We’re Emma (PGCE Secondary Drama) and Tom (PGCE Secondary Music) from Cardiff Metropolitan University. Welcome to our podcast, in which we muse about the joys of working with student teachers, the expressive arts, research, and teaching in general. Expect deep discussions, topical debates, celebrations of great practice, and things to steal for your own lessons!
Our primary audience is student teachers and early-career teachers, but we hope there's something here for everyone who's involved in the world of education, whether you're new or experienced.
Most of our episodes involve a main discussion (often with one or more guests), and two regular slots: something interesting and something to try. And when we hit the holidays, we bring out some weird and wonderful talking points from the internet and just have a chat.
Podcast artwork by Beth Blandford (@blandoodles on Facebook and Instagram)
Music by Cameron Stewart
Supporting Student Teachers Learning to Plan and Planning to Learn
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 during a lesson if needed. To a new member of the profession it looks like magic, and to someone who teaches new teachers, it makes the whole thing pretty tricky to capture and make sense of.
Today, Emma and Tom are in the studio discussing a 2011 article by three colleagues from the University of Oxford: Katharine Burn, Hazel Hagger and Trevor Mutton. In it, they use earlier work by Calderhead which outlines what experienced teachers’ planning looks like, and discuss the learning journeys of several student teachers they worked with at Oxford.
The findings point to some unexpected light-bulb moments about how the process of learning to plan is deeply intertwined with the process of learning to teach, the way that planning evolves over time, and how we as ITE tutors in university or school might go about supporting new members of the profession as the learn to plan, and plan to learn.
Thanks to Katharine, Hazel and Trevor (friends of the podcast all) for the very interesting paper, and we hope we did it some justice in our discussion.
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Recorded in Studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 11th August 2026
18 Sept 2026
Supporting School Attendance with Scott Norman-Stephenson
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.
Scott Norman-Stephenson supports attendance for a cluster of primary schools in Cardiff, and he’s with us to discuss something that can often, in the media, be reduced to simple headlines about an ‘attendance crisis’ or descend into finger-pointing at parents. Scott tells us about what supporting attendance looks like on the ground, the kinds of strategies he uses, some of the underlying issues feeding into the problem, and why he’s definitely not like a traffic warden!
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Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 11th August 2026
11 Sept 2026
SPECIAL REPORT: Wales's PISA results - where do we go from here?
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, and we’re doing our best to try and work out where we go from here without sugar coating the fact that these PISA results are really, really not good.
For those listeners new to these things, we take a brief run around what PISA actually is, then dive into Wales’s results, get a flavour of the commentary, and try to get a sense of where your new Plaid Cymru overlords want to take things next. Were they lucky to get this bombshell early in their tenure? Or are they already too late to avoid another bad news bomb in three years’ time?
Tom’s been sniffing around to get a sense of what’s going on behind closed doors in Welsh Government, and has a few things to report about some speedy announcements, and a curriculum review by the end of the year.
Thanks to Rhys Williams from ITV News for the clip that opens this episode. You can follow Rhys on X (and we recommend that you do!) at @rhyswilliamstv - his digging around the detail of data and inspection reports is doing a fine service to education journalism in Wales.
We’ll be revisiting plenty of the themes covered today over the course of the year. Normal service will be resumed next week!
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Recorded in studio B2.15 at Cardiff Metropolitan University’s Cyncoed Campus on 10th September 2026
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