I’d like to share with you the remarkable 12 month journey we’ve been on to transform a global ‘in-school’ alcohol education programme into a ground-breaking e-learning experience, available free of charge worldwide at: https://online.smashedproject.org/uk

The British Army has launched new resources to recognise Black British, African and Caribbean people’s contribution to the history of the British Army with curriculum links to History and PSHE.

The government has announced that ALL schools will, from September 2020, have to teach RSE (Secondary) and Relationships Education (Primary) and health education. This may seem quite a long way ahead, but now is the time to ensure that your school is ready to implement the key elements of the reforms. First of all, we’d like to encourage you to respond to the consultation on statutory SRE and Health Education, which is open now here.

The statutory areas include:

• Features of healthy friendships, family relationships and other relationships.
• How relationships can affect physical and mental health.
• Staying safe online.
• How to use technology safely, responsibly and respectfully.
• How to keep personal information private.
• Healthy eating.
• Keeping fit.
• Prevention of health problems such as drugs, tobacco and alcohol.
• Recognition of mental health and ways to support good mental health.
• Understanding consent.
• Development of qualities such as confidence, resilience, self-respect.
• Wider social and economic issues.

Here at The Alcohol Education Trust, we can help you with all elements needed to deliver comprehensive lessons covering consent, building resilience and resisting peer pressure, as well as fact files on the law, units, alcohol and its social and physical effects for Years 7 through 13. Nearly everything is free to access by both year group and topic, with plenty of online learning resources for children via www.talkaboutalcohol.com.

You can also access the free 100-page teacher workbook packed with games, activities and lesson plans, named national runner-up for The Education Resource Award for best Secondary school resource in 2017. If you’d like tailor-made powerpoints that are ready to deliver with accompanying guidance and notes, or specialist lessons for children with moderate learning difficulties, then you can access our store here.

Alcohol is often the first substance of experimentation among our pupils. Children who drink regularly before the age of 15 are then significantly more likely to engage in other negative risk-taking, such as taking cannabis, novel psychoactive substances (designer drugs), smoking and engaging in risky sex. Academic results suffer, with weekly drinking being linked to a drop in GCSE predictions of 20 points. Attendance falls too, and so life chances are significantly affected. With all of this in mind, ensuring staff in your school are confident in delivering alcohol education is key.

We know that specialist knowledge in school can be an issue in teaching PSHE topics, so we are here to help. Want face-to-face training, or a chat with schools coordinator Kate Hooper? Get in touch via 01300 320869 / kate@acoholeducationtrust.org! Over 1,200 schools across the UK use Alcohol Education Trust resources. Read some of their testimonials here: alcoholeducationtrust.org/about-aet/testimonials.

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In the age of social media and ‘alternative facts’, sparking your pupils’ interest in the world around them and ensuring they know how to navigate current affairs is essential. Understandably however, in the face of tricky questions and misinformation, many education practitioners can find it difficult to know where to start. To help kick off your conversations, in this article I have outlined my top tips on getting pupils interested in current affairs that are easy to follow, and more importantly, effective.

Q: What’s going to enable students to make smart choices as they prepare for their journeys after school - and aspire to become leaders of tomorrow?

A: Great, creative schools that cultivate a culture of leadership and smart, outward-looking teachers who instil passion in all their students.

Let’s go back a decade. If you found yourself in the midst of a job search after finishing school in the mid-2000s, CVs were sent by post, trips to nearest job boards and job centres were a weekly tradition, and newspaper cuttings of possible jobs were kept on the sideboard as a reminder.

Whether driven by personal belief, a sense of social justice, or by a maniacal headteacher who espouses innovation and novelty at every turn, we are all, as educators, bound by one immutable fact: children will learn something from us which will last through their lives.

We are poised on the brink of a new industrial revolution. In December 2017, McKinsey Global Institute produced a detailed report entitled ‘Jobs lost, jobs gained: workforce transitions in a time of automation’, in which they presented a proposition that by 2030 robots could have replaced 800 million jobs. They look at the impact of this on the labour market - what jobs will be likely to be automated, by AI or robots, and which new types of jobs will be created. In essence, they have analysed which human-driven occupations will thrive and which will disappear. Although no predictions at this stage can be 100% accurate, as educators, we want to know how to best prepare our children for these seismic changes.

How best to prepare students for the shrouded world ahead of them? Here, we present a few of the insights put forward in the Innovate My School Guide 2017/18...

I write as we head towards the business end of yet another academic year, it is somewhat scary when the realisation hits that I am also coming to end of my first two years as an international educator. With this also comes the clarity that the students whom I have been responsible for teaching over the last cycle are now also coming to the end of their courses, and the inevitable terminal exams.