Ijoined Twitter because I wrote a book and my publisher asked me to; I didn’t really intend to ever make much of it, but, as with many people, I’m now sort of addicted, even if the sweet little blue bird has gone and been replaced by a big black X. Twitter (for I will always call it that) does afford the opportunity for the small fishes in the world of education like me to see what the whales, sharks and octopi are saying.
The conversations, well, arguments, tend to be very polarised. Currently, two main recurring threads are about going to the toilet – with one side saying, “all young people should be allowed to go to the toilet whenever they want” (ludicrous, some classrooms would be permanently half empty) and the other side saying “toilets should be locked except at breaks” (also ludicrous, and very bad for the environment of the school playground). The other is about exclusion from school.
There was a great deal of comment after Maureen McKenna, the former director of education at Glasgow City Council, was appointed by Sadiq Khan to London’s Violence Reduction Unit as an education consultant with the intention of developing its ‘inclusion charter’. Ms McKenna, while in Glasgow, “slashed” school exclusions by 90 per cent.
