Sandy Leaton Gray

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One of the deep rooted historic problems IOE has is reconciling its aggressive turn away from spirituality in teacher training, and exclusively towards nascent psychology, in the early 20th century. We are trying to think through how to remediate that through encouraging 21st century sapience.

Glad to hear that, it was painful writing them given the dark nature of the history.

Well, without giving too much away, as it’s not officially accepted yet, it’s a philosophy one that builds on the book ‘Intelligence, Sapience and Learning’ that we published last year.

Of course my co-author, who is known for his prolific writing, wrote a three page ripost to the handful of extremely minor points raised by the second reviewer. I’ve persuaded him we don’t need to send that in. 😂

Well, something unprecedented just happened. After years of emotionally exhausting reviews, I got one that said the submitted paper was great and nothing really needed changing. 😮😄

The thing I found most insufferable was the exceptions and accommodations made for the children of the already hyperprivileged. For example the independent school that covertly graded pupils bronze-silver-gold depending on the potential for parental endowment and personalised teaching accordingly.

So many proverbial bodies buried!

Relatable. Considering writing my own book about the intensely weird way I spent my 20s observing some of these types up close whilst being apparently invisible to them.

See it as a kind of community of practice (of wealth and power), with him as a kind of hub, and it makes more sense.

Uber and Bolt warn of 15% fare increase from ‘taxi tax’ plan The firms have asked Rachel Reeves not to impose VAT on private hire journeys, saying it would hit vulnerable passengers and put women’s safety at risk

Uber and Bolt warn of 15% fare increase from ‘taxi tax’ plan. I think people are absolutely right to object as the unintended consequences, particularly outside metropolitan zones with generous public transport, will be vast.

www.thetimes.com/article/ac20...

I think it’s fair to say he’s taking a rather different approach to custodianship than Jackie Kennedy here.

Title: Northern Lights

Should facial analysis help determine whom companies hire? A new paper suggests a photo can tell a recruiter much about an applicant’s personality

www.economist.com/business/202... TL:DR to profile people this way replicates the biometric racism that Galton and Bertillon were so fascinated by, and which ultimately contributed significantly to the holocaust.

The 2025 Curriculum and Assessment Review Final Report was meant to “build a world-class curriculum for all.” In reality, it signals something quite different: the closure of curriculum reform in England. 🧵

A big shout out to the Cambridgeshire Cycling Proficiency teachers out and about in Sawston this week with cohorts of primary schoolchildren, chanting in unison ‘Turning right!’ ‘Turning left!’ ‘Looking for traffic!’ as they rode along. Cuteness itself and a perfect pedagogy for safety drill.

There was a time dunce hats, caning, British Empire Day and separate syllabi for boys and girls were popular in village schools as pedagogical strategies, but then we invented educational research.

Luckily most people don’t feel like that or I’d be unemployed, wouldn’t I? And I certainly wouldn’t be advising organisations on training via my consultancy business. But you do you.

Music is a National Curriculum subject with two components: performing and composing, and listening and appraising. Everyone is supposed to be studying music until KS4 options. Practical lessons often take the form of recorder/ukelele/group violin/choral singing/percussion.

That’s great! Let’s have more of it.

My final point is that anti-intellectualism is the root of all evil when it comes to education. That’s not to say we need to be pretentious, but as educators we must never outsource questions such as who determines knowledge and how different forms of knowledge fit together. To do so is neglectful.

The problem you have at the moment is the fiction that education can be influenced at a population level by the actions of individual schools, children and teachers. It creates ‘busywork’ with no tide raising all the boats.

So in other publications currently under review or in press we have suggested changes along the lines of reintroducing ‘vernacular’ or folk knowledge linked to eg climate change and sustainability, much greater intergenerational contact in education, smaller schools and new forms of collaboration.

The curriculum has all that already. In the vernacular, the review is just a rinse-and-repeat of the last decade. It moves things around whilst sounding virtuous, but it doesn’t face the massive herd of elephants in the room: poverty, regional disparities and the knowledge economy hurtling ahead.

15.
Full paper forthcoming but in the meantime see my academic preprint on the Interim Curriculum Review. doi.org/10.31235/osf... /Ends

14.
Stability is not the same as justice. Procedural consensus is not democracy. Education policy that refuses to truly imagine the future is already obsolete.

13.
Curriculum should be a public conversation about how we live together, not a delivery system for inherited abstractions. The Final Review turns that conversation off.

12.
To break that cycle, we need a new approach to reform:
1. Name your theory of knowledge.
2. Trust teachers as epistemic agents.
3. Allow learning to breathe.
4. Judgement, not just testing.
5. Education as encounter, not closure.

11.
The danger is that “curriculum reform” now functions as ritual, not renewal - a way of maintaining legitimacy while avoiding the civic and ethical questions that education ought to ask.

10.
In my paper I call this process epistemic consolidation, and I identify five markers:
1. Stability as virtue
2. Depoliticised consensus
3. Symbolic inclusion
4. Assessment entrenchment
5. Epistemic finality