Pathways To Inclusion

When Tom Hunt MP suggested that it should be 'compulsory' for all schools to fly the British flag, all I wanted was to avoid the trap that he clearly wanted teachers to fall into. The one where he gets to cast teachers off as a washy blob of unpatriotic liberals for not wanting to plaster our schools in massive Union Jacks. Why not call his bluff? All turn up at Tom Hunt’s office demanding multiple enormous flags for all schools, one for each office, a portrait of the Queen in every classroom and 12ft marble statue of Boris Johnson in every lobby? But no, best to retain a dignified silence on the matter. He won't get as much joy from his petty culture war if he's the only one playing. I think. But my very first post on this Blog was about Belonging. So... could a sense of patriotism be a helpful thing? Would it not be good if our children were possessed with a reassuring sense of belonging to the nation of which they are a citizen? Well, perhaps. But there are differen...

“I do, often, wish I was like... more normal, you know?” (BH, Year 9) The Pantheon, Rome (architectural cross-section) Normal. What does it even mean? And why does it mean that? There’s quite a history to the word, it turns out. But untangling the history of the word ‘normal’ has helped me to better understand the history of subjugation that ‘abnormal’ or neurodiverse people have faced for centuries. And it could help us figure out what we should do next. When Anaximander of Miletus travelled from Greece to Sparta two and a half thousand years ago he brought with him an idea. If you place a rod, he said, perpendicular to the base of an upright hemisphere, then when the sun was out the shadow cast by the rod would tell you how far through the day you were. The rod was known as a gnōmōn , with the prefix gno-: to know; the shaft of the sundial was the part that knew the time of day. Later, when Roman carpenters were describing the set square used to build their grand edifices (many of...

“Man can and should make himself master over nature by his knowledge of the subject” (F. Mitterrand) Trigger Warning: Contains graphic depictions of animal cruelty and Michael Gove Last Spring I started noticing this bird sitting on a tree outside our bedroom window. At about 8am it would sing, patiently, to this other, similar looking bird perched on an antennae on the roof of the house opposite. Every morning for about a month it did this. This might happen every year, I don't know. The roads were a lot quieter than usual, and I had a bit more time around the house to notice. And then they went somewhere else. Maybe they got freaked out by the saucepan banging, who knows. But one day I realised they weren't there any more. And all that was left echoing down our empty street was a fading, imperfect memory of their song, and my lingering regret that I never found out what they were called. Anatomy of a songbird Dominion 25 years ago, on New Year’s Eve 1995, François Mitterrand ...

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...