In our forthcoming book, The Next Big Thing in School Improvement, we have a chapter where we talk about how diverse teachers are in their beliefs, motivations and instructional practice. We decided not to write a great deal about how much diversity in teaching we felt was optimal, but it is a conversation I have …
Continue reading How much classroom diversity should there be?
We are in the middle of a rather odd educational experiment. I said odd, because normally we run experiments in the hope of learning something new. But so far in this educational experiment, where children have received a wide variety of different distance learning ‘treatments’, we’ve done little to systematically find out how they are …
Continue reading The great education and public health experiment
Blogging is the preserve of the time-rich, and so excludes those of us currently running (in parallel) a household, a home-school for small people, and a job. However, on a conference call whilst simultaneously recording daily weather station measurements with my six year old, I realised we need a new educational theory to describe whether …
When I wrote about reforming accountability measures a few months ago, I promised I’d follow up by explaining why I don’t support any methods for ranking schools from the very worst to the very best, regardless of whether it is an attainment measure, a value-added or ‘progress’ measure or some sort of voodoo ‘contextual value-added’ …
This is an approximate transcript of the talk that Ben White and Becky Allen gave at researchED Kent on Saturday 30th November, 2019. It is a little light on references and grammatically requires improvement - sorry… we’ll try to tidy it up soon! I (Ben) am not sure if it's possible to win teaching. For …
This is a follow-up to my earlier blog 'Nobody Knows Which Schools Are Good'. I'd recommend reading it first. It is the 21st of May 2024, the biggest night of the year for state-funded schools in England. Tonight is the night when headteachers find out how they will be judged this summer. The great and …
This is the first part of the talk I gave at researchED London 2019. It is almost entirely based on work I completed with Dave Thomson at FFT Education Datalab. All the smart bits are his and the errors are mine! Have you ever read so much and thought about something so hard, that you …
If something is important, but not possible, should schools try to do it anyway? There is no better example of a thing-that-can’t-be-done than careers education. The argument for careers education seems compelling: many students (particularly from disadvantaged backgrounds) don’t know what jobs are out there, therefore careers advice is important. Nearly every adult you meet …
I thought I had nothing to say about Ofsted's proposed use of book scrutiny because there is no research on book scrutiny (I wonder why?!?). As far I am concerned, even if Ofsted's own research could show inspectors can rate books with 100% consistency, it would still be a terrible idea. The effect of the …
Last week, Ed Dorrell wrote a strange editorial in TES called ‘Why attaching excluded pupils' results to their school won't work'. I say it was strange because he failed to address the major impediment to including off-rolled pupils in accountability metrics (i.e. finding them... for that, read on). There is no doubt that there are …
