The Balloon Goes Up … adventures in children’s poetry

I stagger to the counter, an armful of book packages clutched to my chest. “Hello!” I say through the perspex slot. “It’s me again.” Mrs Goggins in the post office leaps into action and five minutes of weighing, printing and sticking begins as post codes and zip codes are checked. While the growing queue behind…

March Update … the musings of an ex-deputy head teacher

As a teacher who graduated in the 80s, having studied at Charlotte Mason College in Ambleside where a child-centred pedagogy was developed and practised, I spent the early part of my career coping with the imposition of Kenneth Baker’s ‘National Curriculum’. At a meeting with student teachers in late 1987, a junior minister from Margaret…