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Today I listened to Paul Smith, CEO of Future Academies, talk about his ambition for the young people who attend the schools in his Trust. He said he wanted them to be able to go to a 'nice' restaurant, feel confident about ordering and be able to have a 90 minutes conversation about current affairs. This might seem a pretty modest wish, but I have taught very many children who [...]

Yesterday, I wrote a post explaining that important as the quality of teaching in a school is, there are other, more important things on which to concentrate. In response, Katharine Birbalsingh, head mistress of Michaela School tweeted this: I agree with lots of this but @DavidDidau misses a, if not THE most important thing: kids need to love their teacher. They need to be inspired. When a kid loves their [...]

As John Tomsett says in his latest blog, "It is generally accepted that the quality of teaching is the most influential factor in determining the rate at which pupils make progress in their learning – broadly speaking, the better the teaching, the more progress pupils make over time."[i] Here, I want to argue that teaching, important as it is, only comes third (or maybe fourth) on the list of things [...]

Balance is an obviously good thing, isn't it? After all, who wants to be unbalanced? "What is it indeed that gives us the feeling of elegance in a solution, in a demonstration?" asked the mathematician Henri Poincaré. "It is the harmony of the diverse parts, their symmetry, their happy balance; in a word it is all that introduces order, all that gives unity, that permits us to see clearly and to comprehend [...]

I normally round up my favourite reads at the end of the year but I've read so many really excellent books so far this year that I decided to put them out there now. Who knows? Maybe you'll consider picking one of them up to peruse over the summer. In no particular order... Factfulness: 10 reasons we're wrong about the world - and why things are better than you think, [...]