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Along with being a primary school teacher and leader, blogging is where this all started for Aidan. If it wasn't for his passion for writing and sharing his learning and experiences, he wouldn't be working as an education consultant with schools across the country today. Shared best practice should be available to all and here on the Aidan Severs Consulting blog you can get ideas for making a difference in your own school. The blog is also a great place to learn exactly the kind of work that Aidan can partner with your school on.
Meeting The Needs Of All Pupils Using Continuous Provision in KS2
Can Early Years-inspired practice help us meet the needs of all pupils in later phases? TLDR: Yes. Implementing a version of Continuous Provision in Key Stages 1 and 2 (and who knows? perhaps beyond) can help us to teach inclusively, ensuring that the needs of all are met: those working at greater depth, students broadly in line with average, children with significant learning gaps, those with a SEN or D, pupils who are working at GD AND have a SEN - EVERYONE. Over on LinkedI
Aidan Severs
Mar 262 min read
KS2 Continuous Provision, Flexible Lesson Design and Learning Sequences
If you've not read anything I've written previously on these subjects, you can catch up here: KS2 Continuous Provision Flexible Lesson Design Learning Sequences And now you're up to speed, you might be wondering what these three have to do with each other. Well, let's start with a few questions that some teachers asked me recently when we were working on getting KS2 Continuous Provision right in their school: What is the role of the adult? What does timetabling look like? How
Aidan Severs
Dec 15, 20256 min read
KS2 Continuous Provision: Ensuring Curriculum Coverage
One of the key challenges when designing and delivering continuous provision to any age group, but particularly in KS2, is ensuring that there is curriculum coverage. By delivering masterclasses, setting apprentice tasks, creating routines, providing scaffolds and carrying out check-ins and conferencing, continuous provision and curriculum coverage can be balanced well in KS2.
Aidan Severs
Jul 2, 20256 min read
Curriculum: The Sticky Problem of Sticky Knowledge
Icky name aside, the idea of identifiying sticky knowledge on behalf of pupils is a tricky one. The Origins of Sticky Knowledge I think the phrase originated from Gabriel Szulanski and that he originally applied it to the difficulty that organisations experience when trying to spread good practice. It would appear that in his book 'Sticky Knowledge: Barriers to Knowing in the Firm' Szulanski focuses particularly on how organisations can make sure that its employees carry out
Aidan Severs
May 26, 20256 min read
Reading Roles: Teaching Metacognitive Reading Comprehension Strategies
What is (or are) Reading Roles? Reading Roles is a resource designed to aid children’s metacognition when reading. Metacognition can be defined simply as ‘thinking about thinking’. Reading Roles takes familiar job titles and assigns them to reading strategies and skills thus giving children an easy-to-refer-to system for being more deliberate with their thinking during reading, with the ultimate goal of being able to comprehend texts. Most children will already understand wha
Aidan Severs
Jan 30, 20256 min read
Reading Roles Based on Research-Backed Reading Strategies
Explore effective Reading Strategies to enhance comprehension in students.
Aidan Severs
Jan 30, 20256 min read
Reading Roles Generic Reading Activity Exemplified
In my blog post Reading Roles: Teaching Metacognitive Reading Comprehension Strategies I mentioned a generic activity which can be used with any text. Here's that activity in full: The aim of this activity is to help children gain a better understanding of a text. It focuses on using 5 of the main widely-acknowledged reading strategies. Although the activity itself has a goal of enabling understanding of one text, the cumulative effect of doing several of these activities is
Aidan Severs
Jan 30, 202510 min read
Task Setting: Adopt, Adapt or Create?
When it comes to planning and resourcing lessons you have three broad options: Adopt Adapt Create I'd have loved to have shoehorned another ad- word in there, but 'create' is the one. Adopt These days there are a plethora of great lesson resources available to teachers. Some of them are even free. Sometimes it's just a case of using one of them. However, the writers of those resources don't know your class, your school and your needs, so however hard they try, they might not
Aidan Severs
Jan 28, 20253 min read
Reading Comprehension: Teaching a Metacognitive Approach to Inference-Making
Whilst searching for something else on my old blog I came across an old blog post by Clare Sealy, who is now the Head of Education Improvement, for the States of Guernsey. In it, she referred to a particular blog post I had shared and called it 'incredibly useful' and noted that it had 'set twitter mulling over ‘reading comprehension’ as a thing'. Well, those were the days! Now, teachers think a lot about reading comprehension, and that's a good thing. Now I can't guarantee t
Aidan Severs
Nov 26, 202410 min read
Teaching Reading: Boosting Background Knowledge To Aid Inference-Making
A few years ago, the author Tom Palmer sent me a copy of his latest book Wings: Typhoon. It's a great read aimed at 8 to 10 year olds and is a stereotype-breaking brew of the supernatural, football, fighter jets and the relationship between two sisters. But before I knew all of that I was intrigued to find that the covers of the book extend to contain a cut-out-and-make Typhoon aeroplane model. Is this a gimmick, or is there something more to it? One of the complaints about s
Aidan Severs
Nov 22, 20247 min read
Want Children To Read For Pleasure? Become a Reading Teacher (or Parent)
Uncover the secrets to sparking a love for reading in children. Become a reading teacher or parent.
