🧵This makes me queasy & teachers should resist further bloating of a curriculum at bursting point. Applying for a mortgage is not a ‘life skill’, it’s something you’ll do probably 2-3 times in your entire life. Yes it’s stressful, but it has never held anyone back from doing it The idea that there is anyone out there who has spent years saving for a deposit, found their dream home then just given up because the mortgage process was insurmountable is laughable. ALMOST as laughable as the idea that a 32yo first time buyer will…

NEW BLOG: How I would write a curriculum from scratch.

First practical blog in ages.

In this post I'll take you through a 9-stage cycle of curriculum design and implementation that tries to take into account working memory & reading fluency.
medium.com/@solomon_teach… STAGE 1: Divination
What do we want to teach, and how will it affect the limbic system?

🧵 I fear a significant number of primary leaders are about to make a huge mistake. It’s a completely honest one, and this isn’t an attack, but it is serious enough that we should warn against it. It concerns reading, and what they might be about to do with their SATs data… Many will be trying to identify domains from the curriculum that this cohort scored poorly on eg retrieval/inference/explanation in the hope that they can target these using tailored question types and try to close the reading gap. An example might be an ‘inference intervention’

I want to preempt a charge I know is coming…that lurking beneath that pass mark are huge drops from vulnerable groups, eg PP, and that I’m minimising how much these groups have dropped because they’re hidden from the national average stats 1/4 It’s not that I think ‘they’re doomed anyway, it doesn’t matter’, it’s that when you *talk* to a child who, say, would have scored 29% but is now getting 14%, there is very little discernible difference in the quality of conversation. 2/4

🧵 THREAD

Look carefully. Can you spot the year a global pandemic shut primary schools down for 2 years? I'm struggling.

I know I'll upset a lot of people, but I think the effects have been exaggerated and I think we should guard against the narrative of a 'lost generation'. Yes, the national averages slipped a bit in M & W (Y6 are BETTER at reading now than before COVID), but these slippages are easy to ham up.

It's possible, for example, that most of the extra 8% of children who missed the maths pass mark only dropped 1-5 marks out of 110.

🧵 STARLINGS Vs. WOLVES

👀 Why do starlings fly like this? How are they so incredibly and subconsciously sensitive to the murmuration-mind? Lots of debate recently about ResearchEd, the bad practice it helped sweep away, and the lethal mutations people seem to be blaming it for There's a feeling that @researched1 is somehow responsible for the latest wave of nonsense - mandatory Do Nows, dual code butchery etc. This feeling is misjudged. Part of the problem is treating rED as some sort of conscious organism rather than a collection of talks.

🧵 MEGA THREAD - strap in.

Our children sit down too much. I’m concerned about the university-fication of primary education; it’s getting harder to see what is ‘primary’ about it. If you balked at those words, it’s possible you’ve gone all-in on one narrative which has blinded you to what children in a sane world should be doing with a good portion of their days.

THREAD 🧵

When researchers had to guess what a group of Year 2 children’s SATs scores would be, based only on their answers to 3 working memory tests, they guessed correctly 90% of the time for the children who showed low working memory capacity. 2) We are born with this capacity, and no-one has shown convincingly that it can change. It's pretty fixed. The white bars show performance on the working memory tests, the x axis is achievement on the KS1 SATs (Gathercole & Pickering, 2000)

THREAD

1) I found it curious that 40% of the marks on the 2019 AQA GCSE maths foundation paper (non-calculator) were so comparable to questions on the Year 6 maths SATs paper (left column vs. right). It got me thinking… 2) I think we need a public inquiry into how little the bottom 40% of children are learning at school. I’m particularly concerned about the lowest 20% at primary, who learn almost nothing of what they are taught & are routinely abandoned in Y6 because they have…

THREAD

1) I'm getting increasingly worried about the narrative of supposed 'lost learning' and I want to explain why I don't think school closures had much of an impact at all.

It's important, because the sum of public money on the verge of being wasted is becoming insane. 2) The headline above is from an article in which a think tank genuinely tries to argue that the impact on LIFE TIME earnings of a few months off school cd be up to 3.4% per child...and calls for *10 times* more investment.

The evidence just isn't there. It's smoke & mirrors.

Response to the brilliant @daisychristo 's response (which everybody should read:

https://twitter.com/daisychristo/status/1179093017313103876

) to my blog🙃
Daisy absolutely right to argue that the GCSE paper is designed to tease out the best mathematicians within a large group, and is not designed for mastery 1/n However, our arguments run slightly in parallel. As I see it, the point about exam design is largely academic & needs separating from curriculum design. The GCSE paper is a list of Qs designed to test multiple domains, which get more and more difficult. 2/n