Would you like your operation to remove your gallbladder to be done by someone who isn’t even a doctor? Me neither. Yet this dangerous craziness could be coming to a hospital near you.

Naturalist, broadcaster, humanist, and national treasure David Attenborough is 98 years old today. Happy Birthday! Thank you for decades of inspirational broadcasting, and all your work to promote the understanding of evolution and the natural world.

🧵Your *must-read* of 2024. A thorough & fair report detailing where we went wrong with reading in Scotland. Grateful to have an official record of events. Will anyone will listen? 🤔Jenny Gilruth ScotGov Education Henry Hepburn Emma Seith

TY & congratulations Jennifer Buckingham 🙏

Children with special educational needs don’t get to learn a different writing system as a concession to their needs. If they are going to succeed academically and reach their potential, they need to master the same writing system that other successful people master.

Unscientific American: Science journalism surrenders to progressive ideology. city-journal.org/article/unscie…

Discusses our recent PNAS paper on scientists censoring science, led by Cory Clark.

Similarly, no child enters school as a reluctant reader. Skill precedes thrill.

Monique Susan Godsland Even for my pupils with complex needs, I recommend that about a third of each lesson is pupils reading to the teacher or TA (who is trained to support with good error correction techniques and be mindful of vocabulary, syntax and comprehension).

Susan Godsland I write about it here howtoteachreading.org.uk/the-practice-g…

”We simply don’t get pupils to read enough, & worse, we usually ask the kids who need to read the most, to read the least.” Monique Nowers Monique

Really important points to consider when thinking about using Sophie Bartlett and Mrs B's way of teaching spelling ⬇️ #PrimaryEssentials

”If you have built a career and reputation around downplaying the role of phonics in early reading and advising teachers to teach three-cuing strategies then it is far easier to defeat your opponents by dubbing them conservative than by deploying research evidence.” Greg Ashman

”The secondary curriculum isn’t made up of high frequency words. A year 8 who can’t decode, even one with a decent sight vocabulary, is likely to flounder.” Tricia Millar That Spelling Thing (Tricia Millar)

Now that New Zealand is done with Reading Recovery, I wonder how long it will take us in Scotland to get rid of it—and all of its harmful clone programmes... 🤔

New Zealand: Gets rid of Reading Recovery 💪

Scotland: