I watched the Panorama programme ‘Mental health: Young lives in crisis’ last night. It struck me on one hand as a message of hope over experience, on the other as a story of people reaching out in desperation as they struggle to stay afloat, treading...
From Ben Davis, Headteacher at St Ambrose Barlow Catholic High School, Swinton ( Twitter @bendavis ) Normally when I tweet (which is not often) I get a handful of likes and a couple of comments so I was entirely unprepared for the reaction to my short...
My article last week ‘It’s time to scrap exclusion from schools attracted a few replies on Twitter, among them: * This is interesting. Reasoned sensible argument about exclusions. Thank you Geoff.The need for change. * And prison of course. Let us not safeguard children. * I’d be all...
It’s time to scrap school exclusion. Why? Because Plan A isn’t working. A story - Plan B. A young man on the edge of adulthood, experiencing such severe panic attacks it’s causing him to disengage and putting his educational future at risk. As part of a school...
The Problem Talk from Twitter this week; A July 2020 report from the then new Children’s Commissioner (England) ‘Vulnerable teenagers; where did it go wrong?’ Shining a light on the extent and impact of child vulnerability in England, focusing in particular on children with undiagnosed mental health issues,...
Case note 1: “Some members of my team who are in school now starting to deliver Solutions Focused Coaching sessions shocked the socks off the school and surprised the young people - two very, very good sessions with two disillusioned young people. It was an incredibly...
Last May, as the pandemic was in full flood, this arrived in my email inbox; “Hi Geoff, I have been working from home today and I remembered the job that you gave me which was to notice when things are going well. Throughout the day I have...
I wrote this in March 2021 - what does it say to us now, more than a year later? The important thing about science is not much to obtain new facts but to discover new ways of thinking about them - Sir William Bragg (1862-1942) 21st century...
Performance is currently the clear front runner when it comes to assessing school effectiveness. Accountability is the keyword, evidenced by exam results backed up by a consistent discipline regime. This was emphasised this month in the English education secretary’s reference to children’s behaving in ways...
“For every complex problem there is an answer that is clear, simple and wrong” H.L.Menken Recently I wrote about the essential place for kindness in schools. In 2021 we have a mountain of evidence accumulated over the last four decades which points to the need to...
