Musings on education policy
These three blogs (part I here, part II, part III) are based on a talk I gave at Headteachers' Roundtable Summit in March 2019. My thoughts on this topic have been extensively shaped by conversations with Ben White, a psychology teacher in Kent. Neither of us yet know what we think! Teachers are rarely trained …
Continue reading Writing the rules of the grading game (part I): The grade changes the child
Question: What links GCSE Design and Technology* with my 4 year old's class size? Answer: Money. And the choices we've made about how to spend it. We've made the strangest resourcing choices in England, although it is so ingrained in our societal norms that is hard for us to recognise it. Children start at age 4 …
Continue reading When would you like to be in a smaller class: age 5 or age 15?
I have been talking to many teachers and school leaders recently about what information needs to be recorded, whether in a markbook or in a centralised system, for a teacher to teach effectively. The answer is, partly, that it depends on what information the teacher is able to hold in their head, without the need …
Continue reading It’s not (just) what teachers know, it’s who teachers know
Towards the end of last year I took part in a debate about the quality of CPD. I was asked to take one side of the argument, so this is my deliberately one-sided perspective on it. The wonderful people of edu-twitter helped me compile the bizarre examples of CPD that you’ll read below. Everybody remembers …
Continue reading If CPD is so important, then why is so much of it so bad?
Sigh! New year, new grammar school paper. This time a HEPI paper by an ex-Civil Servant, Iain Mansfield, who has turned his hand to quantitative social research, starting with one of the most complex questions it is possible to devise. Thankfully I missed most of the commentary on it (bout of tonsillitis). If you didn't, …
It's time to get positive about data. The right kind of data.In my blogpost on the question of why we cannot easily measure progress, I explained why short, one-hour tests are rarely reliable enough to tell us anything interesting about whether or not a student has made sufficient progress over the course of a year. …
It’s not easy to contribute to a government report with recommendations when your modus operandi is explaining what’s gone wrong in schools, then declare it tricky to fix. But making data work better in schools is what I, alongside a dozen teachers, heads, inspectors, unions and government officials, were ask to write about. Our starting …
