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#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. They help people see the folly of undervaluing those sectors of society on which it turns out we are all, always, utterly dependent. And they help us see that other ways are possible."
#19 How open should we be with our students' safeguarding files?
October 11, 2020
"We are uncomfortable when people share their stories of trauma, we don't really know how best to respond. How to listen empathically, without judgement, but also without feeling overwhelmed ourselves. So we've created a culture in which these stories are Not To Be Shared, and we gratefully accept any excuse that helps us avoid hearing them."
"All the children I've seen permanently excluded, have already to some extent excluded themselves. Excluding children permanently from school is merely a way of colluding with them in their own self-sabotage. It is a way of confirming to the child the image they already hold of themselves. It is an abdication of our duty as a key part of that child’s community, to do whatever it takes to get him off that downward slide, rather than send him hurtling down it at ever greater speed."
"At its most Kafkaesque, I find that the support she needs for her child is conditional on the very conditions whose absence have necessitated the support in the first place."
#16 Grade Moderation: 2020 Hindsight
August 09, 2020
"The unfairness has always been there. What this current situation has done is simply to force us to explicitly and ‘manually’ factor this inequity into the calculations ourselves, rather than have it done by some invisible hand. This is not creating new problems, it just brings to the surface all the ones that used to remain quietly hidden away."
"I found myself reading it again and again. There was something else, something about the phraseology that kept haunting me, like a ghostly lament echoing down the walls of the empty school corridor. "I need your help"... "it is totally unfair of your child to add extra demands"... "school life is already going to be incredibly complicated"... "we will not have time". And I began to realise, this is desperation, not condemnation. This head's letter is not so much a rebuke of a child as it is a cry for help."
#14 The Mental Health Crisis that Never Happened?
July 07, 2020
"In the back of my mind lurks another, more depressing possibility. That mental health difficulties are, on balance, more likely to arise when schools are open than when they are not. That the place where I dreamt of students finding a cure for their difficulties, may be the very place making them sick in the first place."
"Toddle Waddle does not have a narrative arc as such, and it becomes clear early on that we are not going to see much in the way of characterisation. Instead it becomes an almost Joycean sequence of hallucinatory fragments, imagery and meaning floating across the pages without form or structure."
#12 Why We Should Postpone this Year's 11-Plus Exams
June 02, 2020
"If things go ahead as planned, then at a time when we should be bringing people together, children will be segregated in the cruellest possible way. At a time when we should lend a hand to those in need, we will be drawing up the ladder and leaving them to fall. At a time when we should be offering a safe and nurturing environment for all children, we will be subjecting some of them to the pressures of the highest stakes testing process."
"I miss the undulating flow of a varied existence, the rhythmic passing between spaces, the rituals that celebrate the demarcation of time and place. The experiences, for the most part, remain largely similar. But they are no longer physically or temporally distinct from each other. And I'm finding this problematic."
#10 A Case of Simple Arithmetic - Learning disabilities and population ranking
April 15, 2020
"People with learning disabilities will always be unduly punished by a system that enumerates and ranks the populace in this way. Because to fully understand all the contributions they make, all the 'value' they add, requires an empathic understanding of humanity that such a system inevitably precludes."
#9 What we Gain from Losing our Safety Net - Reflections on developmental trauma in a global pandemic
April 02, 2020
"Many children with whom I work, who have suffered through early childhood trauma, have never been able to develop this fundamental sense of security. Theirs has been a lifetime of donning their metaphorical face masks, of keeping 2m away from strangers."
#8 Private School Conversion Therapy
March 10, 2020
"Selective schools are vehicles for preserving status and shutting down social mobility. In doing so they create areas of entrenched disadvantage. They are a social ill, for which we all have to pay the price at some point... for the burden that low social mobility and inter-generational deprivation places on the health system, on the justice system, the costs of unemployment, the cost to economic growth, the waste of talent."
#7 Talking to Children about Climate Change
March 03, 2020
"It can all start to feel like an abdication of responsibility from our generation to the next in any case. Too many assemblies appear to be pedalling the idea that this is something people of my generation are no longer able to help with, and that it will be up to today's youth to find the answers that have so far eluded us."
"There is a significant risk that putting students through a particularly punitive disciplinary process could both echo the relational traumas they have experienced in the past, and amplify its effects in the present. If a child has experienced or felt some kind of neglect, or rejection, or separation from a key care giver... then placing them in an isolation booth carries with it an obvious risk of re-traumatising the student. You risk reminding the student of, and reinforcing in their minds, the stories they have told themselves to make sense of the trauma. That adults don’t want them around. That they don’t deserve to get what others are getting. That they are worthless."
#5 Telling Your Own Story - Playwriting and SEND
February 03, 2020
"Here they could see themselves, in fiction, as the protagonists they so wanted to be. Empowered, with agency, with resolutions. Heroes in their own story. Playing out the conversations they want to have, in the way they want to have them."
#4 Roger Scruton and the Conservative view of Education
February 03, 2020
"For Roger Scruton, it was a mistake to ever think that education should be child-centered. The purpose of education, in his mind, should never be to lift children up into a world they can enjoy and be a part of, per se, but rather to pass the batons of knowledge, and appreciation of beauty, into their waiting hands"
#3 Autism, Superpowers and Disabilities
January 25, 2020
"With the children I work with, aged 11 - 16, their identities are so malleable. They are still in the process of developing their identity as autistic young people, and the way these messages filter down to them at certain critical moments in their development could determine whether these identities are inflected with success and heroism, or by hardship and exclusion."
#2 Private Schools, Charities, and Power
January 21, 2020
"There’s another reason why charities are so often the preferred choice for those on the political right. The whole system, as Niebuhr realised 80 years ago, serves to justify and indeed reinforce the idea that there is a natural and morally acceptable hierarchy of power and influence in society. By donating to charity, the wealthy and the powerful are able to perform an act that simultaneously justifies their privilege and protects them from guilt."
#1 To Feel Belonging
January 16, 2020
"When a school stops asking what they can do for a child, and starts asking what the child can do for them, you lose something profound. That sense of the school serving their community. The need for children to have a space where they feel like they belong. Children become rows on a spreadsheet, and I have watched as names, faces, are coldly deleted. And when they become data points, then children's lived experiences, vague and unquantifiable as they are, fade into an irrelevant adjunct, and the chances of compassion and relationship building all but disappear."
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