Please stand up if you’ve ever been criticised for your targets not being SMART enough. And please raise your hand if you’ve ever been the critic.. To the critics, this post might make you feel a little uncomfortable, and might also make you think carefully about what you say in the future. And to the criticised: would you like some ammunition to be able to rebuff the criticism? If so, then please read on.. We’ll be discussing this subject in […]

Are you fed up with telling learners how to complete their portfolios of assessment evidence? If so, this ‘call for volunteers’ might be something you’ll be interested in.. There’s a name for what I’ve just mentioned above. Not specifically the ‘fed up with telling learners’ bit, but the time you have to spend working with a learner when they don’t get it right. It’s called ‘preventable contact’. This lovely term helps you get a grip on the ‘payoff’ you might […]

This weekend, I took delivery of a set of 11m, triple-extension, rope-operated ladders. New, they’re over £800, but I bought them for the bargain prices of £65! (By the way, this post isn’t about ladders, it’s about self assessment.) So why only £65, you’re asking – well that’s certainly what I was asking.. Because they are ‘rope-operated’, each tier of the ladder runs in a groove in the one below, and it turned out that the top tier was pretty […]

FE is not about getting people into jobs. Making ‘the job’ (and only a first-rung job, at that) the end of the FE rainbow is the equivalent of the 1970s careers advisor telling the boys to try the NCB and the girls to look into short-hand typing. We need to train our young people for the jobs of tomorrow – the ones that haven’t been invented yet; hell, we want our young people to be the ones to invent them. […]

I love this photo, though you may have to look hard to clarify what you’re seeing. Because of lockdown this year, I couldn’t buy my tomato plants as usual, so I grew them all from seed. As ever with seeds, I grew too many. The six I needed were transplanted to the planter, and the others were either given away or left in their pots on the bench. They’ve all been watered the same, but as you can see, six […]