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I’m reading John Holt’s What Do I Do Monday? at the moment as a kind of relevant-but-still-light-relief alternative to my current Ed.D. studies. I want to remain ‘in the zone’ as it were, but to be reading stuff that stimulates my thinking rather than reinforces predetermined ‘pigeon-hole’ thinking. Here’s the best bits of what I’ve read so far… :p

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In a move which obviously isn’t designed to win (teacher) friends and influence people, Alan Johnson, the Education Secretary has said that the pressure on teachers to get children through tests and improve school league table results should be intensified. Trouble is, what do these tests measure – constructs which can be seen as ‘real’ such as literacy and numeracy, or the ability of teachers to get pupils through tests?

The Independent has an article which reveals that the proportion of university students from state schools is lowest it has been for three years. The proportion of working-class students has also fallen, along with the number of young people from the most deprived neighbourhoods. Having said that, ‘86.7 per cent of university places were taken by state-school pupils in 2004/05, a drop of 0.1 percentage points on the previous year and 0.5 percentage points down on 2002/03’s figure. About 93 per cent of young people are educated at state schools.’ So the question is, so what?

I’m delighted to announce that the website formerly known as mrbelshaw.co.uk/shareforum has now been given its own domain name and more webspace and bandwidth than you can shake a stick at. The new domain is historyshareforum.com and I’d encourage all History teachers reading this blog to get involved sharing their resources. The resources don’t have to be editable, but it would help… :D

BBC News reports that students in post-compulsory education in state schools will no longer have to attend religious services. This, along with the fact that Ofsted delivers no more that a quick ’slap on the wrists’ to schools which don’t ensure a ‘daily act of collective worship’ means that I believe this to be the beginning of the end of religious education in schools. First the daily act of collective worship will be officially scrapped, and then Religious Education will be subsumed under either Citizenship or PSHE…

If you take a look at the sidebar to the left of this site you’ll see a very biased list. Yes, it’s the ‘most popular’ posts that I’ve made on this blog according to the number of page views. If you were sad enough to look at them carefully you’d notice that most of them come from fairly early on in this blog’s incarnation (back in the heady days of December ‘05!) To help redresss the balance a bit, here’s this blog’s top 10 posts chosen by me. So there. :p

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It struck me as I sat down to write this week’s roundup that pretty much all of the blog articles I cite as a matter of course come from American bloggers. OK, so the population of the US is around five times the size of the UK, but surely there must be a lot more educational bloggers based over here than there actually are? A quick Technorati, Google Blog Search and scour of Tagground yielded little fruit… :(

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I’m having a bit of an experiment in podcasting this blog and I’d like your feedback. Yes, YOU, the ones who never comment nor give me any kind of indication you’re reading my inane ramblings! I’ve recorded my SMART Learning post and plan to podcast at least my Weekly Roundups. Let me know what you think and if you have any problems when subscribing to the podcast in iTunes (or your favourite podcast program)… :p

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The TES reports that too many teachers are being trained in History, Geography and Art whilst there are nowhere near enough teachers in Maths, Physics and Chemistry. Am I wrong in thinking that this is more due to the personality traits of average graduates in these disciplines? In a nutshell, are the teachers in the latter categories mainly shy, retiring geeks and the ones in the former more outgoing?

The EducationGuardian reports on what most teachers know to be the case: that full ‘inclusion’ of the most troubled children in society is not good for schools. I may be a bit cynical, but the timing of the Ofsted report seems a bit convenient to me. The new SEN specialist schools – which effectively set up ‘new-type’ PRUs – are due to come online soon. So saying that it’s the quality of the education, not the setting, which is the determinant factor in SEN students’ success seems to be manipulating the debate for minimum opposition. At least that’s my take – not that I’m arguing with taking some of the headcases out of mainstream education!