Daniel Bundred 🦡

I find I can and sometimes do feel strongly about this, but only ever really in reaction to the hard-line sentiments of others. Of course we shouldn't be the stationery cupboard and they should have a pen; also sometimes they don't have a pen and we can lend one.

Oh, is the summer holiday spat about pens this year? The inefficiency of the Bluesky algorithm in delivering conflict has caused me to miss this one.

1000 FBI agents have allegedly been spending months working over the files with their black markers. Having completed their work, it turns out there now aren't any readable files left.

And 'Willenhall, then the world' is a brilliant school motto, far more memorable and inspiring than the anodyne and interchangeable mottos common across the sector!

I remember those headlines very well. Congratulations! Turning around a school is a massive achievement, and an even bigger one to effect meaningful and sustainable cultural change in a school which has had such a long run of poor public sentiment. You and your team have done amazing things there!

Screenshot of first three paragraphs of Observer article about over a thousand largely racist responses to a photograph tweeted by Katherine Birbalsingh showing a class of pupils in her school.

A headteacher whose support base wants nothing more than to deport her pupils confidently faces the leopards.

They're not schools like ours...

I think the corporate world is leaning hard into software incapable of original thought and which has a tendency to reinforce every cognitive bias going. We may be about to see another golden age for actively managed funds and short sellers.

The bit slightly earlier when the German delegation assume the chaotic office is a building code violation, and it's explained to them that all of the exposed wiring hanging from the ceiling is actually a metaphor is comedy gold.

Continually watching the American left invent new and bizarre ways of being racist has not made me hugely optimistic about anyone's ability to handle diversity, and I've definitely seen schools attempt to cater to needs that children may not actually have (or at least didn't before the catering)

I agree that neurodiversity is by definition a form of diversity that exists across a population. But beyond that, there's the question around whether we should do anything about it - and here we sometimes end up in uncharted territory doing more harm than good.

We don't. It's often interpreted by those from other cities in the UK as a sign of hostility, I think it's more likely to be a product of urban density creating the necessity for quiet space to oneself; either way this test would fail at every bus stop used by Londoners - it's culturally insensitive

The thing that always annoyed me was the presentation of the school as a model for the 21st century. But we've seen schools with discursive rules, fragmented leadership, no systematic sanctions, unclear curriculum boundaries etc before.

It wasn't a vision for the future, it was a 1970s free school

All schools are distinct, we have cultural idiosyncracies and good schools cultivate them and wear them with pride. But good schools are also normal, with systems that deviate little between schools. School 21 thought idiosyncracies were the system, and it took them ages to discover otherwise.

I'm just astonished by the naivete of a school that thought its rituals, assertions about the future, fondness for circles, and cross-curricular work in clay, could be the core of its operations. It wasn't merely growing that acted as the reality check, it was the encounter of any external pressure.

A behaviour policy, a departmental review process, planned curriculum, assessments used to check how well students are doing and to provide guidance for improvement, are all things to be welcomed.

They are absolutely compatible with their string based induction ritual, and fascination with circles.

I wasn't much of a fan because I didn't think it would work. Then it turned out not to work. Now, through trial and error, they've managed to settle on things that work: The things that everyone else was doing.

I think they squandered a lot of potential through this bit of experiential learning.

The new approach to School 21 seems to be to run it like a normal school, but to rebrand common approaches used perfectly well in other schools.

And so ends another radical rethinking of how to run a secondary school, not with a bang but with a whimper.

Until the next one comes along...

I'd say fewer kids means less teachers; no government is likely to increase per pupil funding, which will mean lots of schools facing redundancies. Plenty of closures and merging schools as only large schools will afford specialist provision. Can currently be seen in inner London.

1. "Yeah, Ben AI might well be awful but it's coming and we can't stop it so we have to find ways it works for us."

No. Actually we don't.

We could quite easily say AI is an age inappropriate and developmentally dangerous technology and schools should lock it out.

I'm not happy with any child living in poverty. But I don't accept your binary, and I am concerned that a lot of children I teach are in England because of Russian aggression - something that I think we must be prepared to stop.

'Probably never used' is the most desirable fate for all military equipment, it doesn't diminish its importance.

How are you going to 'save the west' if you can't even see a burned out police car and think some people deserve prison sentences?

The total unfitness of Truss to ever govern can be seen in her tour of borderline totalitarian regimes in which opposition political speech is severely limited, arguing that the UK is really the enemy of free speech because we took a hard-line on incitement to violence and rioting.

Lucy Connolly?

Liz Truss' position is that it is an unreasonable infringement on freedom of speech to arrest someone who used their platform to tell rioters to set fire to hotels housing asylum seekers?

Incitement to mass murder should be protected speech?

Economic headroom to reverse the decision on the Winter Fuel Allowance, but none to take children out of poverty. I get how that works in terms of election prospects, but I do not see how that works on a basic ethical level.

Surely the thing to do is subcontract secure examinations to private test centers who already do them for things like the driving theory test?

It's a bit of a theme in comms with this government of concealing perfectly sensible policies in mad and potentially politically damaging value pronouncements.

I'm pretty sure I've seen this policy launched repeatedly from different governments. It has always been pointless.

It's very silly, but it's also an idea completely at odds with how we teach anything that matters. A curriculum without an end point is useless. Give us grit assessments!

Children can read a LOT, and devour text greedily. In #OpeningWorlds by Y6, pupils read c1000 words each lesson in history, geography & RE.
How do we do this? Intentional sequencing: every single tricky word not in bold – scour, meandered, gesture... – has been taught thoroughly before in Y3, 4 or 5