Curios of the week #107

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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As always with researchED Ballarat, I arrived early and walked across Clarendon’s school oval to reach the pavilion. The sun glinted lazily off the buildings, hinting at what was to come—a warm day for the time of year and warm in both the literal and figurative senses.

It was great to catch up with old friends and new. There is something special about the researchED movement. Many took the time to approach me and comment on how valuable the day had been when compared with their typical experience of professional learning.

This week’s Curios include cacti, fingerprints, teachable dispositions and much more.

Personal attack of the week

Amanda Spielman is the former head of the body that inspects schools in England. Now in private life, she has added her voice to those criticising the UK government’s proposed bill that will strip away some of the freedoms that academy schools—similar to charter schools in the U.S.—currently enjoy.

“Most obviously, the schools bill will cut the autonomy of schools and school groups right back, even though this has clearly been a contributor to system success. A better first step would have been a proper evaluation to see which dimensions of autonomy should be protected and which need adjusting.”

This prompted an extraordinary personal attack on Spielman from a ‘source’ in the government who seems to have lost the plot:

“Amanda Spielman should spend less time criticising the reforms this Government is bringing and more time reflecting on her failure at Ofsted and on a teaching profession that entirely lost confidence in her as chief inspector.”

In a later radio interview, Spielman responded that this attack was, “fascinating because that's a union line.” Are teaching unions running the UK government’s education policy and is that why the bill is targeting academies, a type of school the unions dislike?

Missive of the week

I wrote a letter to Clarendon parents that you might be interested in reading. You will need to be on Twitter/X or LinkedIn to read it.

Dispositions of the week

Still in the UK, an interesting debate has been taking place on Twitter/X about the role of ‘dispositions’ in the revised national curriculum that is currently taking shape.