Lee Roberts

Roadie for Mindskrew....🤘

[Naomi Fisher @naomicfisher]

This time of year, we put our 16-year-olds through a coming-of-age ritual. We make them sit in rows and write down things they have spent the last two years trying to memorise. We pit them against the clock, and prevent them from talking to each other. We tell them that this is the most important thing that they will ever do and their future life depends on it.

We don’t just do this once. For most of them, we make them sit in rows and write things down between twenty and thirty separate times in the space of about six weeks. Maths, English, History, French, Biology….Again and again, they have to keep at it. Each time, we tell them how important it is and they better not have an off-day or be ill.

Then we take their papers and we rank them. For some, the result will be accolades and glory. For others, failure and retakes.

We know for sure that this will always be true, because these rituals that we call exams are designed to rank them. A third will always fail. There would be no top grades if we didn’t also have the bottom. It isn’t possible for them all to pass.

And yet, every year, we talk as if this was not true. We pretend that it would be possible for them all to succeed, if only they and their teachers worked harder. Politicians talk about raising standards and accountability. We pretend that the problem is them not working hard enough, not an exam system designed so that hundreds of thousands fail. We blame them, not the exams.

For the truth is that we have a coming-of-age ritual for our teenagers which involves a third of them being told they haven’t met the grade, that they are not good enough. We launch them into adult life telling them that they will carry the stigma of not understanding quadratic equations for ever. We put them all through intense stress, and then when some of them cave in we say they have anxiety and send them to see a therapist.

And then we’re surprised when many of them say they just can’t carry on, that they don’t see the point. They don’t see potential in the future for themselves.

We need to take a step back and ask ourselves why we do this to our teenagers. For the problem isn’t our young people. It’s not their fault that a third of them fail and many are chronically stressed. The problem is what we make them do. We’ve designed a coming-of-age system with a very high cost in human misery.

Every year a new crop of teens will come of age, and despite their distress we just push them harder. We need to ask ourselves whether this is really the best we can do for our teenagers. We urgently need to think again.

[Carole Cadwalladr @carolecadwalla]

Thread! 🧵

Please read, like, share & send the article to your friends.

#TheHarbourneReceipts from @thenerve_news.

Important accountability journalism into Nigel Farage & his crypto pals.

Follow the money 💰 💰 💰

[Lee Roberts @Leerob72]

@Tim_Burgess Radiohead supporting James....

[Lee Roberts @Leerob72]

@Tim_Burgess Yes!

[Lee Roberts @Leerob72]

@TheCoopLive Any way to book parking for this gig please? Not showing on ticketmaster app yet.....

[Lee Roberts @Leerob72]

@frankturner we are coming to Lancaster Town Hall gig tonight, Adam is now 15 and a guitarist! @RayMcVea

[Lee Roberts @Leerob72]

@fthc your youngest fan? Not 3 yet and he copies the vid and sings along. Knows four songs off England cd up to now.

[Lee Roberts @Leerob72]

@fthc we are seeing you in Lancaster Town Hall, this was our boy Adam, he was 3 then now 15 and a guitarist...

[Lee Roberts @Leerob72]

@fthc your youngest fan? Not 3 yet and he copies the vid and sings along. Knows four songs off England cd up to now.

[Susie Dent @susie_dent]

Word of the day is ‘recrudescence’ (17th century): the return of something terrible after a time of reprieve.

[Channel 4 @Channel4]

Spaced is 25 years old today!

Stream every episode now on Channel 4, you lucky people 🍀

[Royal Armouries @Royal_Armouries]

Serving curatorial realness fr.
#museum #history #royalarmouries #genz #armsandarmour

[Susie Dent @susie_dent]

This is what in Japanese is known as ‘tsundoku’: buying book after book to add to a pile you will never get to.

[The Hollywood Reporter @THR]

“We are all connected in the great circle of life” - RIP James Earl Jones

[Full Fact @FullFact]

Robert Jenrick MP claims each asylum seeker arriving in the UK “costs the taxpayer roughly £400,000 over their lifetime”.

But this is based on a report looking at costs associated with asylum-related migration in the Netherlands, not the UK.
https://t.co/Re9PWYWgFd

[Anna Landre ♿️ @annalandre]

A wheelchair-using master’s student is doing this survey for her dissertation about disabled people’s experiences with accessibility on the UK high street. If you have a few minutes and could share it and/or fill it out, she’d be really grateful!

https://t.co/T2BVYt75GF

[Susie Dent @susie_dent]

Word of the day is ‘Podsnappian’ (from Charles Dickens): blinkered, self-congratulatory, and convinced that everyone else should see things the way you do.

[Sky Sports @SkySports]

Every Team GB medallist from the 2024 Paris Olympics🥇🥈🥉

[Lee Roberts @Leerob72]

Please share.

[New Scientist @newscientist]

See some of the dazzling pictures that were shortlisted for the annual Astronomy Photographer of the Year competition. https://t.co/Nk8yIySvbb

[Mikey Smith @mikeysmith]

The "guidance" was developed by The Key, a private company. It is not official guidance, and has nothing to do with government policy.

(It was set up as a funded DfE pilot in 2007, but the project was cancelled in 2008 and it continued as a private firm.)

Also, the "guidance" was written and published...in 2022, under the Conservative government.

[Cumbria Police @Cumbriapolice]

A 10-year-old boy shared as missing from Barrow this morning (13 July) has been found.

Thank you for sharing the appeal.