Nottingham born. Deputy Head. Teach First '14 - London. Moved to Melbourne, Aus in Jan 23 to teach. Occasional cricketing.
London
Joined April 2011
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Tim Young retweeted
“In short, PISA is a screen-based test of problem-solving skills that requires limited specific curriculum knowledge. If you wanted to design a test that would be *least likely* to reward England’s educational approach, and *most likely* to reward the approach in Scotland & Wales, it would be PISA.
And yet, England are still doing better on it.”
🎯 🎯🎯
There's a lot of talk about whether we can trust PISA scores or not.
PISA is not the only international test. TIMSS & PIRLS are run by a different research group, and have a slightly different focus. They test reading, maths & science but with more of a focus on specific curriculum knowledge.
England is also the only country outside East Asia to come in the top 10 on all the TIMSS & PIRLS tests too.
More here.
substack.nomoremarking.com/p…
Tim Young retweeted
It’s always a genuine travesty when a kid is permanently excluded from school.
It’s seductive to believe that simply not excluding solves all of the pain associated with them.
But it’s based on a confusion of causes and consequences.
Focus on the causes.
Tim Young retweeted
The PISA 2025 results are out today. Some quick insights.
- The major story is very significant global decline. The last PISA study was in 2022, and saw big declines in reading and maths scores from 2018. Obviously the pandemic played a part.
- But this 2025 round has seen further falls even from the 2022 lows!
Things haven't gone back to normal post-pandemic - they've got worse.
Every generation thinks the generation below is less smart - but this time they might be right!
Tim Young retweeted
Untangling the factors that have led to England's educational success on the national stage isn't easy.
If I were a betting man, I would say that the gradual improvements are due to:
- Increased behaviour standards and expectations (led by a number of MATs)
- Knowledge-rich curriculum, and the abandonment of trying to teach transferable skills
- Eradication of coursework and "in class assessment" from many qualifications
- Removal of soft/light qualifications like the old "GCSE equivalents"
- Ditching modular assessments
- Moving more teacher training out of the control of universities and directly into schools
- Systematic synthetic phonics
- The growth of explicit instruction and sensible classroom teaching strategies
There's probably more. Off the top of my head, those are the big ones.
Tim Young retweeted
The best evidence that the fads might be causing this problem is that one of the few countries to escape the general fall in scores is England - also one of the few countries to explicitly reject the fads and take a different approach.
Contrast with Scotland - a similar country which had basically the same PISA scores as England in 2012.
Since then the two countries took very different educational approaches and Scottish students are now about a year behind English ones in maths & science (and behind by a smaller amount in reading).
I wrote about this in 2013, but it's even more stark now.
substack.nomoremarking.com/p…
Tim Young retweeted
New PISA data out
England is now top ten in all three areas (reading, maths, science) and the second highest performing country outside of east Asia (after Estonia).
This is a huge public policy success.
Tim Young retweeted
Students using AI for educational purposes is neither desirable nor inevitable.
We saw the same cycle with mobile phones. When they started up, schools were in a bit of a tizz. Nobody really knew how to respond. Then we had people talking about them as learning tools, and that we should be teaching students how to use them appropriately. Time passed, and people realised that this wasn't smart, and today there are only a handful of secondary schools in the country that allow them (or allow teachers to allow students to use them). Gone are the days of kahoot quizzes in class and kids on social media in lunch.
Good, say I.
Of course, we can't necessarily control what students do outside of school. But we do what we can, and we don't concede the ground when there are things we can control.
The crazy thing is that most of us are looking back over the last 15 years and wondering why we didn't take these actions sooner. The writing was on the wall, and it should have been obvious to us that national bans were inevitable.
The same is true for AI. It's clearly bad for students' brains*, and we need to resist them using it as much as possible. We don't need to "teach them how to use it responsibly." It's not practical, and it is almost definitely not possible. And, whilst we can't directly control what they do outside of school, we can:
A. Ensure we aren't actively sending them towards it (either through unmediated chatbots or homework platforms that make use of it)
B. Take simple measures to communicate its undesirability to students. Tell them it sucks. Tell them not to use it. Use strategies like The Greatest Do Now Ever** to quickly and easily check whether or not they've used it. It's not complicated.
