Enhancing Primary Education: Insights from NAPE’s Summer Term 2026

Hello. Welcome back to the National Association for Primary Education. My name is Mark Taylor, I'm the Vice Chair of NAPE and wanted to come on and say thank you very much for everyone who's been listening. We know that there are people listening from around the world, which is incredible, not just here from the uk. So I wanted to come on today and just give you a few insights and some information about some of the things that are happening over this summer term of 2026. Now, one of the recent developments that we've been doing is putting our professional journal Primary first as a digital download. So there will be links to this in the description, so you can click straight through. It's only £5. And what it does is it enables us to give that sort of professional development, insightful articles from teachers and professionals to really sort of showcase some of the best areas of primary education. So I really hope you enjoy that and do always get in touch. Let us know what you think about it. And if you'd like actually to contribute to this journal, you can get in touch at the national office. Again, details will be in the show notes. Now, one very exciting thing that we're doing this term is we have the launch of our book, John Coe - An Enlightened Voice For Primary Education. Now, John was a founding member of NAPE back in the early 1980s and I had the privilege of working alongside him a few years ago and even interviewed him on the podcast. You can check that out on an earlier episode. And what we've been able to do is we've been able to use some of our memories, some of our insights and some of his works and personal papers to put a book together, sort of sharing his insights and making that available to you in a book that we've produced ourselves. Now, we're going to have a live online launch on the 27th of May. You'll get to watch that live on YouTube, so I'll have a link to that video and that live stream in the description as well. And we'd be delighted if you join us. You'll be able to comment and ask questions on that live show. Now, you can get this book both as a digital download, but also as a hardback. If you get in touch with the national office, everything you need is available@naep.org.uk that's nape.org.uk now, there are two more events I'd like to make you aware of. The first is our annual Christian Schiller Lecture and our guest speaker this year is going to be Clem Maloney Banks. Now, the title of this is Maintaining Curiosity in the Curriculum for Children and Their Teachers. Now, Claire's details the insightful and transformational steps that a school can take towards designing and delivering a rich, rigorous and wide ranging curriculum. And it's just coming from her book, as she was a joint author with Mick Waters of A Curious Curriculum. Now, this is going to be on Wednesday 17th June, in person from about 4 o' clock pm at Pearseswood Primary School in Erith, Kent. Really hope you can join us from there. We do often record these as well, so if we get that recording, we better make sure that's available to you as well. Now, the final event I'd like to share with you is our conference for Reading, which is on Friday 8th May, and it's an all day event in association with the University of Bedfordshire. Now, it's a reading year, which is obviously referring to the national year of reading 2026. And it's a major UK wide campaign led by the Department for Education and the National Literacy Trust. Now, what we're really able to provide in this is the fact that not only do we have a keynote lecture, but we also have breakout rooms and workshops going on there as well. So if you live in and around the Bedfordshire area and you would like to come to that, I'll leave a link to the book and details again in the description. Now, our keynote speaker is Professor Roger McDonald and he's an Associate professor of Primary Education in the School of Education at the University of Greenwich. Now, his work focuses on reading for pleasure, the pedagogy of imagination and the power of picture books, drama, education and the role of emotion in teaching. The workshops that you'll be able to choose from, One in the Afternoon, One in the Morning is related to poetry, there's one in terms of writing, there's workshops related to oracy and drama and school retelling. All of those details will be on the links that are in there as well. So just a quick episode today to bring you up to date with all the little things that we're doing. As I said, the website's the place to get the main information, naep.org.uk but links to all these individual events are going to be in the description as well. Thank you so much, for listening and we'll be really excited to hear your thoughts on these things as we start to share more and more of our activities over the summer.