Education governance professional. Occasional politics, frequent memes.
Nottingham, England
Joined February 2014
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Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
A former pupil of The Hill Primary Academy has left them £8,000, helping to transform their outdoor space for future generations.
It's a touching story about the lasting impact a school can have and the memories that stay with us long after we leave ❤️
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/c3ew…
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
What’s the evidence on rent control?
I charted the findings from 112 studies:
Great for rent-controlled tenants ✅
But:
Pushes up rents for other people ❌
Pushes down new housing construction ❌
Pushes down building quality ❌
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
Paris surrenders to Azerbaijani hostage diplomacy, throwing Ukraine under the bus in the process. Ugly, self-interested weakness from France.
Azerbaijan has pardoned a French national jailed for espionage after EU capitals agreed to lift sanctions on two prominent Russian oligarchs in a divisive move driven by France as it pursued a secret prisoner release deal with Baku.
ft.com/content/b05367af-5236…
Given that nobody actually knows or can explain the case for the #Chagos Surrender, this polling question is merely a proxy for the question "do you side with any foreign country against your own?"
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
This sounds right. Many officials are planning to wait until there is a new administration in Washington to drive through this terrible deal, against Britain's interests and the wishes of the Chagossian people. It's an incredible act of self-harm.
Exclusive with @EllenAMilligan
UK officials say it is unclear how the Chagos Islands deal can be reworked despite Andy Burnham saying he’s reviewing it and Wes Streeting saying it isn’t good enough
Burnham and his team do not know how or even if they can reconfigure the agreement, the officials said
That means despite the ‘review’ announced at UNGA, in reality there is currently no prospect of a deal proceeding under Trump, as Ellen reported earlier this week
A senior British official warns it would not be in the UK’s long-term national interest to drop the deal. They caution ministers against publicly criticising the agreement, as Streeting did earlier, because the UK would likely pursue it again in future
So where does that leave Chagos and Burnham’s ‘review’ of the deal after Trump called it “terrible”? It appears the PM has in reality kicked it into the long grass until there is a new president
That leaves the vitally important base in legal limbo for years
bloomberg.com/news/articles/…
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
The extent of the PISA gap between England + other western European countries is extraordinary.
In reading, the 25% most disadvantaged pupils in England outperformed the average for *all* students in Germany, France, the Netherlands, Norway etc...
A decade ago there was no gap
New post out:
England's schools are now the second highest performing in the world outside the far east, according to the PISA study.
Is this because of policy? Attitude to technology? Cultural factors like immigration? And where can we still improve?
samf.substack.com/p/why-engl…
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
MP pay is too high and too low at the same time.
From April 2026 the basic salary is £98,599. Against a UK full-time median of around £39,000, that is a fortune. For someone who would otherwise be a local councillor, a party staffer, a mid-ranking official or a professional who never quite made it, it is the best job they will ever have. Safe, status-rich, and paid like a senior manager.
For a high achiever it is a pay cut. A decent private-sector director, a good lawyer, a consultant, a founder, a specialist doctor or a senior operator can earn more than that without the public abuse, the two homes, the lost weekends or the certainty that one bad clip ends the career.
IPSA itself benchmarks the job against police superintendents, NHS consultants and army colonels and still wants to inch toward £110,000 because even that is not competitive with what capable people can make outside.
So you get adverse selection. The salary is lavish if you are ordinary and modest if you are exceptional. The people for whom it is a step up apply. The people for whom it is a step down often do not. Then we act surprised that the Commons is full of dross.
You cannot simultaneously pay like a public-sector sinecure and expect private-sector talent. That is the whole problem.
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
The result is being portrayed as the Commons rejecting the Bill because the Commons rejected the Bill.
Well said @kimleadbeater xitter.cf/kimleadbeater/status/2…
The result is being portrayed as the Commons rejecting the Bill & hence that’s democratic..but we passed it last year & the only reason it was before the House again last Friday was because a small minority of peers talked it out.
