In our first ‘live’ Teachers’ Podcast episode, Claire meets with Mitch Hudson, Assistant Headteacher, Head of English, and founder of ‘Grammarsaurus’, an online resource-bank offering a wide range of learning materials for teachers and schools. 
Mitch talks about how early in his career, he was able to utilise his grammatical skills and knowledge at a time of increased government focus on this aspect of English. Mitch shares his reflections on how his expertise came to be in demand and how this helped him rise swiftly through leadership roles along with supporting other schools, teachers and delivering professional development courses.   Throughout his career, Mitch has visited a wide range of schools and has shared his skills and knowledge at numerous training events. He has met, worked alongside and coached many teachers and leaders, and this has given him some unique perspectives into the similarities between the lives and working conditions of teachers which he talks about with Claire.   Mitch also discusses his thoughts on the future, his aspirations, where he feels education needs to go next, and how the life of Britney Spears can be an inspiration for all of us.     KEY TAKEAWAYS

To get the best from their children; schools must look after the staff.While children are rightly, at the heart of everything teachers and schools do, the only way to get the best from children is to have staff who are working at their best. Demoralised and run-down staff will rarely be able to effectively motivate and enthuse children, and this can be reflected in outcomes.
You can learn from anyone.No matter where you are in your career, you can always learn something new from everyone you work with. Along with this, however much you might wish to, you won’t always get on with everybody you meet. An important lesson, though, especially those looking to take on a leadership role, is that people who seem to regularly disagree with you can usually be very useful. It can prompt deeper consideration of whatever courses of action you might want to take, and it can help to confirm that you are absolutely on the right-track.
Any child can achieve.High expectations of all children – in particular SEN pupils – should be ‘the norm’. Labels can be unhelpful in terms of how pupils are viewed. SEN, as a label (along with ‘ability grouping’ pupils) can sometimes be seen as meaning ‘they can’t do it’ and should then be given easier work. Done well, scaffolding work, with the same expectations as the rest of the class, can quickly boost progress.
Focus on the important things.The freedoms schools now have to design their own curricula can be a huge opportunity. Teachers should not be afraid to focus in on the key knowledge and understanding that their pupils need, and drop the elements that aren’t going to usefully serve their children.
There is still work to be done to link primary and secondary curriculum.While there are positives with the new curriculum, more consistency in approaches – particularly between primary and secondary schools – is needed. Many pupils can find that methods and approaches between schools (or even between year-groups in the same school) can be quite different and confusing for children. This can set pupils up to struggle unnecessarily. The most effective practice sees schools who are closely linked work together to agree on how pupils will be taught, and then these approaches are broken down further within schools between separate year-groups.
Repetition and revisiting key facts can really boost retention of key facts and knowledge.Some of the more complicated concepts and pieces of information, which can sometimes also end up being taught incidentally as ‘one offs’, can be easily forgotten by pupils if not repeated and regularly revisited. It can also really help pupils to retain facts if they are taught in unusual or ‘different’ ways, such as through songs.

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