Education Matters

The Hannah and Lucy Show asks what schools should be doing about boys and what boys need from the adults around them. Hannah, a secondary art teacher, and Lucy, who teaches seven-year-olds, return after a hiatus of gallstones, a surfing injury in Morocco and a flooded house. They turn to Movember and men’s mental health in education, misogyny in classrooms and online, and the shortage of male role...

Education Matters welcomes Edd Moore, environmental education consultant, author and former primary curriculum coordinator at Green School Bali, for a conversation with host Sandra Patterson about what it takes to put climate action at the centre of primary school life. Edd began teaching in Dorset as an eco coordinator before moving to a jungle campus in Bali. He was named Foundation for Environm...

Sandra Patterson makes her debut as an Education Matters host in conversation with her friend Fiona Sheriff, a geography teacher and pastoral leader from Northamptonshire. Fiona is a Fawcett Fellow at UCL, a Chartered Geographer with the Royal Geographical Society, a resource writer and Vice President of the Geography Association, where she takes over as President for 2026 to 2027. Both teach geog...

Closing Primary Schools in Runcorn. Birth rates are falling, costs are rising and Halton Borough Council has ranked its schools on a matrix of numbers, finances and building condition. Eight made the first list. None of them did anything wrong. Paul, a primary school teacher in Runcorn, and Lian Potter of the teaching union NASUWT are fighting the proposals, and they bring the case to Education Ma...

Teaching Matters, the weekly panel show from Education Matters, asks who gets noticed in school, who gets heard and who gets looked after when money runs short. Hosts Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs , explore bullying in schools, the irrelevance of politics and the contempt of an education authority in telling teachers and pupils to “put on layers” when it’s cold. Our first story starts with a headlin...

Influencer Degrees, French School Riots and Careers for Four-Year-Olds. That's the ground Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs cover on Teaching Matters, the weekly panel show from Education Matters, the digital platform bringing outstanding practice and ideas to a global audience. Would you let your child study social media influencing? Nottingham Trent University has launched a three-year BA in content c...

Once again Education Matters has invited Sam Strickland onto a show. This time he’s on to talk about his fabulous latest book, Behaviour and Belonging: Creating School Cultures Where Every Child Thrives. Sam chose the order of his title deliberately, and he makes a persuasive case for it in conversation with Paul Hazzard, even after Paul admits he'd have swapped the words round. Sam is the pri...

Education Matters host Sandra Patterson sits down with three of her colleagues, Jackie Hill, Nicole O'Connor and Laura McAleer, the Network Leader team behind WomenEd Northern Ireland. Together they trace the story of a global grassroots movement that began in 2017, when a handful of women reacted to the release of pay gap statistics on social media and ended up building face to face events, ‘...

This week's Teaching Matters finds Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs turning over three stories that all circle back to the same question, what is school actually for. First up is the report from Sir Anthony Seldon and Tim Bunting on artificial intelligence in schools, which has already reached the Commons Education Select Committee and prompted calls for urgent guidance for teachers. Paul and John...

This week's episode of Teaching Matters, the weekly panel show from Education Matters, brings together host Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs for three stories that circle back again and again to a single question, what is school actually for. They start with student voice, prompted by an article of Christopher Byrne’s, a primary teacher at Malvern College in Egypt, who set out to learn how his pupi...

Hannah and Lucy are back on a Wednesday night, broadcasting from Portugal and the UK, with a guest whose organisation is reshaping how schools’ approach PSHE and citizenship. Anoushka joins from Superkind, the social action platform built around the UN Sustainable Development Goals, to talk about what happens when young people are given a genuine voice in their communities. Superkind grew out of a...

On Teaching Matters this week Paul Hazzard is joined by John Gibbs for an in-depth look at leadership, attendance and a genuinely strange proposal from Reform UK. The first story is inspired by John Severs piece in the TES on the handover between education secretaries Bridget Phillipson and Lucy Powell. The conversation asks what happens when someone new is promoted to a position of responsibility...

