I’m honoured to be featured in WomenEd’s next book in print, my first ever published piece ‘Hawa or Eve’. Thank you for all the 💜 that got me here @WomenEd @WomenEdLondon @LizAMFree @ViviennePorritt @WomenEdNI lots more to come. Waiting for the right contact 🎁

Stepping up in education isn't just about climbing a hierarchy. It’s flexible working. It’s balancing parenting & progression. It’s early years, schools & policy. Leadership must be inclusive & sustainable. Join our network #StepUpNetwork #EdChat

“A glass ceiling for women. A concrete ceiling for global majority leaders” Mubina Husain uses that comparison to describe the barriers she sees in education. Later in the conversation, Louise asks if talented global majority educators are applying for leadership roles, why are so few reaching them? Is school leadership a meritocracy? And what needs to change in recruitment and promotion? Watch the clip and tell us what you think. 👇 #teaching #equity #education #teacherlife #teachertok #teachersoftiktok

Should pupils attend music lessons during Ramadan? And should teachers be able to take Eid off? When pupils at Mubina Husain’s school said they couldn’t attend music lessons during Ramadan, she worked with families, staff and students to find a way forward. But Mubina also recalls a time when she felt unable to ask for Eid off herself. After rushing out of school to spend the day with her young children, a puncture left her sitting by the roadside in tears. Should schools be planning for Ramadan and Eid or leaving pupils and staff to work things out themselves? What does your school do well and what could it do better? 👇 #teaching #education #islam #teacherlife #teachertok #teachersoftiktok

For those out there, that want to find their people, try following @msybibi @TryThisTeaching @mradamkohlbeck @ottleyoconnor @MrMPritchard

According to this article, the govt want to bring back coursework. If that happens, then you will not be "bringing back clever". Kids will use LLMs to write the coursework, outsource their cognition, and you will accelerate the reverse Flynn effect & the "stupidogenic" society. Explained well here by Barbara Oakley. barbaraoakley.com/why-iq-sco… Would love to see a govt reform that closes the IGCSE independent school coursework loophole rather than increasing the amount of coursework in the system.

This is incredible. Peters generosity extends beyond his students, as he happily shares his resources with all. A huge thank you - I’ve used and shared your KS3 & Physics resources lots!

Data noise, indicator or a blip? A brilliant substack on how to ‘read’ GCSE data. Mark guides curiosity, helping us keep perspective while we crunch and invites us to pause before we conclude. I’m an RSL, and some of this is new to me. Worth sharing.

Insights from A-levels: Maths has 115k entries & Eng Lit just 36k. 20 yrs ago they both had about 50k. At the risk of sounding like Claude, this isn't just educational change - it's cultural change. A generation of kids will be far more familiar with quadratics & conditional probability than Mr Rochester & Ophelia. Bayes is destroying Defoe... substack.nomoremarking.com/p…

Interesting discussions following the new education reform announcements. If we ignore the timing of the announcement, here are my thoughts 💭 We can redesign qualifications, rebalance academic and technical pathways (although I’m not convinced that this is the answer at 14 years old), and rewrite the curriculum but if we don’t tackle the wider issues in society that are driving what ‘success’ looks like to our students, we’ll only merely move the furniture around. We know that education can and is a great lever for social mobility but it cannot compensate or fix wider issues in today’s society. Our students are more fixated on the gym and possessions than swapping a graduate cap for a hard hat. There is also for me what feels like a false debate about preparing young people with the skills they need for the future. Skills don’t exist in a vacuum, they are built on knowledge. If we want students to become adaptable, creative and analytical, we must first ensure they have a rich foundation of knowledge to draw upon. Knowledge isn’t the alternative to skills, it’s what makes skills possible. I also wonder just how given the challenges with funding, school buildings, teacher recruitment how some of the suggestions can practically work.

