Friday Mindset #189

Happy Friday!

Busy times. We’ve been on the road running sessions on Building Independent Learning, Teaching for High Grades, Successful Transition to Year 13… say hello at [email protected] if those topics look of interest. September’s pretty full for staff CPD but there’s a date or two left in July.

We’re at the Sixth Form Colleges Association’s Summer Conference on June 17th, so come and say hello if you’re around.

Martin writes thrillers in whatever spare time he can find, and is sharing short pieces every Friday lunchtime since he’s recently joined Substack - so aspiring fiction writers might want to sign up and see what’s happening there.

Right. Enough nonsense, let’s dive in.

Something we're reading...

We really enjoyed reading Jonathan Haidt’s commencement speech to NYU’s graduates of 2026 this week. Not only does it fill us with envy - just imagine graduating now, and in New York of all places! - but its message is so powerful and hopeful we came away with a profound feeling of optimism.

At its core is Haidt’s contention that a life well lived is one in which we take control of our own attention, rather than have it captured by silicon valley billionaires intent on selling it to advertisers. Once you’re free from the tyranny of the attention economy, Haidt argues, you can ask yourself one of life’s most exciting questions. ‘What do you want to do?’

The piece is here:

But we’re also going to be using it with students as a tutorial read, so we’ve given it a light edit and turned it into a handy pdf for you here, in case you want to hand copies out.

We hope you enjoy it as much as we did…

Portal Talk...

The Coaching Page Gets a Face-lift

Last week I banged on about data, specifically, how VESPA 2.0 lets you spot students whose scores have quietly slipped between cycles, so interventions stop being a guessing game. This week: the coaching page! Or as we like to think of it, the page for staff who have ninety seconds between a Year 12 assembly and covering someone's Period 3.

The first thing you'll notice is what hasn't changed. The page looks and works exactly as it did before. The difference is: it's now really fast. Searching and filtering for students happens instantly, whether by name, tutor group, year or cycle.

The genuinely new addition comes courtesy of Neil Groves at Bangkok Preparatory School, who suggested it. Any member of staff supporting a student, tutor, subject teacher, head of year, etc can now add comments to their coaching record. Comments are anonymous by default, but together they build an audit trail of the support conversations happening around each student. And when it's useful, notes can be shared by email with parents, colleagues, or the student themselves.

That last feature is really the point of this piece. Neil had an idea, told us, and a few weeks later it was live in the platform. We're not a big, anonymous tech company where suggestions disappear into a weird ticketing system. We're a small, independent UK company, and our whole aim is to build something genuinely useful for schools. If there's a feature that would make VESPA work better in yours, tell us - there's a good chance you'll be the one getting thanked in this newsletter next term.

Want to see it in action with your own cohort in mind? Just a short, no-pressure demo 20 minutes, no slide deck, just the portal and your questions.

...or skip the chat and go straight to a free 14-day trial. It comes pre-loaded with dummy student and staff data, so you can poke around the full portal, wobbles and all, before committing to anything.

Something to try...

At this time of year, we’re always going big on reading with students. Encouraging them to expand their capacity for focused concentration; for dealing with new and complex ideas.

In this week’s neat little powerpoint, we look at what reading is like at university. What does a university reading list look like? How do you de-code what they’re expecting?

Subscribers - we’ve got five examples here, each with slightly different features. There’s the reading list split into ‘core’ and ‘recommended’ texts. The list which tells you which chapters to begin with. The list where everything is labelled ‘essential’ and you just have to get on with it. The list with ancient texts on it. The list split down week-by-week…

Subscribe to our premium content to read the rest.