 Hello everyone, this is Ross, Teacher Talker on Twitter. Thank you to those who watched my last video and all the comments you've inspired me to make another video. It's the start of the Christmas holidays. It's Sunday. I know some people have got a few more days left at school. For some reason I've chosen to stand in my garden and I have no idea why. It's not too cold. I know I'm standing in my t-shirt. It's a bit foggy here in London. But I wanna talk to you today about my Santa wish list. I've just put a blog online called Dear Mrs. Claus. A right to Santa every year on my blog. And it's essentially saying what I want for Christmas and education. And in the blog I asked what the true meaning of teaching is. And I remind readers and people watching here that despite rapid government reform, you know, post-2010, you know, the recent publication of the PISA League Tables, England has pretty much stayed exactly the same. You know, 20% of teachers leave the profession within the first two years, never mind the first five years. That's been a pattern for the past 20 years. We work the longest hours, get one of the lowest paid in OECD countries. And a blog that I wrote in October, over a thousand teachers voted and said that within the first academic term, they feel burnt out. So, my message to Mrs. Claus is essentially that the government have forgotten the true meaning of teaching. They've forgotten the people that matter. Now, we know kids matter, but it's actually the workforce that need a bit more attention. So in my blog I've written the 10 things that I would like to wish for in 2017. So I'm gonna give you a snapshot here. I'm gonna finish off with recommending two books that I'm hoping to read that kind of I've not managed to get to the bottom of in 2016. So I'm just gonna remind you what they might be and give a shout out to a couple of people. So number one on my Christmas wish list is PPA time. Teachers work in the longest hours. We've got the workload challenge that's out, the Nottingham Fair Workload Chart, I think it's called off the top of my head, recommended lots of brilliant ideas, but nothing's gonna change until teachers are given time during the working day to mark and plan. And I'm always gonna go on about that. Nothing will change until that happens. Number two, until we all stop putting off-stead banners on our schools, logos and letterheads and everything else, we're only gonna fuel the problem. We've got to stop doing that. Now I wrote a blog to Sean Hartford, who has responded and I've also sent to Amanda Spielman that we need to get rid of the four gradings. We just need to, you either need to be a good school or you're not yet good and you're on your way. Once we get that simplified, then we can start getting away from this high stakes accountability that off-stead creates and start pushing towards a more peer review system, which seems to be what's gonna come next. My third request, this is a bit cuckoo land, but I do believe it is possible one day that we can have a next secondary estate that has worked in the classroom. Wouldn't that be great? Someone that actually understands where we're all coming from. Fourthly, the e-back curriculum. One year later, we're still waiting for this to be published. I've spoken to a few people that I know that work in the House of Lords and there's been a response from Lord Nash with the quote, in due course. So God knows what that means, but hopefully in the new year, we'll finally get a report that categorically says, I believe that school leaders do not think the 90% measure of an e-back curriculum of students sitting e-back subjects in a secondary school is feasible. We can't even recruit teachers to the profession, never mind recruit teachers in those specialist subjects in computing science and in modern foreign languages. So until that's published, I'm gonna still argue with the government to be a bit more common sense. Fifthly, students that I work with in London's challenging schools in London, university is a great success for many of them, but it's not always the only option. So it'd be nice for the government to recognize that the apprenticeships scheme that's coming through is a small kind of step forward, but it'd be nice to see more and more that university is not the only option for students in schools. Number six, curriculum reform and assessment. Now, we know that curriculum reform was needed, and the assessment despite all the nonsense and the leaked tests, key stage one and two, cause all sorts of a fiasco online in the press six months ago. We keep failing to recognize that the curriculum and assessment reform has created a huge amount of workload for teachers in primary and secondary schools. So we need a little bit of consolidation. I'm confident that it's starting to happen, but still very early days, and the government need to recognize that school leaders need to give their staff the time to still deal with exam changes, syllabus changes, curriculum reform, and all those kind of things so that they can have time to embed. Number seven on my Christmas wish list is recruitment flexibility. We have all these different schemes. You know, the university-trained model is slowly dying away, making it a little bit tougher for schools to get the people that they want with all the places not being filled and those kind of things, but be nice to see some more flexibility for schools to recruit the people that they need for their schools today, not for in a year's time, for example, schools direct. Number eight, I would like on my Santa wish list, so this is again in reference to my letter to dear Mrs. Claus, because Santa let me down last year, is to celebrate more things that we do on our own doorstep. There's lots of brilliant work going on in English schools across the country. I only need to think back to one of my first schools that I started with, Alexandra Park School in North London. They took part in the sample of the PISA tests, and they came top above Singapore. Now, Mr. Gibb, if you're watching, go and visit Alexandra Park School. Don't waste your flight ticket and taxpayers' money going off to Singapore and Shanghai and wherever else all your government officials are going. Go and see some good schools across England and you'll start to see that there's actually a lot of good work already taking place. Number nine, an idea that I've had floated from a few people across the world to me, sabbaticals. In schools in New Zealand, every time you complete one year in your place of work, you accrue one week's sabbatical. So imagine that I've been in classrooms for 23 years, that's 23 weeks I could have off on a sabbatical, paid to go and visit other schools, go and do some action research, to keep me motivated and engaged on top of my work and come back to the same school, refreshed, renewed and vigoured to start all over again and maybe do another 20 years. Wouldn't that be great? I can't imagine it costing too much and you'd probably keep hundreds and thousands of teachers in the profession if we came up with a lovely little scheme like that to motivate. Finally, number 10, on my wish list, the College of Teaching. It starts next month in January. I'll send all my best wishes to Alison Peacock. What I would like to see is that the government commit in advance, so yes, it's early days I know, but it is my wish list, to commit funding beyond 2020 to fund the College of Teaching so that teachers can start to see the College of Teaching as the future organisation that will be evidence-led but also hold teachers to account where we can create our own standards, where we can create our own methodology for looking at evidence, our own publications, and we can start to hold ourselves to account and be a self-driven profession. That would be what's on my wish list. To finish off this video, because I'm getting pretty cold, two books that I started reading in 2016 that I haven't quite yet completed and I hope to do so in the next month or so. The first one is Flip the System, which is a brilliant book. I've got through half of it so far. There's loads of academic research in here, lots of references, and I'm lucky enough, I don't know if I can actually say it now, but I've been lucky enough to contribute to a chapter in Flip the System UK version. It was due on Friday, so I need to spend the next couple of days getting my contribution complete and sending that off. And then the second book is a shout-out to Hunting English, that's Alex Quigley on Twitter, with his book, The Confident Teacher, and in Alex's book, he talks about practical steps despite all the workload nonsense that I've just talked about in this video. He mentions lots of practical steps in here that can help teachers be confident in their classrooms. So these are the two books that I recommend you also check out. Just to finish off, this will be my last video, I'm gonna switch off in the next couple of days. I'll put some another video on in the new year, or maybe after boxing there, I don't know, but thank you to all those who are watching, thank you for all the feedback. I hope these are useful, I hope they also inspire you. Please leave any comments, give Semmy some feedback, and I'd love to hear back from you. So once again, happy Christmas, and have a great holiday when it comes. Teacher Talkit, one of the most followed teachers on Twitter in the UK. Find out more at teachertalkit.me.