Saira

🎉 The first giveaway of the season is here - and it’s a good one. For a chance to win a Steplab bundle, simply follow us, like this post and share it. You’ll be entered into a draw to win a Steplab: ☕ mug 👜 tote 🖊️ pen 📒 notepad 👉 Enter by 10am on Mon 8 Dec - winners announced that afternoon.

Friendliness isn't always a sign of trustworthiness. Warmth is easy to fake. The foundations of trust are reliability and integrity. What counts isn't courtesy in the moment—it's keeping commitments over time. The best way to inspire confidence is to consistently walk our talk.

📚 Last week we asked about your summer reads – and most of you voted: fiction only! But if you fancy stacking your shelves with brilliant CPD books by our expert team, we’ve got a giveaway for you! 1⃣ Follow us 2⃣ Like the giveaway post 3⃣ Share it First book drops tomorrow!

Too many people recognize their opinions as feelings, but mistake their beliefs for facts. Closed minds hold truths to be self-evident. Open minds are willing to question even strongly held views. Lifelong learning requires the courage to challenge our own convictions.

One more time: A company is not a family. Healthy workplaces value results as well as relationships.

📢 We're hiring! Join our amazing team across the Fioretti Trust 🌟 ✨ Class Teachers – St Barnabas / St John’s & St Peter’s ✨ Class Teacher + TLR – St Barnabas ✨ Class Teacher (Maternity Cover) – St John’s & St Peter’s ✨ Pastoral Support Worker – St Thomas

Gaza's official death toll is a drastic underestimate. 1) According to Lancet - the world's most prestigious medical journal - it's underestimated by 41%. 2) That means 64,000 deaths from traumatic injuries - in June 2024, i.e. 7 months ago. 3) That excludes indirect deaths. As they say: "Our findings underestimate the full impact of the military operation in Gaza, as they do not account for non-trauma-related deaths resulting from health service disruption, food insecurity, and inadequate water and sanitation." Precedent suggests that it is indirect violence which is the biggest killer. For example, in Yemen, in 2020, the UN estimated 233,000 deaths over 5 years (out of a pre-war population of around 30 million). But they estimated that 131,000 of those deaths were due to "indirect causes such as lack of food, health services and infrastructure".

My new favorite word: sonder. It's the profound awareness that every person you encounter has experienced a lifetime of hopes, fears, loves, and heartaches that you'll never know. Each moment of sonder is a reminder to appreciate how little we truly grasp about others' lives.

OPINION The major advantage of using booklets isn't curricular, it's that you eliminate all the goddamn cutting and sticking of worksheets that plagues secondary classrooms The number of minutes of learning lost to cutting and sticking is off the charts

Seeing a lot of schools mandating retrieval practice in every lesson but also seeing quite a few misconceptions. A quick thread: 10 ways to get retrieval practice wrong ⬇️ 🧵

I sometimes get asked about the common issues I see across primary schools and the kind of support I offer as a result. This brief blog explains this stuff. As ever, retweets really appreciated (given that the algorithm hates links to blogs). primarycolour.home.blog/2024/09/08/how…

In short, distractions *leave a wake* To reduce them, we just gotta systematically work through them: → Reduce student lateness → Streamline colleague interruptions → Secure exemplary behaviour → Ban smartphones → Remove distracting displays → Etc

This is why working with children is so brilliant. ‘Arthur lives down the hill and I live up the hill.’ 🥰

"During that interview, it felt like I was being interrogated as a young Muslim woman of color." On 'Mehdi Unfiltered', @zarahsultana MP responds to @GMB hosts @edballs & @kategarraway, & also calls out the Mail & @elonmusk over the UK riots. Full show: zeteo.com/p/the-fish-rot…

“Why does it matter to use the word ‘Islamophobic?” asks the host to @zarahsultana A mosque was attacked. Had that happened to a synagogue, would we have any qualms about calling it antisemitic? Would a UK TV host dare say ‘why does it matter to use the word ‘antisemitic’?’ Ugh

'Shall I tell you why you don't remember that story? It was a black kid - and a white man had the sword.' 'Where were the riots' after the Hainault stabbing, asks @mrjamesob.

I will not be threatened or bullied into silence.... What we are seeing is straight up right wing violence against those of a different skin colour/religion/background! Muslims/mosques being attacked People with black/brown skin scared to go out Asylum seekers and refugees fearful for their lives Please.....do unfollow me if you feel that these things are acceptable.... and please keep your threats and racism on the other side of the door when you have shut it! There are too many good people here for me to leave.... I'm going nowhere!

When politicians demonise migrants, the far right listen. When they say refugees should be “sent back to where they came from”, the far right listen. When they complain about asylum seekers staying in hotels, the far right listen. Let’s promote a message of unity instead. One that tackles the issues facing us all: the housing crisis, the collapse of our NHS and the disaster of privatisation. One that gives hope to all communities that a fairer society is possible. Stand up to racism. Defend refugees. Inspire belief in a better world. That is how you defeat the far right once and for all.

Summary of @Barker_J & my presentation at #EducationFest today: (Another beast of a thread) ↓

All the odds were stacked against Jeremy Corbyn. He’s one of the only independents to win a competitive election in a general election since World War II. He started his campaign late because of loyalty to his old party. His constituency has a huge turnover. Labour threw everything at this seat. He suffered a relentless smear campaign. He won against huge odds, and his team should be unbelievably proud of what they achieved.