The Bridge Newsletter - Edition #11

June 2026

Welcome to The Bridge Newsletter Edition #11

In this issue you’ll find: • iPGCE - Starting September 2026 • iNPQs - Starting November 2026 • Festivals of Education around the world - Reviews, previews and save the dates for next year!

• Doug Lemov event - Making Explicit Direct Instruction work • The Flourishing Summit - Collective reflection of 2026 and save the date for 2027!

• The Bridge - Round up of 2025/26 • What does it really mean to educate for global citizenship?

• Journal of Educational Research and Theory - Call for submissions • The Bridge CPD & events coming up • State School and partner discounts available Happy reading!

International PCGE Progress your teaching career in international education, gain advanced educational theory and develop excellent classroom practice.

Delivered by Oxford Brookes University, this is an internationally-recognised online programme for teachers already involved in the international school sector. Our iPGCE will give you a global perspective on education, challenge your practice and boost your confidence.

Your learning will be underpinned by the expertise of our tutors and contemporary teaching theories in educating primary and secondary age students.

Start date: September 2026 Duration: 12 months Distance learning To find out more please email Karen Taylor: ktaylor@wellingtoncollege.org.uk or visit The Bridge website

International NPQs iNPQs are delivered in partnership with LLSE and Forest Learning Alliance. The Bridge is seeking expressions of interest from colleagues in the Wellington College International family of schools and beyond to join an NPQ cohort from November 2026.

Headship NPQH

Senior Leader NPQSL

Designed for school leaders who are, or aspire to be, a headteacher, principal, or head of school with responsibility for leading a school.

Designed for school leaders who are, or aspire to be, a senior leader with crossschool responsibilities.

Starts: November 2026

Duration: 18 months

Duration: 18 months Time: 1.5 - 2.5 hours per week Distance learning

Starts: November 2026 Time: 1.5 - 2.5 hours per week Distance learning Find out more

Find out more

Leading Teaching NPQLT Designed for teachers who have, or are aspiring to have, responsibilities for leading teaching in a subject, year group, key stage or phase.

Starts: November 2026 Duration: 12 months Time: 1.5 - 2.5 hours per week Distance learning Find out more

To register your interest in joining a November 2026 cohort please click here

Review of the recent Festival of Education: FoE China – Saturday 18th April Wellington College International Shanghai Wellington College Education China hosted the 9th China Festival of Education on April 18th at Wellington College International School, Shanghai, as previewed in The Bridge Newsletter no. 9 in January. It was the culmination of three intensive days, with the Wellington College Education Forum on the Thursday, the AISH (Association of International School Heads) Conference on the Friday, and then the Festival on the Saturday: a real test of stamina for all involved!

However, the excellence of the sessions more than counterbalanced any fatigue. The feedback received has been extremely positive as the China Festival increasingly reaches further into the education world: there were records set for tickets sold and for external sponsorship. The organising team deserves many congratulations!

Preview of the upcoming Festivals of Education: FoE Netherlands – Saturday 6th June - Edith Stein College, The Hague The team at EducationScape and The Bridge are working hard to prepare for the inaugural Festivals in The Netherlands and in Spain.

Saturday 6th June – in partnership with ToetsRevolutie, the Netherlands Festival will be held at Edith Stein College in The Hague. As the international city of peace and justice, with its connection to the IB and to international government collaboration, there is a pervasive feeling in The Hague that we are all better when we connect and share good ideas. This feels a most appropriate and exciting venue to launch the Festival on Continental Europe.

Our festival keynotes include: •

Pedro De Bruyckere

•

Hannah Miller

•

Paul Kirschner

•

Claire Boonstra

Our sessions and strands are divided roughly half and half into Dutch and English, with a characteristic variety of topics. You can find all information and buy your tickets here!

