Peter Atherton

@AdrianBethune I think you are right. Physical activity or creative activity, more choices, less restrictions, more happiness.

The fall in children's wellbeing in the UK is *mostly* a secondary school problem (massive drop in Y7!). We could improve things massively by increasing the amount of physical activity in secondary (more PE, increased playtime, more sports, daily mile, etc). Discuss 🤔

@Yorkshire_Steve Lack of flex both surprises me and doesn’t surprise me in equal measure.

Words like 'typically' were introduced at the last minute that I hoped would mean that inspectors had some flex thinking about published data context. Instead the word seems to ring applied as 'in most years' or 'in most subjects' (which is also important to be fair).

How would I improve the inspection toolkits? Some things I would tweak but they are ok on the whole. The key issue is the secure fit rather than best fit approach. Something HMCI and Ofsted have said is designed to improve consistency.

If the only way to get academic success is to lose tens of students from your cohort, it’s not success.

@warwickmansell Has #Ofsted made any official response to these devastating findings? How could it give these terrifying abusive culture an “Outstanding” report Sir Martin Oliver? @tombennett71 @bphillipsonMP is there no regard for child safeguarding at Ofsted?

@ChrisWatson54 @NickHopkins1234 Sausage

@NickHopkins1234 Tbh I wasn’t happy with using that word either. I was struggling for something alliterative to go with saviour!

The Bizarre Demise of Nigel Adkins Link: open.substack.com/pub/chriswatso… #TRFC #SWA

@kitandrew1 @jpembroke @mrjkwilson You can sort of download it as is, but you don’t get all the nuance / variation from the tabs

@jpembroke @mrjkwilson @DataEducator And ability to download/save?

Does anyone know if the new IDSR can be easily printed... formatting nightmare in HTML!! @jpembroke @DataEducator

@mrjkwilson @jpembroke No it’s a big bag of rubbish

@AnnieBeale1 Perpetrated by the DfE: gov.uk/government/new…

No phone call, no support just pure bullying backed by the Dfe and the LA. 🤮

Just received an attendance warning for my youngest son, it goes on about if there's a need for support let us know etc 🙄 then a break down of how & what the ed system has decided is appropriate for a child, how long can they be unwell? 1

DfE attendance targets for every school: gov.uk/government/new…

@JAlexanderPrin1 @BehaviourHead Ganjaster Granny

@BehaviourHead I once had an issue with marijuana vapes being sold at my school. A grandma was buying them in bulk for her grandson to sell at 150% profit.

Confiscated several vapes this week. What surprises me most isn’t the number of students caught - it’s the number of parents angry that I won’t return them. We really do have work to do together.

@savoy_girl @MJBurnage The footnote suggests that if they do that then design tech will be included as well

@DataEducator @MJBurnage It’s actually more restrictive - if a pupil *doesn’t* want to do an art subject, they *must* take a MFL and a humanities subject. Personally I hope they add a science option to the choice in the first breadth bucket as they are considering.

The proposed changes to progress 8 are a big worry, and I think they are likely to negatively impact the sector. Here are my big concerns:

@savoy_girl @MJBurnage It’s actually eye-opening as to how many people have misread the guidance. Maybe we need a GCSE in guidance reading.

@MJBurnage I still don’t understand this viewpoint. P8 doesn’t currently require a language. It was only ever the EBacc measure that needed that, and many schools don’t insist pupils follow that.

@adamboxer1 I mean all those other subjects mentioned could be robust and demanding as well.

Every student in this country will do really robust + demanding qualifications in: English Lit English Lang Maths Biology Chemistry Physics As well as a humanity or a language I'm totally fine if in addition to that they have the option to do music or drama or art

@timleunig @daisychristo I think - possibly - when evaluating success, we need to look beyond the London bubble and the thoughts of those who designed the measure when evaluating a measure that simple reinforces societal variation.

I agree with @daisychristo . P8 is working well for schools and pupils. The change will be hugely disruptive for no educational benefit

@daisychristo Works well for who?

So I said that Progress 8 is staying the same but actually that may not be the case. Schools Week are reporting this: Becky Francis acknowledged she and the government “have two slightly different positions on what progress 8 might look like”. Would be huge shame if P8 changed. Schools are used to it, it's working well - why change it? schoolsweek.co.uk/new-curriculum…

21 out of well over 1000 schools by the way that have cohorts of 20%+ disadvantaged white British: …e-education-statistics.service.gov.uk/find-statistic…

Progress 8 has always favoured London by design. DfE’s own analysis shows that only 21 schools that have the most disadvantaged, white British cohorts returned a positive progress 8 score. You can’t punish schools for simply serving different communities.

You can’t build a successful education system around shame, embarrassment, detention & exclusion. You can’t create inclusion for all via a curriculum that only works for some. So as the saying goes “If the child doesn’t learn the way you teach, start teaching the way they learn.”

Off to Data Decoded in Manchester today. Hope to learn about some useful things.