Author: Biff

If you have (or have had) a child of school age you will probably know that your child (and every child) is ‘entitled’ to the full national curriculum at school.  To be entitled is to have a right or a claim to something; an entitlement is basically an opportunity.  But in the case of the… Continue reading The national curriculum: a discriminatory device

The underlying truths within the SEND Commissioner’s report on the failure of Birmingham City Council’s SEND services. If a review is a process of looking back and critically examining something, the SEND Review is not a review of the Special Educational Needs and Disability system, as it promised to be.   Commissioned in 2019 and… Continue reading The failure of a SEND system

When is a review not a review? The Department for Education began a process in 2019 called the SEND (Special Educational Needs and Disability) Review.  Based on this title (and the part of its subtitle which says ‘Government consultation on the SEND and alternative provision system’) an unsuspecting person might be drawn into thinking that… Continue reading The SEND Review

That mutant algorithm Algorithms have had a bad press since a ‘mutant algorithm’ was blamed for the furore over A-Level results in 2020.  This is somewhat unfair on algorithms, which are simply sets of instructions or rules designed to provide a method for solving a problem.  The one used to calculate the 2020 A-Level results… Continue reading The Forgotten Third (or so) – Geoff Barton

Ofsted – Part 2 The birth of the revised inspection framework Many Ofsted inspectors must have experienced something of a Damascene moment in 2017 when confronted by the reality that learning is invisible and not something that they can ‘see’, even if the inspection framework and the training process told them otherwise. (See: http://educonned.co.uk/ofsted-1) With… Continue reading Ofsted -The Education Deceptions

Multi-Academy Trust A private enterprise group that has acquired a whole herd of cash cows, making up into a very nice little earner indeed, and never mind the olfactory and climatic effects of the resultant methane emissions. National Literacy Strategy A set of ideas about the teaching of reading and writing of extraordinary longevity, complexity… Continue reading The Devil’s Educational Glossary M-Z

The Devil’s Educational Glossary was inspired unashamedly by ‘The Devil’s Dictionary’, written by the American journalist Ambrose Bierce and published in 1911. If there is a single entry in that work that epitomises it, and him, it would be this one: Cynic, n. A blackguard whose faulty vision sees things as they are, not as… Continue reading The Devil’s Educational Glossary A-L

Ofsted – Part 1 The observation of the unobservable Imagine that you’re attending a hospital outpatient department for a routine medical procedure and just before it starts (or maybe it’s started) someone enters the room and explains that he or she is an inspector who is there to observe how much your health improves during… Continue reading The Education Deceptions