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It’s Your Time You’re Wasting

It’s Your Time You’re Wasting

By: David Didau and Martin Robinson
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 Education chat with David Didau and Martin RobinsonCopyright 2025 All rights reserved.
Episodes
  • Belonging in Schools: How Do We Do It?

    Belonging in Schools: How Do We Do It?
    Nov 30 2025
    Belonging is Ofsted’s latest preoccupation. In the 2025 framework it sits inside inclusion, now judged in its own right. Schools feel pressure to demonstrate how they notice and support pupils who meet friction in the system. Much policy treats belonging as an emotional climate. Warmth, smiles and pleasant corridors become the accepted tokens of attachment. This flattens a serious idea and overlooks the material pupils use to understand school life. Knowledge as the foundation of belonging Belonging grows from access to shared knowledge: the stories, concepts and cultural structures that let a community recognise itself. Language sits inside this larger inheritance. It is the most visible branch of a deeper stock of ideas. Without shared knowledge, pupils cannot interpret rules, routines or expectations. If belonging becomes a feeling, we lose sight of the material that gives the feeling something to attach to. Language as the medium of participation Every encounter at school arrives through words: rules, identity, aspiration, conflict. Pupils join the community by gaining control of its linguistic repertoire. To belong is to understand the meaning world the school inhabits. The older conversation The Civitas report argues for a renewed commitment to classical liberal education in the UK: The aspiration is to help children develop conscience, moral judgement, aesthetic sensibility, and a sense of belonging to a heritage. These qualities anchor personal freedom in responsibility and shared humanity Belonging.docx Classical societies bound citizens through a moral vocabulary and a shared account of the virtues. Christianity offered a narrative of creation, fall and redemption that gave communities long memory. In each case, belonging meant learning the knowledge and language of the tradition. The Civitas vision of education connects directly to our broader argument: belonging is not just emotional comfort or inclusion. It is entrance into a shared world of ideas, language, values and history. Without that shared knowledge and cultural inheritance, belonging risks degenerating into a patchwork of mood, sentiment or identity fragments. Reviving classical liberal education offers a way to rebuild the intellectual and moral basis of belonging: not as compliance, but as membership in a living tradition one that gives children more than qualifications: a language, a moral vocabulary, a sense of home in a community of meaning. The modern tension. The key question sits quietly behind the framework: belonging to what? Many schools treat belonging as free floating, detached from any story or stock of ideas.. This reflects the multicultural mosaic, which prizes openness but offers little shared meaning. The result can be a community held together by atmosphere rather than conviction. Without shared knowledge, belonging collapses into mood. Mood does not hold communities together. Common stories, common concepts and a common language do. When pupils lack the background knowledge to follow curriculum discussions, they drift to the margins. They may feel welcome, but they cannot participate fully in classroom life. Initiatives that focus on wellbeing surveys or displays of diversity, but do not teach the knowledge that unifies pupils, history, literature, civic ideas produce fragile cohesion. Children sit together but do not share a common frame for thinking. Public debate becomes incoherent without shared reference points. When citizens no longer recog nise the same historical events, moral concepts or civic principles, discussion dissolves into competing feelings. Communities with no common story struggle to integrate newcomers. Without shared civic knowledge, the constitution, national history, the duties of citizenship “inclusion” becomes a matter of sentiment rather than participation.. Societies that retreat from teaching their own traditions often see rising polarisation. Without a common inheritance, people fall back on subcultures, identities or moods that cannot be reconciled. Schools face a clear choice. They can induct pupils into a tradition with coherent knowledge, a shared story and a demanding moral vocabulary, or they can settle for a mosaic of disconnected narratives that offers little common ground. Language sits at the centre of this decision. A shared linguistic repertoire gives pupils access to the concepts, stories and virtues that shape the community they join. Without this, belonging has no anchor and no directi on. If Ofsted wants belonging to mean more than mood, it must address the deeper question: not whether pupils feel at home, but whether they are being given the knowledge and language that make a home possible. What do we want students to belong to?
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    1 hr and 4 mins
  • What Makes a Top School? Facts and Misinformation.

    What Makes a Top School? Facts and Misinformation.
    Nov 15 2025

    In this episode we look at a cluster of articles, tweets and policy announcements, each tugging in a slightly different direction. On their own they’re fragments. Taken together they paint a

    picture of how schools try to make sense of contradictory signals about disadvantage,

    curriculum, SEND, misinformation and reform.

    We look at the top 75 schools based on progress 8 - what is their secret?

    We ask, can you teach kids to spot misinformation?

