Top Posts of 2013

The following posts got the most views in 2013. Some of them weren’t actually written in 2013.

1. What OFSTED Actually Want
2. A Christmas Miracle – OFSTED Get It Right For Once
3. What OFSTED Say They Want
4. How to be bad SMT
5. How to Destroy NQTs
6. A Guide To Scenes From The Battleground
7. The Darkest Term: Teacher Stress and Depression
8. Does Sir Michael Wilshaw Know What OFSTED Good Practice Looks Like?
9. Why That OFSTED News Is So Important
10. What I’d do about OFSTED
11. Progressive Teaching Methods In the Primary School
12. Why I’m against Performance-Related Pay
13. Lies, Damned Lies and Things You are Told During Teacher Training
14. OFSTED Under Fire
15. A Very Short Summary of the Phonics Debate
16. Good Year Heads
17. Why those of us on the left should support Michael Gove’s efforts to “clever-up” the curriculum
18. Some Quick Tips for NQTs and Trainees
19. Marking and Workload
20. More OFSTED Nonsense

I’ve resisted doing a full review of the year post, mainly because as somebody who tries to read all the education blogs, they have been driving me mad and partly because it’s not long since my 7th birthday post. However, I will allow myself 5 highlights my blogging year, in no particular order and with no more of a sentence on each.

• Quite significant growth in the number of hits to this blog, from averaging less than 350 hits per day in each year from 2010-2012 with no upward trend, to 970 per day in 2013 as a whole and 1450 per day in the last quarter of the year, as well as a large increase in the number of Twitter followers.
• The OFSTED campaign which started in February, and was described in detail here, which, at the very least, seems to have blown the whistle on any number of attempts to promote a particular, ideologically driven, style of teaching.
• The High Court agreeing with my supposedly controversial position on the English GCSE farrago.
• The creation of the Echo Chamber and more generally the growth of a community of education bloggers, particularly those expressing views which the media never seem to acknowledge as being held by teachers.
• Political and media recognition for this blog, most notably being mentioned by Michael Gove (starting here; resulting in this, which I don’t regret, and continuing with these) and getting to meet Liz Truss.

As for the year ahead, I have a few things I’d like to see or do. I’d like to see the education people on the opposition benches engage with bloggers, and with the difficult arguments, as much as government ministers have. I’d like to continue looking at some of those issues raised in my blogposts above, like teacher stress and depression, bad management and workload. I’d also like to come out of the shadows a bit, but this will require finding a job (or combination of part-time jobs) where my opinions won’t threaten my employers and where I have more time to spend on research or on blog-related activities (and where I am still teaching in a school for at least part of the week; I haven’t actually given up on teaching).

So, happy new year to all my readers.