This week is a listener questions episode, and you sent in some good ones.

📝 Summative assessment, AI and who gets left behind
A newly qualified teacher writes in after finishing their PGCE and QTS, where the university replaced the usual 5,000 plus word essay with a portfolio, a shorter essay and a recorded presentation. Partly to head off AI, partly so neurodivergent and less academically articulate students could still show what they know. Is there a version of that for schools? Dylan and Hayden go deep on this one. Why a timer on a SATs reading comprehension paper might be measuring the wrong thing entirely. How two children can get very different scores while knowing exactly the same amount. And a fairly candid admission from one of them about cramming a history degree while classmates who read ten times as many books came out with the same grade. The really interesting bit is the warning at the end, because if you rebuild the whole system around oracy, the quiet, deeply academic child who thrives on paper is the one who pays for it.

🎙️ Would you have a Reform politician on the podcast?
A listener asks whether the show would sit down with Reform to talk education. The answer arrives quickly, but the reasoning is the part worth staying for. Where does platforming end and holding people to account begin? Is there a party that would be a straight no? And what changes when the council running your own children's schools is already Reform led? Anyone who has argued about this online will recognise every step of it.

🪑 The bench ban
Not a question, more a cry for help. Five Year Six children, standing still, on a bench roughly one foot off the ground, singing. Banned. Meanwhile the three foot stage they are dancing on is apparently fine. Expect risk assessments, kerbs, sprained ankles and a strong opinion on telling staff about a deal breaker before the day of the show rather than after.

👔 Being the only man in the building
An ECT starting in September is the only male member of staff at their new school and is worried about isolation and being handed every behaviour incident going. The advice is simpler than expected, and there is a fair bit of honesty about what is and is not actually harder here. It also spirals into the number of people who assume Dylan and Hayden are a couple.

🧥 What do male trainees actually wear?
Uniform policies, blue chinos, brown shoes that stopped being brown, a tie worn well into 2023, and the great shirt reuse debate. Plus a genuinely useful point about pushing back on dress codes that nobody can justify.

Honest, funny, and exactly the right level of effort for the last week of the holidays.

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