    We discuss what relevance neuroscience might have for schools

    And whether English teachers actually like Shakespeare? (Should they?)

    https://www.weareinbeta.community/posts/schools-with-strong-contextual-attainment-for-disadvantaged-students-in-2025

    https://substack.nomoremarking.com/p/can-we-teach-students-to-spot-misinformation

    https://x.com/BarbaraBleiman/status/1988165932867612744?s=20

    https://daviddidau.substack.com/p/the-promise-and-danger-of-neuroscience
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    1 hr and 6 mins
  • Curriculum Review: Ebacc to the Future

    Curriculum Review: Ebacc to the Future
    Nov 6 2025
    Curriculum Wars, Again The 2025 Curriculum & Assessment Review – progress or regression? This week, we wade into the newly published Curriculum and Assessment Review — the biggest rethink of England’s education system since 2014. Chaired by Becky Francis, the report promises a “world - class curriculum for all.” But behind the polite phrasing lies a familiar battlefield: knowledge versus skills, rigour versus relevance, freedom versus control. Has the pendulum swung again? Or are we just circling the same deb ates under new branding? What Is English For, Anyway? The review calls for a clearer sense of purpose — including a firmer distinction between English and literacy .  Could this finally kill off the endless reproduction of GCSE question types at Key Stage 3?  Or will “clarity” just mean more bureaucratic fog?  Remember when KS3 had its own curriculum and the Year 9 SATs actually tested something worthwhile? Drama Returns to the Stage The report reintroduces drama — not as an afterthought, but as a formal part of English, alongside reading and writing.  Nostalgia or necessity?  Can English teachers still teach drama with confidence? Or has that expertise gone the way of the OHP and the acetate pen?  When it’s done wel l, drama deepens understanding and builds voice; when it’s bad, it’s awkward theatre therapy. The Oracy Framework: Finding Our Voices, Losing Our Minds? A new National Oracy Framework is coming to “complement” reading and writing.  The idea: oracy underpins learning, wellbeing, and citizenship.  The worry: it becomes another smorgasbord of “amuse - bouches” that distracts from the main course of English.  If it’s about real talk — debate, interpretation, Socratic dialogue — brilliant.  If it’s another round of la minated sentence stems and group talk rubrics, not so much. Grammar in Use, Not Grammar in Theory At last, someone’s said it: move theoretical grammar out of primary and focus on grammar in use at Key Stage 3.  Re - sequencing grammar so it’s taught when students can actually use it.  A revised GPS test focusing on application, not terminology.  Imagine a “literacy passport” — a driving theory test for writing — taken when students are ready. Diagnostics and the Year 8 Test A national diagnostic test in Engl ish at Year 8: to identify reading weaknesses before it’s too late.  Were SATs a good thing?  Because every child who can’t read at secondary is a failure of the system, not the child.  Measure it and it will come. GCSE English: The Return of Purpose (Maybe) The review proposes a total rethink of English Language and Literature at Key Stage 4.  More focus on the nature and expression of language .  Greater range of text types — possibly multi - modal or media - based.  But will this mean deep analysis or “describe yo ur favourite app” nonsense? Broadening the Canon Keep Shakespeare. Keep the 19th - century novel. Keep poetry. But add more “diverse and representative” texts.  Sounds fine, unless “diverse” just means “short and modern.”  Without a central list, we risk tokenism — or a slide back to the 1980s: Angel Delight, pastel colours, and low expectations. “The best that’s been thought and said — by everyone.” EBacc: The Empire Strikes Out The review doesn’t quite kill the EBacc, but it quietly prepares the obituary.  A “rebalancing” of accountability measures signals its long fade.  The arts and technical subjects might finally be allowed to breathe again.  But will schools trust that the accountability system really means it?  Is this the end of “five pillars o f rigour,” or just a rebrand before the next election? The Broader Frame: Inclusion, AI, and Moral Purpose Beyond English, the review leans heavily into digital literacy, sustainability, and moral education Are we educating people or optimising products?  Civic education from Year 1: universal virtue or creeping ideology?  AI readiness: the new “future - proofing” theology. Implementation and Irony The report promises “professional autonomy within entitlement.”  A phrase so elegantly meaningless it could only h ave been written by a committee.  Is it genuine trust, or centralisation in polite language?  And who will train teachers to deliver all this nuance? “It’s a middle path no one will walk.” “Or as we call it in schools — another thing to fake.” The review’ s English reforms are a time machine: part 1990s drama classroom, part 2010s accountability regime, part 2030s AI marketing deck. But the question remains the same: What do we really want English to do : teach communication, preserve culture, or save souls? From SATs ...
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    1 hr and 5 mins
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