Twitter for Teachers

If you're a teacher (or trainee teacher on a PGCE) then you may be interested in The Creative Education Guide to Twitter for Teachers. This is a detailed 34 page guide put together by the team behind the Creative Education website, and provides plenty of advice, tips and guidance in using the service. Strongly recommended if you're toying with using Twitter in a professional capacity but don't know how to get started.

Child Neglect in 2011

The Action for Children charity has just published Child Neglect in 2011, the first in what is planned to be a series of annual reviews on this topic. The research for the report was carried out by a team at the University of Stirling, and covers at definitions of 'neglect', what the UK thinks about it, how it's tackled currently and how this can be improved.

ICT in Schools 2008-11

Ofsted has recently published ICT in Schools 2008-11, a report which reviews how ICT has been delivered at primary, secondary and special schools during the last few years. Issues such as teaching methods, the curriculum and school leadership are considered, and areas where schools could make further progress are identified.

DfE Research

It's been a slow few days for new research, so here's the details of a couple of useful Department of Education reports which were published in December and got missed in the run-up to Christmas.

The Framework for the National Curriculum is a report compiled by an expert panel, with a view to defining the purpose, shape, size and structure of the curriculum. The report contains a number of recommendations which are designed to generate discussion and contribute to the official review of the National Curriculum which is currently taking place. More information and documents relating to this can be found here.

Also new(ish) is a report entitled Class Size and Education in England, which examines how the increased birth rate may impact of class sizes, and the impact that this could have on educational outcomes.

Food and Drink Guidelines for Early Years

The School Food Trust has just launched a set of new guidelines on nutrition for preschool children. The new advice is part of the Eat Better Start Better project, which aims to support children and their families to cook and eat well. Part of the inspiration for the new guidelines came out of a previous report which stated that some young children were being given food better suited to adults.

A practical guide for implementing the new guidelines in early years settings can be downloaded here. Further supplementary information including FAQS and example menus are available from this link.

Good Childhood Report 2012

The Children's Society is making the headlines today with the publication of The Good Childhood Report 2012. This new research details the results of interviews with over 30,000 children aged 8-16, and investigates what factors are important in determining a child's happiness and wellbeing. The overall findings from the survey cover many different areas, though many media outlets have chosen to focus on the angle that almost one in ten children consider themsleves to be unhappy.

To read the full version of The Good Childhood Report 2012, click here. For an overview of its findings a summary version is also available, and a further publication entitled Promoting Positive Well-Being for Children, which contains advice for policy-makers is also available.

Digital Literacy

This week the Guardian is running a campaign to improve the teaching of computer science and information technology in schools and universities. All content related to the campaign is available on a mini-site which features news stories, articles from contributors, lesson plans for teaching computing, and an interesting piece about the BBC Micro which was the first computer to be used widely in UK schools. If you've got an interest in teaching ICT, it's worth visiting the site for a few minutes to see what's being discussed.

Families in an Age of Austerity

Hardly the most cheerful way to begin the New Year, but yesterday saw the publication of a new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies entitled The Impact of Austerity Measures on Households with Children. The report examines how new benefit and tax reforms will impact on family incomes, and suggests that there will be a rise in child poverty, while middle-income families will also lose over £1000 a year. To read the full report, click here.

Review of 2011

So what were the most important developments and reports in the childcare / education sectors in 2011? If you missed any, read on to find out...

Probably the most significant event of the year was the publication in March of the Tickell Review of the Early Years Foundation Stage, which has implications for all early years practitioners. Among the report's many points were recommendations to cut the number of Early Learning Goals from 69 to 17, and a change in focus to three 'prime' areas of learning. A simple guide to the proposals is available by clicking here.

Other major government projects included the publication in May of the Munro Review of Child Protection, which investigated procedures for safeguarding children and the role of social workers, and the Nutbrown Review, which is currently ongoing and is examining qualifications and career pathways in the foundation years - its final report is due next year. Those with an interest in special educational needs will have found the Support and Aspiration green paper which was published in March of great interest.

Annual reports from well known organisations are also a handy way of gauging current issues surrounding the sector. Some of the most useful ones from this year include the Childcare and Early Years Providers Survey, the Ofsted Annual Report, the Joseph Rowntree Foundation's Monitoring Poverty and Social Exclusion, and the State of Children's Rights in England 2011. For a more international flavour, try looking at the OECD's Education At A Glance 2011, or UNICEF's State of the World's Children 2011.

Picking out individual publications from the hundreds that come out every year is always difficult, but some of the ones that seem particularly relevant to readers of this site include the recent Family: Helping to Understand the Modern British Family, and the Institute for Fiscal Studies' Does When You Are Born Matter? which examines the claim that summer born children face an educational disadvantage. While Investing in High-Quality Early Childhood Education and Care is a brief report from the OECD which highlights evidence that points to the benefits of providing support for children from a young age.

And some other miscellaneous stuff... Teachers TV was axed this year, although its full archive is available for free from the Teachers Media site. The Digital Education Resource Archive (DERA) was launched, and provides full access to a growing number of educational reports published by government departments over the last 17 years. Poor Kids and Educating Essex were two TV programmes which dealt with different aspects of childhood, and are well worth watching if they get repeated in the future. And closer to home, one of the most popular posts on this site this year turned out to be one about children's songs... hardly 'academic', but quite interesting...

At the start of 2011, Nursery World published an article outlining professionals' hopes and fears for the childcare sector in 2011 - how far do you think these have been met? And what are the challenges for 2012? The Social Market Foundation's recent report The Parent Trap outlines some of the issues facing the sector over the next 5 years.

If I've missed anything, feel free to share it with other site users by leaving a comment underneath this post, otherwise that's your lot for this year. Get in the festive mood by enjoying the video below, in which veteran music legend Bob Dylan dances in a red hat and gets excited about his impending visit from Santa. Maybe he's just a big kid too...

An Introduction to Child Protection Legislation in the UK

I'm a couple of months behind with this one, but better late than never... In October the NSPCC published An Introduction to Child Protection Legislation in the UK. This is a 13 page guide to all of the major parliamentary Acts covering child protection, providing brief, simple overviews of each one, and also helping to put them into context with supplementary information. As an introduction to this complicated subject, it should be very useful.

To read the guide in full, click here.