RISE advisers reveal ‘hostility’ from ‘stuck’ schools Leaders recruited to the government’s RISE improvement programme have faced 'hostility'

Yet another article which only draws on the opinion of one woman (and she is talking about Reception).

I wonder if anyone is noticing how invisible women are in the reporting of the education sector.

schoolsweek.co.uk/rise-adviser...

Write to Read: Motivating and Engaging Literacy Learners Centre for Literacy and Social Justice Seminar

Do join us on Tuesday for this free seminar www.eventbrite.co.uk/e/write-to-r... it’ll be useful! @kashleyenglish.bsky.social @debrakidd.bsky.social @jonnybid.bsky.social @jonny-walker.bsky.social @raesnape.bsky.social @primarychamp.bsky.social @benniekara.bsky.social please share! All welcome!

It's good to see the outreach team from Cambridge Uni doing some great work in the North East. I was lucky enough to help out at their Interview Conference today, along with other teachers who were providing practice interviews. Such a privilege to support Eng Lit students on their journey.

Really looking forward to the #ReconstructingReading conference this week from the National Literacy Trust. Lots of interest from our Reading team within school. We'll probably watch recorded sessions together so we can reflect on what we can do better.

Interesting. I enjoyed Babel & Yellowface. Both very pacy, w important ideas. Perhaps a little showy too, and some undeveloped characterisation/relationships in Babel, I felt.

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Was Charlotte Brontë's “madwoman in the attic” a Jamaican heiress? Did Jane Austen's Mansfield Park sideline the slave wealth of its characters? How was her own family tied to the Caribbean plantations?

Decolonising the nineteenth century novel.

An excellent listen for students and educators.

Fascinating links to historical research presented in Dr Kauffman's new book, Heiresses: Marriage, Inheritance and Caribbean Slavery.

#teamEnglish #EduSky

note that though this might be the case, the flags were also a cause for concern & would be removed.

The effect was intimidating, whatever the intention. We had recently delivered assemblies & PSHE lessons on 'flags', so at least this groundwork let us have informed discussion w pupils abt it.

I wonder if anyone else has had an issue with flags appearing outside their school? On Tues, Armistice Day, we arrived to find flags on all the lamp posts directly outside our school. A generous take is that they were put there for Armistice but the HT v quickly emailed the sch community to ...

Highly numerate colleagues of mine say the only way they can get a handle on all the detail is by spending hours on YouTube watching explainers!!
I've watched some and they told me things I could never have gleaned from the website.

Thanks for this. Excellent points combined with some valid challenge imo.

This is really good. Overall, a very positive assessment of the CAR for English/Literacy. It does offer some important challenges and sets out hopes for the next steps.

Useful links at the end to responses from other bodies in the English community. That's my weekend reading sorted.

I do think the subject expertise on SLT can have an influence on approaches to teaching and learning. All the schools I've worked in have had strong SLT representation from the English department & that has been a good thing.

I feel there are some overlapping issues for Eng & Hist especially around diversifying rather than decolonising curriculum. I know there were submissions made around this for English & I was at a meeting where teachers felt strongly about it. Totally agree that alternative paradigms are needed.

A superb read on the Curriculum & Assessment Review.

Excellent blogs. I found the claims made about what is working well very jarring when set against the quoted data around widening gaps. The Review states it has worked through a social justice lens but I'm not convinced by this at all. I think you had the right word for it: complacency.

This response to the CAR recommendations for English will be well worth reading.

Due out tomorrow.

There's also a lot of substantive knwl that could be built in from linguistic research. And pupils can do their own research.
Lang change - now there's another fascinating & useful topic. I could go on!
Hopefully the exploration of language diversity will emerge as a curricular thread in English?

Spoken language study opens up so many thrilling and pertinent debates. Pupil engagement is high.
What if KS4 pupils could do extended writing on this - Discuss the view that there's only one correct way to talk. Or this - The way we speak reveals who we are. Discuss your view on this statement.

spoken language use, power and identity. There may be some way of bringing this in but it feels like a lack of joined up thinking, esp as knwl about lang will prob be built into an Oracy framework. I'm thinking about the spoken lang work we do at KS3 which feels relevant, imp and exciting to pupils

Yesterday, I was trying to find positives in the CAR for English Lang but I also feel disappointed it chose not to make recs which would align the subject more closely with some core disciplinary concepts. For eg, it's not clear if it will enable students to study sociolinguistic issues around ...

I look forward to reading it. I've got lots more thoughts so it will be interesting to see where we overlap.

Oh good to hear that. I noticed they didn't footnote Hirsch (I think, I've only glanced through) but went for Lambert & Young re-powerful knowledge. Still problematic 😔. There are so many other ways of looking at 'knowledge' which could revitalise the study of lit.

I don't think there was a comment about the current stipulation of studying texts only by British writers.

I wonder if this might change.

I guess the key question now, especially with perhaps related concerns around the wellbeing of young people who are not in the workforce, is: is incremental change enough?

Yes. Discussion of the role of curriculum, and, significantly, assessment, in young people's well-being was largely absent. Yet these stats are deeply unsettling & should be a call to action.

Finally, there is no clarity on what the threads/big ideas/unifying concepts are that will make the key stages in English cohere.

What happens about that? Who thrashes this out? It is contentious in English & without knowing what these will be, the CAR is a slightly moot point??

Tests.

Any of the proposed tests could have unintended consequences. I do have concerns around the impact of the proposed KS2 writing test if its main aim is to assess technical accuracy. Will it narrow the teaching of writing?

Same potential prob with any Y8 tests - could distort teaching.

KS4 English Lit. A missed opportunity & not addressing the elephant in the room - assessment. Disappointing to see the continued fixation on reading a whole 19th novel. Hard to see where the flexibility is to enable the study of contemporary, diverse texts. Do fewer poems?