Blog

Life beyond levels? Life after levels? Life without levels?  Lots of teachers, senior leaders and academics have come up with some interesting ideas for what should replace national curriculum levels….

My book, Seven Myths about Education, was published this week by Routledge. It was actually first published as an ebook by The Curriculum Centre in June 2013.  There are a couple of new additions to t…

Myth 7 of my book is ‘Teaching knowledge is indoctrination’. I found lots of influential educationalists who believed this, but I did also feel that it was not the most pervasive of the myths I identi…

In my previous two posts (here and here), I looked at the structure of my book and restated some of the evidence I’d used to make the claim that a certain set of ideas were dominant in English educati…

I have noticed that a common response to my book has been a) to deny the existence of the myths I’ve outlined and b) to claim that they are not myths after all. This is not only rather illogical, it’s…

In Seven Myths about Education, I make two claims: first, that in English education, a certain set of ideas about education are predominant; second, that these ideas are misguided. Finding the evidenc…

Over Christmas I read Nate Silver’s excellent book The Signal and the Noise. Silver runs the FiveThirtyEight politics blog and became famous for his uncannily accurate predictions of US elections. Bef…

Andrew Old frequently tells me that the way to get lots of people visiting your blog is to mention Ofsted in the title, so here goes.  If you are an Ofsted-watcher, you might be interested in my book,…

This is part three of my summary of Daniel Koretz’s book Measuring Up: What Educational Testing Really Tells Us. Part one, How useful are tests?, is here and part two, Validity and reliability, is her…