Advocates of traditional teaching methods are incorrectly caricatured as favouring ‘factory models’ of schooling. The truth couldn’t be further: pursuing knowledge to inherit the marvels of our civilisation. @andyburnham seeks to destroy this by tying schools to *local* jobs. 1/

To @andyburnham and @LucyMPowell, There are lots of problems and things to worry about with the introduction of a new technical route at age 14. As mentioned in the article (and flagged by union bosses) there are substantial workload and resourcing implications. Schools don't have lots of slack, and we will be teaching our current curriculums full time as soon as September hits. When will we plan and resource a whole bunch of new technical pathways? Which workforce will teach them, and with what physical infrastructure? How will schools figure out which ones to deliver? How will they be examined? Announcing this in the holidays is traditionally considered a poor move. The Tories were big for it, Labour have consistently done it in the first week back to school to match The Grid, and broadly it is anxiety inducing and not very fun for anybody. I have more substantive issues though: Focusing on your local area's job market somewhat renders the entire project of social mobility dead. The point of schools and education is to take students beyond their horizons, not constrain them within it. Yes, we want students to gain employable skills, and yes, from a purely utilitarian perspective it makes sense for those skills to be local ones, but we cannot lose track of the fact we want students to be *universally* employable, and to communicate to them that the world is their oyster and they can do anything they want. Channeling students into vocational routes at age 14 is - in my opinion - far too young. As much as you say you want parity between the two routes, you won't have it. There is literally an entry in Urban Dictionary for the term "BTEC" to mean a crappy knock-off. The current GCSE regime we have is the best we have ever hand in terms of its rigour, robustness and richness and all students should have the right to access it and carry its credentials with them for life. In the past when we have done stuff like this, it is always "other people's children" who end up doing the technical routes. High performing and middle class schools will magically end up with fewer children in technical routes, and poor performing schools will shovel their toughest students (who are statistically from lower socio-economic backgrounds) into them. This is what happened last time, and it will happen again. It will not help social mobility, and it will ironically decrease employability. Yes, this child might be more likely to be employable as a bricklayer (which, to be clear, is fine), but they will be less employable as a data manager, software engineer, accountant, events planner or retail manager (which, to be clear, is not fine). It's definitely the case that there is a small % of students in a small % of areas that might need different approaches to what we currently have. But it is a logical fallacy to take that small % and extrapolate it to a nation-wide policy change. I would strongly urge you to look at the reams of research that have already been conducted in the area, and established that - potentially alone in the west - our education system is doing pretty damn well. We have a flawed but strong curriculum, improving behaviour and standards across the board and a workforce that is ever more engaged with the research base. After decades of two- and three- tier systems, we have state schools that are now proving that disadvantaged students can leave school with astonishingly high academic qualifications. Let's not row that back. (PS there are plenty of people with rich experience and expertise in this area [who aren't me]. These people are deeply invested in getting the best life outcomes for our students, they aren't fusty old Govian academic snobs. I am always happy to try and help you find them.) tes.com/magazine/news/second…

Gem 💎 alert: Are you a teacher who live models, draws, explains? This by @abubakarhatimy is brilliant if you want to explain concepts better: notability, features, synch and the why behind the pedagogy. youtu.be/KShRQH5D4lc

God grant me the confidence of a 24-year old edtech graduate employee condemning a profession she’s never worked in or studied to irrelevance based on zero evidence 🙏

There are, of course, lots of downsides to on screen exams. One is "curricular backwash" whereby more and more schools will start introducing typing on screens to their day to day lessons, as opposed to pen and paper bookwork. This will definitely be a bad thing. Pedagogically, we know from the research literature and basic lived experience that it will result in worse learning conditions for students. There are issues with traditional exams, but A. They aren't that big and B. Replacing them with something much much worse is obviously not a good idea.

The number of consultants who have AI generated a summary/graphic of the new EEF inclusion guidance > The number of consultants who have read the full report and written their own reflections on it.

Here's the question I think we should be asking about school improvement right now: What would be the impact on student achievement of giving every teacher 25 hours of professional learning on the science of learning? Without this, leaders cannot prioritize improvement efforts.

On my way, Clacton.