 Felly gennymd y riliadau i gysylltu chi, a gael ei wneud i gael gweithio'r enth distortedd lechau ffaisol o'r 50th anfaenau yn awgyrraol. Fe oedd wnaethau bod yn cael ei ddechrau sy'n ugrifiadol. Mae gennymd bod i'n gwasanaeth gwybod. Mae gennymdydiol wedi chi'n gwybod oes o fewn o'i ddechrau'r 50th anfaenau. Mae'n gwybod o fewn i gael gwasanaeth llwyddiadol yn cael ei ddefnyddiadol. I'm Liz Marr, and I'm the Acting Pro-Vise Chancellor for Students here at the OU, and I'm very proud, there it is again, and privileged to be hosting one of the university's 50th anniversary celebration events, which showcase our research, teaching and knowledge exchange portfolios. Each year, the Vice Chancellor invites newly appointed and promoted professors to give an inaugural lecture, and over the course of a year, our inaugural lecture series provides an opportunity to celebrate academic excellence, with each lecture representing a significant milestone in an academic's career. So this evening, we're going to be hearing from Peter Twining, Professor of Education Futures. It says futures in brackets, but I'm going to roll it in. On the topic of if school is the problem, what is the solution? And I think it's very apt for him to be delivering this in our 50th anniversary year, given that our focus, our strategy, our mission is about transforming lives through education in a changing world. And then we're going to have a panel discussion, when Peter will be joined by four external speakers, all with a view on schooling. We have James Pilgrim, who's the head teacher at Kent's Hill Park School, Poppy Petru, who is an ex-student from Summerhill, the co-educational boarding school in Suffolk. So Mike Wood, who's a chair of the Centre for Personalised Education and an expert on home education and flexi schooling, and Stephen Hepple, who is a leading voice on the role of ICT in learning, and Professor of New Media Environments at the Centre for Excellence in Media Practice at Bournemouth University. I don't know if he has to write that after his name every time. So after we hear briefly from each of our panellists, we'll be opening that up for Q&A, and then we'll be inviting you to join us to celebrate with us downstairs. Presumably there'll be cake by that? There's usually cake. So if there's anybody in the audience who's using Twitter, please feel free to tweet using the hashtag displayed, and tagging at Open University, and let the world join us this evening. And Peter's also a keen user of Twitter, and his Twitter handle is displayed too, is it? Somewhere? It's at Peter T. So for members of our audience who are joining us by livestream, welcome, and please use the email address provided, and keep your comments and your questions brief so that we can try and address them all during the Q&A session. Peter is, as I've said, Professor of Education Futures at the Open University. He has been a primary school teacher, initial teacher educator. He's been the head of Department of Education at the Open University, co-director of the Centre for Research in Education and Educational Technology. And co-editor in chief of computers in education. And Peter's brought in over 10 million pounds of external funding to the Open University, primarily linked with his focus on the future of education, building upon his understandings of pedagogy, teacher professional learning, educational change, and the role of digital technology in and on schooling. Peter's professional interest is focused on the future of education, and this includes looking at how to change education systems from the inside and rethinking education systems from scratch. I'm really at time to be doing that, given the state of flux that we are in in terms of educational policy in the country at the moment. So it now gives me very great pleasure to introduce Professor Peter Twiney. Good evening. Thank you all for coming, especially Kieran, who's got a red handkerchief he's going to wave if it's not going well, and an orange one he's going to wave if he thinks it's okay. Thanks, Kieran. Now, I'm really pleased you all joined me both physically and online. I am going to be asking you to join in and vote on some things, and if you've got your mobile device you could set it up now. The URL is polev.com forward slash Peter T 508. That's polev.com forward slash Peter T 508. That will come up on each of the slides where I'm asking you to input your ideas. I thought I'd start by telling you why I'm here. You may have noticed I'm a bit of a late developer. I actually became a professor six years ago, so the inaugural is a bit late. And throughout my education, I was also a bit of a late developer. I was in the remedial class at my prep school, and I have to say I've got a lot of bad memories of schooling. At the age of 13, I cried my way through my French common entrance oral exam, ending up with 36%, but worse than that, I've been terrified of speaking foreign languages ever since. When I was 16, I was summoned to see my headmaster who told me I was going to fail all my O-levels because my English was so bad. And then when I got a B for English language, only one of three children in the school that year who got a B are above, they queried the result. My daughter at this point said, oh diddums, did the little privileged white boy not like his private school then? Of course, that's exactly the point. If the system doesn't work for a privileged little white boy like me, just think how much worse it is for those people that schooling systematically disadvantages, as I will show you as we go through. And as we went on, I had to redo my A-levels. I went to university, got really excited about new technology and the use of computers. I wrote an essay about how computers would allow us to transform education. My tutor gave me a third. And he handed the essay back to me, he looked me in the eye and he said, twining, people like you shouldn't be allowed to take advantage of higher education. So here I am determined that other people will not suffer in the way that I did through my education system. And of course I also am here thanks to my parents, family, friends, colleagues and many others who've supported me through good times and bad. And of course I'm building on all the work of many other people which I hope I've not corrupted too badly when I've built upon it. And now's the chance for you to try voting. I want you to just give a rough indication of how many years you have spent in formal education. So if you go to that URL, it's pollev.com forward slash Peter T 508. You should see this thing coming up on your screen. I'm just going to make sure it is actually working, there should be it. And you'll see little green blobs appearing where people have said how long they've had. I can't actually see it at the bottom, we've got 22, 23. I'll give you another minute or so to go with this. I mean what it's showing us is that most of us have actually spent quite a lot of time in formal education. And that's important because it's really difficult for us to think out of the box. It's difficult for us to reimagine something that's radically different to the existing system. That was brought home to me back in the early 22 or 23 when I worked with colleagues here with home educators with groups of kids in the East End of London who were failing all their GCSEs so we could have as long with them as we liked because it wasn't going to make any difference to anything. And with some very successful boys in a private school down in Plymouth. And we brought in impossibility thinkers and Guy Claxton with his learning power and theatre groups and we ran workshops and we tried to really expand our ideas of what schooling could be like. And they came up with clean toilets, no bullying, starting a bit later in the day, a bit more flexibility and more ICT. And it's like this is frustrating and then Kieran bless him again. He hasn't got any of his handkerchiefs out yet which is a bit worrying. Then Kieran said, look we should give them a lived experience of something radically different. Let's take them into second life. This was in 2006. At the point there were all sorts of salacious things in the press about what was happening in second life but we thought that was a really good idea so we did. So we took hundreds of 13 to 65 year olds into an island in second life with the intention of giving them radically different experiences of what it could be like to be supported in your learning. And I'll be drawing on some examples from that later on this evening. I'm also going to be drawing on some work on the NP3 project which was looking at children's use of digital technology outside school and then how that influenced or the extent to which it influenced practice inside school. And I'm going to be particularly drawing upon the 44 children who we looked at in more depth outside school to see how they were using technology, what they were doing with it. So what am I going to talk about in the next 35 minutes or so? I'm going to try and justify my claim that schooling is problematic. I'm going to unpack some elements of a better system particularly focusing on how we teach and what we teach. I'm then going to look at well so how do we get from here to where we want to be and then I'll try and pull it all together. I usually encourage heckling but because I've only got 40 minutes I'm going to discourage heckling on this occasion. So let's start with is schooling the problem. And I think in order to answer that question you have to have some view about what you think the purpose of schooling