The Hannah and Lucy Show is back for the new school year. Live conversation and super chat with JBL & Fozzie. This week they cover: The start of the school year, inset days and the case against filler CPD and icebreakers Teacher wellbeing, "working smarter not harder" (referencing Greg McKeown's Effortless) burnout and unfilled posts A new head teacher's strong introduction a...

John Gibbs is joined by Dr Sinéad McCauley Lambe , Assistant Professor in the Department of Inclusive and Special Education at Dublin City University, for a conversation about handwriting, and why it's far more complicated than pen on page. Sinéad spent eleven years teaching junior primary in an all boys school in Dublin's north inner city before her classroom experience turned into doctor...

Teaching Matters returns for the new school year. It’s your weekly panel show from Education Matters, hosted by Paul Hazzard who this week is joined by John Gibbs. We help you unwind, not wind you up. The first conversation is based on The Guardian's article by Richard Partington which explores the major review led by Alan Milburn. A chief recommendation is that primary schools in England iden...

Fresh back from Las Vegas and with the World Cup 26 behind them Hannah and Lucy take to the airwaves in the summer heat to tell us all about teachable moments. They start with the World Cup and Team Algeria's host city assignment in Lawrence, Kansas. A famously conservative American town adopted a North African football team with open arms, flags and genuine affection, and Lucy holds it up as...

Virginia Kerr has been a TV reporter, a news anchor, a social media strategist with a TikTok following approaching a million and a YouTube educator who built a seven year business teaching storytelling from a converted laundry room … and so much more … . At fifty-two, with that career already stacked high with achievement, she has decided to become a full time high school teacher, taking on audio...

Paul Hazzard is joined by Katrina Bradley, a former music teacher turned numeracy specialist, resource designer and entrepreneur, for a conversation that ranges across curiosity, confidence and what it actually takes to make maths click. Katrina traces her own path from a music degree and eight years as a peripatetic music teacher to retraining as a primary school teacher, and explains how the ski...

John and Paul co-host the weekly panel show Teaching Matters and explore the Guardian investigation into a school inquiry, led by Estelle Morris and backed by the Department for Education, that recommends high-performing schools admit more disadvantaged white working-class pupils. This story reads like a cautionary tale about school privatisation. Durham High School, owned by the China-linked Gala...

Lucy and Hannah are back on The Hannah and Lucy Show with the episode teachers have been quietly nodding along to since the last bell of summer term rang, Damned If You Do, Damned If You Don't . Recorded in that strange, sun-baked, brain-fried week between the end of exams and the actual holidays, this one takes on everything the summer term throws at teachers, parents and pupils alike, and as...

Paul Hazzard and John Gibbs co-host Teaching Matters. The first story explores Richard Adams and Fiona Harvey's report in The Guardian that our school estate, much of it built well past its intended lifespan, simply isn't ready for the extremes we're now living through. Paul and John talk through the astonishing case of Matford Brook Academy in Exeter, a brand new school demolished before a single...

John and Paul examine three stories that shed light on crucial matters in education. John and Paul trace Gareth Southgate's claim that boys need to be taught differently from girls back through generations of changing attitudes, from segregated school entrances to suppressed aspirations for girls, before asking the harder question. Are differences between boys and girls down to nature, nurture...

What does it really mean to teach adaptively? Not as a buzzword, not as a policy tick-box, but as a living, breathing practice that changes outcomes for real children in real classrooms? That's the question at the heart of our conversation with Andrew Young . Paul is joined by Andrew Young , social sciences teacher, co-director of a Teaching School Hub in York, and author of Adaptive Teaching:...

What happens when the systems meant to protect children aren't talking to each other, the consequences aren't landing, and teachers are left holding responsibilities that stretch far beyond the classroom? Hannah Wilson and Lucy Neuburger don't pull their punches on this one. The trigger for this episode is a Home Office report revealing that police wrote off thousands of crimes last year, includin...

This week on Teaching Matters we explore why young people are leaving school with strong exam results but without the practical life skills they need for adulthood. The panel tackles a damning government review by former minister Alan Milburn. The report suggests that institutions built to support young people are no longer fit for purpose, leaving too many school leavers as NEETs (not in employme...