johncosgrove.bsky.social
Husband, father, grandfather, writer and retired teacher.
I blog at https://johncosgrove55.wordpress.com/
Visit my Amazon Author page here: https://www.amazon.co.uk/stores/author/B001KDLZQE
388 posts
1,136 followers
1,058 following
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Well, that's a point of view... 😂
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Thank you. 6 years which translates to "far too long with no action."
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Interesting. Thank you. The biggest problem for English education is we don't have an agreed purpose (many countries do). The nearest we have to a mission statement justified the 1870 expansion of state education by pointing to the extension of the franchise: "We must educate our masters."
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It is a good one. And interesting that you recall it from school. Sometimes punishment can be improving! The poetry I recall from school is Tennyson (Light Brigade), Wordsworth (daffodils and prelude) and chunks of Shakespeare. Keats, Shelley, Byron etc I "discovered" much later.
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Wise.
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PS. I actually think Percy Byshe just liked the music of the name Ozymandias. It sort of demands a poem. If I were a poet I would write a sonnet about Trincomalee and veracity wouldn't trouble my poetic soul. (To be clear: if I had a poetic soul.)
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Not a very deep rabbit hole. They started renaming streets and squares and removing statues very quickly after Franco died. An episode which, in my view, powerfully makes your point that statues have no divine right to remain for eternity. (And speaking of divine rights, statues of Greek gods..?")
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Fair enough. I should probably have written: "it's almost as if he never existed and the name came from a corruption by people who didn't know any better." 😁
Now, if you had pointed to all the vanished statues of Franco, or the missing words from "El Ferrol del Caudillo" (now just "El Ferrol")...
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For an alternative view of the Athena Trust (of which this school is part) see my blog from February. Let's be clear: high levels of exclusion are not characteristic of a successful "inclusive" approach. 2/2
johncosgrove55.wordpress.com/2025/02/23/t...
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I think you'll find Ozymandias has been so completely erased from the history books it's almost as if he never existed but was made up by some writer. 😁
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Agree 100%. There very definitely is duplication - and the waste is compounded by geography. Even the largest LAs cover a defined geographical area. There are MATs where the same central team works with schools hundreds of miles apart.
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Not only CEOs - the additional costs of bloated unnecessary SLTs?
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Absolutely! That £195 million is the tip of a huge iceberg.
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I am not sophisticated in the use of Blue Sky, but you appear to have blocked Helen (@helenjwc.bsky.social) and then replied to her an hour later. Am I missing something or have I misunderstood?
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Again, I don't know anyone who blames "trauma for every little thing." Yes, I oppose the sort of simplistic, harmful behaviour policy you appear to favour. As explained in the blog post I linked to, such policies damage children.
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Please note: I have a life away from social media. I don't actually appreciate getting home after a couple of hours of doing other things to find someone hectoring me and demanding that I make responding to their contentious posts a priority.
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I have never, ever heard or seen anyone argue against having a behaviour policy. But policies which inflexibly link particular actions to specific consequences are unhelpful and damage children. I have given my views on this many times.
johncosgrove55.wordpress.com/2025/02/23/t...
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I have never seen anyone advocate no sanctions. I know many - including me - who recognise, and say, that Draconian regimes with internal exclusion and actual exclusion for trivial "offences" damage children. I did not, and never would, subject a child of mine to such a regime.
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Thank you. I will have to investigate how to do it first! 😁
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One of my sisters played this repeatedly 60 years ago. It never made sense to me: "If Paradise is half as nice as the heaven that you take me to..." needs to be followed by something like "it must be brilliant," not "who needs it?" 😂 Lovely bit of nostalgia though, on a sunny May Tuesday. Thank you.
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From the birth of Ofsted until I became head the school had always been "satisfactory" or "special measures". We then achieved successive "goods" with elements of "outstanding". I am proud to say we did not put a banner on the fence.
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It's a total mystery, so many acting as if nothing ever happened: Ruth, the coroner, the campaigns, the (empty) promises from Ofsted... and when the dust settles, all people seem to want is a headline in the local paper and a banner on the school fence.
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Thank you.
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I do like the poems I read on her blog. Which book did the poem you quoted come from?
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It is. I had never heard of this poet but I have now found the website. Thank you.
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That's good. Thank you.
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Just read a very good response to this article and realised I hadn't properly thought through what he is actually saying. It's in fact not a helpful approach.