There is a lot of criticism of how politicians get money, but just look how they spend it.
A £210k salary already includes danger money. £860k and a peerage is pure reward for failure.
bbc.co.uk/news/articles/cq77…
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
Our prisons are in desperate need of a reboot. Everything Charlie says about their predicament is a gold bar of truth.
See interview with @charleshymas about the state of our prisons in today’s Telegraph telegraph.co.uk/gift/f1922a5…
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
Thinking on an higher level, this is actually a profound moment for our gloriously mushy constitutional order: their Lordships did just this, they asked the democratic House to have a longer think, ponder some more.
And it did, and changed its mind. And that's grand, that's how it ought be.
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
Surely the point of the Parliament Act is that Lords should not always have the ability to block the well-considered view of the Commons.
But this Bill was not, on first turn, well-considered by the Commons: hence it was stalled by peers, reconsidered by MPs & finally rejected.
MPs have thankfully corrected their previous error by voting down the #AssistedSuicide/#AssistedDyingBill today - it was always deeply unsafe and untruthful legislation.
Lauren Edwards blaming the Lords for her failure today shows how misguided the Bill's proponents have been.
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
I've just heard my MP @helenhayes_ has spoken at an event in the House of Commons blaming England's attendance problems on its "narrow knowledge-based curriculum".
If a knowledge-based curriculum causes attendance problems, how come Scotland & Wales have a worse attendance problem than England when they have a skills-based curriculum?
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
2) England is a rare exception.
During the 2010s many other countries (including the other 3 UK nations) changed tack, experimenting with ideas like transferrable skills instead of focusing on tried-and-tested disciplines and methods. It looks like those experiments have failed.
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
Two extraordinary charts from today’s PISA test results:
1) School test scores continue to collapse internationally, underscoring how this is no longer a Covid effect but sustained decline.
Those falls in reading and maths are equivalent to about two years of lost schooling.
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
Devolution created a natural experiment here. Wales and Scotland went down a different route focusing on "21st century skills". England is outperforming both. It's also outperforming Northern Ireland with its grammar schools.
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde 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.
Tomas Thurogood-Hyde retweeted
The independent monitoring board for England's newest prison has published its first annual report – and it makes awful reading.
Millsike is a private prison, run by Mitie Care and Custody, which opened in April 2025.
The report highlights a wide range of problems linked to the prison’s “chaotic” opening, with “inexperienced staff not knowing what to do and how to work with prisoners”. Basic processes such as drawing keys, locking doors and counting the number of people held in the prison, were not established by the time people started to arrive.
The board was disappointed that design faults evident in two other recently constructed prisons, Fosse Way and Five Wells, had not resulted in changes to the design at Millsike. The report states that the design of the landings creates blind spots for staff.
The report adds that someone who was on constant watch for weeks “was still able to self-harm on a regular basis”.
Our Chief Executive, Andrea Coomber KC (Hon.), said: “Only a couple of days after the government proudly announced plans to buy more land for prisons, and to build them more quickly, this astonishing report reveals how a desperate search for extra places can jeopardise the safety of people living and working behind bars.
“Faced with a prison capacity crisis of its own creation, the Ministry of Justice rushed to open Millsike too quickly, setting the jail up for failure from the word ‘go’. What ministers saw as part of the solution has now, with grim inevitability, become part of the problem – a chaotic jail with cells left empty because there aren’t enough staff to run it safely.
“For decades, successive governments have tried to build their way out of the prisons crisis – but the crisis is still here. The only route out of this mess is via decisive action to reverse the trend of imposing ever longer prison sentences. Why open more Millsikes when we could be pumping billions into hospitals, schools and jobs instead?”
howardleague.org/news/millsi…
📸 Andy Aitchison
ALT Exterior view of Millsike prison's multi-story beige building with barred windows under a clear sky.