SirWillum

History Curriculum Leader

[SirWillum @SirWillum]

@implausibleblog You went to school 30 years ago, Zack… you can’t base your view of Histoty education in this country on your own experience decades ago

[BBC Newsnight @BBCNewsnight]

"You're spending something like £65 billion on defence and £360 billion on welfare. Lucky you, you must not feel any danger..."

Polish Foreign Minister Radek Sikorski on Britain's defence spending.

#Newsnight

[SirWillum @SirWillum]

@StuartLock Awful tbf

[SirWillum @SirWillum]

@everymovieplug Messiah (Netflix)

[SirWillum @SirWillum]

@rdzthfc Still a big question mark over Solanke for me

[SirWillum @SirWillum]

@uniquemoviemom “Bastard” subtitle makes this so much better

[SirWillum @SirWillum]

S2 was better than S1. But you can’t deny the various agendas it pushed had an impact on its traction. Deviating too far from source material, poor writing at times, poor sets/constumes/armour/casting decisions. Sometimes just daft occurrences - like the cavalry charge halt in S2. All contributed to it not capturing the same essence as the original trilogy.

[Neil Stone @DrNeilStone]

Surrender document being signed at Versailles

1919 2026

[Cameron 🇺🇸 🗽🦅 @CameronCorduroy]

>renames it to the Department of War
>names himself the Secretary of War
>fights one war
>loses

[Steve Hare @sharemath]

Cognitive Load Theory is one of the most useful frameworks in education. It tells us that working memory is limited, that extraneous complexity impedes learning, that beginners and experts have different instructional needs.

All of that is true.

But it's only ¼ of the story.🧵

[NOBUNAGA🇯🇵🏯_夏樹蒼依 @japan_nobunaga]

Stateside, a gas station. I drank a frozen blue beverage too quickly, and was struck down by a punishment this entire nation knows, and accepts, and has named.

The drink is called a slush. Ice, sweetness, and a blue that does not occur in nature. The day was hot. I was thirsty. I drank like a soldier at a river.

The pain arrived in my skull like a war horn.

Behind the eyes. Above everything. Total. I gripped the roof of my car. I may have made a sound.

"Brain freeze," said the cashier through the door, with no urgency whatsoever.

It has a NAME. The affliction is so common it has a household name, like a cousin.

"Tongue on the roof of your mouth," called a man at the pumps. He did not look over. He prescribed the remedy mid-pump, casually, the way one mentions weather.

I pressed my tongue to the roof of my mouth. The war horn faded. The healer nodded at his pump, finished, and was gone in a Chevrolet.

In my land, punishment follows crime by way of courts and seasons. Here, the sentence is instant. Drink with greed, and the ice strikes the mind directly. No trial. No appeal. Perfectly fair.

And here is what moves me. EVERYONE has felt it. The cashier. The healer. Children. Elders. An entire nation united by the same small lightning, all taught the same cure, all passing it on to strangers at gas stations, free of charge.

You cannot fully distrust a country once you know it shares one pain.

The freeze does not punish thirst. It punishes haste.

I finished the slush slowly, like a scholar. Blue tongue. Clear mind.

Then at the door I forgot everything, drank deeply, and was struck down again.

"Tongue, hon," said the cashier, without looking up.

Discipline is a journey.

[James Fitzgibbon @mrfitzhist]

It’s been great having big A Level numbers. However, the mark load is 🤯, so it’s been whole class feedback all the way! Numbered points for strengths/improvements with student reflection, SPAG and mark scheme.

E.g. strengths 1,3,4 and improvements 4,5.

#historyteacher

[SirWillum @SirWillum]

@BBCr4today He’s objectively correct here

[Sophy Ridge @SophyRidgeSky]

It's hard to argue with this from Tony Blair:

"Governments which succeed don't start with a personality contest. Or a political question - as in how do we "save the country" from Reform. They start with an idea, a project, a governing purpose"

[SirWillum @SirWillum]

wtf is this new @Spotify logo

[Josh Hunt @iAmJoshHunt]

This isn’t an attack on Clive. From what I’ve seen of him on TV, he seems like a really genuine bloke who cares deeply about this country.

He starts with one stat. 80% of Finns would defend Finland if attacked, whilst only 33% of Brits would defend Britain. He's right that this gap matters. I also think he's right about why it exists. The British have lost faith because this country has stopped working for them. That isn't sentiment, it is the rational response to forty years of watching the state take more and deliver less.

Where I disagree is what to do about it.

Lewis's answer is to rebuild a state that builds, invests, and owns essentials again. A productive state, public housing, public energy, public transport. He thinks the constraint is capacity, not money, and that bond markets would reward credible productive investment.

I think he's getting the order wrong, and also missing the point on why people have lost faith.

The Finnish state didn't earn 80% support by announcing a plan to. It earned it by delivering, year after year, for decades. Affordable energy, available housing, functioning services, and institutions you could trust. And for the most part, their politicians behaved as if they answered to someone, which you can see in the 18-point difference between Finland and the UK in the Corruption Perceptions Index. The 80% in Finland is the consequence of decades of delivery, not the cause of it.

The British state cannot claim that authority. It has to earn it back. The British people are consistently bombarded by resets, new plans, and promises of change. When in reality, all they want is competence and consistency in delivery. Britain doesn't need an endless stream of creative ideas in government, it just needs competent people doing the basics well.

We now have the highest tax burden since the Second World War. And the bigger the take has become, the worse things have got. That isn't a coincidence, it is a system actively failing the people it is taking from. The state has quietly made modest, normal life expensive and called it policy. Filling the car. Parking in town. Having a drink. People say it costs £100 just to leave the house now, and they're right. Most of that cost isn't the private sector. It is tax, duty, council fees, and the endless levies the state has imposed on everything we do. Making life exorbitantly expensive, whilst the services it funds get visibly worse every year. That is the grinding reality for the average person.

