Now we seem to have 'Imprison Like a Champion', here is my full(ish) analysis of its parent title: philbeadle.substack.com/p/te…

The British establishment have all ready covered this new Banksy up. Can we get it Retweeted 10,000 times to show that they can never cover up their complicity in war crimes?? Protect the right to protest! RT!

Should Nigel Farage's dodgy tax dealings be investigated for criminal behaviour? Please RT if you think so.

This is a gross betrayal of the electorate, fraud of the highest order and gross misconduct in a public office. People in Britain suffered Johnson sold himselm to the highest bidder. Johnson should answer for these crimes in a court of law. RT if you agree.

What utter dickheads we are… Rayner fought for workers: sick pay, maternity rights, protection from unfair dismissal Farage and his MPs voted it down No sick pay from day one. No protections. Rayner gets binned over £40k in stamp duty Farage dodges £44k, shrugs & strolls on Well done bellends, the ultra wealthy win again.

RT @jessicamayclark: This really cannot be retweeted enough. Really can’t. So what you waiting for? 🙏👍

One of the life-long things we learn at school is how important school is. In fact, we start to learn this before we go to school, when we tell our three and four-year-olds that schools are where learning really starts, and that they’re too old now to play all day. Many of us learnt that if we didn’t go to school, we would be illiterate, uneducated, wouldn’t have any idea what to do with ourselves – in short, we would waste our lives. We’d fritter our time away, without doing anything serious or challenging. We learnt that our education is all down to our teachers and our school, that without them we would be nothing. Perhaps we need to believe that, because why else would we have spent so many formative years of our lives sitting in classrooms, and then in turn send our children to do the same? It must be really important, right? If we allowed ourselves to think otherwise we’d have to ask some difficult questions about the way that we spent those years, and that might challenge some of the assumptions we hold about society and the way that we treat young people. The belief that school is crucially important means that we can justify causing misery. We justify making small children sit at desks and copy words, when their bodies just want to move. We justify making teenagers spend months taking exam after exam, dominating years of their lives. We justify testing our primary children on grammar they find incomprehensible. We tell ourselves that it has to be this way, that this is the way to drive up standards. We do to our children what was done to us, because it’s too frightening to do anything else. We learnt at school to be scared of ourselves and our motivations. We learnt to think that we must be made to do things or else we’d do nothing at all. Which is strange, because we can see evidence to the contrary all around us. Small children learn wherever they go, with no need for force. Adults set themselves enormous challenges – writing books, and running marathons – with no need for force. Humans are driven to learn and to participate in the world around them. Until you stop them, and tell that that instead, they should follow instructions and do what they’re told. Somewhere along our motivation was educated out of us. We lost our self-belief. We’re afraid to do anything differently – but if we continue to do what we’ve always done, we will only learn what we’ve always learnt. Our children need something better. This has to start with us.

When I was young, I got very good at taking exams. I sat nine GCSE’s, each with at least two papers. I went to 6th form college and sat more exams there. Onto university, and at the end of each year there were more exams which I had to pass in order to continue. Summer after summer, dominated by high stakes exams. I sat in hot exam halls with my clear pencil case and wrote until my hand hurt. By the time I was in my early twenties, I knew a lot about my own exam taking style. I knew that it wouldn’t matter if I slept badly the night before, because I would get a rush of adrenaline and it would carry me through. I knew that afterwards I would be convinced I had done terribly and would go over and over the answers in my head. I knew that mostly I would do okay even if I was convinced I hadn’t, although I did almost fail a biochemistry exam in my first year at university. And histology exams were more of a guessing exercise than a test of my knowledge. I never could see anything in the slides. Sometimes I dream I have to take another exam, and I get that same adrenaline rush. I wake up remembering being seated in distanced rows, with tags fastening my papers together. I remember the panic of a leaking pen, or realising that you’ve completely misunderstood the question with only ten minutes to go. But now, no one wants to set me an exam. Since I finished university, I have not managed to find anywhere to practice that skill that I so painfully developed, summer after summer. And when I think about it, I can see why. What would be the point of making me sit in a lecture room and write everything that I could remember, without being allowed to look things up or discuss them with someone else? What purpose would it serve? How would it be worth all the hours of revision? What would it tell anyone usefully about my capabilities in work or life? And then I wonder what might I have learnt in with those years, had they not been so dominated by exams and the need to do well every summer. For what I learn was to play safe, not to choose anything too challenging. I learnt to choose subjects where I thought I would perform, not that I found most interesting or inspiring. Sometimes I got it wrong (like the biochem) and then I would avoid that subject if I could in the future. I did not choose art, or Japanese, or philosophy, because I was not sure of my ability to do well enough in the exam. I learnt to colour within the lines and to give the examiners what they wanted. I did it well. It took me years to unlearn what I learnt over those years of exams. It took me years to start to scribble outside the lines, or to think for myself without wondering if I was ‘getting it right’. And I did well. For those who do badly, they learnt that there is no point in trying, that they don’t measure up and now their grades will confirm that to everyone else. Our young people are still going through the same performance. Year after year of their adolescence is spent worrying about exams, and years of their education is spent trying to get them to perform well for those hours in an exam hall. We don’t seem to be able to stop, despite the evidence that it isn’t working and that many of our young people are left ill-equipped for life and work. We need to think differently. Let’s tear up the exam papers and start again.

