Teach Secondary Magazine V.9 No.6 Edizione posteriore

What a strange year it’s been. After a spring term of uncertainty, rapid responses and holding things together, followed by a summer term of frantic planning, remote teaching and manning the fort, teachers, leaders and students deserved a quiet summer break for recuperating like never before. But then the barrage of news bombshells and policy surprises just kept on coming. Delayed school re-openings. A summer free school meals scheme that was, then wasn’t, then was again (thanks, Marcus). An exams season thrown into complete chaos by, in Boris Johnson’s telling at least, a ‘mutant algorithm’ – the fallout of which led to the departures of both the head of Ofqual and the DfE’s most senior civil servant. And as we go to press, we now discover that headteachers will be the ones to make the call on whether mask-wearing should be mandatory within their schools, contrary to what had previously been said by government officials. That’s quite the lead-in to a new school year which, by all accounts, is going present challenges to teaching professionals that they’ve scarcely even imagined before, let alone experienced. It therefore won’t be much of a surprise that this issue is somewhat heavy on pandemic-related reading. Matters relating to mental health (p31) and catch-up strategies (p65) will surely loom large in schools throughout autumn and beyond, so we hope you find something helpful and engaging in our two themed sections. That said, we wanted to leave room for some topics that remain as salient now as they were in ‘the before times.’ To that end, we have Dr Amanda Barton unpacking the perennial question of why boys continue to lag behind girls in MFL (p60) and Alex Quigley on the need for every teacher to be aware of their subject’s reading demands (p90).