9 Good reasons to attend: the ones to put to senior leaders

November 7, 2025

All of the reasons to attend that I’ve suggested in 21 reasons to attend conferences are valid, but they are personal, in a sense. So here are 9 suggested arguments that may appeal to your senior leadership team.

21 Reasons to attend conferences

October 14, 2025

It’s often difficult to get time out of school to attend a conference, but I think you should try and get to at least one a year.

Getting permission to go on a course or to a conference

November 20, 2021

Having to make the case for actually registering for an event is, in my opinion, treating teachers as if they were (a) non-professionals and (b) children.

Picture by Mohamed Hassan on Pixabay. Licence: CCO

Creating a culture of innovation, #6: Attend talks

February 28, 2018

Why attending talks can be a good way of fostering innovation, and six things to consider before you do so.

Forthcoming education conferences in London, England

September 25, 2017

Here are a few interesting-looking conferences coming up in London, England, up to January 2018.

Getting the most out of education conferences

August 15, 2017

This book has received 22 five star reviews in total so far, and is the TESOL Institute's featured book. Read on for more information, and for details on how you can buy a personalised version.

9 questions to ask about big name speakers at education conferences

December 5, 2016

Life's too short to waste time going to the wrong conference talk. Here are 9 questions to ask to help decide whether or not to attend a talk given by a well-known speaker as opposed to an unknown teacher.

Recent book reviews

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Quick look: The Teachers' Standards in Primary Schools

This is very well set out. It takes each standard, and gives you ideas on how to achieve it, and what success in this context looks like.

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Quick look: How Computer Games Help Children learn

When I was teaching Econnures I realised that I could have taught quite a chunk of the synabus if I'd been able to run Sim City on the school network.

Quick look: Reinventing Project-Based Learning

I can verify from first hand experience that PBL kept students highly engaged, and helped them to develop skills such as working with others and independent research.

Quick look: The Human Touch

Although this book is published by the BCS, the Chartered Institute for IT, the focus is not on IT at all.

Quick look: Better Living through science

I have often thought that I would have been much more interested in science at school, and been much more successful at it, had the teachers taught us anything of practical value.

Quick look: Tubes: Behind the scenes at the internet

We are all so accustomed to using the internet, searching the world wide web — "going online" — that most of us most of the time probably do not stop to consider the question: yes, but where exactly is it?

Quick look: Profits, Prophets, Coaches and Kings: (When) do leaders make a difference?

I have somewhat dichotomous views of this question of whether leaders make a difference, or much of a difference.

Review: Power Up, by Matthew Lane

This book looks at the maths concepts — and, to some extent, the physics concepts — hidden in popular video games.

Review: The Shortest History of AI

How is it that ChatGPT, Claude and other Al models appear to perform so well at certain complex tasks that some people become convinced that they're sentient — only for them to then promptly fail at simple tasks that even a child could handle?

Review: Teacher Geek

Every so often I like to take a look, or another look, at a book published a while ago, and today I’ve been looking at Teacher Geek, by Rachel Jones.