THREAD. My 8yr old nephew stayed over last night and is doing his homework this morning. He’s using a website to research states of matter and using it to create an information text. He’s just declared ‘can’ is a modal verb.

He’s also just lamented the fact that he didn’t choose the topic of ukuleles and evaluated his use of ‘Mindblowingly’ as a sentence starter.

The point is that with parental support, rich childhood experiences, and teachers ready to capitalise on that, children are capable of so much. He’s asked to do this work and is proud of completing it.

Where the former isn’t in place, schools can do so much to create equity through commitment to unrelenting warmth, positive regard, and ‘cheerleadering’ plus ensuring their curriculum provides powerful encounters with knowledge and the wider world.

The challenge is to maintain the same high expectations of what every child can achieve regardless of starting point and context. The values-actions gap means that not sometimes our beliefs are not in line with what we do as educators.

Every child I teach has been this 8yr old. We can’t control if they have laptop to research, a table to sit at or an auntie to encourage. We can give them access to it through careful resourcing, relentless focus on closing literacy gaps and by setting the task in the first place