Rebecca Clark

Year 3 Teacher. Geography lead. Cat owner. Keen photograper, also love good wine and a good book.

[Dave McPartlin @dave_mcpartlin]

I think most of us had deep reservations about the changes to Ofsted but gave them more time than they probably deserved - hoping things would get better.

But they haven’t. They’ve got worse.

The challenges facing schools have never felt greater. Budgets are stretched beyond belief. Staff are exhausted. Leaders are carrying more than ever.

Education doesn’t need more pressure, more judgement or more fear.

Our children, our staff and our schools deserve better.

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@Stefanovich_ @rellim_evad @Number10cat Yes it is; it's a case of the name used rather than the actual physical geography. Ireland doesn't use the term.

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@DeputyGrocott Or when you enjoy watching Michael Portillo in another one of his train programmes!

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@KirstieMAllsopp I wonder at the timing of this book being published. Why now, all these years later? Is it because CS has seen the money that Harry got from Spare, and has thought I wouldn't mind some of that. Does he have a large bill to pay?

[Leena-Palestine @Leena53022916]

*BRILLIANT*
The French made a short film about what could happen after all immigrants would follow the ‘_white, angry old man’s_’ advice to go back where they came from.*

[Hugh | Investor 🇬🇧 @HughInvests]

Remember when the tax-free allowance was £12,500?

That was in 2019.

Today, it’s £12,570…just £70 higher.

If it had simply kept up with inflation, it would be around £17,000 today.

Meanwhile, food, rent, energy, fuel and everyday bills have all risen sharply.

They can say they’ve “not raised taxes.”

But they haven’t needed to.

Freeze the threshold while wages and prices rise, and inflation quietly pushes more of your income into the tax system every year.

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@PeasantInTN @wfbenny99 @Mr_Husky1 We haven't had thise 4 hours this year because the day before the chdn come back is a bank holiday. Not that 4 hours even begins to touch the surface of setting up a classroom.

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@The_Clive_Smart @Prof_Umbongo Your last sentence - I'd rather have them hit a wall than a tree, because a tree is still a living thing. But the rest is spot on. I'm sorry you have nightmares.

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@JamesMelville You're exactly right. Especially the ladt part about how pensioners are being excluded because of digital technology.

[James Melville 🚜 @JamesMelville]

I don’t want technology to “evolve” another bloody inch. I hate that everything demands an app or QR code. I hate supermarket self-checkouts that scold you for “unexpected items” as if you have committed a hate crime with a packet of biscuits. I hate ringing a company and suddenly you’re trapped in a doom loop of an endless conversation with a robot before being left on hold long enough to waste an entire afternoon. I hate how local bank branches are closing and customer service is no longer communication with a bank manager but with an AI bot. I hate websites that force you to prove you’re human by enforcing a dystopian farce quiz to spot 3 sets of traffic lights in a fog of pixelated misery. I hate digital app passwords, verification codes and subscriptions. I hate how town centre car parks often no longer accept cash payments and the only way to park is by registering to another bloody app. I hate receiving unsolicited phone calls from an AI automated robot. And I really hate how the whole digital circus excludes half of the country’s pensioners simply because they never signed up to live inside a smartphone.​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​​

Rant over.

[Sam @SamCKx]

Nigel Farage has only attended around 30% of Parliamentary votes since becoming MP & hasn’t run a single surgery for his constituents in Clacton.

For that he is paid £98,000 a year of taxpayers’ money, whilst making £millions on the side.

The average PIP recipient gets £6000 a year.

The first person who needs their taxpayer funded benefits taken away is Nigel Farage.

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@Jennyfurfuls Julia Hartley-Brewer

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@PhilipSwallow2 It wasn't inability to bear the weight of proper intellectual scrutiny that lead Arday to take his own life. It was the constant hounding by the press. There's a difference between accountability and a witch hunt. He resigned, hounding got worse. He killed himself, it continues.

[JenC @JenC910669]

@omgsidewalks

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@DeputyGrocott It's not so much a thing as a place that's been "discontinued" ... I really miss Woolworths. But maybe that's for a conversation on a different day!

[Sama Hoole @SamaHoole]

The last overseas shearers Britain intends to let in are on the fells right now, working out the final weeks of their leave.

The door shut on 30 June. No vote, no debate, no announcement, just a date passing quietly in a summer when everyone was looking elsewhere. Those still working the Borders this week are here on leave that expires on 1 October, and when they fly out that is the end of it.

Understand what is walking out.

Six New Zealanders spent three months in one Northumberland valley last year and sheared nearly 90,000 sheep. Fifteen thousand head each, across farms from the Scottish Borders down to County Durham. They have been coming into Coquetdale for over thirty years. Since 2011 a concession has let up to 75 of them in each spring, and between them they take the wool off one and a half to two million British sheep in a window a few weeks long.

The Home Office rejected the application on 2 February. Twenty-six days of farmers writing to their MPs got it reinstated on 10 March for one final year, with a line about the sector having had fourteen years to train British workers and now being expected to transition to domestic labour.

Here is what that sentence is standing on. British Wool trains over 800 people a year, most of those courses are basic level, and most of the people on them are sheep farmers learning to do their own flock. Training was never the bottleneck. A top shearer clears a ewe in two or three minutes, calm hands, no panic in the animal, hundreds a day for weeks on end, and reaching that standard takes years of conditioning and a place in a global trade that follows the season around the planet.

Fourteen million breeding ewes. A few weeks to do them all. A sheep left in fleece gets eaten alive by maggots, so the job is not optional and the date is not negotiable.

Next spring those farms make phone calls that nobody answers.

Seventy-five shearers, once a year, and a government that could not find room for them.

[Hedgie @HedgieMarkets]

🦔AI companies are bulk-buying rare books, scanning them through high-speed machines that cut the spines off, and shredding the originals. A service called ISBNdb facilitates orders of up to a million books and keeps buyers anonymous. Pre-2022 books are premium because they're free of AI-generated text. A federal judge ruled the practice is fair use because eliminating the original means only one copy exists at a time. Anthropic hired the former head of Google Books partnerships to obtain "all the books in the world."

My Take
This got to me. A bookseller told 404 Media that rare books with almost no surviving copies are being fed into this pipeline. Books that survived wars, fires, and centuries of handling are being shredded so an AI can learn to write a better marketing email.
ISBNdb's website literally says "'AI company destroys two million books' is not a headline that generates sympathy," and they still built an entire business around making it happen quietly. They offer NDAs as a feature. They coach clients to call it "digital preservation."

I've covered AI companies scraping the internet, torrenting libraries, and stealing music. This is worse because it's irreversible. You can re-upload a website. You can reprint a bestseller. You can't replace the last three copies of an 18th-century botanical text once someone shreds them for training data. And the judge said it's legal. So it's going to accelerate.
"We shred rare books and offer NDAs so nobody finds out" is a legitimate business model in 2026. What a timeline.

Hedgie🤗

[Bernie Sanders @BernieSanders]

Elon Musk Wealth
2012: $2 billion
2026: $719 billion

Jeff Bezos Wealth
2012: $18.4 billion
2026: $255 billion

Mark Zuckerberg Wealth
2012: $17.5 billion
2026: $212 billion

Federal Minimum Wage
2009: $7.25
2026: $7.25

Obscene. We must raise the minimum wage to a living wage.

[Rebecca Clark @meeow99]

@IloveSocio96560 @RogersHistory This, exactly. I'm in primary, and been on this situation. So infuriating when you end up doing their work as well as your own. Ended up doing my own planning and resourcing and not sharing, which is not like me. But needs must.