Teach Secondary -Issue 15.1

+ H ow a community partnership project in the North East helped schools boost their student attendance + The meaning of ‘withitness’, and the advantages it can confer upon your behaviour management skills + 4 ways to keep students motivated during MFL lessons + Since 2015, the Youth Sport Trust has been projecting how physically active children and young people will be by 2035 – so how are things shaping up? + The key lessons that one Teach First graduate took away from her initial in-school training + How leaders can ensure that staff are with them as they embark on an AI journey of discovery + Help your students keep their cognitive load in check with Zeph Bennett’s helpful tips CONTRIBUTORS SARAH MONK Chief strategy officer, Edwin BRENDAN TAPPING CEO, Bishop Chadwick Catholic Education Trust ROBIN LAUNDER Behaviour management consultant and speaker CLAIRE WILSON Educational consultant, BBC Bitesize OLIVIA DUNN Teach First graduate BEVERLY CLARKE MBE Education consultant, speaker and author LEARNING LAB IN THIS ISSUE FUN AND LAUGHTER Thinking about … L et’s kick things off with a radical notion – school should be fun . Yes, fun. That thing often exiled to Friday afternoons, school trips and the last 10minutes of a lesson if everyone behaves. But what if fun – real, soul-lifting, laughter- inducing, brain-buzzing fun –wasn’t seen as the sideshow, but rather the main event? Let’s continue with another radical notion – that joy is the key to it all . For learners aged 11 to 16, right in the eye of the hormonal hurricane, joy isn’t a fluffy extra. I’d go so far as to say that it’s a lifeline.When the world feels overwhelming, when your identity is a puzzle missing half the pieces, when your phone’s become so intertwined with your social life that it’s now a pocket-sized portal to drama, validation, and the ever-scrolling story of who you are, joy becomes essential . By ‘joy’, I don’t mean balloons and bouncy castles (though I’ma big advocate for both); I’m talking about laughter in lessons. Banter that builds connections. Teachers who aren’t afraid to be daft and schools that create space for silliness. Because when we laugh, we learn.When we smile, we remember. And when we play, that’s when we let go.We’re present.We’re more ready to engage. Professor Stuart Brown said it best when he described play as being ‘like oxygen’. It’s all around us, but we don’t really notice it until it’s gone. And for a lot of us, it feels like it’s been gone for a while. Too often, education can feel like a grind in the service of a huge, beige, results-obsessedmachine. The ‘cult of serious’, as I call it, marches kids through corridors of compliance, slowly siphoning the colour from their days. Yes, datamatters, but children aren’t data points, nor are they robots in revision factories. They’re beautifully weird, emotionally elastic and gloriously curious beings. And they’re wired for joy. What if we stopped seeing joy as a distraction from learning, and instead started seeing it as the key ingredient? I can tell you right now that joy is the secret, not the reward, of inspiration – because where joy leads, innovation surely follows. Fun builds relationships. It opens the door to trust and creates safety. Brains do their best work in safe spaces.When laughter echoes through the classroom, cortisol drops and oxytocin rises. Students feel seen. They belong. And belonging is the soil in which confidence, creativity and resilience grow. I’mnot saying we should ditch the entirety of the curriculum in favour of opening a comedy club, but we can rewrite the unwritten rules of what ‘serious learning’ looks like. That means embracing the awkward, celebrating the absurd and letting kids know it’s okay to laugh, even when learning is hard. Because let’s face it – life is hard, and for many young people, school will be the only place where joymight find them that day.We have the chance – the responsibility, really – to light that spark. Laughter doesn’t water down learning. It deepens it. Fun doesn’t replace rigour. It fuels it. In our big, increasingly shouty and bonkers world, our classrooms must be spaces where joy isn’t just welcomed, but a visible part of the school’s DNA. ABOUT THE AUTHOR Gavin Oattes is a former primary school teacher, managing director of Tree of Knowledge and author of Confidently Lost: Finding Joy in the Chaos and Rediscovering What Matters Most in Life (£12.99, Capstone) 71 teachwire.net/secondary L E A R N I N G L A B