Each school subject relates to a distinctive quest for truth. SLT must know how each subject captures this, so the curriculum as a whole teaches awe, humility & respect for truth. My piece in @CharteredColl Impact #SLTchat impact.chartered.college/art…

In this week’s episode of The Amol Rajan Connection: @daisychristo on how we’re messing up Education; the danger of the Stupidogenic Society; what technology does to our minds; long-term vs working memory; and how AI affects what children should learn. Out now on YouTube, Spotify, Apple Podcasts and Amazon Music.

I love it when people from the education world break into the wider public consciousness. And delighted that we’ve sent education’s mightiest avenger for this task.

Skills statements are making a comeback in England. This approach to assessment is one of the major differences between a knowledge-based and a skills-based curriculum. It’s a clear sign that the current government are unpicking the successful education reforms of the last 15 years. substack.nomoremarking.com/p…

How did we manage to set up one of the most selective graduate schemes in the country, where we convinced top graduates with multiple job offers to turn them all down and instead become… a prison officer?!

What's the point of school? substack.nomoremarking.com/p…

This long read from Daisy is rightly getting a lot of attention. It sets out where we’ve been, where we are and where we’re now going. It shows that, even if a policy shift is inevitable, we needn’t repeat mistakes from the past. Anyone with policy influence must read.

There are some interesting debates on US edutwitter right now. Similar in structure and tone to a lot of the debates that English edutwitter had in 2014-2019. There are things we got wrong at that time, and I can see them going wrong for the US too. One is fixating on interesting ideas that are unlikely to work at scale. For example, E-edutwitter got really excited about some strategies like the use of knowledge organisers. They went big, but probably didn't affect all that much and weren't executed well outside of a handful of adherents. I suspect similar is the case for "scripted lessons" and formal Direct Instruction, which is US-edutwitter's current big thing. The second is harder and it relates to interlocutors. It's really easy to fall into a camp or tribe. Some people are bad faith interlocutors, and need to have their arguments dismissed. But others aren't. They are people who broadly agree with you, but have issues with some of the recommendations, positions amd positionings. We didn't always disagree agreeably with those people, and I can already see some of that happening in the US. Not everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot or evil or whatever. If you sit too securely in your camp, you end up losing quite a lot of valuable insight. I personally am a lot more chill on here than I was back then, and I really regret that style of debate. I've worked hard on this vice of mine, because I could have learnt more and developed faster. My advice to US-edutwitter: not everyone who disagrees with you is doing it in bad faith. Try and listen and learn. You don't need to agree, but it's worth paying attention.

Reading this and, regardless of one’s faith, this seems to be a vitally important: “When efficiency becomes the ultimate measure of value, human beings are tempted to see themselves as a project to be optimised rather than as persons called to relationship and communion.”

#HowIUsedGISToday 1/ Vibe coding with GCSE pupils! We brainstormed features we'd like to see on our GIS app, based on the pupils' experiences using GIS so far. Great fo see how much they had picked up of core GIS features - and all included in the #TransformED Geog curriculum.

“The target isn’t the strategy”. Emboss that in gold, for just about everything in education.

Our first cohort of GCSE Latin students began their course in September, after three years of KS3 Latin teaching. We’re very proud of this. We are a school that is now over 70% PP. Don’t make Latin the preserve of the elite.

Oracy floats on a sea of knowledge The UK government wants oracy assessed “from primary to GCSE and beyond”. My take on why you can only speak well about what you know: daviddidau.substack.com/p/or…

People. I have some VERY exciting news. @MoJGovUK have published the latest @unlockedgrads retention stats directly comparing retention outcomes for Unlocked officers vs those entering the same prisons via standard routes…

Brilliant to be at this celebration of the launch of Now Foster at the House of Lords last night. Such a needed organisation.

Celebrating 10 years of @unlockedgrads and also the end of an era. Every single member of staff has stayed to the very end and I could not be more grateful to the huge support we have had over so many years to do something so incredibly hard, but so worthwhile. #ForeverUnlocked

The one thing I’d want everyone to know about Direct Instruction is that the methods, materials and routines are far less important than the underlying drive behind it: the unswerving belief that EVERY child can achieve, regardless of circumstance. DI is based on a deeply held conviction that if a child didn’t learn, it was because the teacher (or curriculum) didn’t teach them properly. In that sense, it is a movement rooted in social justice but one which takes responsibility for outcomes. In the 60s and 70s, there was a view in the education academic establishment that formal academic work was premature for 4-year-olds, and doubly so for poor ones; so what they needed was enrichment and play. Worse still, in the early 70s, some academics described DI as a racist enterprise*. Engelmann's own memoir notes that he and Bereiter were called “Nazis” and “kid-haters.” Despite this, Engelmann taught disadvantaged 4 year olds to factor and to solve simultaneous equations, and filmed it. Bereiter and Engelmann’s argument, set out in ‘Teaching Disadvantaged Children in the Preschool’, was that the disadvantaged child was not “behind” in some general developmental sense but behind in specific, teachable things, that all kids could learn with the right scope and sequence. The preschool they opened in the mid 60s ran for two hours a day, with three twenty-minute lessons in language, arithmetic and reading, taught to small groups by a teacher following a specific DI sequence. Those kids made huge gains which faded when they went to normal public schools. DI has its limitations like everything but the drive behind it is sincere. As #SoldAStory season 2 will show, it has been portrayed as something very different to what it actually is and the animating principles behind it. *Baratz and Baratz, ‘Early childhood intervention: the social science base of institutional racism.’

David presents a balanced argument, the positives and the limitations of this thing called Oracy. And warns ‘we risk treating oracy as a generic skill that can be developed independently of what children know.’ A great post.

Final blog in my 'Probably the first truly knowledge-rich GIS curriculum in the world' on practical implementation, impacts and progression. alistairhamill.substack.com/…

Great KS3 history teaching starts with great planning. In the first episode of our new podcast, @mrwbw talks through planning Soldiers on the Steppe from Changing Histories for KS3, the series from @Counsell_C and a team of expert authors. Listen here: lnkd.in/ed4CxUYt

2025 PISA analysis: "[T]he strongest readers of complex digital material were not the students with the greatest exposure to technology, but those who had read books longer than 100 pages. Reading deeply requires students to sustain attention, construct meaning, connect ideas, and critically reflect on information, precisely the capacities they need to navigate a world overflowing with digital content and AI-generated answers." ncee.org/thriving-in-a-compl… Thx Kevin Grijalva for sharing this!