Another decision that will warp teaching for the worse. Leaders & teachers: if you’re aiming for excellence, caution against allowing pupils to use equation sheets until the very end. Having a high degree of fluency has huge benefits. Caveat: teaching must be strong!

Great analogy

Gabor Maté just issued a stark warning to every new parent: “If I was a new parent today, I would not let my kids near social media for many, many years. I would not let them see a screen — except maybe in my presence talking to grandparents on Zoom.” He goes further: No cell phones in their hands. No screen games. No screens at all if possible. His reasoning is brutal and evidence-based: These devices are designed to be addictive. Brain scans of 3–4-year-olds with heavy screen exposure show visible damage — structural changes that impair development. And the silent killer? Parents staring at their own phones — sending the clearest message: “This device is more important than you.” Maté’s bottom line: Protect their developing brains at all costs. The cost of convenience is too high. New (or expecting) parents: Are you drawing a hard line on screens for your kids — or is it already slipping?

World’s cities appear one-by-one over 6,000 years

Why am I against screen-based assessments? This change will warp teaching practice for the worse. I guarantee it. More & more lesson time will be devoted to putting classes in front of screens. School leaders will feel pressure to prepare pupils which 1/

Persian and Jew celebrating together in London

REUTERS reports the Ayatollah is confirmed dead.

At birth, success is being alive At age 3, success is not pooping your pants At age 10, success is having friends At age 16, success is having a driver's license At age 20, success is having sex At age 30, success is having money. At age 40, success is having money At age 55, success is having sex At age 70, success is having a driver's license At age 75, success is having friends At age 80, success is not pooping your pants At age 90, success is being alive We all start somewhere and finish where we start, time is the real success so use it wisely

In 1965, Winston Churchill’s coffin was brought to Westminster Hall, where for 3 days his coffin rested on a catafalque surrounded by candles.  As a schoolboy I queued for several hours, with hundreds of thousands of others as we paid our respects. It was the  first time I went to Parliament.   I remember being struck that, regardless of political allegiances, a nation was united in honouring the man who led Britain to victory over the Nazis. By contrast, yesterday’s disgraceful vandalising of Churchill’s  statue in Parliament Square demonstrates a woeful lack of respect. It also displays an extraordinary ignorance of how easily our liberties - the right to protest, to vote, to think for ourselves - would have been replaced by Hitler’s dictatorship if Churchill hadn’t succeeded in preserving our freedoms and democracy.

I urge everyone to fill this in. Screen-based assessments will be a disaster for England’s schools. The entire proposal is absurd & a complete waste of taxpayer money. 30% of students fail Eng / Maths: invest in this instead. 😡 ofqual.citizenspace.com/publ…

MrBeast trains new employees at his company with a 36-page knowledge-rich PDF and a quiz at the end. Oh, and he asks them to read the PDF twice, because they won't retain everything the first time. Watch what people do, not what they say.

Sooner or later, the penny is going to drop. When Labour realises that it cannot physically remove the Chagossians who have returned to the archipelago – quite apart from the legal obstacles, it will be politically impossible for a second Labour government to drag them from their ancestral lands – it will see that there is only one alternative. If it wants to secure British sovereignty over the islands, and so guarantee the base, it will ditch any notion of evacuating the population, turn 180 degrees and facilitate the resettlement of any Chagossians who want to return. It won’t be cheap. Putting in the infrastructure – electricity generation, a clinic, a primary school, a regular link to the Maldives – would, according to a KPMG report, cost a minimum of £800 million. Still, that is a tiny fraction of the £34 billion that Labour was planning to give to Mauritius. Peopling the outer atolls is both morally right and politically sensible. The way to stave off hostile rulings from Third Worldist judges is to uphold the right to self-determination of an inhabited territory.

Moving exams online is the wrong thing to do. That’s why l tabled amendments to the Schools Bill to stop a shift to screen based testing. We must stop pushing young children onto devices & ensure tech in education is driven by evidence. Everyone who care about this should respond to the consultation, the link is here: ofqual.citizenspace.com/publ…

Final chance to write to the consultation to try and stop the government taking school exams online. This is the address to write to. consultations@ofqual.gov.uk And here’s what I wrote.

RT @JonHaidt: In The Anxious Generation, I underestimated the harm from the phone-based childhood because I focused on the mental health ou…

Thinking of Bootcamp for your school? Take a look at this 2 half day workshop @stmartin1963 and @clivewright1969 that will showcase the why, what and how of Bootcamp during year 7 transition and reboot for all other years For more information email us at: info@knowledgehub.org.uk

Thank god, here come the social media influencers to explain to us how we’re doing it all wrong.

"You can learn complex topics in 20 minutes" No you can't bro

Every measure of a good, decent life in Canada is plummeting. But euthanasia is booming. This isn't compassion. This is darkness. This is a society that's given up. Something is terribly, unforgivably wrong with a country that can't house its people or grow its economy but excels at helping them die.

Quiet wrong. Homeschooling mainly benefits children with significant support mechanisms (eg highly educated adults with lots of free time), and AI/ robo-teaching is only useful to students who enjoy calm, supportive environments- highly ambitious and motivated, self-starters with high prior ability. Both of these groups correlate strongly with a tiny % of the population, and are overwhelmingly (not always, but usually) affluent. There is a lot that can go wrong with state education, God knows. But done properly it can be brilliant. We already know how to do it, at scale: evidence-informed practices that have been shown to work. Throwing around fairytale solutions that don't scale won't make anything better for anyone other than a tiny elite.