The festivities are over, the turkey is (nearly!) gone and a massive dent has been made to the buckets of alcohol that were purchased. So it is, that thoughts turn to the return to work for a couple of days before I build up the energy for the “big night” out .. I do love New Years Eve!

Today I’ve been looking at the publication by the DFE on Christmas Eve (seriously!!) about the meetings between the exam boards and trying to put the pieces together as I suspect we are only seeing one “side of the story” as both of the publications refer to other letters that I cannot trace (I have asked for a copy from Ofqual and DFE but aint holding my breath) and will blog more about it tomorrow.

In the meantime I came across an interview with John Hattie (you can listen to the whole thing on the IRIS Connect site here -> John Hattie Interview)  and parts of it really resonated with me – I have mentioned before about Cameron yanking my chain with his promise to retrain 1000’s of maths teachers and this suggesting we haven’t got a “scooby doo” how to do our job. I have also written about how we are compared to other countries in the pursuit of improving our education system. I still maintain that we have the expertise here, yes! Here on this little island of ours.

So imagine my joy when during the interview (the first 5 minutes in fact) I heard: “Success is all around us and my worry is we keep looking elsewhere for this magic bullet that is going to fix teachers, fix schools, and my point was can we have the courage not only in the policy domain, not only in the parent domain but also in the teacher and school domain to say we have excellence here?.”

The interview ends with a call to arms by saying “We have a profession where the Minister for Education can totally ignore what the profession says, but we have to say “hey, we’re actually very good at what we do, we know what we do and you need to listen to us”

Two words … Hear! Hear!