Here's a genuinely sweet piece of writing by me where the examiner is the lead character: open.substack.com/pub/philbe…

Absolute disgrace of a school. WT actual F?

RT @naomicfisher: I was talking to a grandmother last week about schooling. ‘I can see the difference’ she said. ‘When my children were you…

Car insurance is an absolute joke. Not the prices necessarily, although that's a laugh, but the faff surrounding looking for deals. The government should set up a one-stop comparison portal for all companies to sign up to, that's clear for everyone to use. Not causing a monopoly.

The UK has the highest retirement age in the world, the lowest pension in Europe, some of the longest working hours in Europe, one of the lowest minimum wages, the highest energy costs, the biggest profits, and the lowest taxes for the richest. It all needs to change.

This

🗑️ 10 things schools can bin off (IMO) because every little helps: Asking teachers to log behaviour incidents - get someone to come round to classrooms with a laptop and do the recording of incidents dictation style rather than asking a teacher to log into software and click about 50 buttons to log something, then blame them for not ‘why wasn’t it logged?’ - if a 5 period day, there is literally no time to log. Excessive morning briefings - email, zoom, record, whatever. But that 5 minutes also involves a 5-10 minute walk and then potentially afterwards a rush to a registration room and a more stressy start to the day. Also if morning messages are just a quick fire stress bucket, then this is just a horrible start to any day. Marking - just let teachers do what they want, if that means no marking, fine. Why? Limited evidence it makes much difference to outcomes. Compulsory twilights on CPD - let each teacher take ownership of their own CPD to do as and when they want to do it. Teachers will put the time in, let them dictate when that is. Flexible working rules from 2026 may spell the end for compulsory events of this sort. Mad Behaviour systems - don’t make teachers go through insanely arduous warning systems (that’s your 4th warning/C4/L4 etc) and then same children end up back in same room lesson after lesson. They get to 3rd warning, avoid getting sent out, restart again next lesson. Adds workload and stress. Phone calls home - demanding teachers call home and asking why they haven’t when behaviour is poor. Thee last thing a teacher has time or willpower to do after a full day is make a series of calls. By all means if teachers want to, fine, but if not - no. Static PPA - go flex - let teachers take PPA wherever they want. Oh, and if someone had a funeral, let them go to it. Recognising solid work - no bells and whistles, just consistently in and doing it in the classroom, not much outside? Great - that’s the core job. Please praise big style in an authentic way. Undertand what teachers are doing that goes unnoticed - the little convos that make a difference to a student but don’t tick any performative boxes. Little convos add up to lots of time - don’t punish teachers for doing this by then highlighting when they are behind on the easily visible stuff. Parents evenings and reports - just make them as incredibly easy as they can possibly be. Cut corners. Chill the hell out. There’s more than this but I may need to do a part two! 2️⃣

Here's the latest in my series of massively irritating human behaviour

Soooo. Had another AQA Lit review back today. Across both papers, it moved up 41 marks from a Grade 6 to a 9. Buzzing and fuming. #teamenglish

If the papers and broadcasters had held the Tories as accountable in 14 years as they have Labour in just two months, the country would be nowhere near as fucked as it is. The difference is staggering and enraging.