Teach Secondary Issue 14.2

DEEPSEEK Until January this year, the tech industry’s party line on generativeAI was that it needed vast amounts of data, huge storage capacity and significant processing heft to function.At which point, anAI assistant bankrolled by a Chinese hedge fund called DeepSeek knocked on the door and said,“ Is that your lunch? Think I’ll eat that. ” Because DeepSeek, you see, is a genuinely open sourceAI model –meaning researchers can check its reasoning and adapt it to specialist purposes – that costs far less to run, and can even be installed on local hardware so that it doesn’t require an internet connection. That said, DeepSeek does get coywhen you ask it about the events that took place inTiananmen Square on 4th June 1989, reportedly responding with“ Let’s talk about something else. ”And then there are the allegations fromOpenAI, the owner and developer of ChatGPT, that DeepSeekmay owe its existence to the theft of trade secrets. So while it might give yourY9s yet another handyway of suspiciously aceing those history essays,we can at least chuckle at the delicious irony of howAI models themselves now appear to be brazenly copying each others’ homework... Thinkofanumber... ONE FOR THE WALL “A nationalist encourages us to be our worst, and then tells us that we are the best” Timothy Snyder Teach Secondary’s digest of the latest goings-on in the profession... The newsletter What arewe talking about? The Stranger Shores curriculum-based toolkit fromDurhamWildlife Trust BEAT THE BUDGET The UNINFORMED teacher’s guide to… 70% of secondary schools require parents to provide five ormore branded items of school uniform Source: DfE WHAT THEY SAID… ““I thought [the detention] was unjustified. Trying to foster aptitude through negative reinforcement doesn’t really work” Parent of a pupil attending Stewards Academy in Essex,where top set pupils scoring less than 90%are issued with detentions DO SAY “...whatever’s on your mind. I’m here to help you!” “Name a countrywith six letters, starting with ‘T’ and ending with ‘N’” DON’T SAY Who is it for? KS3 What’s on offer? Videos highlighting different aspects of the six-year, Defra- funded Stronger Shores project to examine how undersea habitats protect coastlines fromerosion and flooding.These are accompanied by PowerPoint presentations, quizzes and activities for classroomuse. Howmight teachers use the resources? To support teaching around climate change, sustainability andmarine biology, and as a prompt for discussions around the roles pupils and schools can play in preserving coastal ecosystems. Where is it available? durhamwt.com/learning-and-education- packs £7,400 Projected secondary school spending per pupil in 2024/25 – down from30% in the 2000s, and from50% in the early 90s Source: Institute for Fiscal Studies £13.5 billion is spent by local authorities every two to five years on repayments for private finance initiative infrastructure projects Source: National Institute of Economic and Social Research 06 teachwire.net/secondary