1908: the Lancet, one of the most respected scientific journals, calls for 18 age limit on reading in bed amidst a moral panic surrounding children becoming "addicted" to novels, which were "designed to keep kids hooked" and destroy their attention/mental health

Asking this on Bluesky out of laziness, but would any south London/south London adjacent folks who work in tech be interested in taking part in a "work in progress" night to try out new talks? (quick 🧵)

Primary Teachers! It's BRITISH SCIENCE WEEK next week and since I can't visit all your schools, I've written a blog post with some ideas for FUN AND EXCITING SCIENCE DEMONSTRATIONS for you to use to explore / explain the science of RAINBOWS yourself!

I do wonder how much this has changed and how much has stayed the same. I remember 3 weeks into y7 being offered a police escort home because of an expected fight between our school and the nearby rival (long history, one went co-ed before the other, girlfriends were ‘stolen’. All 20? years prior.)

Some tips here that can and should be universally applied in all classrooms, yet I’ve seen similarly worded “tips” set out as Section F provision in EHCPs.

I grew up on-site on a young offenders institute where my Dad worked. Part of my learning to read was from the kids he'd bring round to read my Spider-Man comics with me. Then came trips to the library for Asterix, Tintin, weekly copies of Beano and Dandy, then on to 2000AD etc. Comics are great.

We now have over 10yr of back issues of the Phoenix, so pretty much everywhere in our house is in grabbing distance of one. The kids are all teens now and they still regularly pick them up and flick through. Lost track of the number of times in history they say ‘oh yeah, he was in corpse talk’.

"Code was the medium, [but] judgment was always the craft. We just conflated the two because, until now, you couldn’t exercise the judgment without also doing the typing."

This is an important part of the reforms, not just getting expertise where it is needed more easily, but also from the point of view of building collective responsibility, with specialist settings & mainstream working in partnership as a community of schools serving a community of children.

Dydd Gŵyl Dewi Hapus 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁷󠁬󠁳󠁿 The snowdrops have done a marvellous job through the many weeks of grey but I am very ready for the daffodils and sunshine to take over. Our hill is usually a week or two behind the lower ground but surely our time will come…

If your interested in SEND reforms might want to tune in here now as legal team breaking them down with SEND parents. www.facebook.com/share/v/1DyP...

If you’re at @researchedbrum.bsky.social tomorrow I’d love to see you at 11:55 in the MFL corridor. Room 105. It’ll be fun. I’m going to share some of the insights on belonging from researchers like Claude Steele, Greg Walton, Geoff Cohen, Kathryn Riley and David Yeager. See you there?

Me for the rest of the day after having to actually talk to someone on the phone

Everyone ready for #rEDBrum tomorrow? Come and see me talking about how a synthesis of evidence is at the heart of our teaching and learning principles 🔬

Planning the trip now... Also feel the need to point out for anyone I might accost in the coffee queue that I still mostly look like my profile picture but with added glasses because I am in disguise and not just getting old or anything at all. Don't be fooled :)

you know I would say her matching pink phone case really makes this, gives Goodwin a huge "sad loser man at the end of Legally Blonde" vibe

My new book, "Teaching Meaning", the first for general teachers (I believe) to draw on enactive cognitive science, is finished and being laid out. It'll be adding something completely fresh to educational discourse within weeks!

I wrote about the SEND proposals in the White Paper, and my view of how we got here politically. V personal - no one's views but mine. open.substack.com/pub/jimlaude...

cockney rhyming slang - "hark at that influencer she'll do anything for a bit of gorton" - gorton and denton - attention

One of the "that's why it's worth it" home ed group days. Birthday cake; an impromptu show with the teens helping the youngers; children running around outside; exams, LAs and general life chat; a couple of new faces who want to stick around; and the rain held off until it was time to go home. 😍

A tale of two Times SEND stories on X, the everything app: same paper, same journalist, 48 hours apart Story about spending on equine therapy - 136,000 views, 111 RTs, 95 comments, many foam-flecked Story about 20+ system-induced teen suicides - 4,000 views, 30 RTs, 7 mostly scornful comments

Exclusive: Kevan Collins has been appointed as the education secretary’s delivery adviser with a focus on SEND reform and reviewing how the department engages with councils https://schoolsweek.co.uk/kevan-collins-to-be-phillipsons-send-delivery-adviser/

Come and see me at #rEDBrum! I'll be on in Session 6, 2:50, Room 202 - Maths corridor talking about how we used a bunch of research to develop our common principles of teaching and learning and how we've kept them going ❤️ 🔬 ❤️ #EduSky

📚Little research exists on how schools support students who are both autistic & nonbinary, even though teachers already navigate this. I’m a doctoral researcher at University of Birmingham, recruiting secondary teachers for interviews. #AutRes 🎬CPD video provided 🔎https://thegoo.se/teachers-info

Wrote quite extensively a while back about how schools are set up for the most able children and how this makes them institutionally biased against those who find things most difficult. bennewmark.wordpress.com/2023/04/29/w...

