Elaine Long

Bringing balance to the 'reading wars' debate | The Staffroom: S06E01 A holistic view of how phonics, writing, reading and language come together to make a child truly literate.

Season 6 opener of my Staffroom podcast with @elainelong.bsky.social

Bringing some sanity to the 'reading wars' we hope.
www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/202...

‘We are here and we deserve it’: being an autistic teacher in Poland Despite an increasing focus on autism, neurodiversity and inclusion in the education sector, there remains limited awareness of the experiences, needs and strengths of autistic educators. This gap ...

Fantastic to see that our article on the experiences of autistic teachers in Poland has been published open access in the International Journal of Inclusive Education 🙌https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13603116.2025.2518393#abstract #AutismResearch

Co-creation of research agendas could strengthen policy research engagement Drawing on research on the conditions for effective engagement between research and policy, Georgiana Mihut, Sevda Ozsezer-Kurnuc and Thomas Perry consider whether policymakers should be involved earl...

Co-creation of research agendas could strengthen policy research engagement wonkhe.com/blogs/co-cre...

Making sure everyone matters: Evelyn Forde tells 'herstory' | The Staffroom: S05E04 Evelyn Forde shares her lived experience, from not feeling she mattered in school to becoming headteacher of the year.

A must listen for teachers and leaders. @evelynforde1.bsky.social tells us why mattering is so important @markquinn1968.bsky.social

Mental-health lessons in schools sound like a great idea. The trouble is, they don’t work | Lucy Foulkes All-class therapy sessions don’t help, and may even make matters worse. The evidence shows we need different solutions, says Dr Lucy Foulkes, an academic psychologist at Oxford University

I’m in the Guardian today, arguing that we should stop them all-class mental health lessons in schools

I've thought very carefully about ‘going public’ with this, because it's a sensitive argument to make, especially in the face of so many young people struggling.

(cont 🧵)

tinyurl.com/vun92cz7

How we dumbed down teaching - and what we must do to fix it Over the past decade, teaching has been pushed towards a prescriptive model that reduces intellectual curiosity and overlooks essential classroom engagement, argues Sam Gibbs

This is a superb piece. It simultaneously made me want to jump for joy and sit with my head in my hands and weep. Pretty much everything Sam Gibbs argues for is what I've been on about for the last decade or more - losses that I've witnessed that have transformed
www.tes.com/magazine/tea...
1/

I shed so many tears reading that book

Workload A poor perception of workload was a common issue across all respondents, and was not determined by use, or non-use, of standardised curricula. There were no significant differences between the workload perceptions of non-standardised curriculum users and standardised curriculum users. This finding applied to both primary and secondary teachers, and to both full and part-time teachers. Workload’ emerged from the study as a highly complex issue that cannot be reduced to a simplistic notion of ‘hours worked’. Curriculum design and lesson planning are clearly activities that require time. However, if these are activities that teachers value, then trying to remove these activities from teachers to tackle workload issues does not necessarily tackle the ‘work strain’ that teachers experience. It may also be the case that standardised curricula have not reduced teacher workload, but have simply changed its nature. Instead of spending time researching material and selecting resources, teachers are spending time interpreting and adapting generic materials to meet the needs of their pupils. The interviews suggested that teachers saw standardised curricula as having positive uses that were limited and precise: to cover for absence, to compensate for a lack of specialist knowledge, to reduce aspects of workload, and to mitigate the problems of high teacher turnover. Beyond discussion of these uses, respondents repeatedly expressed concerns about a range of issues related to autonomy, self- efficacy and workload: standardised curricula embodied a lack of trust in teacher expertise; teachers lacked the freedom to adapt standardised curricula to meet the particular needs of their pupils; standardised curricula functioned as a control mechanism to monitor teachers’ work; practices of collaborative and flexible planning were being replaced by standardised commercial or in-house curriculum packages ‘imposed from above’;

Worth reading:

NEU's research into:
The impact of standardised curricula on teacher professionalism
#UKEd

neu.org.uk/latest/libra...

This.

I just LOVE this from @emmaturner75.bsky.social's recent blog. It gives me such confidence in the amazing practitioners out there like her & it's great to see that there's such an appetite for the kind of English teaching I've spent my whole career doing, arguing for & trying to offer support for!