is. Brian Kaplan has written this comprehensively boring book demonstrating that schooling is really good at signalling kids who are good at conforming, who are compliant, who are reasonably academically able and who work reasonably hard. And if that's what schooling should be about then it's doing a really good job. But I'm not convinced I think that's what schooling should be about. But I thought it'd be fun to see your views. So again if you go to polyv.com.pt you'll be able to move these things up and down and rank them in the order you think they should go. If you think that I haven't got the right purpose and it's what it should be, not what it is, but what the purpose of schooling should be then you can add your own suggestion of what you think the purpose should be. As with all of these things there isn't a right answer. This comes down to your values, your beliefs about what you think the purpose of schooling should be about what we think is important in the world today. Fun. There's a nice idea. Was that you Kieran? You can tell, there's always one isn't there. Tank chief isn't out yet. Let's see if I can scroll up and down this thing and see what happens. So you can see what's happening here. Can I scroll up and down? No, you can only see the ones at the top. Okay, well you can carry on voting for a minute but most of us seem to be agreeing that it's about preparing people to live in a world today and in the future. I'm going to kind of outline my vision and what my values are about this and my vision really for education is that it should lead to individual fulfilment and universal well-being. And of course universal well-being must include rhinos. Actually Aunt Honeyby's because if we don't look after the flora and fauna ultimately we are doomed too. And I'm going to try and persuade you that school isn't doing that very well. I'm going to start with a recent survey from 2018. It is American, which I know is slightly problematic and is a relatively small sample of 500 people. These are all American youths who had left school and were then asked to reflect back about their experience of being in high school. 37% said that they felt afraid of making mistakes most of the time and anyone who knows anything about learning will understand that if you're scared to make mistakes you're probably not in a very good learning environment. 51% said they were stressed almost all the time or most of the time. 51%. 44% said they were bored all or most of the time. And 52% didn't think school prepared them very well for life after school. And then we go on and we look at issues to do with behaviour and you know just recently last month the government announced 10 million pounds scheme to crack down on behaviour and find new punishments and rewards to control the little so and sos. A 34x increase in the use of drugs to control the behaviour of children with ADHD. An increase in the number of exclusions and just too many exclusions. And in all of these examples the children are the problem. There's no question that it might be the school that's the problem. The kids are a problem so we'll drug them and of course you've got an increasing number of people opting out of the state education system and home educating. And then this one, off rolling, persuading people that they will leave your school. And I read this and I looked at that first word unsurprisingly. Our inspectors expect the system to be inequitable. That's outrageous. I want to be part of the system where the inspectors write outrageously some of our children are discriminated against. And of course the whole system is designed so that around the third of the kids have to fail for the others to be seen to succeed. That's fundamentally flawed. How can you have an education system that is designed to fail a third of its learners? So, I hope I've convinced you that schooling is a problem and the question is what can we do about it? So, I'm going to start trying to unpack some elements of a better system. I'm going to start with how we teach, with pedagogy. And I have this kind of naive view that how we teach ought to reflect how children learn seems to make sense to me. And of course we're used to the idea of learning by being told, hey look, I'm here standing up and doing it. And we're also used to the idea of learning by doing but in school learning by doing is usually decontextualised. You know it's decontextualised in the science experiment when you don't get the result the teacher expects and rather than saying, God, that's interesting. I wonder what's happening there. Let's investigate and find out why you got that result. She's much more likely to say, copy the results of the group next to you and write it up for homework. And then learning through role play. Now I ought to know about this because I was early years trained but the Scone Park programme really brought it back to me. This is Trixie, Queen of the Pixies. She came up to me and she said, Ranger, I was the Scone Ranger in second line. Ranger, will you give me away? What do you mean Trixie, will I give you away? She said, I want to get married. I want to get married to Wintermute who was a brain in a jar as in Futurama. And he also was one of the most challenging characters within Scone Park. And I have to tell you, I wasn't too comfortable about the notion of giving away Trixie to Wintermute. I had this vision in my head at the front of the Daily Mail. Just at the moment where it said, you may kiss the bra. I mean, it was all going to go wrong. So I said, Trixie, I really don't think this is a good idea. And we had this kind of debate over the course of a week. And she came to me and she said, I said, it's got to be PG. Everything on the island has to be PG, parental guidance. So she came back and she said, Peter, they have weddings in PG films. So I explained to her my real worry about, in a head of department of education gives away a Trixie to a brain in a jar. In the front of the Daily Mail, it really wasn't going to go down well with our funders. She came back to me and she looked to me and said, Ranger, you do realise this is all pretend, don't you? At which point they got married. And they had the big white dress and they had the photographer. The video is on YouTube if you want to go and watch the wedding. And they did the whole bit and they got to the Kissing the Bride, which went fine. And then they had the disco afterwards with virtual champagne. But the important thing is, they learned a lot through the process. Getting those disco lights to flash in time to the music is really quite complicated to do. Just coordinating it so that everyone knew a wedding was happening and the Rolls Royce was made in time and the priest knew her lines and all that stuff and the camera person was there. There was a lot of organisation and stuff to take place. It was a really powerful learning experience, but it was pretend. And then I learned about learning by becoming. That's me, incidentally. It was a kind of take-off because on the main grid I was Scoma Simpson. Sorry, I just fenced the yellow hair. Anyway, on islands in Second Life you've got to limit the number of things you can build on an island, the units of building, 15,000. We exceeded that in about three weeks because we said to the people on the island you can build anywhere you like above 200 metres. So I went back to the community and I said, look, it's your island, how are you going to sort this problem? And it was a problem because when your avatar rendered on the island, you came in with no clothes on, which was quite embarrassing for some of the members of the community. And you couldn't move and nothing would work. Anyway, they decided they'd investigate different forms of governance, which they did and they decided democracy was the way to go, which we all know is a mistake because benign dictatorships, as long as you can maintain the by-nineness, is clearly much more efficient. But they set up seven government departments and they had elections and they elected the officers and they had a planning department and they had planning officers. And the first thing the planning officers did is they came up with building regulations. And they went round slapping notices on all the building saying, if you haven't got planning permission within a week, we're going to delete your building. Now I am telling you there is absolutely nothing pretend if you spent 40 hours creating something, if someone comes along and deletes it. There were some very powerful discussions between members of the community and those planning officers were not pretending, they were the planning officers, they were deleting people's buildings and the reactions were real. It was an incredibly powerful emotional experience and they learned a lot about negotiation and actually about red tape and all sorts of other things as well. Very powerful. And this got reinforced from me on the MP3 project when I was looking at kids who used technology at home and how they learned to become confident users of technology at home, those of them who did because they didn't all. This is Rory, he was 11. He was a gamer, he made mods, so he extended games and he then shared those extensions with other people. He also filmed himself doing things within Minecraft. He actually also made all sorts of movies and put them on YouTube and stuff. The way he had learnt was his mum, when he was seven, bought a book on Minecraft and worked through the book with him until he got better than she was, at which point she fell to the wayside and he carried on and he was then