Aidan Severs
Nov 19, 20248 min read
Case Study: Revolutionising Curriculum Delivery in KS2
Explore how a UK primary school transformed its KS2 curriculum delivery, emphasizing open-ended challenges, same-day interventions, and more
Aidan Severs
Nov 12, 20246 min read
Case Study: Continuous Provision and EYFS-Inspired Practice in KS2
Bringing an early years approach into KS1 isn’t unheard of – there are plenty of Year 1 classrooms where continuous provision has been effectively established. But, at my previous school the vision was grander: we wanted to know if EYFS-inspired teaching and learning could have an impact, not only in KS1, but also in KS2. The rationale for taking an EYFS approach into year 1 is perhaps to provide children moving from Reception with some familiarity, however many proponents o
Aidan Severs
Oct 8, 20246 min read
Featured Article: 8 Classroom Routines for Teachers to Nail Before Half-Term
I wrote this quite a while ago (back when I tweeted as @thatboycanteach and when I was beginning my deputy headship at an 'RI' school) but I still stand by these 8 classroom routines. If I went back into the classroom now I'd still do these exact things. These were developed during my years teaching in a school which Ofsted had deemed as 'inadequate' where routines were non-existent and as a result, much time was wasted to begin with. We got that school to 'good' within 3 yea
Aidan Severs
Sep 2, 20241 min read
Can Codifying Teaching Really Improve Teachers?
Can we really codify teaching, simplifying it into a set of easy-to-follow steps? Is it possible to see a video, a diagram or read about a routine, and then enact that in the classroom in a such a way that a particular outcome is guaranteed? Even if we practise it outside of the classroom first in some kind of simulation, can we be sure that those actions are going to have the desired results? Is it a case of becoming an expert, aiming for the hallowed 10,000 hours of practic
Aidan Severs
Jun 4, 20244 min read
Curriculum: What Is The Best Kind Of 'Big Question'?
Unlock the secret to crafting the perfect 'Big Question Curriculum' with the ultimate guide. Learn the best question types and their impact.
Aidan Severs
May 21, 20246 min read
Backwards Planning: What I Got Wrong
Here's the resource that this blog post refers to - you can download it for free below: In the old iteration of the above planning framework, I had the following prompts in the very last step (step 5): Who are the children who will need extra learning steps prior to the ones outlined above? Who are the children who will need extra learning steps following the ones outlined above (NSFD)? In all my recent work around providing for pupils with SEND I have realised how mistaken I
Aidan Severs
Feb 20, 20242 min read
Featured Article: Interleaving: What Is It And How Can It Improve Memory And Learning In The Maths Classroom?
Here's an article I wrote for Third Space Learning about interleaving. It was fascinating to read the research on this strategy and to think through its implications for the classroom. You can read the whole thing here: https://thirdspacelearning.com/blog/interleaving/ If you would like Aidan to work with your school or organisation, you can get in touch here , or by using the links below:
Aidan Severs
Feb 19, 20241 min read
A SEND-First Approach... To Everything
Imagine a world where children with SEND really were the priority. What would that look like and what would the impact be on all children? That which we've explored in a couple of previous blog posts, Margaret Mullholland puts succinctly in a TES article: "...there’s now a feeling that schools should be structured for these pupils in the first place, rather than trying to adapt to their needs retrospectively." I read the above article whilst working on a SEND project for Oak
Aidan Severs
Feb 6, 20243 min read
Provision for Pupils with SEND = Provision for All?
If you read articles or listen to podcasts about SEND you'll hear one phrase more often than others: "What works for pupils with SEND works for all pupils." Look, here it is from a recent TES article by Rob Webster: "David Mitchell, author of 'What Really Works in Special and Inclusive Education: Using Evidence-Based Teaching Strategies', says those with SEND “respond to universal approaches in much the same way as non-SEND pupils”. Put another way, good teaching for pupils w
Aidan Severs
Jan 25, 20244 min read
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