My thoughts on stuff

I've recently started a new job, working with some of the highest achieving students in the country. The types who have been top of every class they've ever been in, for whom an A is a bad mark and who have had a clear pathway obvious to them since starting primary school. Their ability to absorb information quickly and effectively has been a revelation after a decade or so training people more at my own level. I can provide far more content, the questions asked are more relevant (and massively more frequent), in short the job is far easier. It got me thinking about just how much actual impact we have when working with naturally talented people. Dan Micciche, an England U16 national football coach, estimates that 95% of an elite footballer is innate talent, and that the most a coach can do is try and add that extra 5% to allow them to make a career in the game. You can take super talented 8 year old kids, give them the best facilities, top class coaching and they are still ...

The Cambridgeshire Insight website, run by the council, shows that Cambridgeshire has been the fastest growing county authority for more than a decade. And that by 2031 the population of those 65+ years old is due to increase significantly. Many of these people will be able to live independently, with family and friends to support them without any intervention from the council at all. However many won’t. Not everybody has family, not everybody has friends. Earlier this year the county was hit by quite a large storm, it was called Storm Doris and I remember it very well because it highlighted to me a huge problem we have with isolation. My wife and I were putting the kids to bed and just as I was heading upstairs I heard a strange scraping sound from my front door. I assumed something had blown against it but when I opened to check I found an elderly lady lying on my doorstep. She was soaked through, very shaken and unable to stand. Having tripped on the dark path outside my hous...

1. Modular half-way houses in each town/village/suburb in the country. The NHS is under enormous pressure for bed space as a result of the lack of available social care facilities. There are huge numbers of people well enough to be discharged from hospital but not well enough to return to living alone. They do not need nursing or specialist care, simply someone to look after them. The budgets do not exist for live in care for every individual so often they are waiting for a space to open up in a care home. So could we add bed capacity quickly and alter it with demand? Perhaps the solution would be an area in each population centre dedicated to care modules - individual stand alone units that are transportable and can simply connect into site services. Clustering these homes together allows dedicated on site carers longer with each patient, allows onsite meal preparation and service and allows district nurses to visit and advise on health issues. Modular design would allow mass m...

You have probably by now heard of Bitcoin, the magic money making machine that doubles in value every 24 hours, until it doesn't. Bitcoin is the most famous example of a cryptocurrency - an electronic means of exchange - that has a value because people think it has a value. The logic behind cryptocurrencies was to create a trustless means of exchange. Instead of having to believe that the gold you were giving me was real gold, or the bank transfer you were paying me with wouldn't turn out to be a scam, a system would be created that would record every transaction ever made.  To ensure this record of transactions could be trusted completely it would be written down onto lots of computers. When all of the computer records matched the transaction would be completed. This is called "the ledger" and the system of writing it down onto lots of different "blocks" that form one "ledger" is known as the "block chain". Now within the...

Year 2 parents evening and once again I was reminded about how the school system is set up for people like us. We hear nothing but praise. She works hard, excellent reader, a pleasure to teach. We flick through the maths and literacy books and see page after page of neat work with ticks and smiley faces all over it. About half the parents in my daughter's class will be having a similar experience. Generally (and there are some exceptions) we are all people who did reasonably well at school, not straight A grades and Oxbridge degrees but A-levels and degrees. The types who make up most of the white collar professionals in this country. And the types who decide how the education system should work. I then think of all my friends and relatives and their children. And the only ones who aren't having similar experiences are the handful who have a child with additional needs. We, and our children, are stuck in this positive feedback loop where our children are hitting the tar...

My mum, a retired reception teacher, recently told me that she had been chatting to the former headteacher of a school she worked in. They are both now grandparents with grandchildren in the early stages of primary education. The level of expectations and formalised learning methods that their grandchildren are experiencing are a world away from the 1975-2000 period of their teaching careers. They questioned whether they had done enough. As they live in the village they taught in, and have done for over 40 years, they of course know the families of the children they taught. And there are the full range of academic outcomes across them, some who have achieved highly, and some who left as soon as possible. So whilst it didn't seem to have had any noticeable impact (after all every other school would have been teaching in a similar way) they wondered what would have happened had they pushed us more. My own experience in that primary school was one of freedom and excitement. I rem...