The Learning Spy Monthly Round-Up #3

Welcome to the third edition of The Learning Spy Monthly Round-Up, a curated digest of the the past months reflections on education, culture, leadership, and learning. You can find the first two editions here and here.

There are now over 2,000 of you subscribing which is terrific. A reminder that I post at least one essay per week for paid subscribers (here’s the most recent on the power and pleasure of re-reading) and that you can upgrade you subscription for just £3.50 per month or £30 per year.

Here’s summary of everything you may have missed over the last month.

10th May - Failure is not a virtue (£)

In this piece, I challenge the increasingly fashionable view that failure is somehow virtuous. While mistakes are unavoidable and can be instructive if processed correctly, celebrating failure risks embedding misconceptions and bad habits. Especially in academic subjects, where prior knowledge often misleads, we must start by encoding success through explicit teaching, clear modelling, and guided practice. Only once students know what good looks like does productive struggle become useful. Failure, in other words, is not the goal; it’s something to be minimised through effective instruction that helps students err less and learn more.

12th May - The Good Cookbook: Why Paul Meehl still matters

In this, I explore Paul Meehl’s landmark 1956 paper Wanted – A Good Cookbook, which remains uncannily relevant to education. Meehl warned that professional judgement, however well-intentioned, is often unreliable unless tethered to structured, testable methods. He exposed how confident but vague statements — what we now recognise as the Barnum effect — can masquerade as insight while offering no genuine knowledge. Drawing on Hume and Popper, I argue that the habits of intuition and routine leave teachers vulnerable to epistemic overreach, mistaking plausibility for truth. Meehl’s ‘cookbook’ isn’t about reducing judgement to formulas, but about building intellectual humility into professional practice: if our judgments affect lives, they must be accountable, falsifiable, and morally responsible.

14th May - Rorschach blots in education

Education is awash with words that sound meaningful but collapse under scrutiny. Here, I argue that much of our professional language functions like Rorschach’s inkblots: ambiguous, inviting projection, and allowing everyone to see what they want. Terms like rigour, engagement and cultural capital serve to create the illusion of consensus while concealing deep ideological divisions. This vagueness enables performative accountability, where aesthetic displays stand in for genuine improvement, and inspection becomes a game of pleasing opaque frameworks. Unless we define our terms with precision and commit to construct validity, we risk mistaking simulation for substance. In a system built on euphemism, clarity is a necessary act of rebellion.

16th May - It's Your Time You're Wasting: Coaching or ker-CHING?

Instructional coaching sits at a crossroads: it could be the most promising form of teacher development we have, or simply the next overhyped fad. Its appeal lies in personalisation, trust, and the promise of sustained improvement, but its success depends entirely on careful implementation. When done well, coaching blends structured feedback with teacher agency, rooted in curriculum and supported by evidence from cognitive science. When done badly, it degenerates into compliance, box-ticking, and expensive consultancy. The tension lies between over-prescription and vagueness, between tight frameworks and relational trust. Coaching works best when it empowers teachers to coach themselves; without that, it risks becoming yet another well-intentioned carriage pulled along by jargon and hope.

17th May - Cognitive science isn’t confused, it’s just not doing philosophy

There’s growing pushback against cognitive science in education, with critics like Bernard Andrews arguing that its use of terms like “knowing,” “understanding,” and “remembering” collapses meaningful distinctions and creates conceptual sloppiness. While I share the concern for linguistic precision, I argue that this critique risks missing the point: cognitive science offers models, not dictionary definitions. When we say understanding depends on remembering, we’re advancing explanatory hypotheses about how learning works, not redefining terms for rhetorical effect. Science and philosophy serve different aims: one seeks precision in language, the other seeks to model processes. In education, we need both disciplines in tension, using philosophy to clarify our terms and science to inform what we do.

18th May - Keeping reading alive: what can families do? (£)

Reading aloud plays a vital role in fostering children’s fluency, comprehension, and love of reading, far beyond the early years. Drawing on personal experience, I reflect on how reading aloud helped both my daughters, even as they faced their own struggles with decoding, and how shared reading creates both cognitive and emotional benefits. Fluent reading builds vocabulary, background knowledge, and critical thinking, while also helping children develop prosody and comprehension without the cognitive overload of decoding in real time. In an age of screen-driven distraction and shallow digital reading, reading aloud serves as a powerful counterbalance, preserving the deep, reflective engagement essential for academic success and lifelong learning. Ultimately, it’s not just a strategy but a way of building a family culture where reading is normal, valued, and shared.

