Of course you have to hope that his widow does the decent thing and gives it all away to charities.
Professor of Education Futures at UCL. Personal account, posts represent my own opinions and not those of my institution.
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Of course you have to hope that his widow does the decent thing and gives it all away to charities.
Meet Guy Dinwiddy, fundraising on a sponsored bike ride for Hockerill College, where he is the Design Technology teacher. Pork pie at the half way point.
Less style
She must be quite a special woman. I think we need more information on all this.
Brilliant
It appears 57% of school cyberattacks are carried out internally by *pupils*. I will just leave that thought with you all.
Then there’s all those commie woke courses like the Anglo-Saxon, Norse and Celtic BA at Cambridge. Pretending we didn’t start with St George and the Dragon.
Really enjoying the podcast series “Short history of …” on BBC Sounds. Strongly recommend. So far I’ve listened to one on the Domesday Book, one on Van Gogh and one on the Conquistadors.
Really communist, charging massive fees, running MBAs and creating spinoff businesses 😂
As an academic and keen allotment holder, I think ‘poisoning minds’ wouid be very tedious to do as a job. I prefer ‘growing minds’ myself, with all the fertilising and staking that requires.
See if your alma mater can help.
Andrea White Call for Papers/Abstracts We are planning a Mad Studies conference and invite scholars, artists, and activists to participate. We are seeking submissions around the theme of Mad Pasts, Mad Presence in Victoria, BC. contact victoria.madstudies@gmail.com for more info.
Precisely. I have seen a lot in my time and the ability to manipulate compliance in your favour is integral to this.
And the healthcare you do have is heavily skewed by the profit motive.
My littlest kid starts sixth form college today. I have had firm instructions to stop helping him get ready.
I finally read that Wired piece about the VC and the gestational carrier and…it really is that bad. Basically the GC nearly died trying to carry the VC’s baby, and because she’s still alive and the baby is not, the VC is taking “revenge” on the GC to the point the latter is considering suicide.
Having visions of Mike going and asking my dad for my hand in marriage. That would be hilarious. He’d probably respond ‘I’m not paying for a second one!’
I’m not sure it’s even very good religion half the time, quite honestly.
Come back, phone scammer Mike. We could have a beautiful life together. I have shelves that need putting up. Don’t be scared.
In other news, three of my ‘children’ have lost their mobile phones and got new numbers this week alone, requesting extensive financial transfers at the same time as announcing this fact to me. (I knew it wasn’t my real children as they know I would just tell them to get a job).
I am emboldened by watching the phone scamming programme on the BBC with my youngest, which is one of our favourite TV programmes right now.
I just proposed marriage to a persistent gentleman called ‘Mike’ aged 22 from India who just rang me unexpectedly, invoking a mobile provider I have never had a business relationship with, as I felt I could do with a second husband to help around the house, but ‘Mike’ suddenly rang off!! His loss.
Blimey
Exactly, and they are always incredibly interesting. Different lenses on the same thing.
Similarly there’s nothing wrong with respecting the Bible while at the same time accepting it is also a reflection of historicism.
In Christian terms, there’s absolutely nothing wrong with updating your knowledge about the world as things are revealed to you/mankind. It’s entirely consistent with seeking to understand the mind of God.
I analysed some home schooling Christian text books for a keynote I gave and, as a Christian, I was left wondering 1. Why they found it so hard to accept the idea of the literary device, and 2. Why they fervently resisted the idea God had created the scientific method alongside everything else.
Pritzker: Any rational person who has spent even the most minimal amount of time studying human history has to ask themselves one important question: Once they get the citizens of this nation comfortable with the current atrocities committed under the color of law, what comes next
What’s depressing about their brilliance is that I was musically gifted enough to go to music conservatoire but did third study violin at school for five years and it always sounded like an animal in mild pain. Unfair.
Well quite
Let them make a massive fort out of tables and chairs and tablecloths and bedding and sit inside looking at comics and eating biscuits on and off all day.
I didn’t realise we were copying America in this way. He shouldn’t have been arrested in the first place but there was no reason to detain him - he ought to have been released immediately with a huge apology.