FoE Spain – Saturday 13th June – British School of Barcelona, Castelldefels In partnership with The British School of Barcelona and Cognita - the Spain Festival will bring the EdFest energy to southern Europe for the first time. BISB has a spectacular campus on which the orange trees in the courtyard will play host to hundreds of educators connecting with great enthusiasm. The wonderful team at BSB have been excellent colleagues and deserve a rousing success in their first year.

We know it’s hard to imagine why, but let’s just say that we had a rather large number of applications to speak at the festival! With experts coming from as far as Australia to join superb talent from the region, the day promises to be a vibrant success.

Our major keynotes include: •

Francesca Martinez

•

Geoff Barton

•

Owen O’Kane

•

Richard Culatta

During the Festival of Education, we will offer approximately 50 sessions, each lasting 50 minutes. These sessions range in format from large keynotes to smaller, hands-on workshops, covering a broad spectrum of topics and ideas. Join us for a rich and varied programme designed to engage and inspire all educators. You can find all information and buy your tickets here!

FoE UK – 2nd and 3rd July – Wellington College The Festival of Education – the original EdFest founded in 2010 by Sir Anthony Seldon at Wellington College – gears up for its 16th running on 2nd and 3rd July. The Festival promises to be the best yet - we know that we say this every year and we work continually to stand by our word! There has been huge demand to speak, to attend, to exhibit and to connect with the best in educational thought leadership, CPD and ideas that are both grounded and forward-focussed. The one downside of this is that we had to disappoint far too many excellent speakers who applied. We are already working on some new ideas to harness more of the expertise and passion in the sector.

The Festival will have its usual rich mix of content, and there is almost bound to be something for anyone involved in education. Keynotes are here (with a few still to be confirmed in the final 4 weeks as is always with high-profile people), content strands here and as always, it is best to download the Festival of Education app from your favourite app store in order to guarantee that you have the most up-to date schedule.

You can still buy tickets here right up until the last minute, but we’d advise not leaving it that late just in case we hit capacity!

Save the dates for the Festivals of Education 2026-27 USA - 3rd October 2026 - British International School of Washington Thailand - 7th November 2026 - Wellington College International School Bangkok China - TBC 2027 Netherlands - 11th June 2027 - Edith Stein College Spain - TBC 2027 UK - 8th & 9th July 2027 - Wellington College, Crowthorne

Doug Lemov - Making Explicit Direct Instruction work Tuesday 30th June – EdCity, London Join one of the very best educational authors, thinkers, speakers and trainers in the world for a special one day workshop: Direct Instruction has had more lethal mutations than most pedagogical strategies and many people seem to think it means “Just tell them”.

If that sounds familiar, you’re in very good company. The difference between Direct Instruction and direct instruction isn’t widely understood so it is clear that many have no idea how it can feel purposeful, responsive and genuinely engaging for learners.

This practical, insight-rich workshop will be, delivered by Doug Lemov from Teach Like a Champion, will draw on his extensive work with teachers and schools around the world. Doug will help bridge the gap between research and day-to-day classroom practice.

This is another joint collaboration with EducationScape at their beautiful, slick and very convenient HQ at EdCity near the BBC TV centre in Wood Lane. You can find out more and register here!

The Flourishing Summit What does it mean to lead in ways that genuinely promote human flourishing?

This document represents the collective reflection of a group of scholars, educators, and institutional leaders who convened at The Flourishing Summit at Harvard University to explore this central and pressing question.

Save the date: The Flourishing Summit 2027 - Harvard, USA. Wednesday 17th March and Thursday 18th March 2027

Iain Henderson Director of The Bridge

The Bridge - Round up of 2025/26 The academic year isn’t over yet by any stretch of the imagination, but it is worth reflecting a little on what we have achieved so far, what is coming during the rest of the year, and what is already in the pipeline for 2026-27. There isn’t room in this newsletter to go into too much detail, but headlines are: Although this is still very much in progress, there has been a highly productive coalescence and magnification of endeavour in the area of Human Flourishing: •

It would have been easy for several divergent initiatives to do just that: diverge. Yet, everyone is working fundamentally towards the same ends – to enable young people and adults to be able to lead more fulfilling, flourishing and thriving lives.

