Teach Sleep Repeat

More schools than ever are taking two weeks off in October, so where does the extra week come from? Dylan explains how his old school swapped INSET days for twilights, why it can cut term-time holidays, and Hayden asks the obvious question about day one safeguarding training. Then it's your school trip stories, and you sent thousands. A Year 3 child leaves a trail through the British Museum an...

It’s nearly the end of Term 1, which means the first parents’ evening of the year, usually when you’re shattered and losing your voice. Dylan and Hayden talk about why it’s still worth doing, what parents actually want to hear (whether their child is happy, not fronted adverbials), and whether teachers should be stricter about keeping to time. Then a quick-fire round: online or in person, one long...

Hayden plans the episode this week, which means you get a game. He opens with a bedtime story about his nearly-three-year-old that ends with the question no parent wants to hear: “Dad, where am I going to put my bogey?” Then Blind Rank is back by listener request. Dylan has to rank playground duty, parents’ evening, teaching art, the staffroom and one more mystery job without knowing what’s coming...

Hayden is back after one whole week of paternity leave, with a 10-day-old son called Albie (who Dylan has already renamed Albatross). We talk about how much calmer you are second time round, which parenting "rules" turn out not to matter and which ones really do, then get properly stuck into why children are so gross: snot bubbles in Reception, the Year 6 residential room nobody wants to...

Once a year we ask you for your school's biggest red flags, and once a year you absolutely bury us. Nearly a thousand comments on Facebook alone, so we've pulled out the worst of them and gone through them one by one. A memo banning anyone below SLT from drinking ground coffee, after a colleague was caught with a filter mug. A member of leadership asking a teacher if she knew what "professional" m...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app England has just landed in the world's top ten for reading, maths and science. Good news, surely? Dylan and Hayden are not so sure, because the same PISA results show reading ability falling off a cliff worldwide, and the countries where children use AI the most are falling behind the fastest. Here's the arti...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app One day into the new year, and a listener is already drained. Not the big stuff. The whispering, the fiddling, the constant "low level" disruption that never quite stops. She doesn't want to moan all year, but it's looking that way. Hayden has a story about the one thing a leader said to him...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app An ECT one week in, a class sat well below the expected level, and a head already spinning with schemes, planning and new information. What do you actually say to them? Season 5 opens with a full back to school Q&A. Hayden defends the horseshoe seating plan, and Dylan has to break it to him that what he r...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app Five weeks of rehearsals. Year Six production. Opening night a few hours away. And then the head teacher decides the children cannot stand on the benches, for health and safety reasons. The same benches the school uses for bench ball. Before that, a cracking question from a newly qualified teacher whose unive...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app A Year 1 teacher has been told her school is bringing in continuous provision from September, and she is quietly worried her class will not be where they should be by July. Dylan and Hayden take that worry seriously, because badly implemented provision is a real risk. Then they ask the harder question. Where...

Hayden turns up in a Nike sweatband, insists it is not cosplay, and claims his paddle sponsorship money is not far off Tiger Woods territory. It goes downhill from there. Dylan sets a test to work out exactly which decade Hayden's sports knowledge stopped in, then gives listeners a guided tour of the podcast room, recently tidied in the loosest possible sense of the word. Five things you can see,...

Dylan spent half a wedding being blamed for something he definitely did not do, and there were witnesses. It is a strong opening to a Q&A that gets serious surprisingly fast. A listener kicks things off by challenging Hayden to trigger Dylan in the shortest possible time. The broken oven, the door handle, the garden. Only one line actually lands. Then the big one. Is school leadership genuinel...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app Bridget Phillipson is out, Lucy Powell is in, and most teachers could not pick her out of a lineup. So this is the crash course. Moss Side, state educated all the way, a year reading chemistry at Oxford before she walked away from it, a family full of teachers, and her own children at the primary she went to...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app Seven sessions. That is how much rehearsal time one Year 6 team was given for their end of year production, after leadership insisted English and maths carried on every single day. Hayden, who has run more than a few of these, has a fairly clear view on where that ends up. That question from Izzy opens the ep...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app A second year teacher writes in wanting to know when everything you have to do in a day finally becomes manageable. Dylan opens with some news she probably did not want to hear, and then turns it into something genuinely useful about the difference between getting faster at your job and quietly deciding what...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app Under what circumstances would you actually raise your voice at a class? Dylan reckons he can count his genuine, lost-it shouts on one hand, and the single time he did it properly, defending a child who was being bullied, still sits with him years later. He and Hayden pull apart the difference between shoutin...

You've just been handed your new class, and the previous teacher's parting words are that they were the most difficult group they've taught in eleven years. Helpful heads up, or a curse you carry all summer? Dylan and Hayden open with the tricky class handover, why every class somehow becomes the trickiest one ever, and whether tricky classes even exist or it's all down to the scho...

🧮 Free for school staff: generate arithmetic worksheets in seconds at tools.mathszoo.app The government have announced plans for all children on free school meals to be given access to an AI tutor, which begs the question, are we already on the way to humans being replaced by robots? "Am I cut out for this?" Ellie's message is the one that might hit hardest. She moved from TA into a...

Use our FREE worksheet arithmetic generator here: tools.mathszoo.app Twenty-five years in KS2, and Kathy says teaching now feels like a battle. Her message kicks off this listener mailbag: a rise in SEND needs, behaviour, apathy and shaky basics since COVID, and a class where the majority aren't equipped for year group expectations. She's gone more child-led to meet them where they are, bu...

So you sit a sitting Education Secretary down, ask the questions teachers actually want answered, follow up when the first answer wobbles, and then the verdict comes back from you, the listeners. This week Dylan and Hayden go through the feedback from the Bridget Phillipson episode, and it was overwhelmingly kind. Listeners said the questions were clear and fair, that the follow ups kept coming, a...

Two hundred episodes in, and somehow we ended up across the table from the person who runs the whole system. For the TSR 200th, Dylan and Hayden sit down with Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, and waste none of it on small talk. First, the SEND white paper. The move from EHCPs to the new Individual Support Plans sounds tidy, but it could leave families without the right to appeal at a tribun...

"What's the biggest thing you two actually disagree on?" One listener has clocked the I agree, I agree tic and wants a proper scrap, so Dylan and Hayden dig into the teaching vs non-teaching divide and find it's spikier than either expected. Then a brave question lands. Should politics be explicitly taught in KS2? The boys weigh up whether ten year olds can handle it, who gets to...

🔢 Sign up for a free Maths Zoo demo right now and get your school using it before the end of term. Boost maths fluency and arithmetic across every year group, completely free trial, no strings. Book it at www.mathszoo.org A teacher writes in asking if it is genuinely acceptable to eat biscuits and drink sugary drinks in front of children. Are teachers supposed to be role models when it comes to l...

For about twenty-five years, the dominant message in teacher training has been clear. The research says mixed attainment is better. Setting damages confidence, harms low attainers, and widens the gap. Then in April 2026, the EEF published a study that complicates all of that. Nine thousand pupils, 97 schools, two years of data. The finding: pupils in mixed attainment classes made roughly one month...

A teacher is getting emails from a parent at 10pm most nights with an expectation of a reply before school the next morning. Their SLT's advice? Just manage the relationship. Dylan and Hayden have slightly stronger thoughts on that. Then unannounced learning walks, two-line feedback emails with no right of reply, and the working wall that was too busy one week and lacking evidence of learning the...