allowed to interact with his friends, people he knew in the physical world he could interact with online and then gradually he was allowed to interact with other people in Minecraft who he didn't know in the physical world and he became really sophisticated in knowing where to go for help and he was inducted into the Minecraft community and became a valued member of that community who other people then started coming to when they needed help and support. And then we had the Tifa. The Tifa was a Somalian refugee aged 10, living in small flat in north London, shared a bed with her mum. She made YouTube videos. She made skits of being a parent or being a teacher. They were hilarious. And she had a really sophisticated understanding of different genres of YouTube videos. She had a sophisticated understanding of how to present things in an amusing way and perhaps more importantly she understood how to interact with people through the comments underneath the videos. And she had some lovely ideas about how to deal with haters and actually turn it into a positive. You're getting me more hits. Keep going. Because people are coming in to read your hate comments and it's great because I'm becoming more famous. Her brother had made a lot of money through this stuff. But again, the way that she had learnt to do it was being supported and inducted into it by her siblings and her mum. She was amazing. She called herself a techno nerd but she googled how do I reinstall Windows because the editing software she used wouldn't run on the latest version of Windows so she had to roll back to a previous version of Windows. I don't know how many of you can do that but I think that's pretty clever. And she taught herself how to do it but because she'd been supported by her family in having the confidence to engage with these things. So what am I thinking learning is and this happens to align with the socio-cultural perspective. I didn't realise that at the time but that's where I'd got to. From a socio-cultural perspective learning is about identity formation. It's about who you are and your place It's about becoming a member participation in an enduring collection of people, a community who are mutually engaged in a shared endeavour who have shared purpose and shared ways of working shared valued ways of working. And from a socio-cultural perspective learning is intrinsically motivating we do it all the time, we can't avoid it and importantly knowledge is the ability to act in valued ways in particular contexts. And so learning is something that is personally meaningful and ongoing and always situated. So if I was going to formalise this from a socio-cultural perspective human learning we do it because we're interested. We've got a personal goal we want to achieve which might be entertaining ourselves. It's intrinsically motivating it happens whenever we can do it inflexibly it's not timetable or schedules it tends to be something that happens over a prolonged period of time you don't become expert at being a gamer in Minecraft or making YouTube videos by doing it for 50 minutes it happens in context the teacher are the other members of the community the other club members and their role is to induct you into the valued ways of being they're orchestrating your activities and connecting you to the mature practices within that community and the learner is seen as having expertise but not experience in that particular community they've got expertise in other things that they bring to the piece so it's about how you bridge between the expertise and experience they've got and the valued ways of working within the new community and mostly it's about learning through becoming and role play and in a sense role play is pretending to be so it's the first step that you can actually become and that kind of contrasts radically with how we expect people to learn in schooling and I won't read through that because you can read that yourself but in a sense this is another critique of the education system that actually the way we expect people to learn within formal education does not sit well with how people actually learn and so we're running against the tide all the time and that I think how we too should reflect how we actually learn well first of all I think it's important to say it's about multiple approaches there isn't one right way to do things you need to look at the needs of the learners and align your approach with the needs of the learner but trust is really vital you've got to be able to have the confidence to make mistakes and share and be open and acknowledge your weaknesses constructive critical feedback but notice bidirectional this isn't just the teacher telling the learner it's also the learner telling the teacher what they could be doing better how could you support me more effectively how helpful was that as feedback to me about what I'm doing it does involve direct instruction that doesn't mean didactic standing at the front telling people direct instruction is about the learner and the teacher having a shared understanding of what they're trying to do what the purpose is and what success will look like and how they're going to get there and importantly for me that doesn't have to come from the teacher to the child it could be the child telling the teacher what the purpose is and goals and success will look like and of course that means it's about being attentive and active it's about collaborating with other people it's about that participation piece and it's about bridging between and I've already said this bridging between the learner's current expertise and experience and the valued ways of being within the particular community that they are becoming a part of and inducting them into that new community but of course it's also about challenging it's about pushing people to stretch themselves but in ways which are achievable so that you build their self-esteem and their belief in themselves as a learner and importantly it's sustained and that brings us on to the question of the curriculum and what do we teach because if we're thinking about sustained we're talking about depth not breadth so what should be learnt what does everybody need to learn given that when we think about schooling we assume it's something that all our kids are going to go through guess what your turn polyv.com forward slash pt 508 you can't add ones to this you can just change the order in which they appear so you move them up and down on your screen and when you finish you click the submit button and then it will be reflected on the screen here my daughter, bless her the one who said our diddums said to me dad, reading should be on this list it's really important and I thought provocative response 2033, remember it does say 2033, what's important in 2033 my provocative response actually Jess, I don't think reading is going to be that important in 2033 now the guy who services my alarm drives in his van and when an email comes in the van reads it to him and he dictates a response it puts things in his calendar for him he's still driving this van no reading involved for writing for that matter so that was the kind of provocative response and Jess was a primary school teacher she thought reading was really the thing and then I said to actually the real reason Jess is I used to have 36 things on this list but it took people too long to sort them and so I just cut it down to a kind of sample of things it's still quite difficult to make decisions about these things let's see what we've got science facts pretty low down the list learning to learn creeping up the list being able to ask good questions and evaluate information so what we're seeing coming of the list here are the kind of things that we might label incorrectly as 21st century skills because they were around in 1967 when the Ploudin report was written but of course this is a really difficult question to answer because none of us know what it's going to be like in 2033 now if we just go back 14 years to 2005 now Kodak was still the dominant force in photography Youtube the first video was uploaded in April 2005 Facebook.com the domain name was bought in August 2005 Netflix was still sending videos through the post the smartphone didn't come around until 2007 it was just it wasn't even a fantasy in someone's mind at that point it probably was on pilots and things rages but true smartphones didn't come out until 2007 Twitter 2007 all these other things 2009 or later the world has changed phenomenally fast in the last 14 years and the speed of change appears to be accelerating so 2033 who knows but we do know that we face a load of challenges we face challenges around surveillance capitalism you know privacy ownership how would you feel if you got arrested walking down the street in Manchester cos you covered your face from the face recognition camera happened to somebody last month they would find 60 quid is that an invasion of privacy or do you feel comfortable with that biotechnology and genetic engineering who decides what characteristics of a human being we should engineer out or engineer in will it just be the rich people who can afford the technology or should we all have some say in what's appropriate and what's not appropriate robotics AI and cyborg engineering what does it mean to be a human being when computers can do the things that we used to call intelligent what does it mean to be a human being when you can augment our physical capabilities with robotic components so I can hear what Kieran is saying to Rebecca because I've got the little gadget in my ear that