The run up to a general election often trots out the good, the bad, and the ugly, of education policy. We know that what sells to the voter on the …
Rosy Retrospection & Education in the Election
“Memoria praeteritorum bonorum” [‘The past is always well remembered’] Roman saying The general election is a matter of a few short weeks ago. For those of us in education, we …
TL;DR
New words are coined each year. In our age of the Internet, new words pour into the English language at a prolific rate. Many, tagged to technology, are shortcut abbreviations …
Teaching and Trust
(Nomads II, by Pablo Jurado Ruiz) Every once in a while the bleak personal stories of our students are opened up to us like a drawer of knives. We get …
The Problem With Professional Development
I recently had the great pleasure to read a paper called, provocatively and insightfully, ‘Professional Development: A Great Way to Avoid Change’. It was published in 2004, by an Australian …
Is Research Evidence in Education the Answer?
“After 30 years of doing such work, I have concluded that classroom teaching…is perhaps the most complex, most challenging, and most demanding, subtle, nuanced, and frightening activity that …
Are Longer School Days the Answer?
With greater flexibility in setting the structure of the school day, there is a huge variety of practice emerging throughout UK schools. From different models of lesson lengths, to extended …
Why the Sutton Trust is Wrong about ‘Open Access’
When I was eleven years old I sat a tricky exam. I remember very little of the exam itself, but I remember small, tiny cracks of the day with some …
Focusing on Failure
[Insert inspirational quote about failure here] I fail therefore I succeed. Failure is the pathway to success. Learn to fail – learn to succeed. The internet is awash with aphorisms …
Evidence in Education and Building Bridges
The drive for research evidence being used in education has achieved something quite radical in our time: it has been met with near universal political consensus. You won’t hear Gove …