January is now in full swing, and the Christmas break feels like a long time ago. The good news is that your taps have been grabbing the attention of the wider media, with Teacher Tapp stats making appearances on the BBC, as well as in national newspapers. If you spot a Teacher Tapp stat in the wild – do write in and tell us!
New January Prize Draw
With a New Year comes a new prize draw! You are the most important part of Teacher Tapp, and we want to continue saying “thank you” for making such a valuable contribution! We would love to be the new habit you want to make in 2026, and that’s why from the 5th January until the 31st January, for every 15 questions you answer on Teacher Tapp you’ll receive a ticket for the Teacher Tapp Prize Draw.
Five Tappers will win a £100 gift card, and the prize draw will happen on 2nd February. Full Ts&Cs are here. Good luck!
Opinions on the phonics check test
One of the changes announced following the Curriculum and Assessment Review (CAR) was adjustments to the primary statutory assessments. Specifically, the Standards and Testing Agency (STA) have been tasked with working with government to explore approaches for assessing progress for pupils with special educational needs and disabilities (SEND), as the current format of the phonics check means that for some students, the test is “inaccessible”.
Teacher Tapp has been tracking opinions on the phonics check test, and teachers’ thoughts on the test haven’t really changed: around a third want it adjusted and kept (as is proposed in the CAR), and just under half (44%) would be happier if it were scrapped altogether. A smaller number want to keep it as it is (15%).
However, there is a marked difference in opinion between teachers who have 10 or more years of teaching experience and those newer to the classroom: teachers with more experience are more likely to say scrapping the test is the best approach (52% vs 34%).
The results lead us to ask: even with changes made to the test, will teachers be supportive of the test? We will wait and see what adjustments are proposed, and check in once we know more about what is changing and when.
Off-site during school day
A tapper got in touch after seeing a TikTok from a teacher who used their lunch break to do some clothes shopping. They wanted to know if other teachers can go off-site during their lunch. And if they can go, do they ever venture off-site?
59% of primary and 57% of secondary teachers are allowed out during non-teaching time, and 73% of primary and 57% of secondary at lunch time. Preventing staff from leaving during the school day seems to be more common in secondary than in primary (21% vs 3%).
Those are the rules – but what happens in practice? Last week, only 17% of secondary teachers left the school site during the school day, and if they did leave it was most likely to happen during a non-teaching period (13%) compared to lunch (8%) or break (2%). However, 33% of primary teachers went off-site at some point, with 22% leaving during lunchtime, 17% in non-teaching time and 2% at break.
A Teacher Tapper wrote in after seeing the results in the app, and asked how enforceable the rules about not leaving the school site are for teachers. Turns out, that’s a harder question than you might think! We’re checking with the experts and will report back soon.
Weather problems
Last week was a stormy one, and whilst most of England faired ok at the start of the week (just 3% of teachers reported disruption when we checked on Tuesday) by Friday when Storm Goretti hit 56% of schools in the Midlands had disruption to their school day, with 22% switching back to online learning for the day! Many teachers in the South West of England also wrote in to tell us about disruptions they were experiencing with flooded roads.
The bad weather is forecast to continue, which doesn’t bode well for teachers who believe weather impacts student behaviour. Wind tops the chart of disruptive weather – both primary and secondary teachers feel wind leads to the worst student behaviour, but primary teachers feel it more strongly (62% vs 46%). Secondary teachers are more likely to pick snow than their primary counterparts (25% vs 10%), and any teacher who has had to do the terrifying walk across a playground mid-snowball fight in a secondary school is likely to understand why!
Elections
Political weather feels equally stormy right now – but if a general election were suddenly announced, how would teachers vote?
Support for the Labour Party now stands at 26%, down sharply from 39% in May 2025 and 62% in May 2024. This is the lowest level of support for Labour since we first asked teachers this question on Teacher Tapp in 2018.
Meanwhile, support for the Green Party has continued to rise. 22% of teachers now say they would vote Green, up from 13% in May 2025 and just 7% in May 2024. This is the highest level of support for the Green Party we have ever recorded.
Support for the Conservative Party has also increased slightly, reaching 6%, compared with 4% in both May 2025 and May 2024. However, this remains well below its peak of 9% in 2019.
Keep an eye on the app for future tracking on voting preferences to see how these trends change…
Daily Reads
The blog that caught the attention of teachers this week was this corker from Teacher Toolkit on red pens when marking. 11% of teachers clicked to read more about whether the colour you mark in makes a difference to whether a student remembers what you wrote.
Got a blog you think we should feature? Email us at england@teachertapp.co.uk and we will check it out!
