Yacapaca
Great teachers spend less time marking and more time teaching
Category: Commentary
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Here is a fairly typical budget for a smallish 5-teacher department in a mid-sized secondary school: Salaries for 5 teachers (inc. employers’ NI) £215,000 Discretionary (“materials”) budget £1,500 There is a third item that is usually accounted separately, cost of cover staff. If the average teacher is off for 1 week per year – whether…
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Before half term, I sent a small survey to 10,000 teachers in UK secondary schools. I already knew that a popular “life after levels” alternative to NC Levels at KS3 was to extend GCSE grading all the way down to Y7, but I needed more detail to help plan our future grading strategy at Yacapaca.…
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Notwithstanding my general preference for state, non-selective, secular schooling, I am fascinated by Prof James Tooley’s work promoting the value of low-cost private schools. These two recent articles are well worth your time: School choice has worked in India. But we need to compare like with like. Private or Public: Does the proliferation of low-fee/low-cost private…
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I have yet to meet a single head or senior teacher who can answer this off the top of their heads, but it is easy to work out using government-published figures. Teachers work 55.7 hours/week total1, and spend 9.4 hours/week marking2. That’s 17%. The average teacher salary is £28,9513, but we have to add the employer’s…
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When students misspell a common word, what is driving the error? I analysed 35,000 Peer Feedback entries in which the student had intended to write “wrong” and found 1614 instances of misspellings – about 5% of the total. Of the misspellings, 62% entered “rong”, a phonetic error 27% entered “worng”, a typographical error. My…
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