Adam Boxer recently posted on X: ‘To me, I/We/You is a powerful way to conceptualise teaching specific things. It is NOT a powerful way to structure lessons. It’s a cycle. And you could have …

What's the point of assessment?

A GOOD TIME TO BE INSPECTED? Here is some interesting data. Given that 'Quality of Education' is the Ofsted grade that matters, what has been happening to…

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What is the cause, is it a problem - and if so, what can we do about it?

Curriculum is all about power. Decisions about what knowledge to teach are an exercise of power and therefore a weighty ethical responsibility. What we choose to teach confers or denies power. To say ...

Assessment Evaluation Evidence

YouTube video by Peps Mccrea

A message to middle leaders at the start of the new academic year.

As part of my exam role, at this time of year, I undertake reviews of marking. These are more commonly referred to as re-marks, which is a misnomer. Papers are not re-marked from scratch. Instead, the...

I want to share a distinction I perceive. It’s the one in the title, but to see what I mean, I need to shed light on how I’m using the term optimisation. Often, people seem to discuss schools as if th...

We present some very early Key Stage 4 headline statistics, including Attainment 8, collected from 1,200 secondary schools

GCE, GCSE & iGCSE grade boundaries Summer 2024 (updated as released) Links (or scroll down) GCSE AQA EDEXCEL OCR WJEC/ EDUQAS CCEA GCE (AS/A Level) AQA EDEXCEL (Pearson) OCR WJEC/ EDUQAS CIE CCEA Secu...

This post unpacks a typical approach to reading a challenging text, in this case in a geography lesson. It also describes a number of practices associated with strong ‘adaptive teaching’. Reading chal...

Over on BlueSky, which suddenly become the main place where education discussion happens, a chance discussion has shown how powerful AI can be in analysing and interpreting data. Ben Newmark started a discussion about the need to abandon all use of predicted grades. In all the target grades chat there’s a fair few sensible people … Continue reading "Analysing education data with AI"

Pedagogy without didactics is simply not good enough. We should all be aiming for pedagogy with didactics.

If we were to design an assessment system focused on maximising learning, we wouldn’t create a Key Stage 3 "No Man’s Land" followed by the high-stakes pressure of GCSE jeopardy. Yet, this is precisely...