Jonathan Mountstevens

Went down a rabbit hole with Mini-Mountie this evening, which ended up with the Lancashire Cotton Famine, after she was taught to sing Roll Alabama Roll at school today but they missed out on the opportunity to tell them about the US Civil War and the Battle of Cherbourg. Such a shame!

1. The fundamental problem with the SEND white paper is it's working off the assumption there's lots of expertise and great practice available and the issue is it's too hard to get.

The underpinning belief is if this support got to children faster and without a fight things will get better fast.

Isn’t this the job of the curriculum rather than the teacher?

You mean to say there might be trade-offs involved in governing the country? Such cynicism!

I like your line of thinking. It involves placing rather more faith in Ofsted than I have at the moment, and asking a lot of an evidence-base that I’m not convinced is up to the job, but I agree that it’s an honest attempt to rise to the challenge and we can but hope.

That’s obviously an exaggeration but my serious point is that I don’t see what the guardrail against that is. I know you wouldn’t think like that and you wouldn’t allow it in your school if you were a head, but we’re talking system-wide.

Like I imagine the conversation in which an inspector says, ‘Your results for SEND are terrible,’ and the leader says, ‘Yeah but we’ve read Ben Newmark so we’re above all that deficit model thinking because we ascribe intrinsic value to them as people and we’re the enlightened ones on this.’

Your philosophy of intrinsic human worth is beautiful, but it’s soft and cuddly and I don’t see how it provides accountability system-wide to defend against a slide back to an antiquated attitude that kids with SEND are just slow and there isn’t much we can do to help, so expectations slip.

Yeah I agree with all the stuff you say about it being damaging to say we can make everyone learn equally effectively if we only pull the right levers and that we have to stop seeing kids who find learning harder as deficient and trying to fix them. BUT I come back to my concern in the other strand…

I have a lot of sympathy for your view that the whole thing is based on false and problematic premises, but my worry with that line of thinking is how you mitigate at scale against it leading inexorably back to low expectations, low support and low accountability for kids with SEND.

Yeah I fear the same. To be clear I have a number of concerns about the SEND reforms but I don’t feel I have the time or expertise to express them coherently on here. Was just highlighting the complaints issue as it’s something I have quite a bit of experience of and I fear unintended consequences.

I've seen what they can do to a headteacher on various occasions and they are one reason I've yet to convince myself that I ever want a headship. I very much doubt I'm alone on that front. If the DfE can make it better, that's great, but I'll believe it when I see it.

There's so much in the White Paper but this really worries me. It's not so much what's said, which sounds nice, but what it might mean in practice, especially taken alongside implications of SEND reforms for schools. Complaints are already an obstacle to effective leadership in schools.

SEND help Everything you need to know about the government's special educational needs plans

New post just out:

"SEND help"

Everything you need to know about the government's special educational needs plans.

Covering: the problem the govt are trying to solve; key proposals; three big issues that will cause problems; and the politics.

(£/free trial)

open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/s...

I enjoyed the company on gate duty this morning.

Close up of contemporary Bellarmine jug by Serena Korda, with grimacing bearded face, large green toads clinging to the sides.

Close up of Mat Collishaw’s Mask of Youth, a silicon animatronic face of Elizabeth I, with detail of slightly open mouth, wonky teeth and fine downy hairs on chin and upper lip.

Face and ruff of Natasja Kensmil’s Elizabeth I, painted photo negative style and almost monochrome except for red in the hair and mouth.

Close up of Korean photographer Chan-Hyo Bae dressed as Henry VIII, with blood running down the side of his face from beneath his red wig. The top of a gold throne in the background.

TUDOR CONTEMPORARY opens at The Heong Gallery, @downingcollege.bsky.social, Cambridge in two days! I’m so excited to share these amazing artworks with you. Here’s a sneak peek - free to visit, runs to 19th April.

I loved listening to this book and since I’ll be seeing @cjfaraday.bsky.social tomorrow I had to get a hard copy for her to sign. It’s beautiful!

I love how audiobooks have made a couple of hours driving on my own something enjoyable rather than something to endure.

At the opticians and got called Mr Mountbatten. Haven’t had that for a while and these days it’s definitely not an association I’m keen on.

Thought this might be your sort of thing @bennewmark.bsky.social.

Crows at Stonehenge, where their ancestors must have perched for millennia.

Hey Salisbury! Looking good today!

Just because something is common doesn’t make it a good idea. It arises because people want a shortcut rather than because it develops high quality writing.

It’s limiting, it’s not scholarly, it’s tedious, it’s not sensitive to the demands of the subject or question, it disincentivises thought, it makes an artificial distinction between evidence and explanation etc.

It’s like a virus.

I think it stands for Point, Evidence, Explanation (or maybe Evaluation), Judgement.

Or do they mean explanation as the second E? But that doesn’t make much more sense. And one of them has written it out as evaluation.

My students did an essay plan and some of them have structured paragraphs around PEEJ when I haven’t taught them that once. What even is evaluation in this context? Why are people so addicted to a formula even when it’s obviously crap? Why can’t bad ideas go away and die quietly somewhere?

Another superb day of history teacher geekery and camaraderie from @michaeldoron.bsky.social and the #soane26 team! Excellent talks from @sam-jones.bsky.social, Fin Shenton, @citoyenneclaire.bsky.social, @egcarr.bsky.social. I will get to grow old having spoken at the same event as Richard Evans!

Of course! It looks like this.