I don’t normally promote third parties, or third party events, on this blog since you come here for qualification news, but I’ll make an exception for this event. RespectMe’s annual conference takes place on 18 November and it sounds very worthwhile, with workshops on bullying, cyberbullying, and homophobia. More information here.

I attended a lecture by Michael Young on Friday afternoon as part of SQA’s series of research seminars. Michael is a professor at the University of London and has recently written a book about the role of knowledge in schools. The theme of Michael’s lecture was knowledge, and its importance in today’s world. He stressed the importance of conceptual knowledge over “context based knowledge”. Conceptual knowledge, he said, was “generalisable”; context based knowledge was “particular” to a specific set of…