•

In particular, The Bridge has created a pilot CPD programme to enable teachers to develop their practice explicitly to develop competencies and capabilities in young people and adults alike, to maximise the chances of doing exactly that. This is being offered right across the Wellington College Education family in the coming months, in order that the experience and feedback can help us collaboratively to co-create the best development experiences possible. We want, in time, to make this available as widely as we can.

A complete re-shaping of the CPD offer at Wellington, to enable much more beneficial investment in our staff. This is then being mirrored, refined appropriately and similarly provided to those WCI schools that want it.

There is a great deal of thought both within The Bridge and beyond, going into reimagining the role of the teacher as the changing purpose of education and the accelerative impact of AI make this imperative and urgent. Of course, if the teacher’s role is fundamentally different, so must be the way that they can be trained, supported and developed: this too is a major Bridge focus.

Successful development and rollout of Dialogic Teaching: a new perspective on how to elevate thinking.

A thriving and increasingly well-regarded Journal of Educational Research and Theory, with a growing readership and submissions that continue to be robustly and thoughtfully peer-reviewed.

A rapidly growing BridgEd podcast series with expert and interesting guests.

Thought-provoking expert visiting speakers and trainers delivering outstanding training courses, seminars and workshops. Many of these are now starting to focus on converging ideas of how teachers find meaning, purpose, flow and flourishing in their work.

The Bridge has added several major events to the calendar. Some of these are mentioned above and we are working on more of these for next year.

Requests keep coming in for The Bridge team and colleagues to speak at conferences and to deliver training, cpd and consultancy.

Dr Karen Taylor Head of Educational Research, The Bridge

What does it really mean to educate for global citizenship?

What do we actually mean when we talk about Global Citizenship? This concept appears with increasing frequency in school mission statements around the world, public and private alike, yet the question of what it looks like in practice, and whose vision it serves, remains unclear.

These are the questions driving the research that Dr. Jo Skelton of Oxford Brookes University and Dr. Karen Taylor of The Bridge have been pursuing together. Our study, Teacher Identity, Pedagogy and Practice in Contextually-Situated Global Citizenship Education, examines how educators interpret and enact Global Citizenship in their classrooms, and how those interpretations are shaped by linguistic, cultural and geographical context. We were delighted to share our initial findings at the recent Festival of Education in Shanghai . The conversation with participants in our session confirmed that these questions resonate deeply with many colleagues across the international school community.

What the Research Tells Us We launched our survey in late 2025, distributing it across our global networks. Our respondents, drawn from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America and the Middle East, represent a broad range of roles and levels of experience. (If you haven’t yet participated, we are still gathering data and warmly invite you to contribute by clicking here.)

One of the most striking findings is both reassuring and worthy of further consideration: there is strong moral consensus among educators about what Global Citizenship means. Themes of empathy and interconnectedness dominate. A humanist, cosmopolitan discourse, centred on individual moral responsibility and inclusive pedagogy, is the most prevalent orientation in our data. References to neoliberal skills development or economic mobility, while present, were considerably less prominent.

At the same time, respondents demonstrated awareness of the tensions inherent in this field:

the friction between national and global identity, the vagueness around what Global Citizens are actually expected to do, a tendency toward depoliticised language when addressing global issues, and the risk of a version of Global Citizenship that remains the preserve of the privileged.

What is less visible in the data, and what we think deserves further attention, is engagement with structural injustice and power dynamics. The moral consensus is genuine and important, but it may not, on its own, be sufficient.

What the Room Told Us The session in Shanghai echoed these findings in many ways. When participants contributed to a live word cloud, language such as togetherness, interconnectedness, and mutual understanding closely mirrored what we had found in our survey responses.

