As some of you may know, on Thursday 30th December we lost a member of our school community in a brutal and unprovoked attack. Zaian was brilliant. He was charming, charismatic, funny, and sensitive. His loss has left an enormous hole in our school. (1) Zaian was the 29th teenager killed in London this year. The statistics are sobering and the hurt that is being caused to communities, schools, and families is hard to describe. (2)

Building your curriculum from scratch? At @rEDSurrey2021 I went through some of the how and why (thanks @joe__kirby for prompting me to share this). THREAD: 1 - When thinking about *why* you might want to build your curriculum from scratch I ran through the case study of my own former history curriculum. It was a pretty functional curriculum, but I could never escape the feeling that it felt weird and disjointed

We launched our new reading for pleasure programme a month ago. It's been great fun, so I thought I would share some details. So much of this work has been done by a brilliant colleague who pushed and pushed SLT to reform our approach to reading at OASP. THREAD: As @HuntingEnglish notes, reading is the "master skill" of a school. If you've ever visited a school and seen children regularly reading of their own accord you will recognise this. It goes without saying that regular reading expands minds and opens doors. (1)

LONG THREAD: I presented the new curriculum policy I've been working on to SLT this week and thought it worth sharing on here. I was interested in the two models that @ragazza_inglese outlined in her piece in the ResearchEd curriculum book. Both felt painfully familiar (1) I was interested in the idea of a 'third way.' A model which saw subject leads develop school curricula with the support of engaged and knowledgeable leaders. A model that would put subject expertise at the heart of what we do (2)

Gave CPD today on the need to situate new learning within existing frameworks of knowledge. Tethering in this sense can help build schema + shine a light on curricula narratives. I also think it is *really* hard to do well. (1) A useful starting point is to understand why prior knowledge is significant to learning. Robertson’s forgetting pit helps with this. When we pay attention, new learning enters our working memory but soon falls into the forgetting pit (long term memory). (2)