Interesting. I enjoyed Babel & Yellowface. Both very pacy, w important ideas. Perhaps a little showy too, and some undeveloped characterisation/relationships in Babel, I felt.

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Was Charlotte Brontë's “madwoman in the attic” a Jamaican heiress? Did Jane Austen's Mansfield Park sideline the slave wealth of its characters? How was her own family tied to the Caribbean plantations?

note that though this might be the case, the flags were also a cause for concern & would be removed.

The effect was intimidating, whatever the intention. We had recently delivered assemblies & PSHE lessons on 'flags', so at least this groundwork let us have informed discussion w pupils abt it.

Highly numerate colleagues of mine say the only way they can get a handle on all the detail is by spending hours on YouTube watching explainers!!
I've watched some and they told me things I could never have gleaned from the website.

Thanks for this. Excellent points combined with some valid challenge imo.

I do think the subject expertise on SLT can have an influence on approaches to teaching and learning. All the schools I've worked in have had strong SLT representation from the English department & that has been a good thing.

I feel there are some overlapping issues for Eng & Hist especially around diversifying rather than decolonising curriculum. I know there were submissions made around this for English & I was at a meeting where teachers felt strongly about it. Totally agree that alternative paradigms are needed.

Excellent blogs. I found the claims made about what is working well very jarring when set against the quoted data around widening gaps. The Review states it has worked through a social justice lens but I'm not convinced by this at all. I think you had the right word for it: complacency.

There's also a lot of substantive knwl that could be built in from linguistic research. And pupils can do their own research.
Lang change - now there's another fascinating & useful topic. I could go on!
Hopefully the exploration of language diversity will emerge as a curricular thread in English?

Spoken language study opens up so many thrilling and pertinent debates. Pupil engagement is high.
What if KS4 pupils could do extended writing on this - Discuss the view that there's only one correct way to talk. Or this - The way we speak reveals who we are. Discuss your view on this statement.

spoken language use, power and identity. There may be some way of bringing this in but it feels like a lack of joined up thinking, esp as knwl about lang will prob be built into an Oracy framework. I'm thinking about the spoken lang work we do at KS3 which feels relevant, imp and exciting to pupils

I look forward to reading it. I've got lots more thoughts so it will be interesting to see where we overlap.

Oh good to hear that. I noticed they didn't footnote Hirsch (I think, I've only glanced through) but went for Lambert & Young re-powerful knowledge. Still problematic 😔. There are so many other ways of looking at 'knowledge' which could revitalise the study of lit.