Becky Allen
@profbeckyallen
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Co-founder and Chief Analyst @teachertapp ; visiting prof @uniofbrighton ; Books - Next Big Thing Teacher Gap .
Cuckfield, Sussex
Joined May 2010
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Pinned Tweet
New blog post: The allure of solving the fundamental problems of schooling
#edublogshare
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I wish I had the kind of life where a 10pm curfew affected me.
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I think we should declare tomorrow ‘National Find Your Logins to Your Child’s Online Learning Platform Day’.
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I'm going to put up a new grammar school post later tonight. It'll say the same thing as my other ones.
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When I run the education system, no two schools will be allowed to have the same name. Sorry to all the Saints, but you are a data cleaner’s nightmare.
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So one of my kids is going to get 22 hours a week of classroom instruction between now and end of July whilst the other will get zero hours. I just can’t get my head around how someone came up with this plan. 🤔
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Why is school closure binary? Why not increase social distancing a little to slow transmission?
Stage 1: ask all parents who can home educate to do so
Stage 2: keep just 1-in-10 schools open for health and other key worker kids
What am I missing?
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My son was excited to be told he was having a spy teacher today. Less excited to discover she was just a supply teacher. 😂
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This may not be mad, just irrelevant: How often does a student get a better grade in mock than in exam?
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The first assessment myth from
@daisychristo
- “no other countries have exams like GCSEs”
#rED21
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Your gentle reminder that GCSE exams aren't perfectly reliable assessments of 'true' attainment either... Let teachers assign grades, no school league tables and hopefully the students can move on with their lives in September.
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Excited to announce that I’ve written a book with Matt Evans
@head_teach
and Ben White
@Waldenkent
called ‘The Next Big Thing in School Improvement’, to be published by
@JohnCattEd
on 22nd October. Pre-order or
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Thanks for all your kind words - I'm very excited about the new research centre and looking forward to sharing our plans very soon!
Professor
@drbeckyallen
has been appointed Director of the new Centre for Education Improvement Science.
📰
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Think what you like about politicians, but this DfE party included civil servants - public officials - who were at the time forcing unvaccinated teachers to keep schools open amid the Covid surge.
BREAKING: Gavin Williamson's lockdown-busting Christmas party investigated by Cabinet Secretary
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I’ve had to make some lifestyle changes to adapt to living in Tier 4. One is increasing my daily naps from one to two. Any other recommendations from Tier 4 veterans?
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Last night, this beautiful little boy asked me to join him in the garden to watch the sunset together. 😍🥰😍🥰😍 (Doesn’t make up for his terrible mealtime behaviour.)
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Thought for the day: After this is over, we should introduce universal basic income of £1 a week for all citizens. That would set up the infrastructure for us to immediately ramp it up to £100 or £500 a week at times of crisis like this.
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If schools have large numbers of kids in every day, transmission rates won’t fall so all the other children will be at home until May, which will be catastrophic for non-key worker families.
Williamson clearly says that only ONE parent needs to be a critical worker in order to access a school place for their child. (We have results from
@TeacherTapp
coming up on how many schools are following this at 3.30pm)
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My husband is teaching my 11yo to tie a tie ready for Friday. It’s a fraught training session. Still, at least it’s an essential life skill to prepare her for a life as a male estate agent (or something). (Who else wears ties nowadays?) 🙄
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Transcript of the
#teacherworkload
speech I gave last night. Warning - speeches are made to be heard and not read. The book chapter with
@Sam_Sims_
, when we finally publish, is much clearer and more concise.
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My 10 year old said she was anxious about going back to school. I showed her some tweets from anxious teachers having trouble sleeping and it blew her mind that a teacher could be worried about school!
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Thanks to edu-twitter for helping me prepare for my Caroline Benn Memorial lecture on teacher workload tonight!
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One day I will look back fondly on the Christmas Days where I was woken repeatedly from 5am onwards.
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Beginning to understand why most countries don’t bother trying to school kids until they are 7.
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‘Ordinary working families’ won’t get access to grammar schools – and government data confirms as much.
@edudatalab
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The great education and public health experiment
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Blimey. I’d completely missed that the government has offered to reduce teacher workload by 5 hours a week. Just like that! Do they not know anything about 25 years of education policy?
It really makes you wonder who is sitting at the negotiating table.
Late last night
@educationgovuk
said it had “put forward a fair and reasonable offer, backed with funding for schools.”
( this refers to £2.3bn cash over next 2 years from autumn statement). Statement added the offer included a reduction in workload of 5 hours
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The UK only has 456 COVID cases because it is impossible to get tested. We’re as much in the dark as the US about the scale of the outbreak.
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One of the maddest things about our education system is that we have much smaller class sizes for 15 year olds than for 5 year olds.
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If Corbyn wins, can there be a new category for people who are members of the Labour Party, but not supporters?
