A culture for improvement

This is the story of two teachers. Angela and Amber have been teaching for 10 years each. Angela is a 32-year-old primary teacher whose particular specialism has been teaching reading in Years 3 and 4. Amber is a secondary drama teacher, now in her early 50s, who came into teaching after a first career as a lawyer and has taught everything from Year 7 to Year 13, with plenty of stints in other subjects thrown in. In many ways Angela and Amber have had similar careers. They are both, unusually, still working in the same schools where they trained. They’ve both spent countless hours planning lessons and marking books. They’ve both been on various courses and have sat through lots of twilight INSET sessions. They’ve both been offered middle leadership roles – Angela is head of lower Key Stage 2 while Amber is now second in English. But the similarity stops there. Since day one of their careers, Angela and Amber have had very different trajectories. The stark difference is th