Virtually everything you do in the UK is now a taxable event. When that happens, things stop happening. People don't invest, expand, hire, or take risks. They simply don't bother... and they even stop leaving the house.

So before we ask whether the state should do more, it is worth asking why it is delivering so little for so much.

The state is currently running 213 major projects worth almost £1 trillion. By its own assessment, only 14% are rated as highly likely to be delivered successfully. That figure was 48% a decade ago. The value of projects classified as unachievable or at major risk has doubled to £198 billion in a single year. Two thirds of the portfolio has no robust plan to evaluate whether the projects even work.

Below that sits a layer of local failure the country can no longer measure. Over half of council chief executives believe their council will be effectively bankrupt within five years. Most haven't published audited accounts in years. The National Audit Office has refused to sign off the Whole of Government Accounts for two years running because so much of it is unaudited estimates. The country is being managed on guesswork.

This isn't acceptable. And more of it won't help.

Then underneath all of this sits something cultural. There is no skin in the game inside the state. It is always someone else's money. Nobody really cares about waste. Nobody is punished for failure. The political class is largely made up of the people who couldn't do anything else, who have never built, run or risked anything. Most Nordic countries get the opposite. They have built political systems that punish cronyism. Ours rewards it. Then we wonder why our politics produces nothing of consequence.

Outside the state, and I'd argue this is a consequence of state failure too, we have built a culture that treats success with suspicion. We blame, we resent, we tax, we regulate. The successful are spoken about as if they probably stole what they have. So they stop trying. Or they leave. And when you spend your life paying for a country that feels like it is out to get you, you don't tend to bring your best to it either.

It is also worth looking at what kind of choices this state makes when it does have the opportunity to invest. Norway found oil and built a sovereign wealth fund now worth over £1.5 trillion. Britain found oil and spent it. One country invested for the next generation. The other consumed the windfall and is now demanding the next generation pay for what was already used up. That isn't an institutional accident. It is a political choice this state made, and would likely make again.

This is the state Lewis wants to entrust with the Bee Network model at national scale. The state that spent 88p of every housing pound subsidising landlords rather than building homes. The state that, on his own analysis, would rather compensate for markets it broke than fix them at source.

He says the real constraint is capacity, not money. In some ways he's right. But adding to the remit of a state that has lost its capacity will not restore it. It will stretch thinner what is already stretched too thin.

He preempts the bond market objection by arguing markets reward credible productive investment. He may be right. But I am not arguing we cannot afford this, although that is an argument to have. I am arguing the British state cannot deliver it. It isn't competent enough. That holds whether the borrowing is cheap or not.

The Bee Network is his strongest counter-example. One transport network under one strong mayor is encouraging. It is not proof the central state can replicate that at scale across every sector. Plenty of regional projects in the same portfolio are also failing.

If we want to get to 80%, here is what I think that actually looks like...

This isn't an argument for shrinking the state, although I think out of necessity, it will need to. It is an argument for credibility. Before government earns the right to take on new ambitions, it has to demonstrate it can deliver on the ones it already has. Defence. Law and order. Roads. Justice. Borders. The basic functions every government, of every size, is judged on. Until those work visibly and consistently, every conversation about expansion is fantasy. People will not trust a state with new things when it cannot deliver the old ones.

It is also an argument about the relationship between the British public and the state. National resilience isn't only about what the state delivers. It is about what individuals, families and communities are able to do for themselves. Real resilience is built from the bottom up. It needs local economies left to grow rather than endlessly extracted from. It needs families that aren't taxed to the edge. It needs communities the state has not crowded out. We have spent decades hollowing all of that out. Asking the state to do more of what hollowed it out will not bring any of it back.

Until this happens, asking the British public to fund and trust further state expansion is asking them to give more to a system that has already failed them at scale. Having only 33% of people willing to fight for their country isn't a problem the state can solve by doing more. It is a verdict on what it has done so far.

A country that cannot command the confidence of its people cannot defend itself. Lewis is right about that too. But you don't restore that confidence by promising new things. You restore it by delivering on the old ones. And by trusting the people of this country to build the rest themselves.

[Mary Myatt @MaryMyatt]

Stories do more than engage.

They build knowledge, they deepen vocabulary, and they give pupils access to worlds, people, places and ideas they might not otherwise meet.

That is why story-rich curriculum work matters.

[Not Jerome Powell @alifarhat79]

Trump threatening Iran for weeks

[Father V @father_rmv]

Today on which the Church commemorates the English and Welsh martyrs, I highly recommend The Stripping of the Altars, Eamon Duffy’s history of the English Reformation. It argues that traditional Catholic religion in late medieval England was vibrant, deeply popular, and thoroughly integrated into everyday life through a rich calendar of feasts, saints’ cults, pilgrimages, images, prayers for the dead, and elaborate liturgy. Far from a corrupt or decaying faith ripe for reform, this “traditional religion” commanded broad lay enthusiasm right up to the 1530s. The book then traces how Henry VIII’s and Edward VI’s regimes systematically dismantled it: dissolving monasteries, banning images and shrines, rewriting or suppressing service books, closing chantries, and enforcing new Protestant doctrines and worship.

Duffy shows this as a top-down cultural revolution that met significant passive and sometimes active resistance, especially in the countryside, and left ordinary people bereft of familiar rituals and communal devotions. The title refers both to the literal removal of altars and to the broader cultural “stripping” of a whole religious world.