One day late, occasioned by a late train home from London yesterday evening!

1. Frank Cottrell-Boyce is the current Waterstones Children’s Laureate here in the UK. He gave the annual ‘Laureate Lecture’, The Kids Are Not Alright, earlier this week. He invited a number of guests speakers to share his lecture with him. Well worth a listen/watch! https://youtu.be/_HvrXL50Vb4

Frank and his guests spoke about the impact on children of technology and the digital world, the power of reading to build communities, and all the wonderful work he’s seen across the country during his Laureateship, as different services collaborate and support families to read together.

2. What does good teaching at university level look like? Here’s one university’s take, this year’s Pilkington Prize winners for ‘excellence in teaching’ from Cambridge University https://www.cctl.cam.ac.uk/pilkington-prize/2026

3. Growing apart – The evolution of the disadvantage gap is the title of a sombre recent report from the Education Endowment Foundation https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/growing-apart-evolution-of-disadvantage-gap PDFs of Executive Summary and of full report below.

The summary of the summary? Once you’ve fallen behind with your education, it’s very difficult to catch up again – especially so if you fell behind early on, likely through no fault of your own.

4. Here’s a robust exchange about Brexit between James O’Brien and a hapless caller called Richard with whom one could almost – almost – sympathise https://www.facebook.com/reel/1630519421540696

5. And, finally, from an age when you could still smoke on television chat shows, Orson Welles’s meetings with Hitler and Churchill https://youtu.be/YDecEVfVhcw