enhances my hearing it just changes the nature of what human beings are and how we view ourselves and of course you've got all the stuff about automation and employment you know this kind of stuff you know by 2023 47% of the US employed population will be unemployable and then you get the kind of neoliberal argument yeah but new jobs will come along it will all be fine and then you get other people saying yeah but the new jobs will be automated too and you'll end up with all the rich people owning the factories and no one with any money to buy anything so the rich people won't be rich because they'll be making stuff and no one else can buy and the breakdown of market capitalism what is the purpose of school if most of the population are unemployable and then we've got all the things to do with demographic and environmental challenges you know population growth increasing age demographics all the stuff to do with resource sustainability pollution and global warming and you know attitudes towards mass migration Trump and his wall and all of these things lead to greater risk of civil strife and conflict and I personally think schools ought to be equipping kids not just to address these issues but to really have a say about how we want the world to be so my curriculum would look something like this on the individual fulfilment side you know I think it's about identity it's about finding your passion your purposes in life it's about building your self-esteem your belief in yourself as a learner it's about getting success and recognition for the things you have done and achieved and it's about being able to deal with this I was going to say shit and I probably shouldn't oh you inaugural with all the stuff that is going to get thrown at you through life so you've got to have the resilience and the persistence to deal with that stuff and then on the kind of universal wellbeing side it's about the participation it's about our values and understanding and talking about our values it's about diversity and welcoming and recognising the importance of diversity it's about intercultural understanding and even if we don't agree at least being able to empathise to put ourselves in the other person's position it's about perspective it's about equity and rights, remember the rhinos and obviously sustainability because otherwise we are all doomed and then for me there's the kind of glue in the middle that holds all these things together which is around the ability to act about agency and it's the kind of those 21st century skilly things but I've added in things like philosophy and ethics because we have some really hard decisions to make around those global challenges and fundamentally the only thing we know about 2033 is it's going to be different and it's going to be continually changing and so learning to learn for me is probably the single most important thing and of course you've got to have content because you can't do any of that stuff without content so that kind of argument is it content, is it skills is it complete nonsense because you can't do skills without content and I agree with the Boston Centre for Curriculum and Redesign who say the content should be the kind of big conceptual ideas that allow us to make sense of the world the notion of a system we can have the nervous system we can have an ecosystem all sorts of places where you can have systems so you can apply that concept of system in lots of different contexts and there are lots of other big ideas that are really important to help us to make sense of the world and they are the things we should be focusing in on so to pull it all together so far my vision is about individual fulfilment and universal wellbeing I think my pedagogical approach the way we teach is about enhancing human learning and we need a curriculum that enhances that focuses on the content the skills and the attributes bearing in mind that knowledge is about the ability to act in meaningful ways in particular contexts but you know that's pretty tame I think we need to be a bit more radical I agree with Kerry Faser he said you know we really need to analyse what is the purpose of school what could and should school be doing in a world in which actually voice is becoming more problematic and politician I mean that's not talked about politicians and so for me there's an issue around open to people okay so we're doing away with age and we're saying we'll have people but we're still talking 4 to 18 year olds why are we still talking 4 to 18 year olds why are we still front loading all that stuff why aren't we making it life long and why aren't we really valuing the older members of our community Sir Gartran Mitra and his granny cloud is onto something and you know we may be doing away with timetables and 50 minute lessons but we're still thinking 8.30 to 3.30 why are we thinking 8.30 to 3.30 why aren't we saying it's when it fits in with your life it's when you need it it's flexible open to community I always love the notion of being open to community and then building the 8 foot security fences always seems to me that there's some conflict here but you know we do invite people to come in to visit the school sometimes and we do occasionally bring kids out of the school into the community completely re-change the focus you know the school should be at the heart of the community not a little isolated island in the middle of it and we need to move away from that focus on individuals learning to individuals learning to enhancing their communities because it's about individual fulfilment and universal wellbeing so you know here's my new summary we got to be open to people life long learning not just 5 to 18 my daughter told me off for that as well it should be open when needed 24 7 it should be about enhancing human learning through impacting on their communities and we need that mix of content skills the application of information and attributes what we need is SCOM not school not home SCOM the education system for the information age automation age I updated it was the information age in the good old days when we were doing it but heck how do we get there because we all know how difficult it is to change education systems Christensen and colleagues have this model for disruptive change what they say is if you've got existing system that's got existing clients who are doing okay against some existing performance measures and you bring in a disruptive innovation like a new model of schooling there's a lot of catching up to do before you're as good as the existing system and in that situation the incumbents nearly always win and what you need to do if you want to bring about significant change is you need to first of all compete against non-consumption in the context of school that means deal with the kids who are not being dealt with by the current system those who are excluded or who are failing in the existing system and come up with metrics that work for them and in that situation the new entrance nearly always win and in Australia they're doing exactly this so big picture schools which are kind of scomy in several ways they're about passion projects they're about kids actually having real jobs in the community at least one or two days a week they're about parental involvement there's no assessment as such except presentations to the local community and what they're doing which is really interesting they've got mainstream schools with their standard programs the standard provision and then they're tacking on big picture academies and they're saying you can apply to move from the standard program into the big picture academy stream and in some schools it's aimed at the gifted and talented kids who they want to stretch more through the big picture process in some schools it's the kids who are being excluded and who are failing in the existing system in some schools it's just any kid who thinks that looks more fun and guess what they're helping to refine the big picture model they're providing evidence of how efficient and how effective it is and more and more people are opting out opting across but you know the problem is assessment those new metrics that's the killer because summative assessment drives curriculum and it drives pedagogy teachers quite rightly do what they're held accountable against they should do that the problem is we hold them accountable against the wrong things and actually often that high stakes assessment isn't really about the kids at all it's about the quality of the school it's about the league tables and of course terminal exams aptly named in my view are great if you're interested in content but are absolutely useless for most of those other things we've got to be able to do better and I don't have the answers to that so AI data mining now this is one of the first challenges you meet in the education version of minecraft you have to get out of that valley and you're leaving a digital footprint of everything you do so you can look at how long do they try to get out how persistent are they in solving the problem how different is their solution to other people's solution how creative have they been to what extent do they talk to other people you can infer a lot from the digital footprint that gets left behind but there are massive problems ethically about data ownership and about transparency transparency both in the sense of do you know you are being assessed but more importantly can the system explain why they've come up with the judgement that they have because very often AI systems can't or have bias built into them which is concealed so there's