This year, my students completed tens of thousands of questions online for me. Some of them took shortcuts in their answers and some were overly lenient in their self assessment. I picked it up, we dealt with it. But - despite substantial and intensive checking and triangulating - I found absolutely ZERO evidence any of them used AI to answer questions. Getting them not to use it is not beyond the wit of man.
None of this is inevitable, and in ten years time we are going to look back and wonder why we didn't do this sooner. Teachers are absolute suckers for new tech. But we don't have to be, and until someone can prove that this stuff isn't detrimental, kick it out.
---
*See Benjamin Riley's EXCELLENT post on the matter: buildcognitiveresonance.subs…
**carouselteachlearnlead.subst…
Tim Young retweeted
“We are not experiencing an “AI Jobs Shock”. At most, we are experiencing a reduction in hiring by executives who do not understand the technology but who have absorbed vibes that there will be a real-soon-now “AI Jobs Shock”. Where do these vibes come from? From a combination of grifters seeking money, and madmen hearing the voices in their heads of a forthcoming Digital God”.
Brilliant quote from @delong’s newsletter.
Tim Young retweeted
My various positions on "behaviour is all about relationships" are (in no particular order):
If you want behaviour to improve, trying to build relationships is a significantly worse option than
- Having a good policy
- Implementing simple behaviour management strategies like FLMOP and Golden Silence
Building relationships in challenging contexts is not a straightforward undertaking. Nobody really knows how to do it. There are a few tips here and there, but there is literally nothing that is "guaranteed" or even close to "guaranteed" to work. Sure, there are some things you shouldn't do (like shout, be sarcastic, be rude), but what *should* you do? Anyone who tells you they know the answer is lying or deluded.
If you work in a school where you have a good behaviour policy and culture, it's much easier to build relationships.
If you work in a school where you have a good behaviour policy and culture, building relationships isn't going to help you, and if you happen to have ok behaviour it's because of a different variable.
Good relationships are neither a necessary or sufficient condition of having good behaviour.
Some of the students who have caused me the most grief are also the ones I had the best relationships with.
I have plenty of students who I have no relationship with (i.e. ones I only just started teaching), who magically behave just fine.
All the above means that correlation and causation are impossible to untangle. Ok, so Sarah over in maths has great relationships with her class and lovely behaviour? Which came first? Did they behave because of the relationships, or did the relationships flourish because of the behaviour?
If you are a cover teacher, or new to a school or anything like that, you should be able to expect good behaviour without having to build relationships first.
Final point:
None of the above means I don't care about building relationships. In fact, I care MORE than the "behaviour is all about relationships" crew. Why? Because I think they are important in and of themselves. I couldn't care less if they mean I get better behaviour - that's not why I try and build them. I think it's part of my job to respect my students and build relationships with them because it's fundamentally important, and not for any other reason.
Tim Young retweeted
8. The school named had a large legacy of poor performance. It failed thousands of pupils. Why did no journalist cover this?
Tim Young retweeted
Another excellent article about Alpha schools. I agree with so much of it, especially the points about how education isn't something to be "gotten through" as quickly as you can so you can do the fun stuff in the rest of the day.
It also makes me so grateful to teach in the English system. Our assessments aren't all multiple choice and closed answers, and I have no doubt that many of these students who "ace" reading exams would get utterly obliterated in a GCSE English literature paper, and pretty much any other subject (including maths).
There's certainly no way to prepare for GCSE science in the time that Alpha students have. It's just impossible. The best human 1:1 tutor in the world couldn't deliver the course in the amount of time allotted. Most students in this country will have around 6 hours of science a week. MAYBE you could half that, if you were brilliant. I moved like the absolute clappers with my Year 11s this year and barely finished, and they did SO MUCH work outside the classroom too. I'm certainly not skilled enough to be able to cut that 6 hours/week substantially even in a 1:1 setting.
I'd actually love it for an Alpha school to open a state school in England. We can then get standardised data, they can sit GCSEs like everyone else, and we can validate the "we are so much better than everyone else" claims.
