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Grainne Hallahan

Former English teacher turned education journalist, now Head of Community at Teacher Tapp, and co-host of the They Behave For Me podcast.

Jun 12, 2026

29:11
What's your instinct on whether or not it's a good idea?
29:13
I mean, so in my personal experience of teaching students who had this, it never worked.
29:21
It didn't work.
29:23
That's not to say that it can't work anywhere.
29:26
Like I'm, you know, if somebody says that it works for them.
29:30
that's great for them but in my experience it's never been an effective strategy and it led to disruptions not just for the child who would go out of the room but also for the other children in the room it created this kind of silly why do they get to have that special treatment i want to have that special treatment and then those other students would go and request the same cards and it would become like a desirable thing to have an additional need that required a card um and like it drew attention to that child who sometimes had that card and really did not want any extra attention and actually wanted the card for reasons why you know for they wanted to use the card and they didn't want to like draw attention to themselves but inadvertently were drawing more attention to themselves by having the card and it just sort of became a bit of a bad cycle for them and um yeah it's i'm struggling to think of any time i've seen it used and it went well also made it really complicated when kids were outside in the corridor and you're challenging them and they've got the card it's like but did you go out because of that card or have you just come out do you know what i mean like it's the when you're trying to sort of control the corridors and make sure that anyone who's in the corridor is the person who's meant to be in there and There's nothing like, there's not a fight kicking off or there's not something being like dealt.
30:49
Do you know what I mean? Like the really unpleasant things that are sometimes happening in toilets and stuff when during the school day and you're like sort of checking where people are and why they're there.

8 MINS LATER

38:38
Sorry.
15:38
What have you got for me?
15:40
We have between 10,000 and 11,000 teachers tapping each day.
15:43
At one point, we had the dizzy height of 12,000 teachers.
15:47
That was...
15:48
That was great.
15:50
And we have people joining the app every single day because teachers are always leaving and retiring.
15:55
And we do send out little emails like, oh, why did you leave us? And invariably, it's like, I've left teaching.

1 HR 35 MINS LATER

111:19
walk into a school, how's it going to look different? How's it going to look the same?

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