We’re always exhorted to do something different, but what if the basic principles of what you’re doing are pretty sound? Perhaps sometimes putting old wine into new bottles is better than producing new wine.

For example, giving pupils a quick mental warm-up at the start of a lesson, such as with a terminology test or a news quiz, is definitely a good thing to do: teachers have been doing it for ages, in every subject under the sun. But maybe these days we’d want to use a polling application to capture their responses.

What prompted me to think along these lines was a visit to a local allotment society open day a few weeks ago. They had scarecrows on many of the plots, to keep birds away. We all know what a scarecrow looks like, don’t we? But these folk had decided that the traditional sort of scarecrow was passé, so they came up with versions like this: