It’s Your Time You’re Wasting

Why can't Britains schools cope when the temperature goes over 32c ?

The Interim Report is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/young-people-and-work-interim-report/young-people-and-work-interim-report

Pic of Milburn used under permission: https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3/

Is Gemma Collins visit to the Department for Education a sign of the decline in standards or a recognition that the long tail of underachievement in this country leaves far too many kids with a cynical view of school and are marked by that failure for the rest of their lives?

Can V levels help enhance the education of those who currently think that school is not for them?

In this episode, David and Martin discuss phones, AI and the need for educational scepticism. They ask why schools are increasingly banning phones while being encouraged to embrace AI, and whether this contradiction reveals a deeper problem: education has allowed others to define the terms of technological change.

They explore the arguments for banning phones, including attention, authority, social life and the conditions of learning. They look at new evidence on lockable phone pouches, which suggests that bans reduce phone use but do not, by themselves, transform attainment. They then turn to AI, asking what it can usefully do, what it cannot do, and where it risks replacing the effort and judgement on which learning depends.

The central argument is that schools should not wait for tech companies to do their thinking for them. The sector needs to decide what technology is for, where it belongs, and what human capacities education must protect.

Key questions

• Are phones and AI really separate debates?

• Why should schools ban phones?

• Is a phone ban a school improvement strategy, or just a condition for improvement?

• What should we make of evidence showing little average effect on test scores?

• What can AI usefully do for teachers and pupils?

• What must never be outsourced to AI?

• Are schools at risk of letting tech companies define learning?

• What principles should guide technology adoption in schools?

Key claims

• Phone bans should not be judged only by test scores.

• Phones corrode attention, authority and the shared social world of school.

• A ban clears space; it does not fill it.

• AI can support expert teachers, but it cannot replace educational judgement.

• AI is dangerous when it gives pupils the product without the process.

• Schools need scepticism, not panic.

• The education sector should lead the debate before policy and procurement make the decisions for it.

Sources and links

• Carl Hendrick note on the new phone ban evidence:

https://substack.com/@carlhendrick/note/c-254294042?r=18455&utm_medium=ios&utm_source=notes-share-action

• NBER working paper, The Effects of School Phone Bans: National Evidence from Lockable Pouches:

https://www.nber.org/papers/w35132

• DfE guidance on mobile phones in schools:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/mobile-phones-in-schools/mobile-phones-in-schools

• DfE guidance on generative AI in education:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/generative-artificial-intelligence-in-education/generative-artificial-intelligence-ai-in-education

• DfE generative AI product safety standards:

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/generative-ai-product-safety-standards/generative-ai-product-safety-standards

• Year 11 intervention thread:

https://x.com/Yorkshire_Steve/status/2051592439614386237

• hb_history post:

https://x.com/hb_history/status/2051198226489803082

• NPorter post:

https://x.com/NPorter_/status/2050578907955392577

• Greg Ashman post:

https://x.com/greg_ashman/status/2050769058669511126

Who needs critical thinking? We've got books to win in a competition! Listen in and find out how to win David's new book! https://www.amazon.co.uk/dp/104117215X/ref=cm_sw_r_as_gl_api_gl_i_2HSGGSTD9W7WTK75K5ES?linkCode=ml1&tag=thelearning07-21&linkId=8a1c9c357a01b11d4f9cae79c40bab00

Can you teach critical thinking? If you can, should we even try?

PISA has decided how well a country's schools teach creativity. They then go on to calculate what impact that will have on each country's economic performance.

How well did the countries of the UK do? Have a butcher's in our latest podcast.

Should English Departments ditch their 'most popular' texts in order to leave room for books written by female authors? Can we really teach the best that has been thought and said if managers keep foisting texts on teachers that are short and accessible? We discuss this and more...

The article that set us off: https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/secondary/diversity-gcse-english-remove-popular-books

Chesterton's Fence - What do we lose when we use AI to make decisions for us?

The recent Bafta controversy tests the limits of inclusion in public places. Just how tolerant are we? How does inclusion work in classrooms up and down the country?

