The Parent Portal Weekly

Ask a five-year-old how they feel when their tower falls down and you'll get 'bad'. Two decades of research on emotional granularity suggests the size of a child's feeling vocabulary changes the feelings themselves - and the gap shows up far later than anyone expected.

Sweden spent a decade filling classrooms with tablets. Then reading scores dropped and they changed their minds. The research on what happens in a child's brain when they pick up a pencil might explain why.

For a decade Sweden pushed tablets into every classroom and sent the printed textbooks into storage. Then a reading score dropped, a brain study came out of Norway, and the whole experiment went into reverse.

A decade of research now shows that green space around schools changes how children's brains develop - not metaphorically, but structurally. The children with the least access to it are the ones the evidence says need it most.

Reading is only 5,000 years old. There's no genetic programme for it. When your child struggles to sound out words, their brain is attempting something evolution never planned for - and understanding that changes everything.

Everyone says AI is just like the Industrial Revolution - machines replaced muscle, now they replace minds, but new jobs will appear. It's a comforting comparison. It's also wrong, and the difference matters.

Times tables speed, counting, quick arithmetic - none of them predict long-term maths ability. What does is something most parents would never guess: whether your child can imagine the world through someone else's eyes.

Ask a three-year-old where Sally will look for her marble, and they'll get it wrong. Not because they're not paying attention - because they genuinely cannot yet understand that other people know different things.

In the 1970s, schools banned calculators. They didn't destroy maths - they changed what maths meant. We're in that same moment with AI, except this time it's everything.

Your hairdresser takes the same time to cut your hair as fifty years ago, but it costs ten times more. An obscure economic theory from the 1960s explains why - and what it tells us about AI in schools.