A new English UK conference specifically for summer schools was so popular that it may become a regular event.

Get Ready for Summer attracted around 50 teachers and directors of studies, keen to pick up new ideas for making the busiest season of the year run smoothly. "It went very well and people were very positive about it," said Huan Japes, English UK's deputy chief executive (professional services). 

"The rationale is that summer schools have very particular needs: they have younger learners, there's an increased volume of students, it's often residential and a total package, and teachers often live in as well. Learning and leisure are part of the package, and in some ways it's about surviving all those demands with large groups of students."

The event, held in London on Sunday 21 June, started with a session from Jim Scrivener on doing more than surviving - including many useful tips which the audience took away to use at school - and ended with Thom Jones' advice on how to work with students who are less keen on finding themselves in a classroom during the school holidays. This included suggestions on how to incorporate more learning into leisure activities.

Another useful session included advice from Trinity's Janet Goulding on how to prepare students on even short summer courses for exams, while Jon Hird discussed ways to adapt course books or use them as a basis for tailored lessons to be more engaging for this group of pupils, without incurring too much preparation time for teachers who might also be running leisure activities. Also on the programme was an intensive session on safeguarding, presented by Sarah Etchells.