I watched the 1st meeting day of RFK Jr’s handpicked committee of vaccine advisors. It was utterly depressing. 1/

What is a knowledge-rich curriculum? In any event not just facts, not just math and reading, and not elitist. It is the strongest lever for equity. And thus ultimately a matter of social justice. #EduSky @timsurma.bsky.social, @danielmuijs.bsky.social

NEW: Man who wants Nobel Peace Prize creates Department of War.

Some more beautiful books here that arrived on my doorstep yesterday. @marymyatt.bsky.social . Perfect for animal classification and packed full of facts that could be used across school . My five year old loves them. #edutwitter #primaryreading #lovebooks

YES! So well articulated.

A former cabinet minister has said the UK government is “digging itself into a hole” over Palestine Action and fellow Labour peers and MPs were regretting voting to ban the group. www.theguardian.com/politics/202... #wato

DDoLL (Development Disorders of Language and Literature) has been forced to close (technical reasons that are too costly to put right, I understand). Greg Ashman 'Filling the Pail' etc + Substack contributor is setting up a network to continue invaluable support - join via Google.

And, Rachel, I'm still looking for the book that contained your brilliant short Stig of the Dump passage/analysis for SEN. Can you help? Looking forward to your next moves and whip-sharp humour if/when you're writing/posting again

2024 was - by some distance - the most expensive election in British history Labour really needs to act to take money out of politics, before it’s too late

Catholic Church said a parish priest and several others were injured after an Israeli strike hit a Gaza church. The priest, Fr. Gabriel Romanelli, was very close with the late Pope Francis and the two spoke often during the war in Gaza. apnews.com/article/gaza...

Advice from Washington Post today. 'When the price isn’t listed, I ask. So should you.'

A taster...

Reading should be a pleasure in each subject. So build it in, don't bolt it on. Let the scholarship used to design the lessons ooze through, in its cadences, rhythms & latent questions. And climb in thro well-crafted text: don't introduce knowledge as tidy, generalised facts. Publication in June...

Trump's hand-picked Supreme Court is allowing him to eviscerate the Constitution as we know it. We cannot stay silent. #ResistTrump

New in PN: A corrupted Supreme Court sinks to new lows "When future historians grapple with how Trump managed to so quickly and so thoroughly dismantle American democracy, the role of the Roberts Court cannot be overstated."

6:05 am. Hour 21 of fighting this awful tax scam. Been up all night, but not going to give up anytime soon. The health care of 17 million Americans is too important not to fight for.

Until we get to grips with why the implications of this horrific selection and the confusion and influence the discredited APEd has on gov. policy we just continue to be complacent with current gov. policy.

🎙️ Episode 2 of Chalk Dust is out now! In this episode, I sit down with the incredible Manisha Gazula—principal of Marsden Road Public School—alongside my co-host Rebecca Birch, to dive into the real, on-the-ground strategies shaping early literacy instruction.

I received a copy a couple of days ago. It's exceptionally helpful - ideas that could easily be adapted to enable creation of evidence-informed training schools in UK etc.

Very informative, very depressing. Basically, autocracies work (ie, don’t fall or don’t have to resort to full on mass oppression) for as long as their populations feel better off and safer under them. That will be the big challenge for right-wing, democratic backsliders in Europe and the US.

This is the freight train almost no one has noticed coming down the tracks. Wage stagnation, expensive housing, smaller private pensions are going to be a terrible combination.

New post. Difficult conversations about Special Educational Needs. "What are the potential benefits? What are the risks? bennewmark.wordpress.com/2025/06/24/d...

This is exactly what I’ve been trying to get across in response to Ben’s post. With good intentions, everything but the kitchen sink (excuse the flippancy of the colloquialism, but…) can get thrown at a child. We can’t just try things on a whim. Careful and thoughtful discussions needed.

Photo of the Day. Credit to Palestinian photographer, Saeed Jaras. Posting this here because hardly any mainstream media outlets will publish it. An ongoing genocide silenced. #Gaza

Aside from perhaps helping shoot down Iranian missiles it's very hard to see how the UK could even be useful in an Israeli/US operation on Iran's nuclear sites. We have about five planes and none of the necessary munitions.

