Short pieces from reviews: where markbooks and schemes part company, how to sample work without a second register, and how to write a governors’ paper that can be contradicted.
11 March 2026
A department can run a full term of lessons, collect a full column of marks, and still be unable to say which curriculum outcome any given mark was meant to evidence.
1 April 2026
Curriculum reading needs pieces of work, not a parallel database of names. Schools already have a register. A review should not invent another one.
17 May 2026
Colour codes travel well in a slide deck and poorly in a discussion. A term narrative that names tasks and silences is slower to produce and easier to defend.
8 June 2026
Some departments want a machine on the office desk to tally columns they already own. That is a filing preference, not a change in who is responsible for the pupils.