My thoughts are with members of the Black community and their allies in this significant and difficult week.
On the Teach First website, as promised, I’ve written about what we have done in the year since the tragic murder of George Floyd and about what comes next for us.
https://www.teachfirst.org.uk/blog/george-floyd-one-year-fight-equality-continues
Warning: this post discusses violence against women. The clash of hope and despair this week, between the celebration of International Women’s Day, the Meghan Markle interview and the murder of Sarah Everard, feels so stark. It is clear from talking to friends, family and colleagues that Sarah’s murder is an extreme end of a continuum […]
Through a high stakes and narrowly quantified definition of performance, we allow institutions to appear that they are high performing by externalising some of their true costs: they make other actors in the system pay some of the price for their results…
It is hard to process the images and events coming from the US at the moment. President Elect Joe Biden called it an assault on the citadel of liberty. In ancient times, strongholds most commonly fell to internal treachery: someone had to open the gates…
The most viewed articles of 2020
Some reflections and lessons from this blog so far. Including nine ‘management maxims’ and some daily prompts.
The practical value and harm of a measurement system does not seem solely tied to its validity. It is equally dependent on the consequences attached to the measurement.
There’s a danger in using schools to change society. It’s tempting: children are the future, after all. But it is also risky to prepare young people for the society we wish existed rather than the one they will actually find themselves in.
Popularity in leadership is a contradiction. We rightly prize the leader who does not court popularity, who makes difficult decisions and does what is right. At the same time, in free societies, people only really lead by consent and, without a certain level of confidence and respect, leaders cannot do their jobs.
The system or the student? This blog is written with the benefit of hindsight and the luxury of not being accountable. I don’t pretend to have warned this would happen or have any easy answers. The problem this year was that we tried to act as if exams were being sat when they weren’t. A […]
Note to self 