Tom Bennett OBE

Some AMAZING names already signed up to speak at 🔬researchED National Conference 2026, Sept 5th, Parliament Hill, London. An Olympic pantheon of reason, practice, and evidence. More to come! Ticket link below ⬇️

@MrMac_Math @irish_news @hannahpattJ

@tombennett71 @irish_news @hannahpattJ ‘weapons of mass distraction’ nice

My interview yesterday with @irish_news. Good to talk to @hannahpattJ (nb: sadly I'm still not a Tsar, no matter how hard people try to make it true !) Northern Ireland school behaviour Tsar labels mobile phones ‘weapons of mass distraction’ irishnews.com/news/northern-…

@somefilmstudies @irish_news @hannahpattJ Everyone loves them and they live long, happy lives?

@tombennett71 @irish_news @hannahpattJ Probably for the best Tom. You know what happens to Tsars 😬

@dylanwiliam This makes me want to teach children through Mr Beast videos and Dua Lipa TikTok dances.

@tombennett71 Reminds me of Kipling's "And what should they know of England who only England know?"

An elegant rationale for all education: to wander in the world in order to better understand our own world.

@NMSResources Source?

@tombennett71 "No adult could endure a workplace where colleagues intimidated you, hurt you, constantly disrupted your environment." That happens to almost all adults at most workplaces, actually.

Unfortunately one of the dangers of using suspensions and exclusions as a metric to evaluate a school's effectiveness is that it will simply put toxic pressure on heads not to exclude, like in the 2000s and early 2010s. Which leads to chaotic and violent students being retained in the classroom, and everyone loses- including them. It also leads to lower level sanctions becoming meaningless, because a core of repeat offenders realise that defiance will lead nowhere. This is how school cultures perish. We've been here before, and we shouldn't go back to mistakes we already learned from. Some schools need to exclude and suspend, sometimes, They are a necessary mechanism to protect other vulnerable students, classroom cultures, and preserve the dignity and safety of staff. They should be a last resort for the most part, but when they are necessary, they are *necessary*. And some schools need to suspend more than others, because they serve more challenging cohorts. Mallory Towers and Waterloo Road have different behaviour profiles. There are more deaths in a hospital than a cinema, but that doesn't mean they are more dangerous places. No adult could endure a workplace where colleagues intimidated you, hurt you, constantly disrupted your environment. Why should we expect children, the most vulnerable of us, to endure it, when we could not?

When someone claiming to know about educational theory says learning styles:

About 250 years ago a quirky moral philosopher named Adam Smith discovered a chain of logic whereby the selfish desires of man would result in widespread prosperity. It’s one of the greatest discoveries of all time. Here’s how it goes… 1.Selfish desire seeks wealth, status, security. No virtue required. This is the raw material, as unpromising as it sounds. 2. In a market with property rights, you can’t take, you must trade. Theft and fraud are policed, so the only legal route to someone else’s money is offering them something they want more. Self-interest is channelled through voluntary exchange. This is the crucial valve: the baker serves your bread not from benevolence, but because it’s how he gets paid. 3.Every voluntary trade creates value for both sides. Nobody trades unless they prefer what they’re getting to what they’re giving. So each transaction is positive-sum by construction. Wealth isn’t moved; it’s made. 4.Competition forces the selfish to serve better. You’re not the only one chasing that customer’s money. To win, you must offer more value, lower prices, or something new. Greed disciplined by rivalry becomes, functionally, service. The customer becomes the boss of every capitalist. 5.Prices emerge as signals of what people actually want. Millions of trades compress dispersed knowledge - scarcity, preference, urgency - into a single number. No planner needed. High prices shout “make more of this” and falling prices say “stop making this.” The cure for high prices IS high prices. 6.Profit directs capital toward unmet needs. Profit is the reward for spotting something people want but can’t get, and losses are the punishment for guessing wrong. Capital flows automatically toward solving problems and away from waste - a self-correcting search algorithm running on selfishness. The profit motive pulls the greedy person towards genuine service and efficiency. 7.The pursuit of advantage drives innovation. The only durable way to out-earn competitors is to do something new - create a better product, a cheaper process. Each entrepreneur trying to get rich makes the previous solution obsolete and the average person’s life better. 8.Specialisation and scale compound productivity. Competition pushes everyone toward what they do best; trade lets them exchange it. Output per person rises. 9.Rising productivity spreads as falling prices and rising wages. Competition doesn’t let producers keep the gains forever - they’re competed away to consumers. The luxuries of one generation (cars, flights, antibiotics, computing) become the staples of the next. The rich get richer, but the poor get richer too. 10. Prosperity becomes self-reinforcing and civilising. Wealth funds education, health, science, and even the welfare state that redistributes it. Commerce rewards trust, reliability, and cooperation with strangers (doux commerce). A system built on self-interest ends up producing the most extensive cooperation network in human history: millions of strangers coordinating to put breakfast on your table. The hockey stick after 1800: from ~$3/day for all of human history to a 30-fold rise in living standards wherever this system took hold is pure magic.

@scriptwren I also think schools need to dial down setting everything on digital platforms so that kids become habituated into constant access at home.

@tombennett71 What is difficult is the pressure to set homework on teams etc from parents and then the mobile phone issue. Not every school gives students chromebooks etc or even has good WiFi.

Agree with Adam. We should be minimising screen time in schools, not requiring it.

I'd put this single paragraph from G. K. Chesterton up against any self-help book out there

This is literally one of the worst ways to present information you want people to process and retain.

@MusicEdu4all We few, we happy few

@tombennett71 Congrats! Twinkl named me one of the top 50 educators of the last 50 years, which is patently ludicrous. Realistically, I should be somewhere in the top 1.

Very honoured to have been selected as #20 in Education Business magazine in their list of Top 50. More than I deserve, I am sure of it. educationbusinessuk.net/eb50/2025-2026…

Wait until they ask about network capacity and how many devices are in schools across the country. I reckon they’ll see several hundred million downsides

I enjoy the thought-provoking writing of GK Chesterton and in 2021 wrote a piece about “Chesterton’s Fence” as applied to reading instruction, after being introduced to this concept by @stephenfry in a podcast. Pretty sure it still applies in 2026. pamelasnow.blogspot.com/2021/01/the-sc…

@atomicjoy Alright Plato

@tombennett71 Students should behave /well/.

Students should behave.

Co-sign. Also, NB: the books still exist.

“I was only laughing” “It’s not that deep” A phrase we should challenge is “I was only…” All too often this is dismissed. We should be focusing on sweating the small stuff. We should clearly explain why the behaviour is unacceptable and link back to our school values. Small moments become big norms if left unchallenged. The standard you walk past is the standard you accept.