John Walker, Sounds-Write

The secretary of state wants to "hardwire" oracy into the curriculum, and give it equal status to reading and writing. Ok. How? What are the traditional levers that turn "a thing a politician wants" into "a thing schools are doing"? In general, if we want to achieve educational change in this country, it's through curriculum, standardised assessments, and ofsted. Therefore: Are we going to formally examine oracy, in the way that we do for reading and writing? Is there going to be a formal oracy curriculum distinct from other subjects? Is it going to be assessed as part of other subjects? Will it count somehow to GCSE science and DT and music and history? Are Ofsted going to inspect oracy? What would they be looking for? Are we going to insist that schools have a dedicated oracy policy? Are we going to make schools do oracy training as part of their CPD and then have a bit of paper that says they've done that? I'm just not sure what the other options are. How would you, from DfE central office, make it so that schools now do this thing without pulling one of those levers? It matters because I think all of those levers are bad. I think if we pull any of them, it will absolutely result in performative nonsense that distracts from the good work schools are doing already (including in the area of developing students' ability to express themselves verbally), and the areas we collectively really need to focus on (mainly behaviour). I'd be very interested to hear from pro-oracy policy people on this. What do you want to happen? In actual schools and classrooms? How will you hold them to account if they don't do that? What policy levers will you pull?

School leaders try to do too much. A never-ending kaleidoscope of new initiatives. It doesn't work, and there's a better way. Read and share 🙏🙏

There are some interesting debates on US edutwitter right now. Similar in structure and tone to a lot of the debates that English edutwitter had in 2014-2019. There are things we got wrong at that time, and I can see them going wrong for the US too. One is fixating on interesting ideas that are unlikely to work at scale. For example, E-edutwitter got really excited about some strategies like the use of knowledge organisers. They went big, but probably didn't affect all that much and weren't executed well outside of a handful of adherents. I suspect similar is the case for "scripted lessons" and formal Direct Instruction, which is US-edutwitter's current big thing. The second is harder and it relates to interlocutors. It's really easy to fall into a camp or tribe. Some people are bad faith interlocutors, and need to have their arguments dismissed. But others aren't. They are people who broadly agree with you, but have issues with some of the recommendations, positions amd positionings. We didn't always disagree agreeably with those people, and I can already see some of that happening in the US. Not everyone who disagrees with you is an idiot or evil or whatever. If you sit too securely in your camp, you end up losing quite a lot of valuable insight. I personally am a lot more chill on here than I was back then, and I really regret that style of debate. I've worked hard on this vice of mine, because I could have learnt more and developed faster. My advice to US-edutwitter: not everyone who disagrees with you is doing it in bad faith. Try and listen and learn. You don't need to agree, but it's worth paying attention.

Such an odd and disturbing response. Jews remain the only minority group that are not allowed to define what discrimination against them looks like. We are consistently told that our concerns should be wrapped up in generic "antiracism", lest we construct a "hierarchy of racism." It's just silly and overwrought. There is lots of antisemitism. Some of it is outright and obvious to everyone (Jews control the world), some of it is outright but not obvious to everyone (shouting "free Palestine" to random Jews in the street), and some of it is harder to determine, and needs unpicking and sensitive thought (e.g. "Zionism is racism"). The NEU's statement contains neither subtlety nor empathy. Instead, it sidelines our community's very real concerns, and tells us that in fact we have misunderstood our own oppression. Poor show, but not entirely unsurprising.