend hours writing them, and yet an experienced teacher appears to do the whole thing in their head, and be able to replan the whole thing on the fly during a lesson if needed. To a new member of the profession it looks like magic, and to someone who teac...

As teachers, we can work all the magic we like, but if a pupil’s not in our classroom, there’s not much impact to be had. In the wake of Covid, there are more and more pupils who are missing significant amounts of the school year. Somehow, we’ve got to season 9 without having an episode specifically about this important issue, but today we’ve managed to find a guest who can help with the details. Scott Norman-Stephenson supports attendance for a cluster of primary schools in Cardiff, and he’s w...

We interrupt your Friday off from our podcast to bring you a special episode about Wales’s PISA results! There’s been plenty of commentary about this already, and we wanted to contribute something that chews over the implications. Despite the results landing very inconveniently in the middle of our busiest teaching period of the year, we found a slot when we could both get in front of a microphone, and we’re doing our best to try and work out where we go from here without sugar coating the fact...

Welcome back to the podcast for what is, unbelievably, our ninth season! For this first episode, Tom is out and about with his microphones, and has an interview with Dr Gwenllian Lansdown Davies, CEO of Dysgu. Dysgu was set up around a year ago to oversee the professional learning offering for people working in education in Wales. We wanted to find out how it sees its role, what its priorities are, and what would count as success for a nation still grappling with major educational challenges. ...

First of all, welcome back to Emma! Although listeners may not have noticed (thanks to us imprisoning her in a studio for about a week last summer and then putting the episodes out slowly across the year), she has in fact just returned from a whole year away from the mic. In this bonus episode, we look back at season 8, and find out that Emma hasn't been keeping an eye on Tom while he was left to drive the podcast by himself - and it's a good thing he didn't realise or who knows what might have...