A thread about cultural and social capital in practice, with the lived experience of a mother and daughter and a GP appointment 🧵 So yesterday I took my oldest to the GP as she is keen to find out if she has ADHD. Since she was tiny she has had a collection of ways of experiencing the world that would suggest something sensory, attention-related. Now she's away at university, it is more noticeable to her

While our curriculum & pedagogy are focused on destination learning, testing, and are devoid of critical thinking skills, there’s no room for and no acquisition of competence for learners to learn or teachers to teach in ways that are antiracist. Don’t be fooled by the ‘diversity’ & new multiculturalism agenda. Much work emphasising “diversity” does so as an undeveloped afterthought, not a paradigm shift. It focuses on pausing to consider how a person is different from the norm & therefore ‘diverse’ - reifying racisms.

Thread re Ukraine situation🧵

The extent to which the racism is showing regarding the situation in Ukraine is painful if not surprising.
Open shock and consternation that this should happen to white people - such is the power of the notion of whiteness as supreme The double standards would be funny if they weren’t so insulting.

Foreign secretary Liz Truss tells U.K. citizens to go and become vigilante street fighters when so doing is illegal and where it happened in Syria and Spain was a breech of the Foreign Enlistment Act

Thread on the DfE political impartiality in schools guidance 🧵

The guidance states that "When teaching pupils about racism, teachers should be clear that racism has no place in our society and help pupils to understand facts about this and the law." However, when helping them to understand the facts about this, schools may not teach children anything about racism except that it is unacceptable. They are not allowed to explain how racism came to be, what purpose it serves, and how it has been used to further interests.

A thread on the ‘presence’ of racism in U.K. policy & education 🧵

Michael Apple in 1999 talks of race becoming an ‘absent presence’.
Talk of race was overtly absent in the discourse around markets and yet an absent presence in the goals of the marketisation of education. Tomlinson in 2008 traces how in policy and education race slips in and out of being an ‘absent presence’ to a ‘present presence’.

In the early 2000s there were some attempts to tackle long-standing race issues with the New Labour declarations around social and racial justice.

Another🧵This time, staff MH and wellbeing:

Been talking to schools about mental health and wellbeing. When it comes to staff, no amount of cakes, recognition walls and coffee vans are going to cut it.

My experience of the world of work tells me these things matter: Feeling valued professionally 1:

Does my line manager schedule regular 1:1s with me, show up to them without fail and hold a conversation with me around a simple agenda
-What's going well?
-What could be better for you?
-What's stopping you?
-What will you do next?

So. @TeachFirst "manifesto for ending educational inequality" is out. Some thoughts...
First of all, inequality seems to be summed up in passing English and maths GCSEs, and is defined as follows: The bold aim for the next decade is to "work towards eliminating inequality in education altogether". It is government policy which creates inequality, in health, wealth, education, housing, work. Education sees itself as the big equalizer but is it?

There is a difference between being anti-racist and just someone not wanting to be seen as racist.
In fact, someone who is anti-racist is much more likely to be able to see why they themselves are racist, have been socialised to be inherently racist and live in racist framework This inherent racist framework we all operate within is known as ‘whiteness’ in critical race theory. It doesn’t mean all white people are racist or bad. It means our system is designed to favour white people and disadvantages PoC as the de facto setting unless we challenge that