"AI is like a tireless tutor" says @drleatongray.bsky.social 🤖💻 This year, students have been using AI to discuss marking frameworks, write sample answers and get feedback. www.theguardian.com/educatio...
I would love that too. I am from an era where we would flip our clothes inside out when we bought them to check the quality of the seam.
Diagnostic software triples rate of full recovery in stroke patients www.thetimes.com/article/0213...
🔴 Need a laugh , today ? 🤭🤣🙃🤭 #Dogsky #Dogs 🐥
Is this a cultural reference?
Toga
Definitely
Exactly
Sicily: Swim in the sea, have some fish for lunch and then knock on a Nonna’s door.
Germany: Drive around in the rain
Evidently I should stay away from Tooting: my kind are not welcome 🧶
No top hat or sword though. Unlike Finland.
I’d be inclined to buy a rechargeable generator with loads of USB ports
The City of Atlanta is opening its first municipal grocery store today. The city is spending $3.5 million in partnership with a neighborhood grocery chain in an effort to eliminate a downtown food desert. www.wsbtv.com/news/local/a...
Try solar with an inverter
Happy to read with a view to possible endorsement
My grandfather also wants to pass along the message that RFK Jr. is destroying one of the prime achievements of American medicine. This is something he knows well, given the decades of his life he dedicated to medicine, to the scientific pursuits, and to helping research new treatments for diseases.
Lively Artificial and Human Intelligence SIG!
And if you don’t like being part of that, go home!
I regret to inform you that yarnbombing has gone corporate.
That’s the cunning plan. Presenting at BERA on it in a couple of weeks.
Schools are generally so bad at Ed Tech you could probably remove it from most institutions and watch standards rise.
We are trying to develop a novel product to do exactly that - to look at progress of groups, not individuals, via concept formation patterns.
That’s why it shouldn’t do the first pass. That needs a human.
A psychotherapist working with US forces families posted in Europe recently discussed with me how US kids live very constrained lives compared to local children, as their parents over-supervise and drive them everywhere in fear of a risk of gun crime that only exists in their heads, not in reality.
I do agree with that but I think part of that work is triangulating to ensure consistency and quality.
Don’t confuse the cheapo public face of AI with the more robust options out there. We’ve been using higher powered accounts to check for plagiarism via paraphrasing and it’s been impressive.
It’s not going to be great at that. It might be helpful on more prosaic assignments. We’re developing a way it could track concept formation, for example.
Not necessarily in a commercial account with the right privacy settings. You always need human review.
You can buy institutional subscriptions that create a walled garden with the data not shared other than for processing.
Yes, this is a very helpful adjunct to the human approach.
One thing that schools could do is to mark work the old fashioned way and then get AI to rank it, to look at marking reliability, for example, or create a report on common problems and misconceptions across the group.
I was really referring to university where we set criteria and put a lot of resource into moderation.
Actually I did use PowerPoint Designer a bit on the graphics so I suppose he is kind of right. I really like that function.
I spent the whole of yesterday afternoon crafting some lovely slides for the BERA conference paper Mutlu Cukurova and I are presenting on using AI with sociolinguistics to track concept formation in history and social science. Then he asked me if AI had done the slides! Should I mess them up a bit?!
AI can be a great third marker in a moderation team, as well as a great tool for Early Career colleagues to learn different ways of applying marking criteria consistently. What it’s not good at is doing the first pass unless the task is quite trivial.
This is why I love kids and dogs.
This is Thanos. He has figured out how to rest and babysit at the same time. Very impressive, very Montessori. 13/10 (TT: thanosthesaint)
Guilty
10/ So yes, Britain can afford a fairer system. In fact, it already spends the money anyway, just in the least efficient way imaginable. The real task is to rebuild a covenant with the young, one where education and housing provide security, not stress. /Ends
9/ International comparisons are instructive. Nordic states spend more directly on education and housing, less on loans and subsidies. Germany funds apprenticeships with employers ahd has more rent caps. Britain spends a similar share of GDP, but with less equal outcomes.
8/ The result is a system that is costly but stressful: high debt, high rents, and persistent inequality. Britain already pays heavily, just not in ways that build security for the young.
