I've made a blog-post where all the resources I've shared - from science curriculum documents to tier two vocabulary lists - can be downloaded. Help yourself! primarycolour.home.blog/2019/11/02/one…

Arguably the oddest part of the debate around oracy is that it was coined as a word to mirror 'literacy', but spoken language abilities have since been subsumed into definitions of literacy in education, making one of the two terms redundant.

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For a good example of how literacy is commonly defined in education, here is how it is described by the National Literacy Trust:

And don't get me started on UNESCO suggesting that 'counting skills' are part of the conventional definition of literacy:

This is why I really don’t get the oracy hype train. No one has been able to explain how it is different to what is currently in the NC.

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Teachers shouldn't tell kids that letters *say* sounds.

This is potentially confusing because it is a secondary use of a common verb that metaphorically implies an active role for inanimate objects.

Instead, let's tell children that letters *spell* sounds.

Wait...

Let me clarify:

My point is that each of 'say', 'spell' and 'represent' all have their own problems when dealing with young children, and trying to suggest that one is definitely superior to the others is to get bogged down in minutiae that likely makes little difference.

In the school I trained in, there was a weekly T&L briefing where we were exposed to one new initiative a week.

In the school I went to next, we had monthly department meetings where there was always one new thing we had to do.

In the school I went to after that, every member of SLT was doing an NPQ, which led to approximately six new initiatives a year (normally which had to be done within a term).

At my current school, we've had four T&L focuses in seven years.

Change fatigue is real. Teachers are busy, and even if it was desirable to try and change that many things in that space of time, it's impossible.

I suspect this state of affairs is still pretty common. Does it feel familiar to you?

New blog below exploring different routes, please share if you can 🙏🙏

This is very good from, IMO, the most interesting modern political philosopher Joseph Heath.

josephheath.substack.com/p/reproducing-…

Bloody repeats.

So reposting this.

Super excited to get my hands on a copy of this today! @Hachette_Learn

We will see this figure a lot in the coming days as a result of Sold a Story, likely from DI sceptics. It’s important to be realists when it comes to research evidence, and interrogating headline data is important. So what does this figure show….

How do you develop great school leaders who have the knowledge, ambition and network to eradicate the disadvantage gap across a region?

We think you do it as a team.

East 100 as a programme for aspiring headteachers across the east of England.

Demonstrating a lack of competence publicly is something that we all avoid.

But we ask kids to do this every day in school. And we should. It’s an inevitable part of learning hard stuff.

That’s one of the reasons I think belonging is so important.

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There's been a lot of talk in the last few weeks in edu circles about whether the trad education movement has failed, what it needs to do next, etc.

This article is just the latest in a succession of examples that shows how us edu-trads have not been nearly as successful as we hoped in altering elite consensus on education.

We have obviously seen with all the Labour party policies that we completely failed to convince Labour.

But actually, it's not like we've really convinced the Conservatives either. This is Dan Hannan, major figure in Brexit, major figure in Conservative politics, presumably has some idea of who Michael Gove is - and here he is in the Telegraph confidently asserting that we no longer need to know things because we can look things up.

(The ironies in this piece abound, by the way. He argues for lessons in spotting bad bogus arguments at the same time as building an article around the argument that memory doesn't matter any more. He argues that "identifying improbable claims" is a generic skill that can be taught in the abstract, at the same time as claiming that handwriting and geography are obsolete. He says that you can always just look up what you need, whilst signally failing to look up any of the evidence on the role of long-term memory...I could go on.)

I wrote a few weeks ago that there was some evidence journalists at the Financial Times were waking up to all the evidence on cognitive science, its implications for schools, the international test evidence.

But the elite understanding of this is a very thin layer, absolutely skin deep.

The mass of second-hand dealers in ideas are still distilling their frenzy from Romantic pedagogy.

Depressing. I honestly don't know what else we can do.

We wrote the books. We had the debates. We built the schools. We aced the tests.

And then it turned out nobody cared.

Right now it is definitely a bleak time to be a trad. It feels like we are on Athelney Marshes, beset by vandals without and dissension within.

BUT we have to keep the faith. Reality is an undefeated champion. Despair is a sin! What we do works!

It may well be that for now, the New World with all its power & might etc., is going to have to step in to save our bacon for a bit. Maybe the momentum is shifting to @ehanford and Sold a Story, @rastokke and Chalk & Talk, @jettybe3 , etc.

We have got to dig in. As Declan Rice said, it's not done!

Is it ok to plan a unit of lessons without any objectives?

We’ve got opinions on that, and much more.

Check out They Behave For Me whenever you get your podcasts so Adam stops texting me to tell me that the listener numbers are down because of me.

Here you go!