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Final checks to proof of book with
@Sam_Sims_
“The Teacher Gap” done. So excited - out in June . 😆
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Well, it’s been a strange week for me; and next week might well be even weirder. But tonight I’m going to have a beer to celebrate my daughter being given the role of Narrator 6 in the class nativity.
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I cannot recommend this 6-pt podcast on US reading instruction in the US highly enough to British listeners. It isn’t our story, but there many parallels with experiences of teachers over here. Search for ‘Sold a Story’ by
@ehanford
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There are diminishing marginal returns to each hour in school per week (with respect to wellbeing and learning). Distributing the hours more equitably across kids is welfare enhancing.
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This is your occasional reminder that twitter is a public forum and when you say things they are *published*, so you need to make sure the things you insinuate about people are true.
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Ofsted inspections are (still) unreliable by design
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The goal of the curriculum and the shape of the attainment curve
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But pupil numbers are rising. How would pensioners feel if we kept the state pension fund fixed and reduced payments as retirees rose?
Theresa May’s Plan for a Stronger Britain means increasing school funding every year, so every child gets the best start in life.
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Happy publication day to The Next Big Thing in School Improvement! Loved writing this with
@head_teach
and
@Waldenkent
. Excited to see what people think of it.
Excited to announce that I’ve written a book with Matt Evans
@head_teach
and Ben White
@Waldenkent
called ‘The Next Big Thing in School Improvement’, to be published by
@JohnCattEd
on 22nd October. Pre-order or
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A head of maths buys one of a full-service maths curriculum packages for their school and gets brilliant results. They can’t answer questions about the curriculum purpose, intent, mapping and sequencing. Are they a bad head of maths? 🤔
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Our 6 yo boy insists on us reading him Captain Underpants books EVERY night. PLEASE PLEASE PLEASE (before we go crazy), what books can we read to gently wean him off them?
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Important clarification from DfE on a Friday night, as is their tradition. Your parents should be keeping their children at home with them if they can, even if there is a ‘critical worker’ in the family.
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@jdportes
@_IanMoss
@Alison_McGovern
@BBCRadio4
@BBCr4today
Almost every secondary maths topics depends on x tables. If you have expansive working memory (~high IQ) then ‘working out multiplications’ on the fly might be manageable. For most children it isn’t. This is an agenda to promote equity in access to maths.
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We’ll have historic trend in weekly blog on Tuesday but I’m pretty sure this is the largest Labour-Tory vote split I’ve seen for teachers via
@TeacherTapp
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I’ve just managed to persuade the 11 year old to put the 7 year old to bed. Life is good.
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@BBCNewsnight
@lehain
@miss_mcinerney
@wonderfrancis
Call it what you like 9-1,A*-G. It is still just a bell curve cut into discrete chunks. We just changed the size of the chunks a bit.
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My wonderful 9 year old wrote Q3 on
@teachertapp
today. 😍🥰😍🥰😍 (I had to do some minor edits of course...)
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We’re having a BBQ lunch this year so that grandparents can safely say Merry Xmas to their grandchildren. Like Australia minus about 30 degrees. 🧊 ☀️ 🥶
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Like the Olympics, every
@researchED1
is the “best so far” (except for the St John’s Wood one without the map that just confused me). But
#rED21
felt in the superstar league, given the times we live in. Thanks
@hgaldinoshea
and Hail Hydra
@tombennett71
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.
@TeacherTapp
is 5 years old at
#rED22
tomorrow, so here’s my homage to accidental, middle-aged, truth-seeking entrepreneurship with
@miss_mcinerney
and
@A_Weatherall
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And that’s all the myths that
@daisychristo
the
#ProExamRomantic
has for us today. Fantastic to see her talk again. 👏🏻👏🏻👏🏻⭐️⭐️⭐️
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Exams are pretty unreliable in subjects outside maths and science too! If we did it in August or September then how are we to ensure equality of access to education between now and then? Because I know which kids would do well out of it...
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Still brilliant on a second read. Why Most Social Science Research is Probably Wrong via
@QuilletteM
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The limited uses of question level analysis
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@HelenaMarsh81
Once upon a time teachers had spare time to spend with their families and hobbies. Not part-time teachers. Just teachers.
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I think
@miss_mcinerney
‘s tweets might be better than the long 1 hour version I gave tonight. Reporting at it’s most masterful. 🙏 Laura!
Thread of tweets from an absolutely masterful speech by
@drbeckyallen
explaining why teachers now work ridiculous hours.
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My 6yo boy desperately needs a playmate. What’s the quickest way for me to legally achieve this? Become a childminder, set up an unregulated school at home, find a cleaner who can bring a child along to work with them?
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Heads: If you need laptops to be delivered by DfE, you just need to get a national news organisation in to film you and the laptops will appear like magic. Couldn’t be easier to meet the needs of your disadvantaged pupils!
