Founder & CEO @unlockedgrads •Board etc: @childrenscomm @impetusuk @get_further @youthendowfund BF(@PRTuk) •Forever teacher & policy nerd (KSA/TF06)
Joined October 2010
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950 Photos and videos
Highly appreciative of the TFL worker this morning at Paddington SCHOOLING on good tube etiquette.
“I don’t want see you boarding before people have come off the tube you are getting on. That makes no sense”
“Get those backpacks off before you get on a crowded carriage everyone”
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Somehow missed the publication of 4 evaluations of Trauma Informed Practice funded by YEF and the Home Office, the first RCTs looking at the connection between trauma informed practice and children's behaviour and involvement in crime.
Headline: "no or very small positive impact"
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How this is reported by the YEF is interesting. There is clearly a real desire for TIP to work. I think perhaps it speaks to a practice which many people who work with these children want to do, and motivates them to sign up to this work in the first place youthendowmentfund.org.uk/wh…
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Not sure who to raise this with, but I really don’t like the new voice on the Bakerloo line…
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May 31
Kids who end up in prison come from a small number of hyper-local areas. It’s a no brainer that more work should be done in these areas to work out what exactly is wrong and how to fix it.
Simultaneously we need to rethink YOIs, starting with how we train and support officers.
May 31
This was so shocking to research.
- A fifth of kids in YOIs went to the same 6 schools.
- 2/3 grew up in care
- 43% feel unsafe in custody
- 2/3 of young offenders go onto reoffend
- a place at a YOI costs double the fees at Eton and a Secure Training Centre as much as the Ritz
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May 31
As explained here, the cost of holding a child in custody is as expensive as living in the Ritz! But YOIs are unimaginably violent and outcomes are poor. The temptation is to focus on diversion alone, but this will never be the whole solution because we need the option of custody
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May 31
Here’s the @RSylvester1 article, and great to see such an engaged youth justice minister in @JakeBenRichards
‘You can’t harm someone to heal them’: the crisis in Britain’s youth justice system observer.co.uk/news/politics…
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May 31
For YOIs to deliver safe and secure care, we need to invest in radical workforce reform - developing domain specific expertise through much more training and support for frontline staff as trusted adults.
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May 28
On first read this seems like an actually insane approach to reading. Am now a bit terrified that we’re slipping towards a dystopian future where instead of reading amazing books we prompt some LLM chat bot to churn out formulated crap masquerading as literature for us…
May 15
2. Teach Tales
Our reading philosophy at Alpha is simple: kids learn to love reading by reading what they love.
Sure, it’s important for kids to be exposed to classic literature. But being forced to read highbrow literature as a young teen is often the very thing that makes kids hate reading in the first place. Many of them never bother picking up a novel again.
So, we built Teach Tales to solve this problem.
Teach Tales is an AI-powered story-building platform that turns your kid into the author of their own custom adventures.
teachtales.com/
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Natasha Porter OBE retweeted
May 24
Providing individual written feedback to students in a class of 25 is time-consuming. Some teachers are invested in this process but I'm not aware of evidence to support this over less intensive approaches. Am I up to date on this, @dylanwiliam?
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May 21
See a number of these being used in prison education too. Good to have such a clearly laid out document to myth bust around some of these!
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May 16
Grateful to all the Met police officers working to keep London peaceful and safe today
May 15
🧵London will be very busy this weekend with the #EmiratesFACup final and two large protests taking place in central London. Officers will be on duty to keep people safe and minimise disruption. Please plan ahead if you’re travelling.
mynewsdesk.com/uk/metpoliceu…
ALT What's on in London image showing the Unite the Kingdom protest, Nakba Day protest and FA Cup Final.
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Only 9% of people in prison have 5 GCSEs and only 2% have passed 2 A levels. About 2/3 of adults in prison are functionally illiterate.
Academic attainment is one of the most powerful protective factors.
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(This is from a cohort of prisoners’ NPD records matched at point of release for a study looking at the educational profile of prisoners in the adult estate.)
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Perhaps next we could be really angry at those schools where kids are failing to get 5 good GCSEs and it is just being accepted as inevitable because of the challenges they face?
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Natasha Porter OBE retweeted
May 2
Fabulous day at @researchEDGsy
Great sessions on writing and keynotes by @jon_hutchinson_ and @daisychristo
Brilliant session on learning from prisons by @NPorter_
And I had fun in mine!
Superb organisation- thanks to everyone involved 🔥🔥👏👏👏
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Some people will be graduating university with humanities degrees this summer who have never written an essay themselves. AI has made cheating the best option for a median level university student, says @daisychristo in her keynote at @researchEDGsy
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Delighted to be presenting at the inaugural @researchEDGsy. I’ll be sharing what lessons schools can learn about engaging some of the hardest to reach children from the best professional practice in our prisons from our book Leading Prison Landings.
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Listening to a welcome speech with a fun anecdote about the MADNESS of national curriculum “levels of progress” back in the day at @researchEDGsy.
This is a strong reminder about the risks of having a compulsory national curriculum when the evidence continues to evolve.
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Apr 30
Shocking and awful that this is needed
Apr 30
By sheer coincidence, it was my turn to do Thought For The Day at TTA this morning, so I chose to talk about the horrific attack in Golders Green yesterday, and what it means to be a Jew in 2026 Britain.
Please give it a few minutes of your time if you can.
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