Blogs & articles

George Osborne: new ideas and new questions

Blog

08 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

Just come away from the Great Room after responding to a speech by George Osborne - you can see a short interview with him below. The Shadow Chancellor concentrated mainly on the case for new and better forms of oversight and intervention in financial markets.

Why the ATL (and The Observer) should be ashamed of themselves

Blog

07 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

I said yesterday that the ATL’s methodology for its attack on parents and children couldn’t possibly be as dodgy as the one I used for the NASUWT twenty five years ago. This morning David Aaronovitch confirms that it was! The ATL (usually a serious and thoughtful union) should be ashamed of itself. I wonder whether there are any maths or statistic teachers at their conference and if so whether they would teach their GCSE pupils to rely on a self-selecting, unrepresentative, deliberately skewed sample in order to legitimise a major attack on the behaviour of large sections of British society. As for The Observer – which dedicated four pages to this tendentious nonsense- well that’s the last time I’ll be parting with £2.

'The market is bust but so is the state'

Blog

07 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

This is the headline of Philip Stephens’ piece in today’s FT. The intriguing thing about Stephens’ discussion of the relative merits of state and market solutions is that he fails to make any mention of the third - or civic sector. The growing economic and social crisis will turn into reality the warning we have been given by many social and political theorists: state and market alone are not sufficient for sustainable progress – indeed both state and market rely on the civic sector.

G20 protests: does the lack of iconography = a lack of vision?

Blog

06 Apr 2009

Caleb Klaces: In Everything that rises: a book of convergences, Lawrence Weschler compares graphic imagery used in Communist-controlled Poland’s Solidarity movement with later social justice movements in the US. He argues that the image of an angry crowd facing directly forwards was instrumental in really bringing people together in both cases. In his view, the image was more powerfully drawn in Poland than the US because the movement itself had more vitality.

Are parents and kids really that bad?

Blog

06 Apr 2009

Matthew Taylor

In a strange editorial decision, The Observer decided yesterday to dedicate its front page splash and nearly three full internal pages to research by the ATL (Association of Teachers and Lecturers) which claimed to show that children and their parents are not only vicious and nasty but getting worse. The Today programme featured the same survey this morning. For the media to report the ATL’s claims so uncritically is lazy and reactionary.   

The 'problem' of governor churn

Blog

06 Apr 2009

In its embryonic stages the Prison Learning Network sought to address a very specific ‘problem’ – Governor churn.  The idea was that the frequent movement of number one governor’s and senior staff prevented good work from becoming embedded in a particular prison. While the movement did mean that poor performance was prevented from taking root, it was the good stuff that needed to dominate the discussion; highlighting the wealth of innovation and great work that exists in a field too often shrouded with negativity.

Sci-fi: speculation as art form

Blog

05 Apr 2009

Much of the art around climate is about imagining new futures. Rubbing up against visions of the future is a good way to reconsider the present. Sci-fi is the daddy of that concept, so it's interesting to see EcoGeek doing a series of really excellent in-depth interviews with US sci-fi authors.

The Fogg Behaviour Model

Blog

03 Apr 2009

Behaviour models are a way to understand the factors that drive particular behaviours. The best known comes from economics and is the theory of rational man (or homo economicus). Rational man theory simply says that people decide how to behave by weighing up the costs and benefits of each choice, and choose the action that maximises their expected benefits.

Has the National Curriculum had its day?

Blog

03 Apr 2009

The government's defensive response to the select committee's recommendation that the National Curriculum take up no more than 50% of the timetable is as frustrating as it is predictable.