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Enough Already With “Trad vs Prog”!

The past few days have seen the opposite (if not equal) reaction to the recent emergence of the #EducationForward campaign. With scant regard for factual accuracy, various bloggers and tweeters (since they crave attention I’ll anonymise them for now) have attempted to summarise the Education Forward book, without the tiresome task of actually reading it. One, describing #EducationForward as ‘Education Backward’ (witty),  linked EF to Class Action, the recently created magazine ‘by teachers for teachers’ (wrong). Others questioned how EF is funded (it isn’t). But the biggest (though I suspect knowing) misconception has been to cast Education Forward as promulgating …

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Education: How We Should Seek To Understand While We Condemn The Westminster Attack

 Perhaps the best way to describe the mood in the UK tonight – on the day when over forty people have suffered at the hands of a crazed, isolated lunatic – is saddened, but not traumatised. Setting aside the “Twitter-emote” hyperbole, it feels like most people are less inclined to #PrayForLondon than they are to get back to normal, while seeking to understand why it happened. As Seun Roberts-Edomi, who worked close to Westminster Bridge, said, he would be back tomorrow like every other day in the office. “I’ve never been scared. This is what I’m used to. It can …

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Lies, Damn Lies, And Conscious Misrepresentation of Evidence

An earlier post of mine, on ‘what counts as evidence’, generated a healthy debate, and I thought I could leave the thorny problem of ‘what works’ in education for a while. Maybe lighten the mood with a blog about the all-out assault on the judiciary in post-Brexit Britain, or what’s an appropriate response to a Donald Trump presidency, something like that. But the ‘evidence’ issue reared its contentious head again yesterday, November 4th, so The Donald might have to wait. The flashpoint was the publishing of a report by the Educational Endowment Foundation (the UK equivalent of America’s What Works …

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