I find Gmail’s new “write this for me” feature deeply sinister. They’re trying to convince you that you are dumb and helpless. Don’t let them steal your ability to formulate thoughts and communicate. You were capable of writing an email in 2022 and you’re capable now.

IGCSE Edexcel English Language pupil guide complete and available here - overview of course, AOs and assessment criterion for each part of both papers - we are exam only next year! sites.google.com/view/engteac...

Y11 IGCSE Edexcel Lang Lit homework booklet. An interleaved (interweaved, never quite sure) revision tool Each week, three tasks 1. Paper 1 Reading practice. 2. Quotation drills for OMAM 3. Essay practice for OMAM but will translate into other areas sites.google.com/view/engteac...

Academic wider reading is a focus for Y12. Introduced Topic Tues, whereby ppls present on an article they've read that has piqued interest. I've gone through our SORA database + collated magazines we subscribe to against subject group with aim pupils will read 1 article a wk. A start.

This is interesting, thought-provoking & doubtless controversial, and I think we're going to hear more & more about it. One thing: it surely fatally weakens the idea of "overdiagnosis"

Something that applies to the human child/education too - both moving from lab to classroom and perhaps even more so when school is not part of the equation at all.

Fascinating story. Mice raised in cages their entire lives are given a brief taste of relative freedom, and thereby become less fearful. Interesting implications for scientific research that’s based on keeping animals in a state of deprivation.

A slightly longer than planned Christmas break with a little added snow… However back to a flurry of activity with major new amendments to the Children’s Wellbeing Bill. What’s the gossip, everyone?

*Spectacular* Christmas show at New Vic Stoke ✅ Christmas films begun ✅ Children halfway through reading us A Christmas Carol 📖 Shopping and wrapping all done ✅ Christmas jigsaw in progress 🧩 Hold here please for a short intermission - back in the New Year.

I have used Little but Fierce with adults and children and it works great for both. It is a fabulous entry into D&D style roleplay without the mountains of things to learn. It is accessible, great fun to play and highly recommended, and this new version looks fab.

To my regular followers, I'm happy to give any of you a free Kindle edition of this book if you fancy reading it:

Meeting s friend over from Australia later today - first met them via Twitter. Social media can be awful, and does a lot of harm in the world (it would, without doubt, be a better place without X) but some wonderful things have resulted from it for me. That includes knowing some of you. Thank you.

I am trying out Substack - hoping it's straight forward! open.substack.com/pub/claireha...

I'm sharing this here, as I have on Facebook and Instagram, but there's no account on here to share from, and I just think this is wonderful. A really good balance of design and implementation, and appears to achieve everything it set out to do, and it *SO* appeals to my inner 'work nerd'.

If you were given a choice of two Further Maths modules (FP1, FP2, FS1, FS2, FM1, FM2, D1, D2), which one would you a) study as a student b) teach as a teacher as your top two? Interested to hear this as a few of my Y12 FM students are asking for option changes! #ALevelMaths #Mathstoday

Is there anyone who would be prepared to do some past paper marking for Edexcel International GCSE English Spec A for me? Just a few one-off papers, prepared to pay a going rate. #EduSky

Come and work with me! app.vacancy-filler.co.uk/salescrm/Car... Barton Peveril Sixth Form College is in Eastleigh, near Southampton. We have over 1100 students studying A-Level Maths across both year groups. If you have any questions, please drop me a message! #ALevelMaths

Just starting to catalogue a few of my home ed related books. I have about 20x this left to go.

I grew up in one of the many ‘nothing much’ towns of England, briefly lived in London, and moved ‘back’ again to raise my children rurally (giving up my job, and most prospects of doing anything similar ever again, in the process). But they will almost certainly have to move again for work.

Is there anyone who would be prepared to do some past paper marking for Edexcel International GCSE English Spec A for me? Just a few one-off papers, prepared to pay a going rate. #EduSky

100% Assessment open.substack.com/pub/100asses...

A few people have suggested I should write a “how to teach” book but I’d feel fraudulent doing that. However, I do think that trainee and new science teachers would get a lot out of reading this. One trainee recently told me it was better than anything on their official teacher training reading list

"You can’t just set up a room and put some cushions in it and hope it’s going to be OK." Why resource bases in mainstream schools may not be the SEND savings silver bullet it has been heralded to be. @johngroberts.bsky.social reports⬇️

NEW POST: The 1% club: @captaink77.bsky.social's analysis of Tribunal stats shows LAs won almost none of 25k SEND appeals in 2025, at an indefensible cost of over £200m. Plus, a shocking announcement from the DfE shows the truth of the “national SEND conversation” www.specialneedsjungle.com/l...

