Phil Beadle

An inspirational inner city English teacher, an education  consultant, and a vastly experienced trainer, Phil Beadle is available for both corporate and conference  speaking engagements.

He is an expert in literacy and behaviour management, and his entertaining and challenging training sessions leave teachers energised , full of ideas and straining to be back in front of a classroom full of children.

Phil has a long history of delivering transformational English results in schools and academies in challenging circumstances. He has worked in the most improved schools in the country (in the year when he worked there) and with the highest CVA in London. He brings expert, up-to-date knowledge of how to create great lesson experiences in even the most difficult of classrooms, as well as truly innovative approaches to teaching and learning.

He is well-known for appearing in the Channel 4 series ‘The Unteachables’ – as the teacher who got his students to read Shakespeare to cows and learn punctuation through Kung Fu actions - and in ‘Can’t Read, Can’t Write’ – where he taught adults to read using space-hoppers. He has won two Royal Television Awards; his programmes for Teachers’ TV are used in universities across the English speaking world and include three of the forty most popular programmes in the channel’s run; and he has appeared on Newsnight, the Today Programme, Woman’s Hour and Start the Week.

He refuses to accept students’ backgrounds as an excuse for underachievement. He has originated and taught successful modules on texts many teachers would argue as too difficult, for example Conrad’s Heart of Darkness - and yet his classes' essay results on this novel exceeded expectations by two grades.

A prolific advocate of the right to a decent education, he has written for every broadsheet newspaper in the UK (aside from the Independent), most memorably as an education columnist for the Guardian for ten years during which time he was nominated for a European Commission Award for the promotion of equality in journalism.

He is also the author of 10 books about teaching and learning. His influential 'How to Teach' manual was awarded 10 out of 10 in the Times Educational Supplement, who said of it: “There should be a national exam to check its message has been understood before all teachers take an oath, written in blood and sworn on their payslip, that they will implement at least some of Beadle's ideas.”

His other books include his ‘Could do Better’ guide, which was serialised in the Telegraph; ‘How to Teach Literacy’, which was well-reviewed; ‘Literacy Through Football Skills’, an outline of how to teach sentence structure by playing football; ‘The Book of Plenary’, the first serious text by any British teacher about metacognition; and ‘Rules for Mavericks: A Manifesto for the Disobedient’, an examination of how orthodoxies respond to maverick stances and how to live life profitably outside the mainstream. He has since written, 'Why are you Shouting at us?', 'The Fascist Painting', and more highly acclaimed educational literature. 

His work has been acknowledged internationally - there is a whole term dedicated to it at Adelaide University, Australia - and he is a former winner of the United Kingdom Secondary Teacher of the Year Award in the National Teaching Awards.

He is still to be found inspiring children to believe in themselves in classrooms on council estates and is currently working on a book about metacognition.