Exactly a year from today, as pretty much every media outlet has reminded us, we Brits will be waking up outside the European Union. Attempts by remainers - everyone from Tony Blair  to J K Rowling - to reverse the exit strategy seem doomed, not least because as Timothy Garton Ash wrote this morning, Leavers are willing to make any compromise simply to get the deed done, while “Anti-Brexiters, by contrast, have 10 different plans and therefore none”. The liberal left’s  perpetual inability to

Educators are fixated upon whether traditional, or progressive teaching methods are proven to 'work'. The 'either/or' polarisation distorting this debate has little to offer most teachers. Meanwhile, what employers and societies actually need from young people is never measured, and therefore rarely taught. We need a different narrative......

A question not discussed often enough in school staffrooms is 'what are we all doing here?' The purpose of schooling is one of those rarely-visited assumptions: we all think we share the same mission but, on closer examination, those assumptions can frequently differ widely. In Valerie Hannon's* new book, Thrive: Schools Reinvented For The Real Challenges We Face the case is powerfully made that the point of schools is to create thriving societies: “education has to be about learning to thrive

“Look at me - I’ve got youth on my side!” - That’s how Jeremy Corbyn responded to a question on his long-term intentions on TV this morning, following the sensational turn-around in Labour’s 2017 UK general election. I don't know if it was a planned remark, but it was brilliant in its reflection on the energy that surrounded Labour’s leader through the final weeks of the campaign, and, more significantly, pointing to the  seismic shift that took place in this election. It’s a shift that should

This is the first blog post I've written since December 8th 2016. I'm normally a reasonably regular blogger – more than once a month – but I confess that, this time, I completely stalled. And I'd like to explain why. I don't think the date of the last post is coincidental. It was exactly four weeks since the Trump presidential victory, and since then I have been very busy travelling with work. But it also felt like social media wasn't a place I wanted to spend much time on. I left for a two

What does a man George Osborne described as a ‘revolutionary marxist’ and the banker’s banker have in common? Quite a lot, as it turns out. Paul Mason, author of PostCapitalism, denies that he’s a marxist, revolutionary or otherwise, but describes himself as a ‘radical social democrat’. Still not a natural bedfellow to the Governor of the Bank of England, however. But in a speech in Liverpool on December 6, 2016, Mark Carney has aligned his solution to the mess that we’re in, to one that is

My last book was about the ways in which knowledge, and learning, has become ‘open’. My next book is going to be about the power of us: how ordinary people can punch above the weight of corporations and the so-called ‘elite’ (you know the elite, those very rich people who complain about a handful of people having all the power). And there’s probably never been a better - or more confounding - time to be looking at this. I freely admit that I’m struggling to get a handle on 2016, but I’m in good

Closed narrowly won the battle of Brexit, and the world will hold its breath over the Trump/Clinton choice, not least because it’s the biggest play so far in the Open/Closed war. But here are five reasons why I’d argue that, regardless of the outcome of the November vote, Open will eventually prevail

"This song is Copyrighted in the U.S., under Seal of Copyright #154085, for a period of 28 years, and anybody caught singin' it without our permission, will be mighty good friends of ourn, cause we don't give a dern. Publish it. Write it. Sing it. Swing to it. Yodel it. We wrote it, that's all we wanted to do." Woody Guthrie “Open will win. It will win on the internet and will then cascade across many walks of life: The future of government is transparency. .. The future of culture is freedom.