New study by @abesterman.bsky.social shows that approx. 6% of people with schizophrenia have specific, identifiable genetic variants, which could help inform new genetic tests. Results suggest that genetic testing may be useful for early diagnosis in the future. 🗞️ tinyurl.com/39t8jmkp

I recognise the flaws and challenges of predicted grades, but I think that our whole functional assessment structures are far less statistically robust at an individual level than we perhaps think they are...

It’s also partly *why* Westminster votes this way, isn’t it? So you can have a look and see who is voting on which side and follow someone you usually agree with.

This might sound depressing and cynical and that your MP is outsourcing thinking to The Party Machine but in reality it is simply broadly speaking impossible for a single human being to comprehend every piece of legislation that even their own party brings forward in the UK legislature

This is a good thread on why political parties matter, but wanted to draw out this point as a reason why 'candidate diversity' matters, in that our life and career experiences will shape what the three or four things MPs know about (and are therefore most likely to rebel or be influential on).

To bring forth a world means to enact dimensions of meaning through the living body in action and through multiple kinds of psychological, sensorimotor, and interpersonal couplings. The mind is what occurs in these enactments and not what goes in in the head. —Linguisitc Bodies #EduSky

The Department for Education has refused to release the full report of a damning audit that found it broke the law in its handling of pupil data – claiming it 'may distract' from plans to collate even more information on children schoolsweek.co.uk/dfe-dodges-d...

Right, it's a bit like the declining number of people with alcoholism: is that because Gen Z is somehow different or that Gen X's diagnoses are 'fake' - no, it's because Gen Zs as a cohort drink less, we've changed the environment in a way that is positive for younger people who are at risk.

(It's the increase in the wage floor IMO. Yes, loads of other states have raised the minimum wage but we are the only country to have drastically shifted ours and it just fits the actual data a lot better.)

'UK has too many ADHD diagnoses' doesn't pass the smell test as explanation for UK's rising number of young people not in education, employment or training - ADHD diagnoses have gone up at similar rates across our peers, but the UK's rising NEETs are a UK issue.

My dad abhors any negative comments about immigrants. Asked him recently why he’s so strong on it: ‘Because we’re always happy to take the rich and clever ones. Which means it’s not about disliking immigrants. It’s about disliking the poor and vulnerable. And that’s a bad human instinct.’

**How distributed is the brain-wide network that is recruited for cognition?** That goes to the top of the list! #neuroskyence doi.org/10.1038/s415...

Interesting dive into the problems that AI is causing for new entrants into prestigious professions, which are necessarily built around facts and precision. Medicine, teaching and many others are now facing a similar wave of potential deskilling by AI tools. Are we ready for this?

7. We should also look at why so many more people feel they need diagnosis. Are people coping less well than they were? Or were they always not coping and now talking about it more? Has life changed in ways that make it harder to cope?

Good one for #psychology #teachers @theatp.bsky.social No benefit of interleaved (vs massed) retrieval practice in an introductory psychology course. Suggests that interleaving benefits (v. well established in maths) may be far weaker for other subjects. psycnet.apa.org/record/2026-... #UKEd

This just seems like the wrong end of the telescope to me. Review should be into barriers to employment, not diagnosis. I really *do* have a fine motor condition, but in the 21st century this poses absolutely no barrier to me working in 90 per cent of jobs in the UK.

We have a big box of dressing up clothes at our home ed group - lots of them are ones my children grew out of many years ago (a few I made). It comes out every time and is one of the most used things there - I love that they’re still bringing playful joy 😍

A half day absence is not always a half day of missed learning. A half day attendance is not always a half day of learning. The “attendance” system measures a very small window of presence at registration times.

One idea given by EduCognitivism was: We'll save KS3 (lower secondary) and be ambitious with learning by just having students memorise quiz questions of content. It's time for a new vision of what learning in school entails. And that requires moving on from computer metaphors. #EduSky #UKEd

Although it does tend to lead to this...

I always said - and I think I was usually being truthful - that "between us, we got 100% on this assessment. Individually, no one did. That means that every single person in this room has something to learn from someone else here, and that's why we're going to go through it together now".

I’m totally paralysed below the knees and can’t use 80% of the muscles in my legs. DWP claimed I don’t meet the standard rate for PIP mobility, let alone enhanced.

Primary 5-a-day with 4 levels of difficulty: bronze, silver, gold and platinum #corbett5aday #maths5aday Answers: corbettmathsprimary.com/2018/05/30/5...

Morning everyone :)

Ben thanks for saying this. My child is never going to get a GCSE but still needs education. The focus on intelligence as central to judging if worthy of support is inhumane. Like going back to the days of declaring that some children are 'ineducable', like some children just don't matter.