At present, so little details have been provided by Alpha or any of its boosters that I find myself personally annoyed that I'm commenting on it. Like, why bother? Who cares? It's a magic dreamland full of stuff they've potentially made up and hasn't been validated, and it seems like we are being asked to "trust me, this time it's different."
Well, I'm afraid I don't. Educational progressives have propounded these ideas for over 100 years and...it's never been different. It's a desiccated and soulless view of education, that will fail to scale and will remain the privilege of an elite few, who would have succeeded regardless of the type of education they got.
The whole thing reminds me of a t-shirt I once saw that said "Citation or GTFO." Pretty much says it all.
Alpha School claims its students learn 2.6x faster than average in only 2 hrs/day, based on test scores--using an AI tutor.
My questions: How do they teach social studies, novels & writing? And do test scores measure everything?
More in my new post:
nataliewexler.substack.com/p…
Tim Young retweeted
MrBeast trains new employees at his company with a 36-page knowledge-rich PDF and a quiz at the end.
Oh, and he asks them to read the PDF twice, because they won't retain everything the first time.
Watch what people do, not what they say.
MrBeast explains why the education system is completely broken
“Why are students today being taught the same way their parents were? Look at how much everything else has advanced. When I was in school the teacher would just stand there, read out of a book and write on a whiteboard”
"Now look at Mark Rober’s videos. You can learn complex topics in 20 minutes in a way that’s engaging, fun and you retain it. Just because our parents were taught one way doesn’t mean we need to keep teaching that same way. It makes no sense to me, I think education should be reformed dramatically”
“Students spend so much time in school. If we had real courses made through videos, made learning more hands on and optimised everything with modern technology, kids could probably learn more in 5 hours than they currently do in 8 hours"
Tim Young retweeted
Sam is correct.
Also, from an assessment point of view, this whole debate reveals why rank order sometimes can be really useful.
EG a lot of the time you will hear people say "Well it's the absolute score that matters, not the rank order".
But when there is a big external shock to a system - like a pandemic! - comparing pre and post absolute scores is misleading.
Rank order is actually more useful in this situation.
In this case, yes, England's absolute scores did not change much pre & post pandemic - but in the context of almost every other country's score falling!
A passage from the Phillipson profile is extremely misleading.
She claims England's improvement in PISA scores isn't impressive because recent scores are not much higher than in 2009. She also claims that @michaelgove's reforms failed to close the attainment gap between rich and poor. Both are misleading.
Here's some context she 'forgot' to add:
- England's Maths Ranking: 27th (2009)➡️11th (2022)
- England's Reading Ranking: 25th (2009)➡️13th (2022)
- Scores fell during the pandemic everywhere, but England's scores fell by less.
- Wales (under Labour) didn't implement Gove's reforms. Their scores are lower than England's and haven't improved.
- In fact, the average Welsh pupil now performs at the same level as the most disadvantaged pupils in England.
- Scotland is a similar story. They had better scores than England 20 years ago. England's are now higher in all three categories. (Scotland also withdrew from other international metrics.)
- Phillipson claims our average scores might be up, but we've done little on equity/fairness.
- The problem for her is that England's attainment gap between rich and poor is very low by international standards.
- England's 86 point gap is below France's (113), Germany's (111), OECD average (93). The gap is marginally larger than Finland's (83), but our gap is stable while theirs is widening.
I agree with the New Statesman article that Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson isn't a Marxist. But let's be clear, she is undermining successful reforms and abusing statistics in the process.
Not a Marxist, not good either.
Tim Young retweeted
A passage from the Phillipson profile is extremely misleading.
She claims England's improvement in PISA scores isn't impressive because recent scores are not much higher than in 2009. She also claims that @michaelgove's reforms failed to close the attainment gap between rich and poor. Both are misleading.
Here's some context she 'forgot' to add:
- England's Maths Ranking: 27th (2009)➡️11th (2022)
- England's Reading Ranking: 25th (2009)➡️13th (2022)
- Scores fell during the pandemic everywhere, but England's scores fell by less.
- Wales (under Labour) didn't implement Gove's reforms. Their scores are lower than England's and haven't improved.
