Education secretary @GavinWilliamson now delivering a statement in the Commons on plans for bringing children back to school. Stay tuned for live updates.

The government's response is proportionate to the risk at hand, @GavinWilliamson says.
.@GavinWilliamson says in a small number of areas where infection rates are highest, only vulnerable pupils and children of key workers will attend primary school face-to-face. This is NOT all Tier 4 areas. The overwhelming majority of primaries will open as planned on Monday.
For secondary schools, it will be a staggered start, says @GavinWilliamson – with staff testing starting from 4 January, exam years returning on 11 January and everyone back in by 18 January
In particularly hard-hit areas, @GavinWilliamson says that exam year students, as well as vulnerable students and children of key workers, will still attend secondary schools in person, with all other classes taking place remotely
.@KateGreenSU says that the government has lost control of the virus and it is now losing control of children's education…it is clear its plans have failed
.@KateGreenSU going in on the detail of the government's plans for schools – asking for data on schools, laptop rollout and how the government plans to support working parents who now have unexpected childcare issues
.@KateGreenSU also asking about those students taking exams (eg, BTECs) over the next few weeks, and what the DfE plans to do to make sure these exams are fair
It appears @GavinWilliamson and @KateGreenSU are locked in a battle to see who can thank teachers the most on behalf of their respective sides
.@GavinWilliamson declines to outline the advice given to the government by Sage, saying only that Sage will publish its findings "soon"
.@halfon4harlowMP says he has "real worries" about the impacts of closures of schools on vulnerable students and families and asks what risk assessments have been carried out – and asks for school and college staff to be put at the front of the queue for vaccinations
.@GavinWilliamson says that the government will do everything it can to avoid "kneejerk reactions" in closing schools
.@GavinWilliamson doesn't address the call to put school and college staff at the front of the queue for vaccinations
GCSE and A-level exams will go ahead as planned, pledges @GavinWilliamson
James Cartlidge (South Suffolk, Conservative) reiterates @halfon4harlowMP's calls for school and college staff to be prioritised for vaccinations
.@GavinWilliamson says that vaccination decisions cover a "whole wealth of areas", and the most clinically vulnerable are being prioritised – once through that "clinical need", decisions over vaccinating teachers and school staff can be made
Matt Western (Warwick and Leamington, Labour) raises heads' anger over the government's detail-light pre-Christmas announcement on testing in schools – calls again for vaccinations for front-line teachers and asks about support for vocational exams
.@GavinWilliamson says on vaccinations that once the vulnerable groups are worked through, he hopes school staff are looked at to ensure "they are high up on the list"
.@YvetteCooperMP uses a local college to illustrate the point that schools and colleges are currently having to plan for mass testing without knowing what financial and practical support they will be receiving to help them carry out said testing
.@GavinWilliamson says the details are readily available
We will be guided by the public health advice on a local basis, says @GavinWilliamson in response to a question on how long these measures will be in place

More from Education

An appallingly tardy response to such an important element of reading - apologies. The growing recognition of fluency as the crucial developmental area for primary education is certainly encouraging helping us move away from the obsession with reading comprehension tests.


It is, as you suggest, a nuanced pedagogy with the tripartite algorithm of rate, accuracy and prosody at times conflating the landscape and often leading to an educational shrug of the shoulders, a convenient abdication of responsibility and a return to comprehension 'skills'.

Taking each element separately (but not hierarchically) may be helpful but always remembering that for fluency they occur simultaneously (not dissimilar to sentence structure, text structure and rhetoric in fluent writing).

Rate, or words-read-per-minute, is the easiest. Faster reading speeds are EVIDENCE of fluency development but attempting to 'teach' children(or anyone) to read faster is fallacious (Carver, 1985) and will result in processing deficit which in young readers will be catastrophic.

Reading rate is dependent upon eye-movements and cognitive processing development along with orthographic development (more on this later).

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I hate when I learn something new (to me) & stunning about the Jeff Epstein network (h/t MoodyKnowsNada.)

Where to begin?

So our new Secretary of State Anthony Blinken's stepfather, Samuel Pisar, was "longtime lawyer and confidant of...Robert Maxwell," Ghislaine Maxwell's Dad.


"Pisar was one of the last people to speak to Maxwell, by phone, probably an hour before the chairman of Mirror Group Newspapers fell off his luxury yacht the Lady Ghislaine on 5 November, 1991."
https://t.co/DAEgchNyTP


OK, so that's just a coincidence. Moving on, Anthony Blinken "attended the prestigious Dalton School in New York City"...wait, what? https://t.co/DnE6AvHmJg

Dalton School...Dalton School...rings a

Oh that's right.

The dad of the U.S. Attorney General under both George W. Bush & Donald Trump, William Barr, was headmaster of the Dalton School.

Donald Barr was also quite a


I'm not going to even mention that Blinken's stepdad Sam Pisar's name was in Epstein's "black book."

Lots of names in that book. I mean, for example, Cuomo, Trump, Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bill Cosby, Woody Allen - all in that book, and their reputations are spotless.