Jamie Oliver appeals to APEd Committee:Marcus Fysh.Chair & Registered Contact.Conservative. Lord Knight VC.Labour. Andrew Lewer. VC James Sunderland. VC Jonathan Gullis.VC Nicholas Dakin.VC Jack Lopresti. VC Andrea Jenkyns.CHAIR. Not accountable.Deliberately confused with legit.accountable committee

VIDEO DEMO: Counting syllables in spoken words helps learners with many reading and writing tasks. In an introduction to a Spelling for Life lesson on doubling final consonants, Lyn decided to do a quick syllable counting review with the class. youtu.be/X1a6fn8kDn4

A Teacher Shares His Transformative Experience of Unstoppable Learning open.substack.com/pub/unstoppa...

"Systematic phonics... is affordable, replicable and deliverable across thousands of state schools.... That matters. In education, if it doesn’t scale, it doesn’t work."

🥳 The ‘holy grail’ of reading inventions that was birthed in NZ & exported to the world has finally been dumped. Now the way is clear for children to receive scientifically-based instruction & stop being instructional casualties. H/T @kathyrastle.bsky.social www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10....

Love this so hard - from @didau.bsky.social about his free advice to Jamie Oliver on how to run a restaurant . It's fabulous. open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

[that Robbie Gibb] who worked for the Conservative party and helped set up the most biased, hard-right news channel in the country, was deemed to be the perfect person to ensure impartiality at the BBC, tells you an awful lot about the mess it has got itself into.'adambienkov@substack

Defending the Science of Learning List-ID:<thenext30years.substack.com> Robert Pondiscio in US and Carl Hendrick UK - cutting-edge exposure of the scandal that's affected far,far too many pupils.

Metasaid to be in multibillion dollar talks to invest in intelligence startup —marking what could turn out to be one of the largest private company funding events of all time. Meanwhile, OpenAI founder Sam Altman’s eyeball-scanning identification tech is being rolled out in UK.

Struggles with 'Bleak House' open.substack.com/pub/nataliew...

Teach Us Too open.substack.com/pub/marymyat...

Brilliant interview with the exceptional Mandy Nayton. Well worth printing out the document - covering as it does so many areas encountered by struggling readers . Thanks to Brendan Lee for conducting the interview on Knowledge for Teachers Podcast SO3E9.

Sukhjot Singh "This fierce peregrine mom was patrolling her territory to provide a safe airspace for her newly fledged babies. I thought she was going to attack a few gulls that flew close, but she decided to take a hard right and turn around, offering a rare face-to-face moment with the camera."

“Once I Was A Tree” by #EoinMcLaughlin and #GuilhermeKarsten takes us on a fantastically funny journey from seed to book. It’s full of facts as and detail but never misses an opportunity for a joke both in art and in word. Clever, quirky and huge fun. @nosycrow.bsky.social #PicturebookPage

Ollie Lovell's ERRR0101_Alex Evans on Systematic School Improvement and Instructional Coaching.docx.pdf St Luke's in Exeter typical of the many schools drifting along the bottom without clear direction. Root and branch change.

NEW podcast with @trivium21c.bsky.social open.substack.com/pub/daviddid...

Excellent report. But why does the DfEd continue to ignore the c.20% of children, often lacking strong foundational skills, by avoiding simple tests showing how and why so many are completely unfit for secondary?

New post just out from @ldfreedman.bsky.social Trumps's Ukraine peace process has failed, as it was always going to. What happens next? (£/free trial) open.substack.com/pub/samf/p/t...

primarytimery.com/2025/05/20/w... Just superb. Devout wish that primary advisors to DfE literacy were to be eChristopher Such and Clare Sealy (with sub-committees). So many other priorities &biterally billions could be saved. CLD inc John Catt & Substack have added greatly to our knowledge.

@tombennett71.bsky.social “I had taken courses in lesson planning, evaluation, psychology, and research. Next to nothing was said about what a first-year teacher most needs to know: how to control a classroom,” he wrote. Robert Pondiscio 'The Next 30 Years' on Substack.

In which I confess my early struggles with reading

Tomorrow, Brill turns a sprightly 342 years old! Here's a fascinating glimpse into the typesetting process the press used in the 1970s, allowing it to print in nearly 30 non-Latin alphabets – including Arabic, Coptic, Syriac, Ethiopian, Sanskrit, Chinese and Japanese. www.youtube.com/watch?v=Gqwe...

It doesn’t. It needs to do much more, of course we get into the globalisation and immigration discussions here re: business looking for cheaper alternatives, hence why I think outward facing vocational institutions are part of the offer that is missing.