Happy holidays, Tappsters!
Congratulations – you have reached half term and the end of summer term one…and we have BIG NOTIFICATION NEWS here at Teacher Tapp 📣🥁📣🥁.
You have asked so we delivered… a second PING and a later notification time of 7pm 🥳. Check your app to make sure you’ve got the latest update and you have opted in on the settings page under ‘notifications’.
Prize draws 🎟️
Congratulations to Ellie, our Teacher Tapp prize draw winner from March – here she is enjoying her new umbrellas!
🏆 Now – this month’s prize draw! 🎽🏃🏃♀️🏃♂️
Our sports day prize draw will see one lucky tapper score £500 to spend making their event olympian-level-brilliant.
But how can you enter? The good news is, if you have answered questions for three days in a row or more, then you’ve already scored yourself a ticket.
The more three day streaks you accumulate, the more tickets you are awarded, and that means more chances to win 🥳. Look out for an email with the winning ticket name, and all tickets are in your app if you check ‘prize draws’ on the Daily Read screen.
All the terms and conditions can be found here.
The return of The Teacher Tapper Party Tracker
General election will be the 4th July with schools everywhere turning into polling stations and policy promises being made by every party. Unsurprisingly, here at Teacher Tapp we will be tracking EVERYTHING education and will be finding out your thoughts on what our next would-be-leaders are proposing…so watch the app to make sure your opinion is recorded!
Voting intentions have stayed pretty consistent since we last asked with 62% picking Labour, 9% Liberal Democrat, and 3% Conservative – the same as in October 2023.
There are more Conservative voters in fee-paying schools compared to state-funded schools (8% vs 3%), but also more Green voters (9% vs 6%).
However, when movement has happened….where has it happened? Our Teacher Tapp Party Tracker below says some ‘don’t knows’ have become Conservative, and previous Conservative voters switched to Liberal Democrats.
Labour have gained mostly from ‘I don’t know’, and then also from Green and Liberal Democrats.
Will you be getting your students involved in General Election activities after the half term? Let us know your plans on X, Facebook, Insta or over email 📧.
Sent out of class
Back into the classroom, we wanted to know how many of you had to resort to sending a pupil out of class last term.
In every type of school we can see an increase since April 2022. In the most affluent state schools student removals increased by 10 percentage points to 66%.
In the Q2 (second most affluent) and Q3 (second most disadvantaged) schools it increased by 14 percentage points to 76% and 80% respectively.
And in Q4 the schools with the most disadvantaged pupils, it increased by 10 percentage points to 84%.
Fee-paying schools also saw an increase, but a smaller one of 2 percentage points to 30%, and unlike all state schools this is lower than their 2019 response rate.
Along a similar theme, we can see that the number of you reporting lessons stopping altogether due to misbehaviour was worse in schools with the highest levels of deprivation – and that this was at a higher level than in 2022.
The good news is that Q2 and Q3 and fee-paying schools experienced a small drop in disruptions compared to February – hopefully now we’re in the summer term (and secondary schools have fewer pupils without their year 11s and 13s) behaviour becomes more manageable.
Everything okay?
Our ‘are you content at work’ tracker has once again popped its head metaphorically around your classroom door to see how you’re doing.
Today we wanted to show the difference between responses in the most deprived state schools, the most affluent state schools. and fee-paying schools.
Now, in all categories of schools 5 out of 7 was the most common response.
If we track just those who rated themselves a 5 out of 7 – the middlers. The teachers who say that day they feel ‘not absolutely content’ and not ‘this is awful’ over time, we can see a pattern emerge.
Consistently, teachers in the most deprived state-funded schools are more likely to have fewer teachers awarding themselves 5/7.
But perhaps all this tells us is that fewer people are reporting being extremely content? What do you think…do you have a range of numbers that you move between? Or are you a consistent 7/7 person? Let us know what you think over socials or on the app…💬
Literacy at primary
KS2 Sats papers are being marked right now (perhaps by you? Watch out for a question on this in the next few days…) but how would you assess literacy levels in your current classes?
We’ve been asking this question regularly since 2021, and can see the marked increase of “most” from 3% to 10% that jumped up in 2022, and has stayed there ever since.
Classes in the most deprived schools are more likely to contain a majority of children struggling with literacy when compared to schools in more affluent areas.
If you’re a teacher in one of the schools struggling with literacy, how does that impact the teaching of all subjects? Let us know what your experiences have been like ✍️.
And if you teach in a school where you’ve faced difficulties but have made progress – what made the difference? With so many interventions out there and programmes to use – share your success and let us know what worked for you…
Tattoos and teachers
Hooray – the tattoo question 💉🎨!
If only we had Teacher Tapp in the 1900s…wouldn’t it be fun to compare responses at the turn of the 20th century to today?
Just 3% believe a hand tattoo should prevent you teaching, and 89% believe teachers with hand tattoos shouldn’t have to cover them up in the classroom.
And then on Twitter, we had a whole sleeve 😆 of responses…
Would you ever NOT get a tattoo you wanted because you would be worried about job prospects? If so, did these replies change that?
If you’re a headteacher, have you encountered inappropriate tattoos you’ve had to ask to be covered?
Join the conversation and let us know!
Top events
This week’s top event is…Complete Maths and their in-person maths conference Maths Conf35.
There is even a Teacher Tapp discount code for this month’s top event! Check the app to find the code and see all the new events on offer.
Ups and Downs
On the rise 📈
Headteachers having the final say in exclusions Who should get the final say in school exclusions? Once again there has been an increase in the number of you opting for ‘headteacher’. Today it is 76% vs 65% in 2018.
Heading down 📉
Technology failures Could it be? Tech is getting BETTER?? Apparently so. There has been a 10 percentage point decrease in primary since 2018. It was 46% but is now 36%.
Daily Reads
Our most read daily read this week was the blog: No more sir or miss.
If you would like to read the rest you can find them here 👇
