February 2010

  Tuesday, February 23rd. I loved maths at school. I studied it to A-level and enjoyed the more mathematical aspects of my degree.  I think that, as a country, it would be better if there were many more people who enjoyed the subject and felt confident with it. However, I was deeply uncomfortable on watching Channel 4’s two-part Dispatches programme, “Kids Can’t Count”, which finished last night. My unhappiness centred not on what was revealed – the problems/challenges facing maths teaching have been known for a long time – but with the nature of the reporting. Having been prepared to give the programme the benefit ofRead More →

Thursday, February 4th, 2010 Another misleading defence of national testing from Conor Ryan in The Independent today. Mr Ryan, the former political adviser to David Blunkett, is entitled to his point of view. It’s just a shame his arguments are shot through with inaccuracies and false assumptions. He sets up the piece by arguing that National Union of Teachers and National Association of Head Teachers, which want to replace the tests with teacher assessment, started to ballot their members last week on a planned boycott of this year’s tests. In fact, they merely announced plans to ballot for a boycott last week. A date when theRead More →

Wednesday, February 3rd, 2010 Well, there’s been a bit of a gap in these postings, caused by the serious distraction that is moving house, followed by the rather-less-stressful distraction of a holiday to recover from that. But I’m getting back on track now, and hope to be posting regularly. That said, this first one of the year is just a link to a blog I’ve written on another site. I’ve written a piece for the NAHT on why publishing school test scores seems so attractive for politicians, including those in other countries, despite the problems that often follow for pupils. Read it here. I’ve alsoRead More →