Teach Sleep Repeat

So you sit a sitting Education Secretary down, ask the questions teachers actually want answered, follow up when the first answer wobbles, and then the verdict comes back from you, the listeners.
This week Dylan and Hayden go through the feedback from the Bridget Phillipson episode, and it was overwhelmingly kind. Listeners said the questions were clear and fair, that the follow ups kept coming, and that the show genuinely tried to hold her to account rather than rolling out the red carpet.
But there's a but. A lot of you felt she dodged. The questions were sharp, the answers were not, and plenty of listeners came away feeling the big ones never really got answered. Dylan and Hayden sit with that uncomfortable truth and ask whether that's on them, on her, or just the nature of getting a politician in the room.
Honest, a little cheeky, and a proper postmortem of one of our biggest episodes yet.
🎧 New episodes every week. Leave us a review if you enjoy the show!🔢 Want to boost maths fluency in your school? Book a free Maths Zoo trial at www.mathszoo.org💬 Join our completely free WhatsApp community and connect with teachers from across the UK: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HB7n1PNGdGL5STACssEH1s

Two hundred episodes in, and somehow we ended up across the table from the person who runs the whole system. For the TSR 200th, Dylan and Hayden sit down with Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson, and waste none of it on small talk.
First, the SEND white paper. The move from EHCPs to the new Individual Support Plans sounds tidy, but it could leave families without the right to appeal at a tribunal. What happens to children with complex needs when the funding does not follow?
Then the part that stings any new parent on staff. Civil servants get 26 weeks on full pay, teachers get eight. That opens up parental pay, a dropping birth rate, the quiet saving fewer pupils hand the Treasury, and whether the real answer is cutting class sizes rather than closing schools and cutting jobs.
And the big one. A projected 6.5% pay rise over three years that is not fully funded. We asked the Education Secretary directly where that money comes from, and who loses their job to pay for it.
Honest, occasionally tense, and exactly the conversation we wanted for episode 200.
Oh, and yes, we did ask her about Gemma Collins turning up at the DfE.
🎧 New episodes every week. Leave us a review if you enjoy the show!
🔢 Want to boost maths fluency in your school? Book a free Maths Zoo trial at www.mathszoo.org
💬 Join our completely free WhatsApp community and connect with teachers from across the UK: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HB7n1PNGdGL5STACssEH1s

"What's the biggest thing you two actually disagree on?" One listener has clocked the I agree, I agree tic and wants a proper scrap, so Dylan and Hayden dig into the teaching vs non-teaching divide and find it's spikier than either expected.
Then a brave question lands. Should politics be explicitly taught in KS2? The boys weigh up whether ten year olds can handle it, who gets to decide what counts as balanced, and what happens when a kid asks the question you really didn't want them to ask.
Next, draconian behaviour policies. Listeners have sent in the ones that humiliated children or just made no sense, and some of these are hard to hear without wincing.
A one form entry teacher wants to know how on earth setting could work in her school, and the lads have a proper crack at it rather than dodging.
Plus the SATs week ask that will make every Year 6 teacher's eye twitch. Revising all afternoon for the next day's test, every day. Reasonable prep or completely ridiculous?
And to finish, the question with teeth. What's your real, unpopular education opinion. The one that might genuinely cost you a listener.
Honest, funny, and not in the mood to play nice today.
🎧 New episodes every week. Leave us a review if you enjoy the show!🔢 Want to boost maths fluency in your school? Book a free Maths Zoo trial at www.mathszoo.org💬 Join our completely free WhatsApp community and connect with teachers from across the UK: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HB7n1PNGdGL5STACssEH1s

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A teacher writes in asking if it is genuinely acceptable to eat biscuits and drink sugary drinks in front of children. Are teachers supposed to be role models when it comes to lunch, or can you have whatever you want in your packed lunch and not feel bad about it? Dylan and Hayden have thoughts.
Then a listener has been trying to get Dylan and Hayden to answer this for ages. Is teaching the most ethically dubious job in the world? Photocopying copyright violations, Disney Plus being streamed in classrooms when the licence says not for public use, the list goes on. Are teachers all walking around breaking rules constantly without realising?
What is the quickest you have seen someone start teaching and then quit? A listener once knew an ECT who left by the second week of term. Dylan and Hayden swap stories.
There is also a properly nerdy question about teaching publications. Does anyone still read the TES? Are the union magazines just bin material? Recommendations for the actual good podcasts, websites and reading for teachers who want to stay informed.
Plus the SEND support staff question. What is the value of lived experience versus a formal qualification?
And the most important question of all. What classroom item is the first you grab in a zombie outbreak?
🎧 New episodes every week. Leave us a review if you enjoy the show!
💬 Join our completely free WhatsApp community and connect with teachers from across the UK: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HB7n1PNGdGL5STACssEH1s

For about twenty-five years, the dominant message in teacher training has been clear. The research says mixed attainment is better. Setting damages confidence, harms low attainers, and widens the gap. Then in April 2026, the EEF published a study that complicates all of that.
Nine thousand pupils, 97 schools, two years of data. The finding: pupils in mixed attainment classes made roughly one month less progress in maths than pupils in sets. High prior attainers made two months less progress. And the team that produced this result is the same team that gave us most of the evidence against setting in the first place.
Dylan and Hayden get into what the study actually found and what it did not find, what they were both taught during training and whether they still believe it, and the honest classroom experience that the academic literature tends not to capture.
They also make the strongest possible case for both sides before landing somewhere honest. The mixed attainment argument does not collapse because of one study. The setting argument is not vindicated either. But the conversation has shifted and anyone working in secondary maths right now deserves to know how and why.
Sharp, properly researched, and the kind of debate that should be happening in every staffroom in the country.
🎧 New episodes every week. Leave us a review if you enjoy the show!
🔢 Want to boost maths fluency in your school? Book a free Maths Zoo trial at www.mathszoo.org
💬 Join our completely free WhatsApp community and connect with teachers from across the UK: https://chat.whatsapp.com/HB7n1PNGdGL5STACssEH1s