Watched the new Anaconda movie last night, which is every bit as silly but as satisfying as it needed to be. Also a reminder that Luhrmann’s biggest mistake in Romeo + Juliet was casting Paul Rudd as Paris. Paul Rudd goony dancing as an astronaut? I’d take that over soggy fishtank boy any day.

Ronan Keating is now… *squints*… Tom Jones? Dear god. What a way to make me feel old at the start of the year!

As someone once pointed out (@missmc.bsky.social possibly?) schools have the budget to do what they were doing in c2010. The problem is so many agencies have retreated/closed that schools pick up the slack without the full budget nor skills to do it properly. Then getting blame when it goes wrong…

if you can't afford clothes, it's not clothing poverty, it's poverty. If you can't afford sanitary protection, it's not period poverty, it's poverty. Divvying up poverty into little bits hides the fact that poverty is poverty and gives right-wingers an in to say "poor people need to budget better."

Huge rise… compared to 2020-2021, when you were banned from leaving your house with a cough. And probably wouldn’t go to a Covid den just for hiccups. Very strange set of comparative data.

Excellent blog. My main take on Twitter was always: ‘If this was a pub, would I visit?’ I can put up with disagreement, rowdy evenings, occasional fights. But hard life rule: I don’t frequent hooligan pubs.

When I was in DHSC I thought we could change the law to reduce or eliminate a lot of this tick box training. Found out there is no law requiring it. No DHSC policy either. Or NHS-England policy. It has just become commonplace - people think it is required, so they arrange it, but it isn't.

(on a more serious note, companies must lose a phenomenal amount of time on this stuff, and I'm not sure what purpose it serves, certainly in the way I've seen it being done, where it couldn't be more clearly a tick-box exercise)

I especially loved the annual LA mandatory online asbestos training. Especially as our building opened in 1999 and so was asbestos free.

community and the number of staff who require training in each area. However it does feel as though we are being affected by seemingly arbitrary decisions to reduce renewal cycles to annual with maximum training groups of 12. A licence to print money with limited evidence of need. 2/2

The amount of content we are now required to cover annually, either by the LA, NHS or via commercial training providers has resulted in us consulting on reducing the teaching week by an hour in order to accommodate it all. It’s a particular issue for Special schools due to the nature of our 1/2

We had one module (can’t remember which one) where I’d never done the module before and I just went straight for the test and passed. Most of this stuff isn’t difficult and shouldn’t be difficult, but they make it out to be such a big deal.

10000000000000000%. If I have to do another bullshit EDI, GDPR, safeguarding or e-safety module again I may lose it.

Most of our annual mandatory training at work has this (we have to do a fair bit because of being in a heavily regulated industry, as well as being responsible for critical national infrastructure) - there’s a screening quiz first and if you get it all correct, you can skip most of the training.

And for school governors especially those of us who are retired headteachers. Watched all the mandatory videos at double speed but still hours of time wasted.

Some alternative questions: 1. Should I add butter to this food? 2. Would melted cheese on top improve this food? 3. Should I add a bit more butter to this food? 4. What's on telly?

A year or so ago a Question Time audience member suggested the NHS could save millions by having doctors & nurses do quizzes at start of annual mandatory training courses - and only make you do it if you fail. I think it could go for most jobs tbh.

Got this fantastically clever Christmas gift. It's a dedicated algorithm free music player that you can carry around without the distractions of your phone, and it can hold thousands of songs without needing an internet connection. The UI is so simple anyone can manage it. Fantastic

Great Twixmas activity this morning: - dictated notes on every clothes/shoes item into Notes on iPhone - copy and pasted into chatgpt & asked what I should get rid of/what I need - then copy and pasted into separate chat and asked for outfit idea given today’s weather/planned activities

Teacher salaries haven’t increased as much as average earnings. (Doctor lines are same). But I always wonder: how much of this is because of huge minimum wage increases bringing the average up?

