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Maximising Student Potential

Welcome to my blog!

Here you’ll find my rants, raves, provocations

and research about teaching, education and the educational landscape.

This site contains my personal views about education and teaching.

Latest from the Blog

Streaming Without Conviction: What schools call streaming is often just selective extraction

Schools are not nearly as uncomfortable with sorting students as they like to pretend. We talk about inclusion, belonging, mixed-ability learning, and meeting every student where they are, which are all noble enough ideas when they are taken seriously. At the same time, we run selective schools, opportunity classes, gifted pathways, accelerated streams, extension groups,…

Differentiation Is Not the Problem. Pretending It’s Easy Is.

Somewhere right now, a teacher is producing three versions of the same worksheet and calling it inclusive practice. There is the “support” version, where a few of the harder questions have quietly disappeared. There is the “extension” version, where the same questions have been given an extra verb, probably “evaluate”, because nothing says academic stretch…

How Many Standards Does It Take to Train a Teacher? 

Education reform has a curious rhythm. A problem appears. A review is commissioned. A framework is introduced. The framework does not quite fix the problem, so a second framework arrives to strengthen it. Eventually, the system begins to resemble a geological formation: layers of policy sediment built up over time, each one deposited with the…

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