Tait Coles

Tait Coles is a teacher, a Vice Principal in a Bradford inner-city school and a writer.

Tait has been teaching science for twenty years. During this time he has had the privilege to learn with, and from, hundreds of young people, many of whom would be classed as coming from a social or economic disadvantage. He has experience of leading on teaching and learning, curriculum and assessment, quality assurance, behaviour and attitudes, as well as initial teacher education.

Tait has been described as ‘a classroom maverick and a respected radical of modern teaching’ (Independent Thinking, 2014). He works relentlessly to ensure that every student in his school and classroom achieves or exceeds their academic potential, but he knows that education is much more than this. Tait has seen first hand the influence that critical pedagogy has had on his students; to enable them to develop a sustained social awareness and a critical consciousness.

Tait is also the creator of Punk Learning; a manifesto that challenges the orthodoxy and complacency of teaching and allows students to be central to a critical educational culture where they learn how to become individuals and social agents rather than merely disengaged spectators who have their 'part to play' in the Neoliberal ideology of modern schooling.

"The best book I've read about teaching in the past half decade is Tait Coles' 'Punk Leaning'. Coles is the most radically left wing of the newer education writers, and 'Punk Learning' contains everything I want in a book about teaching. It is challenging, provocative, experimental and in parts pleasingly flawed. In it, he takes lessons from punk luminaries, and applies them to the act of teaching, steering what initially suggests itself to be an uncontrollable metaphor into a remarkably cohesive statement of political intent. This book combines high-minded seriousness with a deeply ludic approach to what is possible and is, for me, the antidote to the unimaginative priggishness that is the vogue in current educational debate. This book, which is beautifully designed, seems to me to be the educational equivalent of Lydon's advice to the working class, "Get smart. Read as much as you can, and find out who's using you!"" Phil Beadle. The Guardian - 'An education book that changed me: favourite reads revealed' (2014)