20th May - Memory is messy - revision refines

Memory isn’t a filing cabinet but a tangled web of associations, where what gets retrieved depends on what fires first. Drawing on models like spreading activation, ACT-R, schema theory and desirable difficulties, I argue that teaching should be seen as engineering retrieval, not simply depositing knowledge. Last-minute revision works not because it teaches new information, but because it boosts activation strength, making certain chunks more accessible under exam pressure. Effective revision should be framed as managing activation: targeting what’s most likely to be confused, most vulnerable to forgetting, and most crucial at the point of retrieval. Success in exams isn’t just about what students know, but about what wins the race for recall.

21st May - Dash it all! Why the em dash can’t be trusted

The em dash - once a stylish bit of typographical flair - has become something of a litmus test for AI-generated prose, thanks to ChatGPT’s fondness for it. Tracing its history from Laurence Sterne to the present, I explore how the em dash’s flexibility makes it both elegant and prone to overuse, particularly by language models trained on vast corpora of human writing. As AI-generated text proliferates, the conspicuous em dash has become a giveaway, leading some human writers to protest their innocence while others quietly let the model do the heavy lifting. My advice: if you want to avoid the taint of machine-written slop, edit your dashes. Or better yet, take them out altogether.

22nd May - The tyranny of nuance

In this instalment of Academic Papers Everyone Should Read, I critique Keiran Healy’s Fuck Nuance and explore the dangers of fetishising nuance in educational discourse. While nuance is often presented as a marker of sophistication, it can easily become a form of evasion, allowing us to avoid making clear claims or taking actionable positions. Excessive nuance can paralyse decision-making, obscure meaningful debate, and provide cover for professional inertia. Good scholarship requires precision and clarity, not endless hedging. The challenge is to strike a balance: respecting complexity without retreating into the safety of perpetual qualification.

23rd May - It's Your Time You're Wasting: Is our education system making us an "island of strangers"?

In this discussion, Martin Robinson and I examine whether schools are still offering the kind of shared cultural knowledge that binds societies together, or whether we’re increasingly creating an “island of strangers.” Drawing on ideas from Hirsch’s cultural literacy to Michael Young’s powerful knowledge, we explore the tension between inclusion and coherence: can a plural nation sustain a common narrative? While curriculum reform often swings between nostalgic monoculture and fragmented identity politics, the real danger lies in incoherence — where students share neither cultural reference points nor a sense of belonging. Without a curriculum that roots young people in shared stories while equipping them to engage critically, we risk both social disconnection and educational inequality.

24th May - Does setting disadvantage the most disadvantaged students? (£)

The debate over setting versus mixed-ability teaching is less about the system itself and more about how it’s implemented. While setting risks entrenching inequality through misallocation, lowered expectations, and behavioural issues in lower groups, recent research suggests that, when managed well, it need not harm disadvantaged students. Mixed-ability grouping, meanwhile, promises inclusivity but demands highly skilled teaching to meet diverse needs. Both approaches succeed or fail based on the quality of curriculum design, teaching expertise, and high expectations. The real challenge isn’t choosing one model over the other, but ensuring whichever structure we use serves all students fairly and effectively.

26th May - Teaching in the Matrix: What the simulation argument reveals about education

Using Nick Bostrom’s Simulation Argument as a lens, I explore how education is always a kind of simulation: students don’t encounter reality directly, but filtered models, representations, and curated knowledge. From Plato’s cave to modern AI tutors, teaching shapes not only what students know but how they construct meaning and identity. In a world where perception itself may be a neurological simulation, education becomes the art of building the most truthful, enduring models we can. The curriculum should not aim at certainty, but at depth, coherence, and cultural memory, passing on the best of what has been thought, said, and imagined, even if reality itself remains uncertain.

28th May - Thinking critically about rhetorical questions

Rhetorical questions can be powerful tools in education and argument but they can just as easily manipulate as persuade. I explore how different rhetorical forms (erotesis, aporia, antiphrasis, hypophora, eperotesis) often invite agreement without scrutiny, smuggling assumptions past our critical faculties. While effective rhetorical questions can engage and provoke thought, they also risk shutting down genuine debate when used to bypass reasoning. The solution, as Daniel Dennett suggests, is simple: answer them. By responding critically rather than nodding along, we reclaim our agency as thinkers, ensuring that persuasive language doesn’t substitute for careful argument.

29th May - Book threads #1 (£)

In this post, I followed a sprawling thread through books that explore how we record, remember, and imagine the world. Roland Allen’s The Notebook traces how different kinds of notebooks shape how we think, leading me to Chatwin’s The Songlines, a genre-defying meditation on Aboriginal song-maps, nomadism and human restlessness. That in turn pulled me toward David Seabrook’s haunting All The Devils Are Here, a dark, obsessive hybrid of local history and true crime on the Kent coast, and then Richard Flanagan’s Question 7, which weaves personal memoir, Tasmanian colonial history, and a meditation on H.G. Wells’ unsettling imaginative influence on the nuclear age. Along the way, these works reveal how our attempts to fix knowledge on paper always spiral outward into myth, power, and the unpredictable consequences of ideas.