The discussion that followed revealed the full complexity beneath the shared language. When asked about the challenges of teaching for Global Citizenship, participants were candid: time constraints, the difficulty of teaching across cultural difference, the persistent problem of definition (“not knowing what GCE actually means”), and the tension between an education system that values measurable data and a set of goals that resist easy quantification. How do you assess empathy?

Equally rich were the opportunities participants identified: learning from genuine exchange, contributing to an education for peace, developing critical thinkers who are also globally connected, and the possibility of making the world a little more just.

Where We Go From Here Whether survey respondents or our workshop participants, educators broadly agree on the values underpinning Global Citizenship education. What remains less developed, and what our research hopes to contribute to, is the how of developing culturally and linguistically sensitive pedagogy that honours the specificity of each school community, that sustains the balance between universal aspirations and local particularity, and that remains open to the many and varied sources of knowledge that surround us, including those that dominant frameworks have too often overlooked.

We are continuing to analyse our data and will share further findings as the study develops. In the meantime, we would love to hear from you, whether as a survey participant or simply as a colleague thinking through similar questions.

Karen Taylor and Jo Skelton Ktaylor@wellingtoncollege.org.uk and jskelton@brookes.ac.uk

The Bridge: Journal of Educational Research and Theory Call for journal submissions We encourage you to share your research interests and theoretical or philosophical musing with us. We explicitly welcome submissions in a wide range of media so long as they are grounded in theory and/or well evidenced so don’t hesitate to be creative! We are also seeking peer reviewers for submissions. Simply send an email with your address, institutional affiliation, and area of interest or expertise to: ktaylor@wellingtoncollege.org.uk

Read the submission guidelines here

The Bridge CPD & Events You can find out more about upcoming CPD and events or register using the links below: • Foundational coaching* • Advanced coaching* • Reconnecting with purpose: The reason for teaching (Online) • Teaching in the flow (Online) • Emotional dimensions of learning* • Leading for impact * • New and aspiring middle leaders* • New and aspiring senior leaders* • Courageous conversations* • Taking your audience with you • Character education & wellbeing • Leadership for flourishing roundtable (Oxford, UK) • The flourishing summit (Harvard University, USA) • iPGCE (Online) • iNPQH (Online) • iNPQSL (Online) • iNPQLT (Online) • Festival of Education (Netherlands) • Festival of Education (Spain) • Festival of Education (UK) • Festival of Education (USA) • Festival of Education (Thailand) • Festival of Education (China)

All CPD and events can be found HERE *Can also be delivered in-person at a location of your choice and some courses can also be delivered as a series of online sessions. Discounted rates may be available for the hosting school. Please contact us to discuss your requirements without obligation: thebridge@wellingtoncollege.org.uk

State School and Partner Discounts The Bridge offers discounts to state and partner schools:

50% discount

to all state schools

80% discount to our partner schools in the Wellington College Learning Alliance and Forest Learning Alliance Discounts are automatically applied at the checkout Please contact us for further information at

thebridge@wellingtoncollege.org.uk

Consultancy Services The Bridge offers consultancy services to schools both in the UK and Internationally.

From in-person consultancy visits to online consultation, bespoke workshops, accredited courses, or coaching of individuals or teams.

This can take any form that schools and schools groups require.

We offer discounts to state-funded schools.

Whether your school would like to explore consultancy in one of our specialist areas, or in a different area, in the first instance please arrange a free, no obligation, introductory call by emailing: thebridge@wellingtoncollege.org.uk

The Bridge are partnered with EducationScape Training + Events to offer a 15% discount. Please use discount code: THEBRIDGEPARTNER at the checkout.

Upcoming events can be found at: https://educationscape.com/upcomingevent

The Bridge Wellington College Dukes Ride Crowthorne RG45 7PU Follow us on: LinkedIn Email: thebridge@wellingtoncollege.org.uk Web: thebridge.wellingtoncollege.org.uk Phone: +44(0)1344 444 238