This tweet has been doing the rounds on Twitter now that Nathan Gill has pleaded guilty. If only someone had tried to investigate UKIP & Russian interference 🧐 There’s another timeline where the Guardian supported me, doubled down on the investigation & I look 5 years younger ..

Actually I'm with @damsoned.bsky.social on this. I don't think the strategies in the article are particularly useful. bsky.app/profile/dams...

I do suspect the current very heavy emphasis on phonics might have had an impact on reading fluency because fluency requires us to feel rather than sound out a text, to search for meaning and to subconsciously predict where it's going.

Thread🧵🧵👏👏

Just discovered what is possibly the greatest headline of all time: "McDonald’s fries the holy grail for potato farmers"

A story that’s attracted surprisingly little attention in our media: Ex-Reform politician admits Russia-linked bribery charges www.bbc.com/news/article...

So many women have been talking, writing and warning people of the dangerous ideologies and biases of tech in Silicon Valley, for decades, and it’s so infuriating that so many men (not OP here) just flat out ignore it and act surprised at the technofascists infecting it now

Forgive a bit more self promotion but I’m dead chuffed to hear that my book has been ordered by some libraries, so that people don’t have to spend if they don’t have the cash. If you do (!) it’s available on Waterstone’s and Foyles, as well as here: www.amazon.co.uk/Study-Skills...

If you were tasked with designing a fully inclusive curriculum, where would you start? What is absolutely key? Please repost for coverage. #send

I just want a world where quiet, good work is rewarded over dancing for an algorithm. Where children aren’t used as props online, where we hear about good work not because of a social post, but because a human we trust talks about it. Where we don’t need it to be listed online to matter. That’s all

Something to cheer you all up

Shot, chaser Young men more likely to vote Green than Reform. Young men second most progressive group of any demographic. Combined right-wing vote barely bigger than Green vote alone for young men

It also maps, I imagine, closely to who spends most time on X and Facebook

Finally watched Line of Duty. Have to admit to a sense of anticlimax.

Well. That was a day.

To be fair, there’s some good ideas on this from @schoolsweek.bsky.social schoolsweek.co.uk/restrict-ehc...

What if the place you heard about ‘teacher brands’ was on the @teachertapp.bsky.social questions 🤔

"Nigel Farage has admitted he misspoke when he claimed to have bought a house in his constituency of Clacton, saying the property is in fact solely owned by his long-term partner." What he meant to say is that he lied.

Do you know, I think this cold I’ve had might well have been Covid. 2 weeks in and I’m still not right but at least the sore throat has gone

What's Nigel Farage's problem with solar panels?

Blistering.

Ladybird book in the Spotlight The Magic Porridge Pot (1971) Artist: Robert Lumley

"If something is free, you are the product." – Somebody smarter than me

Spot on Simon

Austerity is a powerful lever causing further privatisation of the public realm, hidden neatly by dispersing it to Local Authority level.

This film I am watching really is truly terrible

Reform MP says they will negotiate with the Taliban.

To be fair, I’m not entirely sure how this is Starmer’s fault. What we see now, in my view, is the result of the Tories attempting to eat first UKIP and then whatever other iteration of Farage that came next.

Nothing like being poorly in the last week of your holiday. Bah bah

Apparently, Farage has "rowed back" on part of his deporting policy. If it was any other politician it would be described as a humiliating U turn.

Yet another insanely unpopular Reform UK policy, like all their other ideas: just like fracking, leaving the ECHR, slashing taxes and public spending, getting rid of foreign students, slagging off Ukraine, etc etc.

We need to stop pussyfooting around and/or being legalistic about this and say simply: it is good and right that our law prevents our government from sending men, women, and children abroad to be tortured and killed. The Human Rights Act should be the minimum framework of a humane immigration system

It is utterly bizarre that Starmer doesn’t use the Brexit disaster to discredit farage and the tories

Actively resent the fact we’re expected to listen to a press conference on “mass deportations” as if this is a perfectly normal, mainstream thing and not the unhinged rantings of a racist who is somehow on my television.

Good morning and here, late, are your FT Weekend highlights in threaded gift link form. We begin with the Weekend Essay in which historian Timothy Snyder consider's the origins of Putin's obsession with Ukraine. Enter a danish chieftain.. on.ft.com/4fNMVFw

I'm doing them chronologically this week because why not and Simon Usborne popped to a medieval jousting tournament at Arundel Castle because my lord the English are strange. I really do commend the portraiture in this piece - you want to click on.ft.com/4fQcm9r

Beautiful everyday Ladybird things Brownie uniform (1976) Artist: Gerald Witcomb

When I went to uni to become a teacher, developing lesson plans and schemes of work was a key skill for us to learn, not because premade lesson plans didn't exist, but because *it's how you think through your lessons*. If you're just 'delivering AI content' you're not *thinking*. 😔

Excellent and sensible thread here

17/ Until material inequality is confronted, “rigour” rests on fragile foundations. That is Gove‘s legacy. /Ends

17/ Meanwhile in England, child growth is faltering under the weight of poverty and poor nutrition. Studies link early income poverty to long-term cognitive deficits of up to 13 IQ points. No curriculum reform can compensate for malnutrition.

15/ The lesson is stark. Whether traditionalist or progressive, no curriculum or assessment reform will reduce inequality unless redistribution, workload and accountability are addressed directly. Without structural change, we are rearranging the system while leaving its inequalities intact.

13/ This trajectory is about to find its ultimate form in the forthcoming curriculum and assessment review. The danger is that evidence generated within the EEF framework will be used to justify consolidating this highly neo-conservative model of education.

10/ In other words, we are fixing the wrong problem. Curriculum and pedagogy are treated as levers for equality, while the material conditions of inequality go unaddressed.

9/ Yet this framing introduces contradictions. Literacy trials show that phonics can raise scores, but gaps persist because poverty and home resources are untouched. Mastery mathematics delivers small gains, yet regional divides between London and the North remain entrenched.

England today: As I said previously, 923,000 16–24-year-olds NEET (1 in 8), the highest since 2014. Not a shortage of jobs. A failure of institutions.

Which goes to show IMHHHHHO that it is economics and not education that makes for ‘social mobility’ (or job success)

Nearly a million young people are on the books whose lives have stalled. The number is escalating fast. The post-2010 curriculum and assessment framework has not helped them, has it? Yet all we seem to be offering them is to move it all around a bit. www.bbc.com/news/article...

The witch trials of 1612 still cast a long shadow.