I don’t know how many education academics it takes to change a light bulb, but if this article in the Guardian is anything to go by, it takes at least 14. Of course, most teachers are able to change a light bulb by themselves, as long as they have the required health and safety permit for using a ladder!

The article isn’t actually about light bulbs, though. It’s about a group of 14 leading education academics who – presumably after extensive research, pondering, and tea-drinking – came up with the revolutionary idea that political intervention in schools is ‘counterproductive and damaging’.

Now, education academics don’t change light bulbs themselves. They prefer telling other people how to do it then analysing the results from the safety of their university campuses. Sometimes, this results in great teaching advice. A lot of the time, though, it just results in fads that aren’t practical in a real classroom situation.

This time, however, I think they have done themselves proud and come up with a very sensible solution. Placing emphasis on the actual lightbulb-changers and letting them use their lightbulb-changing experience to change light bulbs effectively, without being micro-managed by a bunch of politicians who’ve never felt the hot glass of a freshly burnt-out bulb on their own fingers, is a great idea.

It’s such a great idea, in fact, that I’m surprised it hasn’t been thought of already. Hang on a minute… It has already been thought of – by just about every teacher in the country. When two people invent or discover the same thing in different places with no influence on each other, it might be considered independent invention.

However, when an entire profession comes up with the same idea, it’s just common sense. Why does this common sense have to reach the government in such a roundabout way? Why can’t they just go to a school and ask a teacher?

I’m not proposing that schools should be based entirely on suggestions from teachers, but when the feedback channels between teachers and those in charge become so convoluted and clogged up with paperwork that even simple, common sense needs to be delivered to them by education academics, it’s time for a change.

Maybe some of the changes suggested by these academics will be taken on board, maybe not. Either way, I applaud them for getting these ideas into the public eye. It’s just a shame that it needs to come from educational academics rather than directly from teachers in order to get any attention.

Today’s image is by Gabriel Del castillo.

I’ve been following the ‘Balls vs. Johnson’ Latin debate avidly over the last few weeks. Being a bit of a linguist myself, I find the debate about whether the fact that Latin is not a living language can be compensated for by how useful it is in academia or its propaedeutic values when learning other languages later on.

While I was doing some background reading on Balls and Johnson, I was a little surprised (and disturbed) to find out that the ‘Balls Johnson’ dance is a kind of male genital gymnastics.

The thing I was most surprised about, though, was that the comments on all the blogs I’ve read about this debate seem to centre on who would win a fight between Ed and Boris rather than whether or not Latin is actually useful to learn at school.

The Guardian’s article, as well as the customary mention of Boris’ £250,000 salary for his column in the Telegraph, offered such gems as “Is he going to butt him in the Ed or the Balls?” from commenter ‘Spoonface’.

The fightin’ talk in the comments beneath the original article on the Telegraph’s website was a little more surreal with one commenter calling for “40 lashes with a wet noodle!”.

The best ‘Balls vs. Johnson’ article I’ve seen so far is over at adamsmith.org. It has a great picture of Ed Balls rocking out and looking a little like David Brent. It’s also well-balanced and contains a lot of common sense. The main reason I like it, though, is because mentions that Balls thinks Latin is ‘harmful’.

I can think of a lot of negative adjectives people use to describe Latin. ‘Boring’ or ‘irrelevant’ are the first two that spring to mind, but I don’t see how learning any language could be ‘harmful’.

Teenagers like ‘harmful’ things, though. ‘Harmful’ things are ‘cool’. Warnings on cigarette packs don’t put kids off smoking, they just make it more intriguing to them. Maybe language teachers could harness this reverse-psychology make language-learning ‘cool’. Are modern foreign languages as ‘harmful’ as Latin? I’m not sure, but if I can make them seem ‘harmful’ enough, maybe my students will concentrate as hard in class as they do on avoiding getting caught smoking.

Right, I’m off to stick “Warning! Language-learning is harmful and my cause cleverness” labels on all my textbooks.

Original photo by Jenny Rollo, edited by SimonSays.

This is brilliant. What a legend; nice to see some of the trade education press come out in support of misleading reports on Ofsted we’ve endured recently. Too often headlines take precedent over the facts, and this is a prime example. Pete Henshaw, editor of Sec Ed, says it better than me: “When you have an annual report that is actually very positive presented with a massive focus on the negative, and thus resulting in a spate of unhelpful and misleading headlines, I cannot help despair at how the system currently operates.”

Sorry if this post is verging on the serious, but something has to bloody well be done. Ofsted have too free a rein to write reports, and make judgements, while seemingly even controlling the way the press report on their findings. Alot of that report was positive, but no one has had anything good to say about teachers for weeks now. It’s nice that someone is fighting our corner. ”To slam teachers in this blanket way and do it directly in front of the nation’s press is demoralising and not conducive to inspiring teachers to improve,” says Henshaw. You go dude.