- In fact, the average Welsh pupil now performs at the same level as the most disadvantaged pupils in England.
- Scotland is a similar story. They had better scores than England 20 years ago. England's are now higher in all three categories. (Scotland also withdrew from other international metrics.)
- Phillipson claims our average scores might be up, but we've done little on equity/fairness.
- The problem for her is that England's attainment gap between rich and poor is very low by international standards.
- England's 86 point gap is below France's (113), Germany's (111), OECD average (93). The gap is marginally larger than Finland's (83), but our gap is stable while theirs is widening.
I agree with the New Statesman article that Education Secretary Bridget Phillipson isn't a Marxist. But let's be clear, she is undermining successful reforms and abusing statistics in the process.
Not a Marxist, not good either.
CLASS WARRIOR by Pippa Bailey
Is Bridget Phillipson really the most dangerous education secretary ever?
Bridget Phillipson has certainly faced her critics since she entered the Department for Education in July 2024. She was likened to a Nazi for Labour’s promise to remove the VAT exemption on private-school fees. The Children’s Wellbeing and Schools Bill saw her derided as a “Marxist”. Her changes have been interpreted as an attack on Michael Gove’s legacy. For them, Phillipson has been labelled an enemy of progress who wants to cut down the tall poppies rather than help them grow. The Mail considers her “the most dangerous education secretary in living memory”.
Phillipson and Keir Starmer are close allies. On 9 February, as pressure mounted on the Prime Minister to resign over the appointment of Peter Mandelson, Phillipson volunteered to support him on the media round. (She was “extremely keen” to do so, a Labour figure says.)
Now, Phillipson faces two even more toxic challenges, the outcome of which will make or break her career, and perhaps the government itself. First, the long-awaited schools white paper is expected in the coming days. Its most difficult proposals involve reforms to special educational needs (Send) provision. Months of painstaking work have gone into building support among Labour MPs in hopes of avoiding a Welfare Bill-style rebellion that could threaten the Prime Minister’s fragile grip on power.
Second, as Women and Equalities Minister, Phillipson is responsible for delivering guidance on how organisations implement the Supreme Court’s ruling that, for the purposes of the Equality Act, a woman is defined by biological sex. Businesses and services are still operating under a code of practice last updated in 2011. Pressure is mounting on Phillipson to deliver its replacement – and fast.
Labour is on the brink. If Phillipson can steer through Send reform and the trans guidance, she could restore a sense of strength and confidence about this government – and perhaps even give it a sense of purpose. If she cannot, she risks becoming an emblem for a government that has neither a coherent vision nor the ability to communicate it; at once loathed and without the radicalism to justify such loathing. On Send reform in particular, the timing is crucial: Labour’s performance in the local elections in May could end Starmer’s premiership.
But who is the woman at the heart of these challenges – and what does she want? Is she a radical reformer, intent on ripping up the legacy of the Gove era to set a path of her own? Or is she a more conservative figure, seeking sensible tweaks to the system she inherited? Does she – and the government more widely – know which she wants to be? Most importantly, perhaps, can she grip the challenges ahead with enough strength to save Keir Starmer’s faltering government, before time and the last vestiges of goodwill run out?
(Cover photo by Kate Peters for the New Statesman)
Before I moved to Aus I'd played 348 games of cricket (that had been recorded).
I got out for less than 20, 153 times. I turned up, and did basically nothing, 153 times.
Yet I wouldn't change it for the world.
@cameronponsonby sums up why perfectly.
I've written a piece for @Nike, for their new Substack called In The Margins that is publishing new sports writing every other week.
The piece is on why you and I play cricket.
inthe-margins.com/p/to-fall-…
Tim Young retweeted
I've written a piece for @Nike, for their new Substack called In The Margins that is publishing new sports writing every other week.
The piece is on why you and I play cricket.
inthe-margins.com/p/to-fall-…
Tim Young retweeted
New post just out:
"The Great VAT Panic"
The claims made by the right-wing press about VAT on private school fees were wildly wrong.
Why? What are the lessons about about (how not to) run a lobbying campaign? And what can government learn?
(£/free)
open.substack.com/pub/samf/p…
