Eithne Leming

Education consultant, author, coach, trainer. Working mainly in London and east of England area.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/auttSC9m6X Call for evidence on a range of school reforms: reduction of the disadvantage gap; whether the gov is adequately tackling the reasons driving persistent absence & the expectation that all state-funded schools will join or form a multi-academy trust.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/TuHYr8utqz "Schools are judged, compared & held accountable for attendance figures in a high-profile way. Many pupils with the lowest attendance have very complex needs linked to anxiety, SEND, family circumstances & wider challenges that sit beyond the school gate”

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/G69EmyGXLV"The new framework provides inspectors with greater scope for professional decision-making." But evidence gathering is by wider inspection teams where levels of experience & contextual understanding will vary - a subjectivity issue for a high stakes system?

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

@warwickmansell Plus the bus and train journeys locally are definitely not of the standard seen in cities. This is a problem not always considered by policy makers who do live in cities or who have plenty of resources at their disposal.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

I have received my first requests from schools to support with the headteacher/CEO's performance management review. I love it when schools are proactive & when leaders use the end of the summer term as the obvious time to review achievements for the school year.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/BWNgMEAiQZ `"Pupils with an EHCP account for an increasing proportion of pupils with SEND: the latest figures show it is now 29%, compared with 19.3% in 2016." The shame is the high cost of producing EHCPs which takes resource away from actual provision.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/ZiE4VVi2pf "The marking framework unfairly penalises pupils at times & even when they demonstrate their understanding, their answers may be discounted on really picky grounds -the reading test now is not actually really determining pupils’ understanding.”

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/eWP9ddtdfY Ofsted’s use of a secure-fit methodology, meaning every grade descriptor has to be met for a school to be awarded a certain grade & the focus on national averages in achievement judgements feels onerous & pernicious -penalising schools for their cohorts.”

[Artur Nadolny @ArturNadol7566]

HOW BRITAIN REWARDS PEOPLE WHO TRY TO SAVE TAXPAYER MONEY: FIRE THEM

Mike Kiely spent 22 years inside BT (@BTGroup). He knew how the telecoms industry operated. So when the government hired him as a consultant to oversee the £2.5 billion rural broadband rollout, he knew exactly what he was looking at.

BT had won all 26 government contracts. All of them.

Kiely did the maths. Installing a street cabinet in Northern Ireland cost around £13,000. On the mainland, BT was charging the government between £61,000 and £80,000 per cabinet. Public money covered roughly 77% of every single one.

He suspected BT was simply inventing tasks and inflating charges to absorb as much public funding as possible without doing more work.

So he shared his analysis with local councils. The people whose job it was to negotiate these contracts and spend public money responsibly.

Then his document leaked to a broadband blog.

The Department for Culture, Media and Sport trawled his internal emails, found what they needed, and sacked him. The man who tried to protect public money.

Margaret Hodge (@margarethodge), chair of the Public Accounts Committee, told the Guardian (@guardian) she was getting increasingly concerned at the way whistleblowers were being bullied. She pointed out that hiding behind commercial confidentiality was denying the public the right to know how their money was being spent.

Her committee later confirmed what Kiely had warned all along. Taxpayers had been ripped off. £1.2 billion had gone to BT shareholders.

Kiely was eventually vindicated when a community in Oxfordshire paid £28,000 per cabinet. Exactly in line with what his numbers predicted was fair.

He lost his job for telling the truth. BT kept every contract.

This is what accountability looks like in Britain. The consultant who raises the alarm gets sacked. The company he raised the alarm about gets the cheque.

Support whistleblowers. They are the only audit most public spending ever gets.

SOURCES
@BBCNews @TheRegister @guardian @margarethodge

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/voBBnZyeJq "For many families & schools, the concern is not semantic but practical: if mental health is no longer clearly located within SEND, who becomes responsible when a child’s distress affects education but does not meet increasingly stretched NHS thresholds?"

[Michael Rosen 💙💙🎓🎓 NICE 爷爷 @MichaelRosenYes]

I thought that if Israeli soldiers or settlers attacked Christian villages, the Christian world would unite in their millions in condemnation that their sacred sites were being burnt and erased.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/vIy3aoQaZF "The cultivation of a competitive notion of education, rather than recognising that the means of measurement (eg, exam grades) are nonsense, SEND students are given various forms of artificial advantage, creating a certain market value for SEND labels."

