Education Matters

About Education Matters

Hannah and Lucy talk about teaching through the winter.

Publisher

Education Matters

Category

education

Language

en

Explicit

No

First episode

6 Feb 2025

Latest episode

4 Oct 2026

Latest episodes

136 episodes in the feed.

1. 

   4 Oct 2026

   Teaching Matters | PS Work, French Protests & Influencer Degrees

   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 creation and the headlines didn't hold back. John, who once taught A level communication studies, says the label misleads. Underneath sits marketing, business and technology, and he'd back a vocational degree that speaks to young people. His sharper target is British snobbery. Anything with "studies" on the front draws pearl-clutching, and the real scandal for John is students paying top fees for crowded lecture halls and workbooks. Paul wonders whether a degree built on today's platforms will age well, recalling an IT qualification that dated within years. Teachers are influencers too, John reminds him, and not always for the better. Paul counters that teachers at least work under regulation, inspection and line management, so perhaps Nottingham Trent is quietly bringing ethics to the wild west of online media. Then to France, where pupils are protesting over overcrowded classes, staff shortages and unfit school buildings. Paul reports 1,949 arrests and more than 3,700 schools blockaded. John sets the unrest beside the 2011 riots in Britain and senses an older anger finding a target, while Paul reaches for the psychotherapist's language of repression and projection. John recalls a friend who joined the 1968 student sit-ins in London, then travelled to Northern Ireland to back the civil rights marchers and was beaten for it. Paul also brings in Impossible City and the French tradition of the manifestation as a rite of passage. John's verdict on the young protesters is clear. "I think there's nothing wrong with being young and led by your heart." Schools that treat children as problems to be managed, he argues, deserve the anger. What should a UK system learn from it? Listen to young people, and build schools of joy, creativity and challenge rather than filters. The last story asks what education is for. Former minister Alan Milburn wants four-year-olds introduced to future careers and compulsory work placements for 14 to 16 year olds. John loves the idea of a postman visiting the classroom but rejects any suggestion that primary school exists to produce future workers, recalling a visit from a policeman with handcuffs and a whistle. He predicts two kinds of work experience, one built on discipline for some pupils and one on opportunity and choice for others, and he doubts a postman ever visits Eton College. Paul, a firm believer in placements, argues they change a child's self-concept and bring a maturity no week in school can match. John concedes the point. Along the way they ask why every social problem lands on schools and whether Westminster thinks education can be mobilised like an army. For anyone working in teacher education, school leadership, curriculum design or careers guidance, it's a conversation with real bite. Then the bananas. Paul tells of a Danish soldier in the Second Schleswig War of 1864 who received a paper outline of his newborn daughter's hand, and reflects that "love finds a way around many things, including distance and war". John offers the word palimpsest, an old text scrubbed out and written over yet still showing through, and finds it all along the high street if you look above the shopfronts, as he did on a walk across London with his daughter. Follow Teaching Matters wherever you listen and share it with a colleague who likes education debate with some heart. A new episode arrives every week.

2. 

   29 Sept 2026

   Education Matters | Sam Strickland, Behaviour & Belonging

   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 principal of Duston School, a giant all-through school with 2,100 pupils aged four to 19 and more than 200 staff. His book distils years of school leadership into something short, direct and easy to dip into. It speaks to teachers, senior leaders, trust colleagues and anyone shaping school culture and classroom practice. This is Sam's third appearance on the show. Sam explains how behaviour and belonging feed each other, why clear institutional expectations give relationships the ground to grow and how both connect to learning through what he calls learning behaviours. Consistency runs through everything he says. "Consistency can be your greatest weakness if you're not, and it can be your superpower if you are." He means far more than rigid routines. Children need to know a teacher's mood won't decide the response, and pupils with special educational needs feel that certainty most. Paul makes a gentle plea for wriggle room, the humour and personality that make a teacher a human being rather than a script, and Sam agrees. Culture gets close scrutiny and, as Sam puts it, "We are a people-centric industry." It's built from thousands of ordinary moments, the front gate at half past eight, the good morning that goes unanswered, the walk along a corridor during lessons. Sam describes the difference between inheriting a deeply entrenched culture and turning one around, why a head's personality matters and how inconsistency from leaders erodes staff trust fast. His "all roads lead to Rome" chapter shows how behaviour, character values and community pride converge on a shared identity, and why the line "this is not who we are or how we do things here" works so well. It depersonalises correction, sets the pupil a quiet inner challenge and leaves their dignity intact. Each key stage at Duston owns a value, with respect at Key Stage 3 reaching from self and peers out to family and the wider community. Sam also talks candidly about the curse of knowledge, and why a pupil joining in Year 9 hasn't yet heard what everyone else has heard many times. The practical sections will interest anyone working on behaviour policy. Sam argues against one-size-fits-all systems, pointing to national surveys that put time lost to disruption at seven to nine minutes in every half hour, and explains how a three strikes model can let that loss build. He's equally clear on entry and exit routines, which calm classrooms, check understanding and give newer or quieter teachers a firm footing. Effective teaching, he insists, doesn't depend on being loud or larger than life. Expectations, he says, create emotional and psychological security, and that security has to reach staff too, who need to know leaders have their backs when things go wrong. The conversation also covers staying calm under provocation, curriculum as a source of belonging, a live issue as Northern Ireland undergoes major curriculum change, and how Sam finds time to write while running a school, including his view that anyone in leadership needs something they do for themselves, which for him means exercise. Paul closes with a favourite Harry Potter line about teachers and magic, “We teachers are rather good at magic, you know.” Professor McGonagall For anyone working in teacher education, initial teacher training, school leadership or continuing professional development, this is a warm, thoughtful and usable conversation. If it helps your thinking, follow Education Matters, leave a comment and share it with a colleague.

