Newsround

What’s been in the news just lately?

• Does mindfulness work and can you afford it?
• Schools and air pollution – why face masks are actually a waste of time.
• Research by Clayton Cook, a professor in the Institute of Translational Research in Children’s Mental Health at the University of Minnesota, says greeting students at the door leads to calmer classrooms.
• According to a study in The Lancet, schools can significantly reduce the impact of bullying and improve pupils’ wellbeing by using a specialised system of conflict resolution and training.

Learning Together offers the potential for broad improvements in behaviour and health in secondary schools and the results of this trial provide strong support for further development of restorative approaches in secondary schools.

• Apparently, more pupils have special educational needs than you might think. That’s odd – I thought all pupils had special educational needs?
• For an educational blog you might wonder why I have included: The Whitehouse report: Review of research nursing and midwifery across the UK and Ireland. That’s simple. We cannot live in a silo as a profession. We can learn so much from the work of other caring professions. I like the opening to this report quoting Florence Nightingale…

For us who nurse, our nursing is a thing which unless we are making progress every year, every month, every week, take my word for it, we are going back…

Now substitute ‘nurse’ for ‘teacher’ and you will see we have a lot in common.

• A review commissioned by Damian Hinds, the Education Secretary, says lengthy report writing is incredibly burdensome and there was “limited evidence” for writing more than the “relatively lean” basic requirements imposed on schools.