[Helen Bevan @HelenBevan]

If we want change to be systemic, we need to engage people across multiple levels, from influencing and involving many, to co-creating with some.

The "Engagement Staircase" from Russ Gaskin (CoCreative) and Akash Bhalerao (Ashoka) is a really helpful, research-informed framework for thinking about who we need to engage and how.

Their core premise is that engagement is not a single act. It exists on a spectrum of levels, from communicating to many, through consulting, involving, and collaborating, to co-creating with a smaller core. Each step represents a progressively deeper level of stakeholder participation, ownership and shared power.

In health and care, that tends to mean a lot of communication and consultation, and not enough collaboration and co-creation. We often inform people about change. We ask for their views. We call it engagement. But informing is the bottom step of the staircase, and consulting, however well-designed, still positions the leader as the one who decides.

Working at higher levels of engagement requires a different kind of change leadership capacity. Co-creation is likely to mean relinquishing control over outcomes. Collaboration requires an ongoing investment in relationships, not just in on-off tasks. Most change leadership development is better at building lower-level engagement skills than upper-level ones.

In our sector, there is a big push towards “co-production” or “co-creation” which is a positive thing. However, It is also problematic to think that we need to co-create with a lot of people. The higher up the staircase, the fewer people are involved, and that's by design. We communicate to many; we co-create with some. We have to be intentional about this distribution. The risk is trying to get everyone to the top step, or, just as problematic, keeping everyone at the bottom. Both are strategic errors.

We should seek to work across all five levels simultaneously. It’s about holding large-scale awareness and influence across a wide network while nurturing a smaller network of co-creators who are deeply invested in the work. This requires thinking about engagement like a portfolio, mapping who needs to be where on the staircase, and actively managing upward movement over time.

There is also an equity dimension. Who gets invited to collaborate and co-create? In too many change initiatives, the higher levels of engagement get reserved for those who already hold formal power or existing relationships with the change leader. Creating the conditions for systemic change means actively seeking out people whose experience is closest to the problem, even when that requires bridging structural divides.

We might treat the Engagement Staircase as a mirror - reflecting on which levels we are working at, with whom, and what it would take to move the right people to higher levels of ownership of the change.

The article: https://t.co/I8WbuvaPrC. It has links to some great resources.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/95txskbJ0t NFER finds link between better life satisfaction & improved attendance among girls & persistently absent pupils.Higher levels of self-reported belonging are associated with lower absence but no clear link once overall life satisfaction is accounted for.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/eNbbmz5Jyq In primaries, Full-time equivalent primary teacher numbers fell by 2,900 - 1.3%. They increased by 1,100 - 3.9% in special schools & pupil referral units, year on year & by 300 (6.3%) for teachers employed by local authorities working across schools.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/9gLJzn82U3 “In most cases” the “direct involvement of specialists” from Experts at Hand should be “time-limited”, with the aim of building skills and confidence that allow school and other settings to support children independently.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/3AqFj8sRFp "Trusts persistently struggling financially, are those serving intakes with higher levels of disadvantage & SEND. A system that accurately reflects context, levels of need, investment in early intervention & sustainable reform of SEND funding is needed”

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/vjzsFEciEn 1, SEND Pupils need to be distributed more evenly across local systems i.e. stronger place planning & monitoring. 2. accountability measures must better reflect inclusion - not disincentivise. 3, funding must better follow need.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

Today I am providing QA for a Peer Challenge visit for a school in https://t.co/chpmmRcFyl is my first visit to this particular school, so I am looking forward to getting to know colleagues and a setting that as yet unfamiliar to me. I love this work and feel privileged to do it.

[Eithne Leming @Eithne_Leming]

https://t.co/C7pXvzhKyq "25% of extra time was granted for 16.6 to 25.5% of all students sitting GCSEs, AS & A levels in 2024-25 - broadly in line with the rate of SEND in the pupil population." In my experience it's rarely the most helpful access arrangement for SEND pupils.