A rise of 2.8% next year will maintain the competitiveness of teachers’ pay, says DfE – but sector leaders say it is ‘extremely disappointing’ and will result in further cuts tes.com/magazine/news/genera…

I am very much in favour of play. Children should be given plenty of time to play because it develops so many life skills like social interaction. And they enjoy it, too. It’s just that the knowledge schools were invented to pass on — reading, writing, maths and their applications — can’t really be learned through play. These are ‘biologically secondary’ forms of knowledge, to use David Geary’s term. We have not evolved to learn them effortlessly through immersive play and sadly, we are not naturally motivated to learn them. All the rest consists of the implications of this.