some big issues with that and then there's point of learning which I helped to develop with two of my colleagues and Paul offers a completely new model a completely new approach which goes something like this you can make you agree some targets some things that we're wanting to measure if you will and you agree what you'd see happening if someone was meeting those targets and make claims so we could have a target about doing a really fantastic presentation you are brilliant at doing public speaking and so I could make claims saying yep done that Kieran where is the handkerchief yep done that and Kieran could make a claim for me saying yeah I saw Peter doing that and I could have an external assessor an independent person saying yep I saw Peter doing that and what you build up over time is multiple people making claims saying I saw that person demonstrating that they had achieved that target that's really quite credible and you build up over three months half a dozen people who said yeah I've seen him do that on multiple occasions he can do that that's pretty convincing compared with exams where you do some stuff and then you sit down for three hours and if you're on a bad day God help you or if you're bad at exams God help you and you're doing that in lots of ways but of course as with lots of systems in a high stakes context there's a real danger of gaming the system so we need to address some of those things and of course the real obvious alternative is open access why worry about the qualifications the OU has done it for 50 years open entry to our undergraduate programs it works but of course that involves a massive paradigm shift a mind flip from gaming the system getting the credits to thinking about actual learning it involves you thinking about trust and meaningful engagement where success is not measured by what I got given in the grade and the exam but it's about actually what I'm now able to do and competent doing so to pull it all together I hope I'm still on time no one has waved at me yet to say you've got to shut up soon Peter some key key key key points takeaways as my son would say we are learning beings teaching should enhance how we learn what we teach should empower people empower people to act and influence the future it is about knowledge the ability to act in valued ways in particular context and attributes we've got to change the culture of high stakes assessment where the focus is more on gaming the system manipulating the system and actually about measuring the school and how the school is doing then it is actually about learning we've got to change that it is a paradigm shift and we need it we've got to move from distrust and coercion from finding parents if their kids don't come to school from penalising kids who misbehave from forcing people to learn things that they don't understand the relevance of to a system of trust where we believe people actually want to learn and where we support them to do that and we need a strategy for doing it and you know the strategy that I've suggested you know start with the low hanging fruit start with those people who the system isn't currently supporting very well devise metrics and this is the really hard bit that show what they have learnt in a meaningful way so we're measuring the things that matter not just the things that it's easy to measure in a paper based exam refine the model because it's not going to be perfect to begin with and demonstrate that it works demonstrate its efficacy and of course you know so I think what I hope I've convinced you that schooling currently is a problem that actually solutions do exist and there are other ones out there like big picture schools the challenge for us really is does the I'm looking at the mayor, does the political will thank you we are going to have a panel discussion afterwards but if you want to follow up I blog at half baked education my kids thought that was the inappropriate picture that it should be something else some of the lucky people here will have got the mp3 pen which has got the URL for the mp3 project if you want to follow that up and the scone website is still there I've been trying to kill it off since 2007 but without very much success thank you thank you Peter wow I have got so many questions I'm going to scone write them all down she says scone write them all down scone write them all down ok so welcome back everybody and now we're going to hear briefly from our panel on what they think about that topic if school is a problem what is the solution and I've got, I'm going to introduce just all four now but they're going to come up for monitor time say that a little bit and then they're going to go over and sit with Peter and then when we get to the last person and then going to come back up and I'm going to ask you for your questions and comments for the panel so the four people that you will be seeing are first of all James Pilgrim head teacher of Kenshill Park School Poppy Petru an ex-student from Summerhill which you may have heard of in school in Suffolk Mike Wood chair of the centre for personalised education and an expert on home education and flexi schooling and Steven Hepple a leading voice on the role of ICT in learning and professor of new media environments at the centre for excellence in media practice at Bournemouth University so we're going to start with James then it's Poppy then it's Mike and then it's Steven so can you remember that learning at scone or something I'll hand over to James, thank you Hi, good evening Peter, congratulations on your inaugural lecture is excellent, I'm not sure how these things work but I hope it's the first of many so well done maybe that's the red flag, I don't know but thank you for the invite for this evening I think there's a really good debate around education wholesale at the moment I'm quite active on Twitter and as I know Peter is and there's lots of things flying around there and various people getting upset about various things as well it seems to be the main thing I welcome this discussion around schools, the purpose of schools the purpose of education but as I said in one of my recent tweets I think I'm the token traditionalist here so please be gentle with me in terms of some of my thoughts just to give you a bit of context Kensal Park School opened as a brand new all through school in September this academic year we opened with 120 pupils in year 7 and 30 in year 3 so we're really, really new into this we were part of a new wave of schools from the new schools network and we are literally just around the corner as you can imagine the opportunity to create and develop our own school almost from the ground up is incredibly exciting it's a real rare opportunity and speaking to colleagues at other schools that I know they were very jealous of our opportunity so it gives us the opportunity to address many of those issues in education or some of those issues perhaps in education that we find so frustrating certainly from the state school system and how that impacts on the children however I find myself too many times probably growling at the radio as I make my way into work I hear commentators saying school should do more it's the school's responsibility to do this for every ill that seems to be for society and I can promise you we are trying to do everything that we possibly can we're very much at the front line I find of pastoral, social emotional support and understanding for children and their parents sometimes and it feels increasingly like there's a high demand for this and that it's increasingly complex issues that we're dealing with as external support is gradually withdrawn and cut we're trying to do everything that we can we do this and this isn't a winch but I'm going to take the opportunity to say it with less funding than ever with ever increasing accountability measures and constraints a recruitment and retention crisis half of all teachers in England leave within five years that can't be right and needs addressing so this discussion around education and whether it's fit for purpose are fundamentally welcome we set up Kensill Park I think it's probably fair to say in a fairly traditional way we've had no input into building design whatsoever that was all the local authority but we do have a teacher in front of every class all the day in the primary school as well our systems and routines are not dissimilar to probably many of the other schools that you'd see as you walked around Milton Keynes and around the country and we're certainly consistent with the trust with which we belong so why do we set it up like this there are a number of reasons firstly as a school as a head teacher I believe that children should know the best that has been thought and said we're developing a knowledge rich curriculum that identifies and clearly sets out what we expect children to know at different points of their schooling we make judgments as professionals about what we think the core knowledge is and where the hinterland of knowledge is this is based on ideas from Christine Council the hinterland being the context that links everything together so that pupils are allowed to develop the schema to move that short term learning into their long term memories we've done lots around cognitive load theory and I'm really keen that my staff research as much as possible it develops us as individuals and as professionals and it develops our teaching style all the time secondly we do this because we believe that in order to apply and develop skills in a variety of new or different situations pupils need the