Monthly Archives: December 2019

Top reads of 2019

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Fiction:

Maggie O’Farrell This Must be the Place: this was the first book I read in 2019. What a way to begin. Absolutely epic family tale which bounces around, so the story sort of comes into focus rather than progressing linearly.

Madeline Miller Circe: This retelling of the Odyssey from Circe’s perspective is like Wicked for people who love literature.

Curtis Sittenfeld American Wife: The balance between reality and fiction is delightfully blurred in the story of the president’s wife. Probably the book I most enjoyed reading this year.

Sally Rooney Normal People: I didn’t think anything could be better than Rooney’s debut novel, but I was wrong. This look at an un-relationship is like One Day but literary.

Tayari Jones An American Marriage: The blurb to this makes the premise sound absurd, but every page feels real and true.

Joshua Ferris Then We Came to the End: My overall favourite fiction read of 2019. I especially enjoyed the character Lynn’s fragility and strength. This is an incredible evocation of the mundanity of office life.

Tom Wolfe Bonfire of the Vanities: An incredible tear through 1980s America’s racism, privilege, and finance. Genuinely laugh-out-loud funny.

Non-fiction:

David Didau Making Kids Cleverer: Definitely Didau’s best, in my view; great ranging over the research with a crystal clear aim.

Becky Allen and Sam Sims The Teacher Gap: This is so engagingly written, and tackles the important issue of teacher recruitment and retention. I think I’ve quoted this book more than any other this year (hopefully accurately).

Eric Kalenze What the Academy Taught Us: Kalenze takes us through a specific project where his school created a “school within a school” for those most at risk of dropping out. He then explores the lessons learned and applies his experiences and research to wider school improvement. I adored it. Funny, smart and full of feeling.

Robert Pondiscio How the Other Half Learns: A fascinating insight into the Success Academies, full of helpful advice and thorny moral issues.

Jonathan Haidt and Greg Lukianoff The Coddling of the American Mind: This book is the most influential on the character curriculum I’m developing for Ark Soane Academy, and is a fabulous take-down of “the three great untruths”: “what doesn’t kill us makes us weaker” (not true; we are anti-fragile and challenge makes us stronger), “always trust your feelings” (never trust your feelings – our minds deceive us) and “there are good and evil people in the world” (not really; we all have good and evil within us. Better to view others with a charitable mindset, no matter how different our views).

Ann Patchett This is the Story of a Happy Marriage: the most personally influential book I read this year, Patchett came along at exactly the right time to help me through grief and spur me to action. One of many great pieces of advice? If you want to be a writer, write. So I’m writing… This collection ranges over love, failure, joy and dogs – all the big issues.

Elizabeth Day How to Fail: This book is an absolute balm to the wounds of disappointment. Brutally relatable in places, it is full of warmth and wisdom.

Ben Newmark: Why Teach: this little book is great, and the final chapter moving beyond belief. It reminded me, importantly, of why teaching is the best job in the world.

Kim Scott Radical Candour: This great book is about so much more than candour. Its superb advice is genuinely useful. It is not about doing more, but rather about changing the interactions we have with others to forge improvements in our organisations.

 

I was surprised looking through the list of books I read this year (thanks to my year 9 English teacher I’ve kept a list since I was 13 years old) at how few were strong contenders for this list – normally I have a big job cutting it down. Next year I think I will be more ruthless about reading books I’m excited about, and stop “saving” the best ones for holidays (or the last week of term, when I tell myself I “need” something brilliant) – there are too many great books out there for that. 2019 was the year that I published a book on education, Simplicity Rules, but, as inspired by Patchett, I really hope to continue writing fiction in 2020, and perhaps feeling confident enough to share it in 2030.

Leading at Ark Soane Academy

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Starting a school from scratch is the opportunity of a lifetime. You have a blank slate on which to project your every hope of what a child’s education might be. While those limitless choices might seem daunting, we are lucky to be surrounded by a group of highly successful schools with Ark, including a number of successful new-start schools. There are no shortage of smart, experienced educators to guide Soane’s way.

What would you do if you could start a school with only year 7? What would the ideal behaviour policy, curriculum, lesson look like? What systems would need to be in place to make that happen? Which parts of all the best schools you know of would you take with you?

We already have a clear idea of the kind of school Soane will be: a rigorous curriculum delivered by subject experts who plan lessons with the lessons of cognitive science in mind, high expectations of behaviour, and opportunities to build cultural capital through enrichment. The large-scale values are in place.

What is not yet in place is the fine detail.

We are looking for exceptional teachers and leaders to lead at Soane. Every teacher we hire for September 2020 will be a leader: unlike a long-established school, the founding teachers always have a special place in a new start school. Whether they choose to pursue promotion or to stay in the classroom, no other teachers who join us later will have created the founding systems of the school. No one else will have as strong a sense of the school. No one after will have made the school from its foundations up.

If you believe strongly that every child is capable of academic success, that every child has the innate potential to be an upstanding citizen, and that the highest expectations of behaviour allow children the freedom to learn, leading at Soane may be the right place for you.

Over the coming weeks, we are welcoming applications from motivated teachers at all stages in their careers to join the founding team to begin our school. It will be a rigorous process, because there will never be a more important team than those who found our school. You will need to be an excellent classroom practitioner, have a strong understanding of the science of how children learn, have a mind for detail and a wish to create and perfect new systems at all levels of school life. Most importantly, we are looking for people who love their subject and who love children.

Please see the ‘vacancies’ tab on our webpage to explore current opportunities with Soane.