Newsround

What’s been newsworthy of late?

• Alert….This is momentous….you have got to admire this and share widely….A pupil-led campaign under the banner #IAMNOTWEAK has encouraged dictionary publishers to remove ‘weak’ from its definition.The previous definition in the Oxford English Dictionary was: “A person who uses strength or influence to harm or intimidate those who are weaker.”But now Google, Collins, Dictionary.com, Oxford Dictionaries and Cambridge Dictionary have all changed their definition of a bully to : “A person who habitually seeks to harm or intimidate those who they perceive as vulnerable.”

• Amanda Spielman, Ofsted’s Chief Inspector, discusses the future of school inspections, how we use data and ongoing work on a new education inspection framework. Take at look at what she said at the Bryanston Education Summit here. She spoke about teachers holding negative views of Ofsted partly because they are left out of the dialogue:

They felt inspection was something done to them, rather than with them. As inspection has become a leadership framed conversation there is now much less dialogue between classroom teachers and inspectors.

• A new research article by Prachi Shah and colleagues at the University of Michigan shows that children who are curious have higher academic achievement than those who aren’t. They see promoting the joy of discovery and motivating pupils to find out answers to life’s questions as an untapped strategy for early academic success.
• Parents put children off studying STEM according to the Institution of Engineering and Technology. I think they mean STEAM!
• Not all interventions work. The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) recently carried out an evaluation of a trial of the GraphoGame Rime intervention for the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) and Wellcome Trust. The results of the evaluation found no evidence that GraphoGame Rime improved pupils’ reading or spelling test scores when compared to business-as-usual (effect size =-0.06). The intervention also showed no impact on reading or spelling test scores for pupils eligible for free school meals compared with the business-as-usual control group.
• “outstanding does not mean ‘perfect’. Nor does it mean that there aren’t areas for improvement..” so says Yvette Stanley in her blog ‘How do we achieve outstanding help and protection?‘
• Where you go to university and what you study really counts: Undergraduate degrees: relative labour market returns
• Tom Bennett’s blog is always worth a read. Take a look at his new blog ‘The Rubik’s Cube of school behaviour – why exclusions are needed to make complex systems work‘. He says, “If we want to save the environment, we need to think more about how we use plastic, not ban plastic. And if we want to reduce exclusions, then we need to exclude sensibly, with care about when it happens, to whom, and what then happens to them.”
• Britain’s wild places are vital to our imaginations says @RobGMacfarlane but how many school children actually get the opportunity to experience this?
• The Independent report that ‘Short-sightedness increases with every year in education‘
• With exam season here there is always advice being dished out – see The Guardian’s article ‘How to optimise your brain for exam season‘
• Trump was the Children’s Word of the Year in 2017 but this year it is….plastic!
• The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has published independent evaluations of two trials: a pilot of a programme to support schools to develop pupils’ spoken language skills; and an intervention designed to improve children’s coping skills.
• What is queer knowledge? Take a look at this knowledge organiser by David Lowbridge-Ellis‏ @DavidTLowbridge