confidence and knowledge to support them you couldn't possibly hope to write about the fall of the Berlin Wall or you couldn't possibly hope to talk about the water cycle whatever it may be without that knowledge that sits behind it so our starting point is always about the knowledge and the content that sits behind the work that we're doing and then comes the application of that knowledge into the skills or the activities or whatever it is the teacher is asking them to do from my experience so-called discovery learning doesn't really work if I give a class of 30 year 9 children on a Friday afternoon the opportunity to go and discover a topic it's carnage and it just doesn't work for us in the situation that we have so we've made it very clear that knowledge comes first for us and then we look at how we apply it to different situations and scenarios therefore the teachers in our classrooms are the experts professionals in their subject areas they're the ones that have studied long and hard and continue to study their particular areas of interest and the materials that go with them it's the pupils' responsibility I feel to deliberately listen and deliberately concentrate on what they say and teach it's through this that we help to develop those skills we help to develop the context we help to develop the schema that allows this knowledge to move into their long term memories and more importantly teachers them the skills of being able to retrieve it when they need it that's why we also focus fundamentally on behaviour it's really essential for children to listen and concentrate and not be distracted behaviour has to be excellent so there are no distractions to learning and children can concentrate we don't use technology as a pupil learning resource at Kensal Park in any of our classrooms we believe that whilst it's a powerful resource and staff and systems rely heavily on it across the school they are a distraction from the learning and from the teacher there's too much interference too much noise and pressure on children to use phones and smartphones and they can't resist the temptation it's as simple as that 90 seconds I think is the average time it takes before someone responds to a text message give it up to a 12 year old I would argue it's markedly less therefore we as adults in the classroom have to model and demonstrate how we learn how we behave the progress we want to make and develop the ideas and that includes from my point of view with technology ultimately at present in schools we are preparing children to take and pass exams is this the purpose of schools philosophically I really hope not but my belief is that we must attempt to provide children with the knowledge and skills that they can apply to different situations and one of those is an exam the idea that we are preparing children for jobs and industries that don't yet exist this shift happens idea that's been around for a long long time is a bit tiresome if I'm honest they were saying that years ago when I was at school as well I've only anecdotal evidence for this but the vast majority that I know from school are working in jobs and industries that we knew very well existed so we need to move on from that but we do have to assess children we do have to find out how much they've learnt at school we are after all spending billions of pounds of taxpayers our hard earned money although blunt and ineffective and fallible the exam system is one way of doing this however I rail against the idea that schools are simply preparing pupils to pass exams it's not a philosophy on which we set up our school I believe, we believe as a school that you learn as much outside the classroom as you do within it but if you prepare children well exam success will be a natural outcome of good learning in all of its forms one of the differences of Kensil Park School and many others is as I mentioned at the start that we're in all through school this means that when we're full we'll take children from ages 2 to 16 and ultimately 18 2009 there are only about 13 all through schools in England and according to the new schools network around 25% of all new schools will be all through in the future this equates roughly to about 150 since 2011 not many but growing steadily what this means is that we can do things differently we're not constrained by traditional systems routines or transition points we've already timetabled our teaching staff across both primary and secondary phases that's definitely out there comfort zone I can assure you for secondary staff when they're that small and want to hold your hand but we have aligned our curriculum we've aligned our assessment models and we've aligned the timings of our school day but more importantly than that the intangible benefits of our pupils working with significantly younger or older children in different phases and the responsibility and rewards that that brings and the removal of traditional transitional points are really vital to developing some of those softer skills manners and attributes that we wish to see in our young people and I'd rather mischievously finish by saying we don't need any new technologies for that thank you very much good evening everyone so my name is Poppy Petru I attended Summerhill School which is in Suffolk show of hands who know Summerhill know Summerhill? amazing great okay don't have to give the whole spiel so starting from the top so I never enjoyed having elders having authority over me I had no respect for anybody around me because I never felt respected never listened to, considered or even part of a decision and as one standing on two legs I feel and I felt that I have a say no matter what what age in fact I'd always been used to the norm that children had to be under an elder's voice I'd been trained to do and think sorry I'd been trained to think how adults, sorry I'd been trained from adults as they knew best a parent is expected to put their child through the system which sparks a problem to me I understand the norm is reality but people only seem to think that the system is the way forward alternative but there is and it is hidden away my young self was energetic, charismatic and creative although I'd always felt something missing as a child one thing that sparked in my mind was not spending as much time with my father as I should have this being quite minor leading to issues within relationships and friendships now my point is others have intense home issues which I was unable to relate to but I can only imagine what staying in a system would have done for me never mind them from experience I wasn't satisfied with the support I was given forcing children into a system in which they're not happy with themselves others around them creating unnecessary nasty dramas as there's nothing better to do with their time I never had the freedom to express my learning at age 10 I had been monitored for the diagnosis of ADHD as if I were a scientific experiment I was actually placed in a room to be watched, written about, judged I was diagnosed and put on Ritalin which was prescribed a drug as you probably know Ritalin creates a space in which I felt I was a zombie tired, drowsy, numb feeling pretty much under the weather I was skin and bone I'd been drugged up with Ritalin and the effect it had on me was so powerful I'd been shifted from school to school putting thoughts in my head as if something had to be wrong with me everybody around me were getting on with their work just not me something I noticed about my early schooling experience with the attitude towards pupils from staff members as if everything were the pupils' faults schools seemed to see problems as being the pupils never ever taking responsibility whether that is learning, bullying or any support needed I'd moved to secondary school thinking as a new start as an opportunity to meet new people and have a nice time I attended for half a year 10 of months very unproductive, it was dreadful I'd been bullied, picked on from the way that I used to look it dragged me down teachers were not taking any care of me I'd have physical fights my mum had to come and pick me up in the car because a girl would be ripping my hair out outside of school and nobody did anything about it I was sinking into a hole and I really couldn't get out of it out of aggressive, nasty humiliating people surrounding me not serving me well at all not seen as a short process it was seen as a forceful long period of time in which we are trained to be the same as each other with good exam results of course is this really what we want to be making our students go through the state school system where exams are forced having to obey teachers who are just there to do their job not having a care in the world at least from my experience sorry I'd have the common sense to realise the teachers saw me as that interuptive disrespectful irritation I was because I definitely was this didn't help when they were trying to give me tasks to complete so moving on to my experience of Summerhill I'll talk a little bit about it for those that don't know I've been told about Summerhill by my mother asking if I wanted to visit Summerhill is a democratic boarding school in which students and teachers are equal there are 70 pupils attending between ages 4 and 8 and you cannot start above 11 years old lessons are optional giving children the freedom to explore their hobbies, passions and themselves there are wake-ups and bedtimes which community members run for the Betty's office of committee 14 heads get on being 2 a day waking children up and putting them to sleep