Blog

On Thursday night I am speaking at the Battle of Ideas on the topic In Defence of Subjects. If you are a regular reader of this blog, you will know that I will of course be defending subjects. I am pl…

From The Tenant of Wildfell Hall: Rose, now, at a hint from my mother, produced a decanter of wine, with accompaniments of glasses and cake, from the cupboard and the oak sideboard, and the refreshmen…

If you want to make yourself enemies in education, probably the best way to do so is to have a decided opinion about grammar schools. They are a litmus test for a whole range of other political and ed…

There have been a couple of posts on Dan Willingham’s blog recently about the value of ereaders in the classroom. I should declare an interest here – I was one of the first people in this country to g…

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post arguing that the ‘traditional’ understanding of a hierarchical, teacher-centric classroom has not existed in English schools since at least the 1960s. In the comm…

A few days ago, I wrote a blog post explaining why I left the ATL teaching union. Put briefly, it’s because the ATL’s views on the curriculum and the role of knowledge are completely inimical to good…

This week the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) held their annual conference. In the closing speech to the conference, the head of the union, Mary Bousted, gave a speech about the effects of…

A colleague at school recently asked me if I knew of any examples of people from hundreds of years ago complaining about ‘the kids of today’.  I said I had a couple of ideas and that I would get them…

I was recently challenged to explain why I believe in a knowledge curriculum. ‘Do you want to just go back to the 1950s?’ said my interlocutor. ‘Aren’t you aware of anything that has happened in educa…