Notes on classroom observation, school improvement, and the data schools already have.
The Learning Lens taxonomy was built on Rosenshine, Hattie and Wiliam, and left out the relational layer. Why I built it that way, and why I changed my mind.
Read →Inspection frameworks differ by country. The teaching practices they evaluate don't. What building for HGIOS4 and Ofsted taught me about the rest.
Read →Scotland and England are both reshaping inspection. Building for HGIOS4 and Ofsted surfaces shared problems and sharply different assumptions about evidence.
Read →Learning Lens omits by design: no graded lessons, no teacher rankings, no AI feedback to individuals, no surveillance. Why that fits professional trust.
Read →Scotland tells itself a powerful story about education. The story is partly true and increasingly at odds with the evidence. Where Scottish education stands.
Read →Every school claims to be evidence-based. Few can point to the evidence. The three kinds that matter, and what it takes to close the rhetoric gap.
Read →Pupil support holds more information about young people than anywhere else in school. Almost none of it reaches the classrooms where it would matter.
Read →Most lesson observations are run by middle leaders with no training in how to do it. The training gap, the relationship problem, and what would help.
Read →Lesson observation doesn't have to feel like judgement. What a good observer captures, and what you're entitled to as the teacher being observed.
Read →Black and Wiliam, Hattie's Visible Learning, Rosenshine's Principles. Why these reshaped teaching, and what got lost when the research hit the staffroom.
Read →Most edtech is built by people who have never taught. What changes when a classroom observation tool is built by a teacher, and why domain expertise matters.
Read →Most lesson observation systems measure the wrong things. What goes wrong with classroom observation, from both sides of the clipboard, and what fixes it.
Read →The UK is shaping formal AI guidance for schools. The five principles, what they mean in practice, and how Scotland's framework differs from England's.
Read →Kirsti Klette asks whether classroom observation can give teaching a common vocabulary. A practitioner taxonomy suggests the answer is closer than it looks.
Read →Qualifications Scotland replaced the SQA in February 2026. Hayward, the 2025 Act, and whether Scottish qualifications reform reaches classrooms.
Read →Attainment gap metrics lean on imperfect proxies: SIMD in Scotland, Pupil Premium in England. How far we can trust them, and what better ones look like.
Read →School improvement plans are filed in August and forgotten by October. How to build an improvement process that lives in practice, not in a drawer.
Read →The behaviour debate is stuck between discipline and trauma-informed practice. What behaviour management is missing is evidence from real classrooms.
Read →The evidence on effective teacher professional learning is clear, and most school CPD ignores it. What would work instead, and why the gap persists.
Read →Schools record more additional support needs than ever. What the rising ASN and SEND numbers measure, why they keep growing, and what they conceal.
Read →Schools split pastoral care from academic progress, but the evidence says they overlap. Why school structures lag, and what a joined-up model looks like.
Read →Schools drown in data they never use and chase data they don't need. How to find the school data already in the building, and start acting on it.
Read →Most lesson observation measures the wrong things. What the research says classroom observation is for, and how to design it for improvement not performance.
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