if you are not awake by 8.30 you are fine you can be 10% of your pocket money is taken away you can get 20 minutes of a job fine cleaning leaves outside I had a day visit walking along the path seeing students roam freely running around, play fighting, climbing trees climbing on staff members even and I remember it was the place that I belonged I'd been told I wasn't allowed to attend unless I was taken off of rittering so I was able to express myself even if this meant the community had to deal with me and it was hard, hard work trust me Summerhill isn't the real world it's a boarding school, a closed community which was a struggle after leaving having that social structure for such a long time after 5 years being home with my parents and no social networks was very difficult graduating being in that headspace being mature and competent as people tend to say I am I struggled with my age group pretty much which meant I'm now mingling with people that are nearly a decade older than me I mean they've been through lots of different things and I just haven't and that's something that I've really struggled with Summerhill I stated help me explore my passions I had access to a studio recording space in which I was able to instrumentally experiment find my genre, expand my set skills musically confident and being self-taught because I had the choice As a 17 year old leaving a community of 5 years it was somewhat haunting although the skills I'd learnt over the experience gave me great worth ethic worth ethic to work for what I wanted to do Summerhill gave me a gift in which I learned to make decisions for myself working in a competent engaged adult capable of manner making my way in the world with the confidence to tackle the challenges the world throws at me So what should schooling be and I have no conclusion there is so much I could say but let's go for it I don't agree with the current system in which everybody has to spend 6 hours seated shown how and what to learn evolving as a person is a compulsory part of growing and I cannot bear the thought of the comparison with schools and prisons being so similar uniform you have to attend you can't go to the toilet unless you ask showers even, some have them why is the norm to prepare for the world by mentally and emotionally destroying young people having to sit exams we will never use schools are broken not only struggling to be kept open but they are broke financially what I can't get around, my head around a space in which new humans are created to be trained as if they are clones I want an educational system that merges the creative, fun educational part of a young person's life being able to create a system in which every head has a voice and an opinion a space in which young people can freely roam the grounds exploring nature a free, fun, refreshing space in which memories are treasured importance of belonging and being part of something why have teachers run a school their way when in fact it's about the students experience I am deeply saddened how children are expected to spend their childhoods passion and self-expression is so important and I feel the system is very restrictive having the freedom to learn what I want run my own events organise my own life in itself taught me in fact the basics of organisation, responsibility and these opportunities help me very much in later life in state schools how can you demonstrate you are good at X if schooling doesn't let you experience the outside world and the work life so yeah that's me good evening crude measures of absenteeism and behaviour are being used in schools as indicators of failing schools leaning to proclaim reason is no excuse as a behaviour policy to protect their schools ranking if you have autism or Tourette your behaviour can remain a disciplinary issue especially if your family is a victim of the CAMHS waiting list CAMHS is the children's mental health services parents are forced to drag children kicking and screaming into school since if they are not in school they are not learning what a child learns from this experience remains debatable of course the parents of some children with a PTSD diagnosis yes they get PTSD diagnoses from the school experience are still finding are still being find because case law says that anxiety is no defence for non attendance forcing growing numbers of parents to offer all their children when CAMHS rating list ran into two years and even three years in some areas there's a dramatic effect on the whole family if parents can arrange a diagnosis it allows the school to treat issues as behavioural rather than therapeutically it's like commute commanding nature to turn the tide at one time families opted to home educate to provide a personalised education and later it was they were concerned about bullying recently parents off role to avoid bullying by institution a suitable education must relate to what is of intrinsic value to the student rather than arbitrary notion of intellectual value education must be curiosity driven flexible and personal if children have to fail to engage it's not a disciplinary issue it's an engagement issue do things differently blame the child is like blaming the patient for not getting well we should not force feed children but to satisfy an appetite I've started from page two and the purpose of education is to keep that appetite alive and not to find new and creative ways to force feed children like geese in the hope of producing intellectual pate so the beginning is why in a world where medicine is designed around individual genomes do we offer an 18th century education designed to turn pressure into a simpler power why do we use assessments which force schools to teach to the test when we all know it's a poor fit for the coming century education must be holistic and designed to meet individual needs of each student and be a good fit for the context of their 21st century lives rather than being based upon a hypothetical notion of a nonexistent average child while legally schools must provide a broad and balanced education where children may encounter something appropriate to themselves as individuals home educators must provide an education suitable to those particular individual needs state education has become lazy showering children with subjects in the hope that each child learns something suitable it waste billions teaching kids things that they can't remember and never needed anyway the answer to children for getting June's lessons by September is not to keep them in the classroom all summer which has been suggested it's to teach them things or to cover subjects which are interesting to them and hold their minds they'll hold in their minds for more than just a few weeks school culture is fundamentally judgmental a place where too many children learn to fail damaging their self-esteem if they're brave enough or desperate enough to refuse to participate we criminalise their parents there's something radically wrong with a system that offers learning for free and yet must physically force so many children into school there's a disconnect here I work with families who are home educating mostly that's my core interest I home educated my four children myself and my ex-wife and I've been doing this and involved in this for over 25 years now and the more I see of it the less able schools appear to me to be to be able to prepare children for life in the outside world schools are a particular they're not just a microcosm of society they're a particular form of society they're a closed environment sociologists study closed environments they've got a name for it I can't remember what it is offhand but they have a name for this prisons and schools and the army are the three usual suspects when they're studying these things they don't reflect society they reflect a 19th century society at best and it doesn't exist anymore it's not about what they're teaching so much as the entire ethos of the way schools are structured and that's where the problem lies we need to disassemble the construct of school and start again thank you I don't know where I am this week William I should just say actually these days I'm mostly a professor of learning innovation in UCJC in Madrid when it's not just I thought that you'd welcome some pictures and I'm hoping my throat mic is on because I'm going to walk out here thank you Peter for what you said thank you Jenny Lee for what you did we know an awful lot now about how to make learning better we know the cognitive science for example this room is too dark 500 lux will be a minimum you're struggling to stay focus it's way too hot 17, 18 to 21 degrees is your sweet spot and the focus at the front is slowly being gassed by the CO2 of your emissions sweeping down here it's pretty hard and if the my favourite learning institute in the world has got its rooms wrong think how hard it is for everybody else kids of course have reached the point where the genie is out of the bottle and that's what makes it so interesting I smiled when James said no phones you know I was in a school 18 months ago where the kids were not I said take your phones out measure the light levels I said we're not allowed phones he got them haven't you whipped them out of their knickers and I said what happens when you get caught they said we carry a sacrificial phone you know it's a good luck mate what they're doing with them of course is they're measuring they're metering their learning environments they're saying hell with bells are CO2 it's high aim Dubai we found CO2 levels over 7000 and of course the kids in those