Teacher Tapp is nothing without its teachers, so we are running a Teacher Tapp Prize Draw as a thank you.
To enter all you do is answer questions as usual! Every question tapped on the app between now and the draw on 1st March counts. For every 20 questions you receive a Golden Ticket, which goes into the draw. Answer every question until 1st March to receive at least four more tickets!
And the grand prize? £1,000 cash! So get tapping to be in with a chance for the top prize 🥳
Minimum Service Levels in schools
With unions and MAT leaders speaking out against the government’s proposals to introduce minimum service levels during strike action in schools, we asked for your thoughts.
We found that 71% of you did NOT support the proposals, similar to when we first asked about the proposals back in October.
As school leaders are the ones who will be issuing work notices, we also asked heads and senior leaders whether they’d make use of the option if it was given.
Most headteachers said no to the work notices, with 62% saying they wouldn’t use them at all during a strike, and only 8% saying they would use them to keep the school open for the children of key workers.
However, one in five did say they would use work notices to keep schools open to vulnerable children if a strike was called at their school.
Line manager appreciation
Teaching is a tough job, and having a line manager who makes you feel appreciated can make heavy-going days a little bit lighter.
So it’s good news that so many of you said that your line manager often or always makes you feel appreciated.
However it’s worth noting fewer of you said ‘often’ and ‘always’ compared to last year – and there was a rise of 2% in the ‘never’ category 😔
Looking at numbers by phase, primary teachers are the ones most feeling a lack of appreciation. 
However, as you climb the ladder of school leadership, that line management appreciation grows!
Out of all the roles in a school, it’s senior leaders who are most likely to say they always feel appreciated by their line manager.
Ofsted grading also seems to affect things, with Tappers in schools judged by Ofsted to require improvement most likely to feel unappreciated.
The downward trajectory of the flight path
The 40% of primary teachers who aren’t sure if their school uses a flight path, listen up! A student ‘flight path’ is created by using data to predict what grades a student will achieve when they leave school, and then breaks those levels down into smaller steps to track progress over an entire school career.
Last week we asked if your school still uses flight paths, and we can see that although they continue to be used more in secondary than in primary, even in secondary flight paths seem to have fallen out of favour.
When first asking in 2019, more than half of secondary schools were using flight paths to track your pupils’ progress. Today that is just 28%.
In primary schools flight paths were never as popular, and today they’re even less so. Back in 2019, 14% of primary schools were using flight paths, whereas this week you told us that figure has shrunk to 7%.
Although they’re certainly less common, it seems some schools are still finding them a useful tool. It will be interesting to see if more drop the flight path model next year.
If your school has diverted from flightpaths, what are you using instead? Let us know on socials or through the app 📣
Which departments have the best subject knowledge?
We asked you about the subject knowledge of the colleagues in your department. Did you think it was excellent, good, inconsistent or poor in places?
It was great to see that the overwhelming majority of you (a huge 73%) said it was good or excellent.
So let’s take a look at it by different departments…
Coming out on top it was our MFL teachers who were tres bien in their ‘consistently excellent’ subject knowledge (49%).
Over to the creatives in the arts and design and technology who swooped in to second place (39%) and then our geographers, history and RE teachers in third place (35%).
The core subjects of English, maths and science all scored similar ratings from their colleagues – perhaps this could be explained by the number of non-specialists having to pick up shortage subjects? 
Ups and Downs
On the rise 📈
We asked you if you felt your work gave you the feeling you can achieve something – and despite asking you this in the run up to February half term, when the mornings are still dark and we have Christmas as a dim memory…46% of you said yes – either sometimes or always.
This was a small uptick on last year when only 41% of you replied to say the same.
Heading down 📉
Although May seems like a long way away, the SATs are never far from a year six teacher’s mind.
We asked you in 2022 if you were running booster sessions for your classes, and almost half of you were. Two years later and that number has dropped to 39%.
Daily Reads
Our most read daily read this week was: Simple mistakes from Tom Sherrington.
If you would like to read the rest you can find them here 👇
