Books

Managing Behaviour in Challenging Schools: The 7 Keys to Success

'Phil Beadle refuses to accept students' backgrounds as an excuse for underachievement. - Evening Standard

Preparing to work in a tough school can be a nerve-wracking experience. Will there be gangs? What if none of the students do their homework? How will you know what to do if faced with a physical threat? Phil Beadle and John Murphy have spent their school careers transforming behaviour in the most challenging and economically-deprived environments. In this book, they set out the 7 keys to successful behaviour management, through innovative approaches to teaching and learning. Beginning with understanding the root causes of challenging behaviour and then approaching the students' behaviour and learning in a positive, but firm way, Phil and John get results by entrenching high expectations, respect and integrity. This tried-and-tested approach to effective classroom practice in challenging environments applies equally on a whole-school level, and is essential reading for anyone preparing to work in a challenging school or college or with excluded students.

Dancing About Architecture: A Little Book of Creativity

Dancing About Architecture is a compendium of outrageous ideas: ideas about how to take more risks and ideas about how to come up with better ideas. Ideas about how to plan experiences that leave people who are in the same room as those ideas awestruck, and ideas to help you avoid the textbook, the worksheet, the barely stifled yawn. From using The Book of Revelation as a planning device; to seeing every experience through the prism of physical activity or song; to measuring a poem to find its real heart: it outlines a methodology that, if you use it, will make you an even greater creative force than you already are.

Published 2011

This book kicks the desks over, opens the windows and lets learning in. I highly recommend this book it s a guide to the bright future of education. --Mhairi Grealis, Course Director, The Richmond Theatre

Here is a book about teaching, and more importantly, learning, that is cool, irreverent and entertaining! From the reference to Frank Zappa in Chapter One, I knew this book was pure Phil Beadle. Buy it, read it. --Richard Gerver, Educational Commentator, Author and Broadcaster

A masterpiece for creativity-led education. Where Sir Ken Robinson tells us what to do in education, Beadle shows us how to do it. --Kwela Sabine Hermanns, Innovation Specialist

Bad Education - The Guardian Columns

'Bad Education' is a collection of Phil Beadle's columns from the Guardian's Education section and is a laugh-a-minute romp through more or less every aspect of British Education over the last decade, which makes the occasional, entirely accidental, serious point.

Published February 2011

A book to be read, dipped into and returned to again and again. But, above all a book to be read by all who have the interests of young people and their teachers at heart.
John Dunford, Chair, Whole Education
Chair, Worldwide Volunteering
Chair, Chartered Institute of Educational Assesors

How to Teach

Beadle is of course a one-off charismatic and, so some would say, inimitable teacher. But here he puts together a rich array of delightful insights into the art of teaching in such a way that everybody will be able to take something to shape their own practice. It s one for the staff library and a must-read for all new teachers. --Sir Tim Brighouse Visiting Professor at the Institute of Education London

Teaching is one of the most cognitively engaging, emotionally draining, and physically demanding occupations there is. In fact, it is such a complex job that one life-time is not enough to master it, which is what makes it such a wonderful career. No matter whether you are a beginning teacher or a 20-year veteran, one can always get better at it, and this book is a great resource for helping in that journey. Beginning teachers will find lots of useful advice about this incredibly hard job; practical, sure, but also realistic about what is achievable in typical classrooms. And even the grizzled classroom veteran will find something new, or at least a new way of looking at old things, here. And this book is funny. It is laugh-out-loud, embarass-yourself-in-public funny. Every teacher should read it (in private). --Professor Dylan Wiliam, Deputy Director, Institute of Education, University of London

Shocking stories, fruity language, stand-up humour, gruesome anecdotes, and politically-incorrect hints -- Phil Beadle takes the 'horrible histories' approach to the how-to-teach manual. The result is a funny, informative, practical and realistic book overflowing with memorable, cut-out-and-keep, easy-to-follow tips. Reading this book will be a whole lot more fun than your first teaching practice - and more valuable too. Beadle is the wise, but mischievous, old lag in the corner of the staffroom - pull up a chair and wonder at his stories of survival. They could save your teaching career. --Mike Baker, BBC News/The Guardian

Could Do Better!: Help your kid shine at school

Phil Beadle is a former rock musician, the winner of the Secondary Teacher of the Year Award 2005, and the inspirational teacher who wowed the nation with his unorthodox teaching methods in Channel 4 series THE UNTEACHABLES. There, his bizarre but effective approach to teaching English included Punctuation Kung-Fu, and reciting Macbeth to a field of cows. Through techniques such as these Beadle seemingly achieved the impossible by successfully drawing out the desire to learn from a group of failing pupils. Now his focus is on spreading the word to parents: every child has the ability to learn, and to do better at school. In this book he tells parents that there is no such thing as a stupid child, only boring lessons. Intelligent, unconventional, humorous and inspirational, this hands-on guide blends personal anecdotes with the nitty gritty of how to best unlock your children's unique intelligence, and how to ensure they have the best possible chance to succeed at school.

Altogether Now... The Ultimate Plenary Book