The 2017 Let Teachers SHINE competition is now open! Our annual competition, supported by tes and Capita SIMS, to find the next big idea in teaching will stay open for applications until midday on the 24th of April, when we will choose a few winning Teachers to partner with on their projects.

Now in its sixth year, the Let Teachers SHINE competition aims to find innovative methods of teaching that inspire children to succeed both at school and beyond it. The competition is for projects that aim to benefit students who experience disadvantage, and try to improve their educational achievement in literacy, numeracy and/or science.

We provide funding up to £15,000 and other support to help get the projects off the ground, or to launch it to a wider audience. To date, we have invested over £1.4 million into 54 innovative Teachers, benefiting thousands of children all over the country.

Bruno Reddy won a grant from Let Teachers SHINE in 2014 for his Times Tables Rock Stars project.

2016 saw a whole range of Teachers win a grant from the competition, including Mike Baldwin’s research project on his forest school. Mike developed Finding My Voice after the special school in which he teaches acquired a two-acre plot of woodland. The woodland-based curriculum helps children with severe learning disabilities to learn new words, develop functional speech, and encourages them to meet their own sensory and physical needs. The idea is built upon Mike’s experience of teaching a thirteen-year-old girl, who upon running in the woods, spoke for the first time. Mike is using his grant to develop an action research project, that studies the impact of verbal communication of moderate and severely learning disabled young people.

Some of our Let Teachers SHINE winners have gone on to achieve international acclaim, such as Colin Hegarty. Colin launched the maths platform HegartyMaths with the help of the Let Teachers SHINE competition. He then went on to be shortlisted to the final 10 nominees for the Global Teacher Prize from 20,000 entries, and won the Pearson national UK award for most innovative use of technology in the classroom.

Full details including the application form are now on the Let Teachers SHINE page. You may also want to read about some of the projects that have been funded in the past here.

You can email teachers@shinetrust.org.uk if you have any questions about the competition, or follow us on twitter @shinetrustuk.