7/ Housing tells a similar story. Britain spends £30bn a year on housing benefit, much of it subsidising high rents and sent to private landlords, while councils built fewer than 9,000 homes in 2022–23. On paper, that looks irrational, but it has been politically convenient.
6/ Why does Britain persist with this model? Budget optics as loans are booked as assets, not spending. Incremental layering as small fixes accumulate into inefficiency. Distributional politics as shifting risk to individuals avoids tax rises. Path dependency as entrenched systems are hard to unwind
5/ Graduate debts show the divergence: England ~£45k, Wales ~£28k, N. Ireland ~£24k, Scotland <£15k. The EU average is under £10k, (and in Germany it is <£3k). One state, four models, and showing very different futures.
4/ That’s 0.5–0.6% of total public spending, which is less than the annual pension triple-lock uprating, or one year’s fuel duty revenue. By international standards, a modest shift. Coins down the back of the national sofa.
3/ Restoring maintenance grants would add around £2bn a year. FE investment of another £2bn would reverse a decade of cuts. Doubling council housebuilding would require ~£1.1bn. Total: £12–13bn a year.
2/ Start with higher education. England spends £10.4bn a year on tuition-fee loans. But 30–40% will never be repaid. Abolishing fees would cost about £7bn a year in budget terms, not £10bn, because much of that “spending” already exists as losses.
1/ Britain spends heavily on education and housing, yet the covenant with the young feels broken, with record student debt, high rents, and insecure work. Could we afford to design it differently? On the basis of the numbers alone, yes, quite easily. The harder question is why we do it this way.
Following on from my thread about universities, let’s lift the lid on the problems of policy accretion, public finance and the intergenerational social contract.
Christmas pudding, ice cream vans, double helix, organised team sports, brass bands, brogues, knickerbockers, penicillin, steam engine, railway, jet engine, I could go on …
The Two Ronnies
11/ The UK’s four nations remind us that higher education systems can be designed very differently, yet often inequality stubbornly persists. The question is not whether higher education creates young people’s futures - it always does - but whose futures do best, and on what terms? /Ends
10/ The lesson for education futures is not just about debt. Expansion can broaden access, as we have seen, but it does not equalise outcomes enough unless the wider settlement of housing, labour, and welfare is also aligned.
9/ Internationally, the UK is unusual. Nordic states expanded higher education without fees. Germany sustained vocational parity. Britain expanded too, but in four different ways inside the same nation state.
8/ And the inequality story? Scotland’s income Gini is ~0.32, Northern Ireland’s ~0.30, which are both lower than the UK average (~0.35). England is higher at around 0.37. But all four nations show the same pattern - socio-economic background still frequently predicts outcomes.
7/ So we can see one state, four models. England delivers world-leading participation but world-leading debt. Scotland offers low-debt access, but persistent stratification. Wales redistributes, Northern Ireland keeps fees lower.
6/ Northern Ireland: Fees capped at ~£4,700. Average graduate debt ~£24,000. Participation is lower than England or Scotland, and many students leave to study elsewhere.
5/ Wales: Fees capped at £9,000 but offset by grants and living support. Average graduate debt ~£28,000. Finance design is more redistributive, but participation gaps remain.
4/ Scotland: Fees abolished for Scottish students in 2008. Average graduate debt under £15,000. Participation is high, but access to elite universities remains skewed towards the economically advantaged.
3/ England: Fees up to £9,250 a year. Average graduate debt ~£45,000, the highest in the OECD. Participation is high, but vocational routes remain weak.
2/ But expansion was designed differently in each nation. England, Scotland, Wales, and Northern Ireland now run distinct systems, each with very different implications for student debt.
1/ These days, more people in the UK go to university than ever before. In 1960, 4% of young people entered higher education. By 1990 it was 19%. Today it is over 50%. Expansion has transformed opportunity.
In a recent thread I talked about vocational education. Let’s talk about the UK, university education and inequality now. Buckle up. 🧵
www.fieldsportschannel.tv/never-never-...
It’s also great for children to be able to make solid friendships outside the home, and experience new things in an educational environment designed specifically for their needs, with lots of great resources. Terrific step forward.
God almighty, that hits home.