A mini thread and lots of thanks to
@itvnews
@BenChapmanITV
I was asked today if I would be filmed watching
@GavinWilliamson
deliver his 130pm speech and then do an interview for the 630news ...my angle was the fact that I am still waiting for 52 laptops that I needed Dec11th 1/3
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Outstanding schools are those who aren’t just great for their students; they find inside themselves the capacity to support teaching elsewhere. Couldn’t be happier for
@johntomsett
and team.
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Despite not drinking at
#rEDSurrey21
, I still appear to have planned several new books and research projects. Prospective collaborators: I promise to under-deliver.
At least I haven’t also agreed to open a free school and play in a band with West Country folk.
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Outraged by this suggestion. If you want grammar schools, put it in a manifesto and get a majority.
Michael Gove: Liberal Democrats stopped me introducing new grammar schools
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@cbokhove
Or... we could look to other countries and just accept we need rotas for the time-being. We don’t need to reinvent the wheel, given that many other European countries re-opened schools first:
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Productive mutations - how education gets better by allowing many instructional strategies to co-exist.
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It’s
#PISA2018
day and the (English) master of the data
@JohnPeterJerrim
has already blogged.
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As DfE tightens the accountability screw on pupil premium reporting, it feels like a good time to revisit this set of 3 posts:
Schools have been told they have to show their pupil premium spending is 'backed by evidence' as a condition of getting the funding.
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Your annual reminder that changes in the attainment gap do not tell us about changes in the attainment gap.
The DfE has published its revised statistics on the attainment of pupils at the end of Key Stage 4.
For the second year in a row, there has been a slight increase in the the relative attainment gap between disadvantaged pupils and all other pupils:
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I was about to create a twitter poll about the multiplication check. Then I remembered that I help run
@TeacherTapp
!
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But what should we do when there *is no evidence* that can help us make complex trade offs between our health, cognitive and economic outcomes? I feel a blog post coming on...
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@KateJones_teach
Thank you for calling this out. Organisations only change when they are forced to face up to the reality of current practice and behaviour.
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I’ve just had a clarifying phone call from DfE to say that the appearance of the laptops shortly after the film crew was purely coincidental... so Heads: DO NOT call the press to help you if you are struggling for laptops. It will not help!
Heads: If you need laptops to be delivered by DfE, you just need to get a national news organisation in to film you and the laptops will appear like magic. Couldn’t be easier to meet the needs of your disadvantaged pupils!
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Hmm... my daughter's school is looking to appoint a governor who has a knowledge of education data. Now where to find someone like that...!
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Update on Nativity saga: daughter has found her Narrator 6 paper and learnt the one line with four weeks to go until curtain up. I was right to correct the word 'manager' for 'manger', wasn't I? And son declares he will not be a King in playgroup nativity. He will be a ghost.
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From Brighouse tonight... Teachers: ever wonder what's the point?
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A movement is forming around dumping outstanding. Now what about all the other judgements? 😉
NEW BLOG: Big moment. I've thought about it for years & now I've decided.
I think the Outstanding grade needs to go:
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Today I attempted some KS2 SATs grammar questions for the first time. It did not go well! (I’m putting an exclamation mark there because the ! seems to be an important part of SATs.)
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Are a handful of schools a bit part of the teacher shortage problem?
@Sam_Sims_
blogs on our new paper on NQT retention.
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Every primary head who is looking in despair at the latest DfE music curriculum diktat needs to read this from the ever brilliant (and eternally failing)
@MichaelT1979
.
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@Samfr
I went through every task on our workflow whiteboard today with the word 'grammars' on it and rubbed it out. So satisfying!
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Yesterday I said no one should have to take the blame for the teacher workload crisis. I was wrong. Oliver Letwin should.
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@michael_merrick
Children desperately need to be able to spend time with other children. Re-opening schools is one way to achieve this. Even part-time for a few hours a week would lessen mental health impact of lockdown. There are others ways, of course.
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@nickhassey
@peter_brant
I was looking at this data tonight. The very best all-ability schools perform far far better than grammars.
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@tombennett71
We propose a museum of failed educational ideas at the start of our book Next Big Thing in School Improvement
@Waldenkent
@head_teach
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Looking at the
@teachertapp
responses to question on what you would stop doing if Ofsted were abolished. So many primary teachers mention photographing practical lessons for evidence in books. It’s such a change from the days when you just sent arts and crafts home the same day
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How about Nick Timothy sorts out education in Kent and Medway? Then we can talk about selection elsewhere.
@Samfr
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There’s going to be some competitive building of models of the Great Fire of London in my village this week. I see some parents cheated by starting over the weekend.
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So lucky that
@tombennett71
took up the mantle to run the conference that became the
@researchED1
movement. Honoured to a Director/Trustee.
@PATSTONE55
@thomas8hillman
And one last thing- this idea of profit. I wonder where anyone got the idea that researchED makes pots of money. It barely breaks even because we charge so little. And normally I subsidise it with my own earnings
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