Welcome to The Learning Spy

In 2011, frustrated by the state of education, I started blogging. What began as an outlet for professional irritation quickly became something more deliberate: a place to make sense of teaching as it is actually lived, not as it is imagined in policy documents. Over the years I’ve written about the constraints and pressures ordinary teachers face, the successes and failures of my own classroom practice, and the ways research and cognitive psychology can help us understand what works, what doesn’t, and why.

The Learning Spy is widely recognised as one of the UK’s most influential education blogs and has won a number of awards. By the mid-2010s the site was attracting millions of readers, and it has continued to be a platform for serious debate about teaching, curriculum, accountability and the stories we tell ourselves about learning.

The blog has now moved to Substack, where I continue publishing at daviddidau.substack.com.

Alongside writing, I’ve spent a great deal of time working with schools on curriculum, assessment, literacy and the teaching of English. One of my recurring themes is deceptively simple: teachers need to make the implicit explicit. Teachers are highly literate, but many have never been taught how to explain the invisible knowledge that underpins fluent reading and writing. Too often we assume pupils can do what we can do. The task is to break literacy down, codify it, and teach it deliberately, so that more children gain access to the kinds of language that unlock the curriculum. If you’d like to book me to deliver training or speak at a conference, please get in touch via the contact form.

I’ve written several books including The Secret of Literacy, What If Everything You Knew About Education Was Wrong? What Every Teacher Needs to Know about Psychology, Making Kids Cleverer, Intelligent Accountability, Making Meaning in English, and Bringing the English Curriculum to Life, all of which reflect my long-standing interest in how schools can teach more deliberately, more coherently, and with more intellectual seriousness.