1. Posted by a friend on LinkedIn – thanks, Martin! – from Index on Censorship, School book banning escalates in the UK as Greater Manchester secondary school censors scores of books https://www.indexoncensorship.org/2026/03/school-book-banning-escalates-in-the-uk-as-greater-manchester-secondary-school-censors-scores-of-books/

A school librarian faced a disciplinary hearing, and scores of books were removed from her school library after she stocked Laura Bates’ ‘Men Who Hate Women’.

If you’ve not come across Laura Bates’s book before, the full title is Men who Hate Women – from incels to pickup artists, the truth about extreme misogyny and how it affects us all. More here on Amazon: https://amzn.eu/d/0dh4XypW

2. Here’s an interview with EvanFrendo on the Teacher Talking Time podcast, The End of Traditional ELT: Why Teachers Must Unlearn Everything https://youtu.be/Id2Kv2NEIDw

“We’ve got to have a very hard look at ourselves and stop calling ourselves experts just because we have a Master’s from 10 or 15 years ago. Those times are over, and we’ve really got to focus on what added value we can bring that AI can’t.”

It’s a longish, discursive, interesting interview: I’m sure Evan won’t mind if you speed him up!

3. And here’s a new British Council report on the topic of AI, AI in language learning: lessons for school leaders https://futureofenglish.britishcouncil.org/hubfs/Global%20-%20Future%20of%20English/Resources/FoE%20AI%20guide%20for%20school%20leaders.pdf PDF below as well.

There’s scarcely a field that Artificial Intelligence (AI), specifically in the form of large language models (LLMs), hasn’t impacted. That includes language education, which has been fundamentally reshaped since ChatGPT’s public launch in 2022. Those changes have come with immediate challenges, threats and opportunities. In fact, a 2025 British Council survey revealed nearly eight in ten teachers (79 per cent) report they have already had to rethink how they set assignments in response to AI either to prevent misuse or to intentionally build it into the curriculum1. But the same is also true in the longer term.

4. There’s no way round it, this one’s a bit depressing: a LinkedIn posting by @StuartG. on the Post Office sub-postmasters scandal here in UK, They Let Him Die Waiting https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/let-him-die-waiting-stuart-gw-md34e/

Every wrongly convicted sub-postmaster in Britain was supposed to receive at least £600,000. That was the promise. That was the floor. Ministers said so in Parliament. It was repeated in Select Committee hearings, in press releases, in carefully worded statements designed to suggest that the State had finally, belatedly, done the decent thing. But the promise was not all that the political rhetoric claimed it to be — not because the money did not exist, but because the machinery built to deliver it was deliberately designed by Officials to ensure that the innocent victims. who had suffered the most would be the last to see a penny of it.

5. And, finally, in complete contrast to that last item, the poet Dean Wilson’s home page is not at all depressing https://www.deanworld.org/ Dean performed at the Philip Larkin Society conference I attended last week. Here’s Dean’s introduction to his Pebble of the Day video https://www.deanworld.org/pebbles.