We’ve added this into our morning time this year and it’s been a great way to introduce all sorts of important figures and moments.

Useful list to see where to start with the white paper. I'm very interested in the details of off-rolling crackdown, tracking of pupil movements and the 'data spine'; and transition from primary to secondary. As for community collaboration - may I suggest offering private candidate exam support ;)

For the government, the real work to sell its SEND reforms begins now. A government source tells me that they are not seeing this as the end of the conversation, and the outreach that Bridget Phillipson has committed to in recent months will continue👇

Here we go... Off to batten down the hatches in the home ed support group. www.gov.uk/government/p...

Pupils’ special educational needs will be met through a new layered system of support, with education, health and care plans reserved for only the most complex cases Here's what you need to know... https://schoolsweek.co.uk/schools-white-paper-the-key-send-reform-policies/

So we finally have the White Paper and SEND documents - @tesmagazine.bsky.social has all you need to know. First, the SEND reform proposals - including EHCP restrictions/standardisation and new individual plans for schools to create - from @johngroberts.bsky.social www.tes.com/magazine/new...

SEND reforms. I don't envy any government trying to reform this mess at all, but this will be absolutely dangerous if they get this wrong, already SEND groups, Parents, Disability Charities lining up to start protesting if they do. I don't think Labour get how unifying this is for voters.

Language is a way of coordinating actions and meanings: a way of being in a community. It isn't something transmitted to us and stored somewhere in our brain. Much the same happens when we participate in reading communities and mathematicising communities.

As we're getting into that last term before the GCSE exam, I'm making our programming tasks simpler and reminding students about the programming revision booklet I made - it's aimed at OCR, but I'm sure you could tweak it for other boards. #TeamCompSci www.advanced-ict.info/examples/Pyt...

Sharing this again I wrote what feels a lifetime ago: bennewmark.wordpress.com/2021/04/13/l...

I've been doing detailed home ed planning per 6-8 week block, in basically the same way, for 5+ years now. Yet *every time* I think I'll have a ton of spare time to get on it while the children have a week off structured stuff, and guess what? It's Friday and I have loads left to do...

New! My 196th gems post. Ideas, updates and resources for maths teachers. 💎 www.resourceaholic.com/2026/02/5-ma... Hat tips to follow. #mathstoday #ukmathschat #alevelmaths

I think it's just an 'othering'. People love to blame our societal ills on other groups and love to impose rules on other people who are not themselves, in order to fix them. They ignore that older people (they themselves) are also impacted by it. It's part of the same coin as anti-immigrant stuff.

COME ONE COME ALL #rEDBRUM

Here is a new Bar Magnet Lab app. I hope you find it useful 🧲 #iTeachPhysics #Science 🧪 sites.google.com/view/hookean...

Coming up the ramp at Euston I always flashback to being 15, travelling on my own down from Telford after my mum had flown back out to Tanzania, to meet the friend who had agreed - several weeks before - to put me up for the summer.

Really powerful interview.

14-16 programs cover three routes - direct entry, school or LA placement, and students who are EHE and attend part-time. I looked into the EHE side here: open.substack.com/pub/learnwha...

Who’s coming to @researchedbrum.bsky.social on the 28th? @bethgg.bsky.social @bennewmark.bsky.social @jonhutchinson.bsky.social @didau.bsky.social @paulclinepsy.bsky.social @oldmanteacher1.bsky.social ?? I’m feeling in need of some focus on actual learning…

'Now is the time to step forward together and seize this moment to create one system with high ambition for all children' https://schoolsweek.co.uk/well-fail-a-generation-if-we-say-send-reform-is-too-difficult/

All secondaries will need inclusion bases under DfE 10-year estates plan. Will those that don’t already have one be in a position to repurpose/add space? Plan for primaries is less clear 🤷🏻‍♀️

So grateful to people like Katie who have helped "Why Don't Things Fall Up?" become a go-to book for anyone, young or old, who needs an introduction to the key ideas of science. Science Week (6-15 March) is a great time to give it to someone you know who might benefit from reading it:

Calling all science followers and educators, #eduphysics #eduscience I am looking for book titles for a 11y old who is dead keen on science to read before she joins secondary school in September, thanks everyone, PS please share even if you are not sure yourselves

This is clearly a post from within cognitivism. But what do the EduCogSciers have to say about this? For me, it clearly draws a distinction between knowledge and understanding. Something that many EduCogSciers have denied (knowledge = understanding). #EduSky

Somewhere along the line **someone** has to do the uncomfortable work of understanding what the hell is going on with the code and project (and keeping that understanding current in the face of ongoing changes to the project) Vibe coding is trading that understanding for short-term gains