There's some debate about my piece on X & a blog by David Didau agreeing with much of what I say but warning against a return to 'some mythical version of the past'. I've written a response to this idea of a 'myth' of a different kind of English on my own blog: www.barbarableiman.com/post/a-respo...

"It would recognise that good teaching often involves navigating tensions between competing aims – freedom and structure, tradition and innovation, care and rigour. And it would treat evidence not as a mandate, but as a resource for deliberation and reflection."

“truthfully, we've got to change the culture that they're consuming and the means by which our technology is facilitating this culture.”

New CEN paper on best practices in evaluating “What Works” in the classroom Classrooms are complex places. It can be hard to work out what classroom practices are most effective in improving learning outcomes, behaviour, and wellbeing. But there’s general acceptance …

A new paper from researchers at the Centre for Educational Neuroscience shares best practices for evaluating what works in the classroom.

Read about their findings below 📚

#BrainAwarenessWeek

The key, for me, is to ensure that teaching is "recursive", as in, it is a back-and-forth endeavour in which students and teacher converse to ensure each party understands the other. These feedback loops need to be frequent, but are removed in the current Taylorist movement which linearises teaching

Greenwich looking glorious in the sunshine

Only 5% of UK medical school entrants are working class, data shows Sutton Trust says underrepresentation of poorer students is ‘outrageous’ but number has doubled in 10 years to 2022

Students from working class backgrounds still make up only 5% of entrants to medical schools across the UK.

This is what happens when widening participation is an activity rather than a central guiding mission.
www.theguardian.com/society/2025...

Who is ‘working class’ and why does it matter in the arts? Prominent figures in the arts say class is a key factor that determines who can make it in the creative industries

“Class is a key factor that determines who can make it in the creative industries” www.theguardian.com/culture/2025...

Seriously! Why do so many scientific, educational, and media outlets still include an X/Twitter "share" button with no corresponding one for Bluesky?

Read the room, folks.

This is the most clear-eyed thing I have read on the intent and likely consequences of what is happening in the US federal govt

Women, Men, And Meritocracy: A Scientific Perspective Will the current backlash against diversity and inclusion boost or harm meritocracy?

www.forbes.com/sites/tomasp...

Charisma? Gravitas? Or ‘Presence’? I recently enjoyed this short (6 minute) podcast from Bennie Kara on the subject of ‘Charisma’.  I agree with Bennie that ‘charisma’ isn’t necessarily something we should see as…

"We should perhaps be cautious about being superficially impressed by someone who oozes charisma." My new blog post this week: jillberry102.blog/2025/02/04/c...

Great way to start the day

"Asking the awkward questions" | The Staffroom: S05E01 | IOE - Faculty of Education and Society In this episode, Guy Claxton takes us beyond simplified conceptions of the learning sciences and explains why teachers are sometimes vulnerable to fads and trends.

If you want to go beyond simplified conceptions of the learning sciences, this is a must listen @markquinn1968.bsky.social

www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/202...

From the early years school to the research school | ECF Staffroom: S04E06 | IOE - Faculty of Education and Society In this episode, Sally Adams tells us about her new role leading adult learning – and the ways teaching can be a great stepping stone for a host of different careers.

There many jobs in 'teaching'. In this ECF Staffroom episode, @elainelong.bsky.social and I quizzed Sally Adams about her route from #EarlyYears teacher to research lead. #Education @ioe.bsky.social www.ucl.ac.uk/ioe/news/202...

This is one of our most provocative episodes of ECF Staffroom, dispelling some #EdNeuroSci myths. @elainelong.bsky.social with Dr Rebecca Gordon youtube.com/watch?v=__zw...

Unstable situation:
A leader of a complex adaptive system, such as a school, that believes in linear cause-effect control of that system.

Schools respond & adapt to new policies. You can't precisely predict the effect of introducing a new policy and SLT must reciprocate the adaptive dance.
#UKEd

What happens to the ‘could have beens’? Emily tells us we should really think more about this if we want to improve teacher recruitment. A must listen for anyone wanting to broaden their knowledge of teacher recruitment

Sort of a bit tired of seeing posts that takes for granted that science is entirely value free. What question did you choose to study? Did you pick it at random? Thought not. What do you measure? Why that and not something else?

Entirely agree…the problem is not the mutation as such, but the fact that we assume research can or should be implemented with fidelity in the first place