Last week I had a bit of a road trip up and down the UK. It was one of those weeks where I shouldn’t have been in charge of my own diary; to be fair there are a fair few of those in this life and Mr Dr Ross, with […]
#inclusion
19 posts
This year has been my first year of working entirely an indie, doing stuff that I’ve spent the last 15 years or so working towards. I never thought I’d be a work-for-myself bod, but since doing a really cool – and seminal in my little pathway through this life – […]
My Dad started his working life out as a mechanical engineer, designing gearboxes for Leyland lorries in Preston. He got chartered and by the time he retired he was doing stuff around people management and training people using CAD/CAM systems for IBM. I liked hitting stuff, and loved maths and […]
Team Ross had the best day out today in Barf. We went swimming- Mr Dr Ross has been taking the Small Human swimming over the last few weeks and he has done so well. I’m not great at it and I’m a bit scared of water but swimming is a […]
I go the loo a lot. I’m 40 years old and I have spent all of those 40 years making some sort of substantive use of varying toilet facilities. Either by myself (in the later years) or with my Mum in the earlier years. And I’d not paid that much […]
A few years ago, there was a song that came out and it was hilarious. It brought proper joy to my little Sheffield world and made me giggle a lot: What’s the Meaning of Stonehenge, by Ylvis I’d not ever been to Stonehenge at that point and in all honesty, […]
This last week I’ve been on half term- just the last one before I leave my current job in teaching. I’ve been lucky enough to visit all sorts of different places up and down the M1 and A1 as part of my quest to take the small human northwards to […]
read a thing on the TES just now about teacher retention, and it made think quite a lot. I’ve been in teaching in various guises and roles for 15 years, some of which have been in mainstream, some in management, private schools and I’ve seen a lot. I’ve been very, […]
Driving home from my folks’ house the other day, the child asked me what a noise was. I told him it was music. Then he said, but I can’t see it! He asked me what it was and why we couldn’t see music. I had to think about it and […]
I whole heartedly believe that the basis of anything we do in life is our relationship with the people doing it with us, to us or for us. Our whole social world is transactional. Through our positions in our social sphere, our statuses are conceived, cultivated and sometimes lost. Our […]
So I don’t often write anything about the Small Ross, because essentially, it’s his life and it matters that he gets ownership of what appears on tinterwebs about him. This isn’t really about him but he’s sort of implicated in it in a way! So all the way through being […]
I am not a primary school teacher and I don’t think I ever could be. I cannot master the dark arts that they purvey and control to survive. It is SUCH a skilled and nuanced professional track and I do not have the skill set to manage it. I just […]
I was talking with a friend the other day- she is a home educator and her kids are AMAZING! For their family, it’s a proactive decision and one that they made rather than a situation that was foist upon them because school had been horrible. But talking with her the […]
I trained to teach in 2006-2007 based at Sheffield Hallam Uni but my main placement was at a school I already knew well in Barnsley. At the time I trained, we were in the throes of the ‘Every Child Matters’ and ‘Stage not Age’ bit of education policy. The aims […]
It’s approaching the final week of school for those of us in the State Sector in England. Some of my lovely (and lucky?!) friends and colleagues, who work in independent schools have already broken up so they’re a week of two ahead of me in the decompression stakes, I think. […]
Trustee: “A trustee is someone with legal control of money or property that is kept or invested for another person, company, or organization”. (Collins, Undated) This happened to me on Saturday just gone. I got made a trustee. I say this in what seems to be a really passive way: […]
The fear exists and is very much in the house. Well, the garden office at this point in time. But the fear is definitely here. A dude. A dyslexia-famous dude had messaged me this morning, via my website. He’s like ‘been on BBC Breakfast’ famous because of a book he […]
What are we actually doing when we say that education is important? Who is it important for and what do we mean by education?They seem like they should be really easy, straightforward questions to answer at a first glance, and then you scratch the surface of any answer that’s given […]
Oh no they aren’t… oh… wait… Oh yes they are… or not? Maybe? It’s that mythical child we’re looking for. It’s the Schroendinger’s child of remote learning. It’s the child who is doing nothing at home learning because provision is so poor, and they don’t access it because teachers are […]