3. 

   29 Sept 2026

   WomenEd NI Autumn 26 Unconference

   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, ‘unconferences’, that have since spread across more than thirty networks worldwide. Jackie, who has spent a career spanning further education, secondary teaching, teacher training and inspection and now sits on the Chartered College of Teaching Ethics Committee, explains how the group's four campaigns, diversity of representation, women in leadership, flexible working and the gender pay gap, took shape. Nicole, a Belfast-based digital learning strategist, remembers being an early career teacher who assumed pay gaps couldn't exist in a banded profession, until a keynote from Vivian Porritt changed her mind entirely. And Laura, head of science in Ballymena with more than twenty years in teaching, talks candidly about being asked to join the network leader team and what it feels like preparing for her first unconference from the organising side rather than the audience, nervous, she admits, but leaning into the same mantra that pulled her in. The conversation keeps returning to that very WomenEd's mantra, "10% braver", and what it has actually given each of them, the confidence to change career direction, to write for the first time, to walk into a room and introduce yourself to a stranger. Jackie sets that against the movement's eight values, clarity, communication, connection, confidence, collaboration, community, challenge and change and they discuss the tangible change the Northern Ireland network has driven, from growing Chartered College membership from a handful of members to a thriving community, to contributing directly to the Northern Ireland Executive's end violence against women and girls strategy, to helping launch sister networks including one now getting started in North Africa. This show is full of warmth, and humour, with reflections on Orla Sally's sessions, on hearing secondary school pupils speak about where women's voices are missing from the curriculum, and on partnerships with organisations like Beyond Skin, CCE and the International Professional Development Association that have taken the network as far as Dublin and the Festival of Education. Nicole talks openly about how the network gave her the push to leave full-time permanent teaching and start writing, describing WomenEd's four campaigns as something she never expected would shape her own career. Laura reflects on the friendships and allyship that make the community feel bigger than any single school or setting. They close by looking ahead to this October's unconference at St Cecilia's College in Derry / Londonderry, with breakout sessions ranging from a Beyond Skin drumming workshop to panels on Black history and culture in Northern Ireland, a Chartered College panel and a session on allyship with Gen Z alongside Patrick Otley-O'Connor and his son Quinlan, plus a closing panel with political representatives and students. Tickets are £15 for professionals and entry is free for student teachers and classroom assistants, with all the details at linktr.ee/womenedni. This is a generous, funny and genuinely moving conversation about what happens when women in education choose to back each other, essential listening for teachers, teacher educators, school leaders and anyone curious about how a small grassroots network can quietly reshape a whole profession. Subscribe to Education Matters so you never miss an episode.

Who has been a guest on Education Matters

Names identified in recent episode analyses. Showing up to five guests.

• Dr Pia O’Farrell
• Dr Sabrina Fitzsimons
• Professor Catherine Furlong
• Dr Shauna McGill
• Shaniqua Edwards-Hayde

Reach and audience

Public platform figures. Ratings count people who left a rating, not total listeners.

Spotify

5.0 / 5

5 ratings

Podcast Authority Score: 41 / 100

A composite of feed quality, social presence, YouTube performance and engagement. Read the methodology.

Quality

82

Social presence

0

YouTube

0

Engagement

0

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Guest appearances

Does not typically book guests

Based on episode analysis; this does not confirm that the show is currently accepting guests.

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