Laura McInerney

Exactly. Much like the purposes set out in our National curriculum in the ‘88 Act

I did also originally say not in multi-party countries but took it off as I thought it was obvious. If you have a single dominant party (or an authoritarian government) it’s also much easier!

My fault, I confused Wales and Scotland population! Basically if you’re under 6m you’re fine. Above 6m, you don’t get this sort of agreement. It’s why you see it in places that are small - Finland, Estonia - or in more provincially based systems.

It doesn't matter what they think.
This government had a huge majority for five years. They should have just done good things.

The fact the news and polls have convinced politicans and the public that you need to win every week is ridiculous. It's not big brother or X factor each week.

The higher you abstract the easier it is to find things in common. Once you implement, especially across a large and diverse population, the more the reality of differences comes to the fore.
It’s why everyone is loving ‘inclusion’ at the mo. As a word, it’s easy to agree. On the ground… let’s see.

Not in countries bigger than Wales. And even then not more than we have agreed in the 1988 Act:

Yes, this was the same conclusion we came to!

I expect it has also got worse with ChatGPT etc but I also think my patience for it has got worse over time too!

Even on those, I’ve long been amazed at how vague most people are. We did a thing in early days of Schools Week where we interviewed a load of leaders of high P8 schools and then regional commissioners about their plans for improvement and we got… very little that was specific enough to be useful.

That’s because there’ll never be agreement so we have to suck that uncertainty up as a feature not a bug.

The worst culprit, IMO, is anything which is trying to be global in education. It’s such a specific cultural thing that there’s not much you can say that makes sense across big audiences. This is why you get a lot of ‘creativity’ and ‘love of x’ chat, but not a lot of detail.

Speeches have been surprisingly vague for ages, even before AI. A few years ago I went back to Hansard in the 90s and the quality of speeches in Parliament was night and day. (I blame phones being allowed in Parliament).
But it’s definitely becoming obvious in a LOT of social media.

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Me too!

It’s almost as if social science is cooler than history… 😉

Coin used as Leeds bus fare was 2,000‑year‑old currency The coin was handed down to Peter Edwards from his grandfather in the 1950s.

This is the sort of thing a cashless society robs us of, the opportunity to try to get away with paying the bus fare in Carthaginian currency www.bbc.co.uk/news/article...

Really interesting piece, learned lots, thanks for writing.

*have!
I need to get this pre ordered.

You had a book coming? That’s so brilliant!

The clip i saw of her talking at the select committee sounded like she was saying she wanted pupils to do both, in the same way that English is split into language and literature, so I’m a bit confused now.

I talk to you!

Post code and income, I think.

I really don’t remember him looking so much like a weather forecaster!

I think we might still own the domain for the ‘would you go grammar’ tool which predicted if your child would be likely to get in.

I appreciate you continuing to debate despite mine too! We can continue another time 🤗

Because the very fact that the children were able to attain highly to 11 without being in a grammar school suggests they don’t need a particular focus. The reason we focus on SEND and FSM is because their results show the opposite.

If you’re not bothered about inequality why were you on about the house price thing in the first place?

It’s because we think that by saying the words ‘technical education’ it will solve the issues of low attainment and challenging behaviour that are often collected into those schools. Alas, it doesn’t.

Why would you care only about the most able kids having this? Thats what I find so baffling!

Are you planning to create more of those?