James McEnaney

Higher history results revive questions about 2024 scandal Attainment for Higher History rose significantly, raising new questions about what went wrong in 2024.

Last year Higher History results fell sharply. Teachers said the SQA 'moved the goalposts', but the exam board said otherwise.

Now pass rates have jumped back up, reopening questions about whether last year's results are reliable.

@heraldscotland.bsky.social

www.heraldscotland.com/news/2536775...

Yeah it's still higher.

Ever wondered what the attainment gap actually looks like? Well here it is.

The space between the top and bottom lines is the attainment gap between the most and least deprived pupils as measured in Higher pass rates in 2025.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/2536352...

@heraldscotland.bsky.social

Exams 2025: What to expect on results day When do results go out and what does the data mean?

Tomorrow is exam results day in Scotland.

Here's everything you need to know about what to expect.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/2536296...

The word 'change' is in bold 𝘢𝘯𝘥 highlighted, and the new name gets a messy underline, so I guess we know they're serious and it 𝕕𝕖𝕗𝕚𝕟𝕚𝕥𝕖𝕝𝕪 isn't a rebrand.

'It will happen again. I’ll be asked why the world didn’t stop it. I’ll be asked why presidents and prime ministers justified the horror, and why they refused to use the word genocide'

www.heraldscotland.com/opin...

@jamesmcenaney.bsky.social‬

“The president cut your health care so he could build himself a golden ballroom” is a pretty easy message to sell

When I taught about Biafra and Rwanda students asked why the world let it happen.

If I ever return to the classroom I'll teach about #Gaza, and students will ask the same questions.

www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/2535...

Please read this today.
An excellent reflective piece from @jamesmcenaney.bsky.social.

The silence, ignorance, fear and intimidation that schools have shown in the last two years, will soon enough be proven as unforgivable at best, and complicit at worst.

www.heraldscotland.com/author/profi...

Strong piece here 👇

How would I tell students about the atrocities in Gaza? The same as every genocide It will all happen again. I’ll be asked why the world didn’t stop it. I’ll be asked why presidents and prime ministers justified the horror,…

You can read it here: www.heraldscotland.com/opinion/2535...

The @heraldscotland.bsky.social education newsletter goes out soon, and the online version is on the site now.

I used to teach students about Biafra and Rwanda. If I go back to the classroom, I'll teach about Gaza.

World leaders have had the answers from the start World-leaders continue to hide behind the semantics, more concerned with “difference of opinion” than the now estimated over 61,000 Gazans…

I’ve written for @heraldscotland.bsky.social on Gaza, and the cowardice of so-called world leaders who use statehood as a negotiation tool with the oppressor… www.heraldscotland.com/politics/vie...

The number of people from the poorest areas going to uni has increased very slightly (less than 1 percentage point) but the government's target for 2030 looks like it may be out of reach.

www.heraldscotland.com/news/2535323...

'That starving kid was actually already sick before he was being starved.'

Why Keir Starmer missed the mark on recognising state of Palestine Keir Starmer will recognise the state of Palestine - unless Israel meets specific conditions. But it simply misses the mark.

"Realistically, this is not a genuine attempt to recognise the state of Palestine.

This, simply, is politics."

www.heraldscotland.com/news/2535328...

Freedom of expression group condemns “years of legal threats” against activist who spotlights environmental issues A group campaigning for freedom of expression has condemned multinationals for “years of legal threats” against an activist.

NEW: A group campaigning for freedom of expression has condemned multinationals for “years of legal threats” against an activist who spotlights environmental and animal welfare issues cause by industrial salmon farming. bit.ly/3IQe7Hn

This is a complete nonsense statement from Peter Kyle here. Total word salad. This might be understandable (if depressing) from a backbencher, but this is *the minister responsible for the policy*.

This is an entirely normal thing for a government to be doing, but given it's *this* Labour Party we can safely assume it's going to end up being a disaster.

wonder if decades of mocking media studies as a Mickey Mouse subject has anything to do with this at all

I'm just saying that given how vocal this party has been about their backing earlier, it really is very curious, isn't it, that they've not responded? Gods, imagine how *embarrassing* it would be if they had been blindsided by this! Imagine how mortified you'd be if your judgement was awful!

Back at the start of all this, Keir Starmer said Israel had the right to cut off food, power and water to the people of Palestine.

Today he's using the recognition of their right to statehood to try to bargain with the people engaged in genocide against them.

a tweet from Louisa Loveluck reading "Sky News reporter says journalists were told by Israeli officials that aid drops into Gaza could be cancelled if media onboard filmed the shattered enclave from above."

sure sounds a lot like "if you try to photograph evidence of our war crimes we will commit more war crimes"

If a Muslim country were doing the same as Israel then western countries wouldn't be considering sanctions months and months down the line. We'd have taken military action a long time ago.

Welsh election law now requires local candidates to list their party memberships in the last year. That's good for transparency re. those listed as independents. It also gives us things like this... (Abermaw, Gwynedd by-election, polling this week)

think this is sort of interesting as actually.....no you probably didn't need to do "more research" into it? you just had to trust the state and local authorities to know better than you when it came to vaccinating your child? not good that the internet has killed faith in institutions!

I hate all of this in almost every way a thing can be hated. I hate the factless waffle that surrounds Big AI’s every improbable goal. I hate how insipidly stupid, or just plain evil, those goals so often are, and the yawning chasm between them and any form of achievable reality. I hate that Big AI’s successes are inflated and its failures ignored — or are even categorised as hilarious mis-steps, like when AI chatbots tell people to eat poisonous mushrooms, put glue on pizza, or make air diffusers from chlorine gas. I hate that Big AI consumes so much energy that every time you generate a six-fingered portrait of Anne Frank or a scene from the Vietnam war in the style of Studio Ghibli, you might as well just kill a polar bear with a crossbow. I hate that it can run roughshod over every copyright law and environmental protection on the planet in pursuit of the data it needs to continue failing, with no consequences save for the enrichment of the worst people on Earth, who have managed to make all of this magical bullshit seem sensible to an intellectual class comprised of people I wouldn’t trust to print an email.

On hatred.

Had a chuckle when I read:

“…innovation is something we must embrace if we are to reduce teacher workloads.”

We’ve had quite a lot of so-called ‘innovation’ that’s just been innoverancy.

Might have to blog on this but note that this £1m is just under the £ for enterprise announced previously.

One of the main reasons for teacher workload in 2025 is the rise in ASN. It is not just about having too much marking or planning etc. Solutions to the rise in ASN is smaller class sizes & more specialists on the ground.

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@johnswinney.bsky.social

I wonder which columnist will be first to tell us that they are simply shocked and appalled to discover that there may be some overlap between transphobia and racism.