30th May - It’s Your Time You're Wasting: It's Artificial, but is it Intelligent?

Martin and I trace the long arc from Socrates’ suspicion of writing to today’s anxieties about AI, asking whether tools like ChatGPT extend human thinking or quietly replace it. Drawing on Alison Gopnik, Michael Polanyi, Heidegger, and Ewan MacColl, we explore whether large language models are intelligent or simply “stochastic parrots,” mimicking language without understanding. We discuss how AI reshapes education, the cognitive value of handwriting, the dangers of frictionless thinking, and the deeper risks posed by powerful AI systems in the hands of bad actors. The question isn’t whether AI will think for us, but whether we’ll forget how to think for ourselves.

31st May - You are what you know (£)

This is a 10,000 word essay on why knowledge is not just facts, but the substance of all thought, memory and skill. Drawing on cognitive science, I argue that knowledge is what we think with as well as about; without it, there is no critical thinking, creativity or problem-solving. Skills aren’t separate capacities but domain-specific applications of stored knowledge, much of it tacit and automatised. The more we know, the better we think. And while we often feel knowledgeable, real understanding requires careful, deliberate teaching of broad, deep, interconnected knowledge.

3rd June - Dog whistles and the principle of charity

This piece explores how certain phrases in education—like ‘knowledge-rich’ or ‘fronted adverbials’—act as dog whistles, triggering tribal reactions that often obscure genuine debate. I argue for applying both charity and precision when engaging with views we disagree with, drawing on Rapoport’s Rules and Dennett’s advice to steelman opposing arguments before rebutting them. If we assume good intent, articulate others’ positions fairly, and concede common ground, we’re far more likely to persuade than simply score points.

5th June - It's Your Time You're Wasting: Uniform Thinking

In this episode, Martin Robinson and I tackle the fraught question of school uniforms. We explore their complex history, the tension between equality and autonomy, the financial pressures on families, and the evidence (or lack of it) that uniforms improve learning. From Tudor charity schools to neurodiverse students today, we ask whether rigid dress codes still serve children’s best interests, or whether it’s time for more flexible, inclusive approaches that put dignity and comfort ahead of control.

7th June - The drowned world: why floods haunt our imagination (£)

This week’s essay is a bit of a departure. I dive into one of literature’s most enduring symbols: the flood. From Gilgamesh and Genesis to Chaucer, Hurston, Levi and Jesmyn Ward, I trace how flood myths evolve from divine judgement to bureaucratic failure, from cosmic reset to personal reckoning. The flood remains a narrative structure through which we process collapse, survival, and memory — whether as divine punishment, psychological unravelling, or systemic indictment. Across time, the waters rise again and again, forcing us to confront what we lose, what we salvage, and what we rebuild.

8th June - The Dyslexia "miracle school" is no model for the masses

I take a hard look at the media excitement around Maple Hayes Hall, the fee-paying dyslexia school claiming to teach reading through morphology rather than phonics. While its bespoke approach clearly works for some, I argue why this is no alternative to systematic phonics for national literacy. Equity, scale, and evidence all point to phonics as our most effective, teachable, and just method — especially for disadvantaged children who cannot access niche, high-cost provision.

9th June - Is the curriculum to blame for plummeting attendance?

In response to Becks Boomer-Clark’s call for a radical curriculum overhaul, I take a deeper look at the real drivers of pupil disengagement. While attendance and engagement are undeniably concerning, the evidence suggests the crisis is far more about belonging, safety, and systemic inequalities than the content of the curriculum itself. Rather than gutting the curriculum to chase fleeting relevance, I argue for teaching it better: with knowledge, coherence, and intellectual ambition, ensuring all pupils are inducted into the language and codes of academic success.

10th June - Catering for the few?

In a gently barbed parody, I respond to Jamie Oliver’s latest Schools Week piece on neurodivergent pupils by offering my expert advice on how restaurants should cater for picky eaters. After all, if schools must be rebuilt around every possible preference, why shouldn’t chefs redesign their menus for every dietary quirk? The satire skewers the well-meaning but simplistic thinking behind much ‘inclusion’ rhetoric, asking whether we’re confusing accommodation with over-engineering.

13th June - It's Your Time You're Wasting: We need to talk about talk

This week, Martin and I tackle the rise of oracy: its promises, its politics, and its many unresolved contradictions. Is it a silver bullet for social justice, or a repackaging of old anxieties about class, language and control? We unpick the evidence, the hype, and the uncomfortable question of whose voices count and who gets to decide.