Some links mentioned:

https://open.substack.com/pub/johnsonphoenix/p/no-sign-says-it?r=1rvl5x&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web

https://www.tes.com/magazine/teaching-learning/general/uta-frith-interview-autism-not-spectrum

Belonging is Ofsted’s latest preoccupation.

In the 2025 framework it sits inside inclusion, now judged in its own right.

Schools feel pressure to demonstrate how they notice and support pupils who

meet friction in the system.

Much policy treats belonging as an emotional climate.

Warmth, smiles and pleasant corridors become the accepted tokens of

attachment.

This flattens a serious idea and overlooks the material pupils use to understand

school life.

Knowledge as the foundation of belonging

Belonging grows from access to shared knowledge: the stories, concepts and

cultural structures that let a community recognise itself.

Language sits inside this larger inheritance. It is the most visible branch of a

deeper stock of ideas.

Without shared knowledge, pupils cannot interpret rules, routines or

expectations.

If belonging becomes a feeling, we lose sight of the material that gives the feeling something to attach to.

Language as the medium of participation

Every encounter at school arrives through words: rules, identity, aspiration,

conflict.

Pupils join the community by gaining control of its linguistic repertoire.

To belong is to understand the meaning

world the school inhabits.

The older conversation

The Civitas

report argues for a renewed commitment to classical liberal education in

the UK:

The aspiration is to help children develop conscience, moral judgement,

aesthetic sensibility, and a sense of belonging to a heritage. These qualities

anchor personal freedom in responsibility and shared humanity

Belonging.docx Classical societies bound citizens through a moral vocabulary and a shared

account of the virtues.

Christianity offered a narrative of creation, fall and redemption that gave

communities long memory. In each case, belonging meant learning the knowledge and language of the tradition.

The Civitas vision of education connects directly to our broader argument:

belonging is not just emotional comfort or inclusion. It is entrance into a shared

world of ideas, language, values and history.

Without that shared knowledge and cultural inheritance, belonging risks

degenerating into a patchwork of mood, sentiment or identity fragments.

Reviving classical liberal education offers a way to rebuild the intellectual and

moral basis of belonging: not as compliance, but as membership in a living

tradition one that gives children more than qualifications: a language, a moral

vocabulary, a sense of home in a community of meaning.

The modern tension. The key question sits quietly behind the framework: belonging to what?

Many schools treat belonging as free floating, detached from any story or stock

of ideas.. This reflects the multicultural mosaic, which prizes openness but offers little

shared meaning.

The result can be a community held together by atmosphere rather than

conviction.

Without shared knowledge, belonging collapses into mood.

Mood does not hold communities together. Common stories, common concepts

and a common language do. When pupils lack the background knowledge to follow curriculum discussions, they drift to the margins. They may feel welcome, but they cannot participate

fully in classroom life.

Initiatives that focus on wellbeing surveys or displays of diversity, but do not

teach the knowledge that unifies pupils, history, literature, civic ideas

produce fragile cohesion. Children sit together but do not share a common

frame for thinking.

Public debate becomes incoherent without shared reference points. When

citizens no longer recog

nise the same historical events, moral concepts or civic

principles, discussion dissolves into competing feelings.

Communities with no common story struggle to integrate newcomers. Without

shared civic knowledge, the constitution, national history, the duties of citizenship

“inclusion” becomes a matter of sentiment rather than

participation..

Societies that retreat from teaching their own traditions often see rising

polarisation. Without a common inheritance, people fall back on subcultures,

identities or moods that cannot be reconciled.

Schools face a clear choice. They can induct pupils into a tradition with coherent

knowledge, a shared story and a demanding moral vocabulary, or they can settle

for a mosaic of disconnected narratives

that offers little common ground.

Language sits at the centre of this decision. A shared linguistic repertoire gives

pupils access to the concepts, stories and virtues that shape the community

they join. Without this, belonging has no anchor and no directi

on.

If Ofsted wants belonging to mean more than mood, it must address the deeper

question: not whether pupils feel at home, but whether they are being given the

knowledge and language that make a home possible.

What do we want students to belong to?