Curios of the week #117

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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On Sunday, we breakfasted at The Green House, Ballarat, a café, as well as a plant and homewares store. I had the Reuben sandwich and if ever you go there, I recommend it, even though it is quite filling. The Green House is in an old warehouse so it has a fashionable post-industrial air.

On Thursday, I flew to Sydney for the MultiLit Advancing Effective Education summit. This morning, I am preparing to see Dr Steve Graham discuss evidence-based approaches to teaching writing before giving a presentation myself on what teachers need to know about cognitive load theory. If you would like to book me to give a presentation on this topic or something else, get in touch.

This week’s Curios include inclusive teaching, a court case, creative climates and much more.

Muppet Show of the week

My favourite TV show as a young child was The Muppet Show. A motif of the show was that it was chaotically and comically disorganised, with different characters often bickering over the schedule and sabotaging each others’ performances. A similar claim could be made by the uncharitable about the Scottish government and, in particular, its approach to education policy. However, in this case, nobody’s laughing.

In short, Scotland has adopted an educationally progressivist curriculum, the ironically named ‘Curriculum for Excellence’, that has coincided with a decline in Scottish students’ performance in international assessments. It has also listened to the most absolutist inclusion advocates and reduced permanent school exclusions to almost zero, while suspensions have dropped from a high of nearly 45,000 in 2006/7 to just under 12,000 in 2022/23.

The effect has been the same as in every other jurisdiction that has been persuaded to adopt this approach—a massive uptick in school violence leading to a stream of negative press reports and an eventual reversal of policy from the education minister, Jenny Gilruth. However, it seems that in Scotland, nobody told the Justice Secretary, Angela Constance.

Graham Grant is reporting in the Scottish edition of The Daily Mail on a rift between the two ministers. In a TV interview, Constance trotted out the usual tropes about exclusion being harmful to the excluded:

“Exclusion does remain an option for schools but you have to remember children don’t learn and children don’t change if they are absent from schools or if they are not sighted by services…

School is often a safer place for many children and our education partners are key in terms of referring children to social services, or indeed raising matters with the police”

Nobody who excludes a student thinks they will learn and change as a result. We hope this will happen and there are some excellent alternative providers who intervene positively and anecdotal cases of students who get their lives back on track. However, the primary reason for exclusion is to protect the other students, the non-violent ones, from bullying and abuse and to ensure a safe workplace for teachers. Anti-exclusion campaigners always ignore this point.

Substack of the week

Andrew Old has taken on the Education Policy Institute (EPI) and a report it has written on the impact of England’s phonics check. Old is not impressed:

“The main conclusion of the report is that the improvements in the teaching of reading after the [phonics screening check] was introduced don't count. The way in which this conclusion is squeezed out of data that show no such thing is impressively brazen.”

This is part 1 of a critique that Old will return to.

Clarification of the week

The authors of a paper I mentioned in last week’s Curios have been in touch. They worry that when I wrote, ‘It reports a modest study of nineteen parents who had children in the early years of an Australian primary school during pandemic school closure,’ that readers will interpret that as meaning all the parents had students in the same primary school. In fact, the parents were recruited from across New South Wales and Victoria and their children were in schools across all education sectors.

Event of the week

Dr Carl Hendrick is coming to Melbourne at the end of June to talk about the science of learning.

More here.

Creative climate of the week

One of the stereotypes that educational progressivists like to peddle about more traditional forms of education is that it is stultifying: Authoritarian teachers force compliance from students because they are bad people who enjoy that sort of thing. Learning becomes only the rigid recitation of facts and figures drilled by the teacher.

As with the argument about exclusion, this leaves out at least half of the equation.