Amy Benziane is a writer and educator. In 2019, she left the classroom and moved to France with her family. She writes about parenting, education, and creating a simple, joyful life.
Although there weren't any cameras watching, I can still see it from all angles. He had tattoos. He had a red, bulging, Frankenstein's monster-esque scar on his neck. He didn't look healthy. He didn't look safe. I should have moved carriages. I should have moved when he started to shout, but my stop was the next one.
Research has identified flexible and part-time working as being one of the keys to the recruitment and retention crisis in schools. Drawing on her own experience, Amy Benziane considers how schools can - and must - become more family friendly...
Woodside High School is at an exciting stage of its development - over the last four years the school has shown one of the greatest sustained improvements in GCSE A* to C pass rates in the country.
Like many first-time mums, I wasn't sure what to expect with my first birth. Initially, I dreamed of having my daughter at home, but home births weren't offered as an option to me so I assumed they weren't available in my area.
"In the early days, I remember my partner's parents coming round with some gifts from their work colleagues and me bursting into tears. Those early days of hormonal rollercoasters were, in hindsight, hilarious." Amy Benziane, on the ups and downs of parenthood...
From past experience, what I have quite often found is that when we talk of "coaching", a lot of the time we end up meaning "mentoring". While this may not seem like a problem, I personally have found that without knowing exactly what coaching is and can achieve, sometimes we end-up spoon-feeding ideas to others.
One of the biggest barriers to achievement is a lack of language skills. Amy Benziane looks at how we can close the achievement gap by encouraging language development - including the role that teachers' own use of language has to play.
Something I have always valued is the opportunity to network with other teachers. For me, the chance to meet with colleagues always seems to strike a great balance between discussing our plans for embedding newly found pedagogy and showing off our latest zany idea (whether it went well or badly!)
When I joined the teaching profession, it was ingrained in me that I should, at all times, be showing that I was in possession of one key characteristic - resilience. There were others, of course, but that is the one which stuck with me when it was dark on my way both to and from work.