Emma & Tom Talk Teaching

The Aberfan disaster, 60 years ago today, still looms large in the collective memory here in Wales. At 9.13am a coal tip slipped, engulfing Pantglas Junior school and a row of houses, killing 116 children and 28 adults, including five teachers. Back in 2023, in one of our Easter holiday episodes where we bring a variety of things to discuss together, Tom brought this clip from David Lloyd's excell...

Wales has an increasingly popular Welsh medium sector and, in secondary at least, an increasing problem finding enough teachers to staff the classrooms! With a government policy to reach a million Welsh speakers by 2050, it’s clear that the target won’t be met without thinking beyond those people whose families have spoken Welsh at home for generations.  Sporting a fresh new title of Dr, our frien...

Planning - a huge part of the working life of any student teacher, and (in the opinion of many of us who work in ITE) the key to all sorts of aspects of the process of learning to teach. We spend hours banging on about it, our student teachers spend hours writing them, and yet an experienced teacher appears to do the whole thing in their head, and be able to replan the whole thing on the fly durin...

As teachers, we can work all the magic we like, but if a pupil’s not in our classroom, there’s not much impact to be had. In the wake of Covid, there are more and more pupils who are missing significant amounts of the school year. Somehow, we’ve got to season 9 without having an episode specifically about this important issue, but today we’ve managed to find a guest who can help with the details. ...

We interrupt your Friday off from our podcast to bring you a special episode about Wales’s PISA results! There’s been plenty of commentary about this already, and we wanted to contribute something that chews over the implications. Despite the results landing very inconveniently in the middle of our busiest teaching period of the year, we found a slot when we could both get in front of a microphone...

Welcome back to the podcast for what is, unbelievably, our ninth season! For this first episode, Tom is out and about with his microphones, and has an interview with Dr Gwenllian Lansdown Davies, CEO of Dysgu. Dysgu was set up around a year ago to oversee the professional learning offering for people working in education in Wales. We wanted to find out how it sees its role, what its priorities are...

First of all, welcome back to Emma! Although listeners may not have noticed (thanks to us imprisoning her in a studio for about a week last summer and then putting the episodes out slowly across the year), she has in fact just returned from a whole year away from the mic. In this bonus episode, we look back at season 8, and find out that Emma hasn't been keeping an eye on Tom while he was left to...

We've reached the end of season 8 of Emma and Tom Talk Teaching, and to celebrate the end of another academic year, we're going to take on the end-of-level boss! Learning Styles is a neuromyth (something that people say about how the brain works that sounds attractive but is basically a load of rubbish). Not just any old neuromyth, but THE neuromyth that just refuses to lie down and die. For decad...

Today we look at our own initial teacher education (ITE) provision here at Cardiff Met, and question how effective the concept of Research and Enquiry has been for our student teachers. Working in a policy environment where teachers are expected to be capable of creating and consuming knowledge about teaching, and bringing to to bear on their own contexts, we provide time and space for our student...

Tom is joined in the non camera-enabled studio today (sorry, YouTube subscribers!) by Sarah McErlaine, who works with schools in Caerphilly county here in Wales. Sarah has just completed her professional doctorate, in which she worked with literacy specialists to try and nail down the key concepts in English. In the absence of much in the way of clues in the Curriculum for Wales framework, this tu...

This week we welcome two academics from the University of the West of England - Joe Brown and Dr Tim Clark - to the studio. They’re here to discuss their recently published book Debating Childhoods, which gives Tom and Sian the chance to have an in-depth discussion about how we think of childhood and how society’s values influence the things we prioritise and consider when providing education and...

With the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) elections here in Wales just around the corner, the team got together in Cardiff Met's broadcast centre to discuss what we learnt from the six parties in relation to some of the big themes facing education today. Tom is joined on the studio sofa by Dr Gareth Evans from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David and Finola Wilson from Impact Wales to discuss scho...

Podcasting solo today, Tom is relieved to have not one but two remote guests to keep him company! Donald Mbeutcha and Sara Gattward are from Every Future Foundation, an organisation that aims to support schools with anti-racist education, mainly in London and the surrounding area.  Whilst the Welsh government have made a commitment to an anti-racist Wales by 2030, and we have organisations like DA...

