Pathways To Inclusion

There was a tweet floating through edutwitter the other day that briefly stopped my scrolling. She’s right, of course. And it's a sentiment I've seen echoed in different corners of my timeline recently, especially because we seem to have agreed to stop worrying about the harm in children spending 14hrs a day looking at a screen. And yet she’s missing something crucial. Because these things actually rely on a large number of elements all locking into place. For example: Availability. One of the things this pandemic has revealed is the extent to which the professional and managerial classes are able to work at home on flexible working hours in a way that others, on whom all our comfort, health and safety is utterly dependent, can’t. I call parents, from the comfort of my bedroom, to discuss their children’s home learning. The parents - cleaners, NHS staff, shop workers - will often answer from their places of work. Once I’ve done what I need to do, I go downstairs to work with my...

  ALL POSTS #22 Selective Schools and the Four Types of Silence December 04, 2020 “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 of children will pass the 11-plus." (John Bercow) #21 Cash for Questions - School reward schemes and why they don't work November 20, 2020 "What Ryan and Deci found was that the use of extrinsic rewards actually serves to inhibit someone’s intrinsic motivation to perform a task. They are less likely to engage with it after the reward has been offered than had no reward been offered at all." #20 Turning Points: Being on the wrong side of history November 02, 2020 "Put a competent conservative in charge and they still won’t be able to convincingly build the structures we need to help us get through these times together. Because global crises help bring the plight of the most vulnerable out of the shadows and into the light...