How do we abolish Digital Poverty for teachers?  FE Soundbite edition 641

Welcome to this week’s FE Soundbite and Happy St George’s day! This is FE Soundbite Edition 641 (and FE Soundbite is the FE News weekly newsletter and e-journal that is now been running for 12.3 years!)

Top of my mind this week is a great article by David Holloway from AoC highlighting the many contradictions in the SEND Green Paper. What is good is that this is that this report is a ‘Green Paper’…now I might be explaining this wrong, but I have always seen a Green Paper to basically say this paper is in the ideas stage and open to suggestions… which is great, as David has suggested a few changes in the article above (and we have more on the way to suggest more solutions) for when the SEND Green Paper becomes the SEND White Paper stage.

Paul Finnis wrote a really interesting piece: “We must show the same sense of urgency to abolish digital poverty for teachers as we do for children.”: Tackling the Digital Divide

Dave Sherwood wrote an interesting piece on Student Mental Health, Paul Mudd also writes a cool piece on #Permacrisis and how to set up a strategy of kindness.

Yesterday was Earth Day and David Jones wrote a fantastic piece that is well worth checking out: Why education is crucial in building a sustainable and equitable future and Neil Sanbrook and Melissa Tisdale (FE Teacher of the year 2021!) wrote a great piece on adding the A into STEM.

This week was the Queen’s birthday (and yesterday was mine!!)… and my good mates at OneFile have won a second Queen’s Award for innovation (their trophy cabinet is getting very full).

Thank you to all of you who wished me a happy birthday on Friday, I really appreciate it. I cooked steak on a new a brand new BBQ, with a glass of nice red wine… life is good! Also, for all of you who were asking after Kelly, she started well this week at Airbus, so thanks for all of your well wishes.

I am also working on a few new things from our end… I think it is a good couple of weeks away as I am in scouting out mode… but it is really exciting, so watch this space… we are about to step into and announce something really exciting and mix up something that has been a bit boring for a while now!.. so yep, it’ll be cool. I will let you know soon.

Also, now this is nothing like the news that OneFile and 263 other org’s who won a Queen’s Award this week… but I was really chuffed to find out that…

FE News has been voted one of the top Education Organisations in Exeter!

On the List we are number 3 (not sure if it is in numerical order)… but I’ll take that, thank you very much to whoever decided that! Nice pic of the Folly (I can see that from my garden on a clear summer day!)