Our notorious Easter holiday light episode is back for 2026, and we’re delighted that we have Emma’s dulcet tones on the recording! In order to achieve this, we recorded this way back in July 2025, and Tom’s got his fingers crossed that everything we bring to the table ages well in the intervening nine months.  Building work outside our normal studio means that we’re in a temporary setup for this...

In this Senedd Election Special, we tried very hard to interview someone from Reform UK about the party's education policy offerings for the upcoming Senedd elections. As you'll hear, we weren't successful in getting anyone to come on, so we discussed the education content of their manifesto document without them. As always, here on Emma and Tom Talk Teaching we then turn to analysis from Dr Garet...

In this Senedd Election Special, we interview Cefin Campbell from Plaid Cymru about the party's education policy offerings for the upcoming Senedd elections.  As ever, here on Emma and Tom Talk Teaching we have post-interview analysis from Dr Gareth Evans from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The interview was recorded on 16th February 2026, and is a collaboration between Emma and Tom...

In this Senedd Election Special, we interview Jane Dodds from the Liberal Democrats about the party's education policy offerings for the upcoming Senedd elections.  As ever, here on Emma and Tom Talk Teaching we have post-interview analysis from Dr Gareth Evans from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The interview was recorded on 25th February 2026, and is a collaboration between Emma an...

We're back next week with the final three slots in the series: the Liberal Democrats, Plaid Cymru and Reform. Here on our podcast you'll get the usual post-interview analysis with Dr Gareth Evans. Don't forget that Jane and Finola will be discussing the interviews from their point of view over on the Impact Podcast too. This Senedd Elections Special series is a co-production of Emma and Tom Talk T...

To complement our Senedd election special episodes, we welcome Dr Gareth Evans back to the podcast to set the scene with a look at how education in Wales has developed since devolution in 1999.  Gareth is well-placed to give us the back-story leading up to these pivotal elections, as he is Director of Education Policy at the University of Wales Trinity Saint David, and previously the education cor...

In this Senedd Election Special, we interview Lynne Neagle from the Labour Party (and the current Cabinet Secretary for Education) about the party's education policy offerings for the upcoming Senedd elections.  As ever, here on Emma and Tom Talk Teaching we have post-interview analysis from Dr Gareth Evans from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The interview was recorded on 5th March 2...

In this Senedd Election Special, we interview Angela Karadog from the Green Party about the Greens' education policy offerings for the upcoming Senedd elections.  As ever, here on Emma and Tom Talk Teaching we have post-interview analysis from Dr Gareth Evans from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The interview was recorded on 18th February 2026, and is a collaboration between Emma and...

In this Senedd Election Special, we interview Natasha Asghar from the Conservative Party about their education policy offerings for the upcoming Senedd elections.  As ever, here on Emma and Tom Talk Teaching we have post-interview analysis from Dr Gareth Evans from the University of Wales Trinity Saint David. The interview was recorded on 25th February 2026, and is a collaboration between Emma and...

Next week we'll have interviews with the Conservatives, the Green party and Labour. Here on Emma and Tom Talk Teaching there's analysis after every interview with Tom and Dr Gareth Evans from the University of Wales, Trinity Saint David. Join us on Monday, Tuesday and Thursday for our first three episodes! This Senedd Elections Special series is a co-production of Emma and Tom Talk Teaching and th...

As Wales's elections to the Senedd (Welsh Parliament) draw nearer, the polls continue to suggest that we might see a major redrawing of the political landscape here. Since devolution in 1999, Labour has always held power. That's a quarter of a century of government, with education one of the policy areas that was devolved from Westminster by the Blair government. So we thought it was worth finding...

Friend of the podcast Dr Mary Woolley joins us on the line from Canterbury for this episode, to discuss a research project about teachers' curriculum conversations. The Curriculum for Wales makes the suggestion that if learners are given the opportunity to make 'powerful connections' between subject disciplines, their overall learning can be more meaningful. The curriculum framework empowers schoo...