Pathways To Inclusion

I’ve long felt that allowing some schools to choose which children they admit, based on the results of an intelligence test, is something of an elephant in the room. It’s clearly not right, but no-one seems to want to talk about it. So it was with great interest that I read John Bercow’s great ‘coming out’ in the Guardian last Saturday as an opponent of academic selection and supporter of comprehensive education. It's notable firstly because this is someone who has nothing to gain from taking this stand. As he himself points out, “vast swathes of the local electorate [are] pro-grammar schools, particularly my Conservative voters”. He will not endear himself to many people with this article, and will anger quite a few. But what struck me most is his frank astonishment at how little attention anyone was giving the matter. “In retrospect, it is extraordinary how very few representations I received against the selective system in my 22 years as an MP, given that only 25% of any cohort...

Bribing children is so tempting. What they want, especially when they're young, is sometimes so cheap, so easy to acquire, that the temptation to offer them… stuff, in exchange for them doing the thing you want them to do, is just too great. And it’s as tempting for teachers as it is for parents, which is why it's become as common a practice in schools as it is in homes. That, and the fact that most people are unaware of the long-term costs. My four year old, like most kids, loves stories. Always has. So when we were given log-in details for Pearson’s online reading programme - ‘Bug Club’ - he loved reading the stories on there too. I didn't tell him about the 'coins' that I could see him accumulating, I wanted his intrinsic enjoyment of the reading to go on for as long as possible. It came to an end last week when he was playing in the ‘rewards’ section of the site, and realised that to ‘buy’ more virtual stickers for his ‘sticker book’ he would have to read more s...

David Lammy put this out on Twitter yesterday: “It is a tragedy that in the middle of a crisis where government competence has never been more important, we have the most incompetent government of modern times.” ( David Lammy ) I feel a bit uncomfortable labelling this government incompetent. Not because I think it’s inaccurate, far from it. He makes a very valid point. But because I think it offers the government a way out. Incompetence is something they can deal with, in theory at least. They might one day nail a decent test, track and trace system, or get to roll out a nationwide vaccination programme. Most probably, they will dispel this image of incompetence simply by replacing Johnson with Sunak before the next election. Being incompetent is something you can fix. But being ideologically on the wrong side of history could be fatal. And with so many of the hurdles they’ve fallen at in recent months, from grading exams to free school meals, it feels increasingly like they are just...

How Open Should We Be With Our Students' Safeguarding Files? Schools don't really like sharing sensitive information about their students. The documents that detail a student’s Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACEs) remain closely guarded, justifiably so. But children also benefit from being able to talk about their difficulties, from having an environment in which they are able to talk about their past experiences. Indeed one of the cornerstones of Trauma Informed Practice (TIP) is that teachers should tailor their responses within the context of an understanding of the ways in which these histories have shaped their present behaviour. So of course we need to prioritise privacy and confidentiality, but at the same time we also need to create a culture of openness and understanding. How do we square this circle? This is a genuine question, rather than (on this occasion) an impassioned polemic. Because from where I'm standing there are two sides, each equally valid, which exis...

Last September our 3yr old son came home from his pre-school with his ‘home learning journal’. 30 pages, each offering some sort of task with space for us to record what he has done at home to achieve it. Fun, enriching activities... play barefoot in the sand, make a den, climb a tree, all that kind of stuff. By Christmas I was naively wondering if we would have time to complete all these home learning tasks. Turned out not to be a problem. Two months into lockdown and I was spending 30mins with him on the High Road trying to get a shot of him "catching a raindrop" on his tongue. Anyway, one of the tasks stood out from the rest. Home learning task no.8 Other activities, nominally at least, required the child to actively do something to complete the task. Make a mud pie, grow a vegetable, whatever. But I found the task of 'experiencing unconditional love' confusing, being entirely reliant on factors outside of the child's control. What would happen to the child who...

I wanted to write about a conversation I have pretty much every year. Variations of it, at least. A Mum will be on a tour, an open evening, some visit to my school and she asks to speak to the SENCo. Because her child has somehow ended up at the tail end of Year 6 (how time flies!) and now she’s not quite ready to let him stumble into this strange, labyrinthine school of mine without saying a few things first. Because our head has been busy painting a picture of the model student who he wants to see passing through our doors in September, and she knows that her child doesn’t quite... fit into that mould. Because she knows that he might do something in the early days that could give the wrong impression. And this is another opportunity for a fresh start, perhaps one of his last, and she's scared he might say something or do something that might spark that old cycle, that downward spiral. Do something that might lead us to reject him. And at that point, she knows she won’t be there h...

There are no easy answers to the 2020 grading problem, that much is clear. The disgruntled murmurings in Scotland may be nothing compared to the cacophony of anguish we’re about to be subjected to on this side of the border over the next couple of weeks. There are going to be some very distressed students, and parents - understandably, justifiably so. I sympathise with those suggesting that we should just let all teacher predicted grades stand without moderation. But on the other hand Nicola Sturgeon and John Swinney do have a point when they say that this would rather undermine the credibility of the system on which we apparently have come to rely. The question we should now be asking is: are we ok with being  completely reliant on a system whose ethical foundations are so shaky in the first place? Clouds (1905) by Arkhip Kuindzhi The main aim of the algorithms used to adjust this year’s scores appears to be to preserve the credibility of our exam grading system - thr...

This letter's been doing the rounds on EduTwitter these last few days, sparking off all manner of heated debates and reaching the ears of the local press. An academy in Lancashire sent a rather angry missive to the parents of a student with autism who had apparently not been working hard enough during lockdown. It's worth reading, if you haven't already done so. What's the first thing that strikes you? Is it the weirdly long-winded rambling? The poorly constructed clauses of the first paragraph? The way it's not personalised (it's evidently been sent to several parents), and yet at the same time still manages to come across as a deeply personal attack on the poor kid? Or is this just an inevitable result of what's been happening in education these last 10 years or so? Because this has been coming. Iterations of this letter get sent out every term. It's unusual in its brutal honesty, perhaps. Like they've forgotten that they're supposed to hide t...