Greg Ashman

Jan 15, 2025 | fillingthepail.substack.com | Greg Ashman

The UK government has decided that the white heat of technology is the road to improvement and is backing Artificial Intelligence as the solution to many problems. This includes an education action plan. Perhaps contrary to expectations, I am cautiously optimistic about what AI has to offer teachers and students. However, this comes with a few caveats. The first of those is perhaps encapsulated by what we might call ‘the Suno problem’.

Jan 14, 2025 | fillingthepail.substack.com | Greg Ashman

It can be a wild ride. A few days ago, ‘Progress 8’ scores were released for schools in England. This measures how well students in a particular secondary school performed in their GCSE examinations compared to how well students with similar levels of achievement at the end of primary school performed across the country. For example, if a school posted a Progress 8 score of 1.00 that would mean, on average, students gained one grade higher than they would if they attended a typical school.

Jan 14, 2025 | fillingthepail.substack.com | Greg Ashman

A couple of weeks ago, I presented the main headlines from my recent survey of over a thousand teachers about their training. In this post, I want to flesh out the answers from primary school teachers and their experiences of phonics. According to the data I collected, there were 407 primary teachers in my sample. Of these, 178 trained in Australia and, of these, 65 trained in the last ten years. Only a minority recalled discussing systematic phonics instruction as part of their training.

Jan 14, 2025 | fillingthepail.substack.com | Greg Ashman

I was 25 when I became head of science at a ‘school facing challenging circumstances’ in West London. I had worked there for a term and only after my appointment, as deputy to the head of science, did I find out she planned to leave. What did the official designation of facing challenging circumstances mean? Essentially, the school was unsafe. I taught in a classroom on the ground floor of a crumbling science block and one issue I had was disruptions and interruptions.

Jan 14, 2025 | fillingthepail.substack.com | Greg Ashman

Last week, I wrote about a campaign against the Mossbourne academy chain that runs schools in the London borough of Hackney. The uproar was triggered by criticism in The Observer of one of these schools, Mossbourne Victoria Park Academy, in an article by journalist Anna Fazackerley. Perhaps inevitably, that initial article prompted others to come forward and widen the claims to include the older Mossbourne Community Academy. Fazackerley duly wrote about these new claims in another article.