Was oddly pleased to hear the PM pop up on You & Yours today, my fave Radio 4 consumer show. Alas, this strategy of sending him out to talk with ‘The Public’ is stymied by the fact that it sounded like 15 minutes of him reading agenda item 7(b) at a municipal meeting that could’ve been an email. 🫠

We're looking for case studies! 📢 The @suttontrust.bsky.social and @smfthinktank.bsky.social are researching school based nurseries - and we're looking far and wide for schools and early years settings with strong partnerships....

Always worth remembering that, when it comes to populist leadership (and cults), the ideas and policies are not supposed to make sense. Hypocritical whiplash is part of the power. As cult psychologists discovered ages ago: after a certain commitment point, inconsistency *increases* belief strength.

Good luck to everyone attempting to get young people out of the door (well, let's face it, out of bed) at the end of term, at the start of the darkest week of the school year

I think this was probably my favourite book of 2025. Eye opening, occasionally unsettling, couldn’t work out if I agreed or disagreed. Everything a book should be to make you think!

Models like this are worth looking at, perhaps in supplement to a smaller Lords. The expertise of the Lords is a good scrutiny check on laws. But it would be worth ‘the people’ looking over it too. Because, while MPs ‘represent’ the people, their role means they are *not* ‘the people’.

Ann Limb, too. She was a brilliant college principal and has always been a tremendous advocate for lifelong learning.

Pleased to see both Michael Barber and Russell Hobby going into House of Lords. Two great education folk, and brilliant policy brains. 👏

This is like how American towns often have stores called ‘x Shoppe’ It’s supposed to look serious and historical but countries with deep history don’t need ‘Shoppes’ to make people believe it.

🧵1/n Don't turn your overnight oats into a grenade! What the hell, I hear you ask? Well, gather round for a thread of light relief.

In the next 18 months the number of 80 year olds will hit a high as boomers hit the mark. The NHS is going to be inundated with the fragile old for a decade. Likewise, the number of 18 year olds is going up the next few years. Neither driving tests or NHS appointments are going to get better.

Perfect analogy.

Teachers who’ve had training in parental communication are more likely to feel very confident calling home. For negative calls, confidence jumps from 18% (no training) to 24% (with training) — a meaningful boost for a tricky part of the job. Has your school offered this training?👇

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.’

1. There's going to be a lot of talk about over or under diagnosis and the conversation is going to be a mess. This is because how ADHD and ASD are defined has shifted. An ADHD diagnosis today isn't the same thing as an ADHD diagnosis ten years ago.

#FashionTeacherAdvent Door Number 4 Warm in my @teachertapp.bsky.social Xmas jumper.

Nigel Farage was a racist bully at school but Rachel Reeves won the wrong chess championship so who can say who is worse?

Today was so long that my second @teachertapp.bsky.social alert came through. All answered, streak intact.

The backlash to the proposals to limit trial by jury is a great example of the UK's stale cakeism. We want the nice things but don't want to pay for them. Then when someone proposes something different we kick off, so they back down, and the cycle of stagnation continues.

A Year in Willerby, available in December. 12 stories printed in a limited edition, numbered book. Illustrated with lino cut prints like these. £20. Not available on Amazon. Let us know if you're interested here. We expect to sell out. www.welcometowillerby.co.uk/a-year-in-wi...

Interesting thread.

If you're over 65 and putting 20k a year into a cash ISA you can definitely afford to pay more tax.

The "don't have an extra kid if you can't afford it" brigade get awfully upset when you suggest they don't stay in their £2m house if they can't afford it, don't they?

If you want some good news this morning, I showed my three boys the PM doing the six/seven thing and now they have all stopped doing it.

Was pondering the other day that if it’s the end of civilisation, and we’re burning library books to stay warm, what five books do you save?

I read this as ‘no PE’ which I can get on board with!

*rolls eyes* The insistence among some HE folk on using a distorted funding baseline is really something to behold. Per-student HE funding is now the same as in 2011-12 before tuition fees were tripled. Over that same period, colleges, adult learning and school sixth forms have been pummelled.

ChatGPT for teachers has launched. A landing page has a series of suggested tasks such as curriculum planning, reviewing work with a rubric. I'd like to see a robust study on the the following: chatgpt.com/use-cases/hi...