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diverse group of teaching staff taking part in a collaborative INSET session focused on building capacity and wellbeing at the start of the school year

Starting the Year Already Depleted: Why September INSET Should Build Staff Capacity, Not Just Deliver Information

An INSET day built around policy updates and information delivery might tick a compliance box, but it does very little for a staffroom that is already running on reserves before the pupils have even arrived. If your September INSET day is currently built around information, it may be worth asking what it would look like built around capacity instead.

Parent and teenager talking together calmly, weeks after exam results

Coping With Exam Results: What Comes After Any Big Outcome

A result is a single number, produced by one performance, on one day, after months or years of preparation that number alone can never fully capture. Our latest blog piece looks at what genuinely helps in the weeks after results day, whatever the outcome, and draws on academic research showing that one-off, high-pressure exams have real limitations as a measure of ability, and can suit some learners considerably better than others.

Four teenagers in a stone school cloister holding GCSE results envelopes and slips, with mixed reactions of comfort, confusion and relief

Results Day, Whatever the Exam: Supporting Your Child on GCSE Results Day and Beyond

Somewhere this morning, a phone is buzzing on a bedside table before anyone's dressed. Somewhere else, a family is deciding, without quite discussing it, who opens the laptop and who leaves the room. GCSE results day is one morning, but it never really belongs to one story. Some houses are celebrating. Some are quietly heartbroken. Some are just confused about how to feel. All on the same day, for the same exam. I've written this week's piece on what actually helps across al

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A teenage athlete sitting quietly on the edge of a sports pitch, looking reflective, with sports kit and kit bag nearby, conveying the emotional weight of high-performance sport

When Sport Is Everything: What Teenage Athlete Mental Health Really Looks Like

There is a particular kind of quiet that settles over a sporting child when they are injured. Not the quiet of rest, but the quiet of displacement. The training schedule that has structured their week since primary school suddenly stops. The group chat carries on without them. The identity they have spent years building, through early mornings, cold pitches, and the particular language of their sport, has nowhere to go. This is the moment many parents bring their child to coa