classrooms and the diagnosis having ADHD was not the kids the kids there had been on Ritalin for three or four years nothing wrong with the children what the children do is BYOP is for my Twitter feed kids bring their own plants in 30 kids 30 plants photosynthesis, Bosch you know CO2 in, Oxygen out everybody's happy makes a huge difference and the husbandry and the science the stem of building little self-watering kits sets all this alight and we know that when we look at all the details CO2 is a tiny part of the 500 variables that make good learning I do learning for the British Olympic team the England rugby Scots and other places and one of the things we learn is that aggregation of marginal gains everything, everything matters here are the girls hockey team this team GB hockey team we remodeled their learning space with James Clark a space oasis, good friend and you'll see the details here blow me down it looks like a front running primary classroom I can write on every surface because we know the cognitive impact of social writing I've got a physical floor where I can pick things up and put them down because cognitive load theory is magnified and accelerated by the physicality of movement I've got a taught pedagogy from the teacher here who having introduced the task puts his hands in his pocket because he's a bloke and if he doesn't he's going to interfere and he stands back and lets the girls get on with the problem solving using the knowledge they have and if you follow hockey you'll know that this team won gold and got their on set pieces and won it on heroism on the unexpected penalty shoot out in the finals and they have a thinking Thursday where they turn up on a Thursday and blimey this isn't what we were expecting which is what schools need so you've got to get your thinking Thursdays in there James as well as your regular timetable and we know that when we take those kids and ask them to design our spaces this is UCJC in Madrid these little puppets here have redesigned the university for us five years down the track of redesigning their own schools not from their own opinions which would be catastrophic or why I wanted black and a bar but from their research of talking to other schools about what works it was so effective we brought them in to redesign the university and this is CPD the university lecturers being led in how this space will work by these little puppets here and they're full of ideas like for example when you book a room you get an envelope full of 3D models of the furniture that's going to be in the room you're going to use so you can play with the layout of your room over breakfast before you turn up to teach a lesson these are kids ideas you can just about read this when you give them a tablet you can have to give them phones because how else are they going to measure the sound levels and the light levels and when they do they say you know what we can fix the sound levels of the dining room and look at what they did if the sound levels go over 70 decibels the price of custard doubles it's really really simple and and you know what this is a Bondi Beach primary school in Australia I work in some lovely places but you know what I never had to do it because the kids are all making a din the minute they are all ladies as it happens behind the hatch reach out to turn the prices around the whole place goes quiet kids have control of themselves kids set their own protocols but you know what is this just putting lipstick on the chicken is it so hard is it so hard to improve schools that maybe we should do the best we can you mentioned exams I've been into over 80 exam rooms in the last two years I haven't found one examination room that wasn't damaging the prospects of the children and by the way the kids sitting on the light side going to be doing a lot better than the kids on the dark side and what are you going to tell the parents when they find out maybe if we want to make learning better maybe we do the best we can with the schools we've got we haven't done that yet have we 900 million kids a year do exams they don't even know what to eat for breakfast because nobody's done the research every single athlete in the world knows what to have for breakfast the morning of their big day you wouldn't even know whether to stick a banana in every orifice you've got in that hope that it's going to boost your potassium or maybe you should have something else so we could do a million times better but if we're going to do what Peter said bravely at the end of his talk we're really going to do this let's start with the kids that it definitely isn't working for to make it good for the kids who are turning up lucky enough to have a school but these kids in Pakistan I've just started working with 25 million children not in education and I've committed to get them into learning by 2025 25 by 25 we haven't got a million spare teachers they won't have teachers we haven't got half a million schools we can't afford schools what we've got are children who can help each other and support each other who can learn in a grounded way about the context they live in their science their flora, their fauna with their parents, with their community the model for it my daughter runs a beach school go there, really interesting sir beach school dot org and the kids preschool kids are down on the beach looking at crabs and jellyfish and sharing with the community this weekend I was walking down the pontoon in the town kids all crabbing I heard grandparents saying oh how do you know it's a boy crab but the children say well if you turn it over you can see the triangle on the bottom this one's going to have eggs the whole town is a wash with knowledge about their environment so I think absolutely what Peter said is right we can mend the world with learning and we can do it for the kids who are sitting waiting for somebody to do something for them it ain't ever going to happen it's on them to help themselves and I think we probably are looking today, this year this decade, at the death of education but rather excitingly we're facing the dawn of learning and I can't wait to see how good that's going to be thank you very much this and really fascinating and provocative ideas there I'd just like to say to Mike that I can recognise an oxbow lake when I see one you never recognise a terminal lake because they talk about it but they don't exist one of those bits of knowledge oops we shouldn't have learnt it serve me in good stead okay so I want to open up to our audience now for questions and comments so please could you say who you are and where you're from and try to keep it short so that we can get as many questions in as possible I think we've been quite busy online so do we want to start with some questions there and then we'll move into the audience in the room hi this is a question that's come in on live stream it's from Polly Cheer from Blackburn my question to the panel is this I'm hoping that we're reaching a tipping point and that our ideas about the mismatch between how children learn and how our education system teachers are beginning to move into mainstream thinking rather than open another democratic school I would prefer all schools to move towards being democratic I realise we have a long way to go in changing a culture of teaching and learning what does the panel feel is the best way of bringing our ideas forward into the minds of policy makers and education providers okay so I think that's a rid how do we get the policy makers to take these ideas on board policy makers you've got no chance I mean when I talk to head teachers I often open with a slide of all past education ministers and say who can name them and nobody ever can is that Mark Carlyle nobody knows them they kind of don't matter they pass through what really matters here is the community of learning professionals stand on the roof of a school and you will not see anywhere else between you and the horizon where you've got how many staff are you going to have James when you've got 100 staff postgraduate qualified reflecting daily on something as complex as learning that's hell of a community but you've also got the kids you're going to have 1000 kids also doing the same thing the community of reflective practice is what makes change happen absolutely is don't even wait for a politician he'd like he'll be there a long time I think secretaries of state come and go every five years possibly it depends at the moment doesn't it but they all want to leave their mark they all want to leave their stamp they want to leave their legacy as it were but actually the process of changing education is much slower than that and we don't give it enough time to actually bring things about and really embed them within schools and I think there's a really as I said at the start of my talk I think there's a really good dialogue at the moment about education in all its different facets but it takes time and it's not going to be an overnight success is it movements are a simple thing movements are a simple thing we know that you need to move you've got the one heart the blood goes to your legs then your brain so if you're sat upright with your back like that and your legs horizontal the flow of oxygen to your brain is diminished and if you stay like that for more than about 20 minutes your attention we can measure attention very accurately will decline if you get up during the lesson and move around fine your body gets brain your brain gets oxygen but it feels a bit like anarchy so you've got to start thinking about zoning the classes and having a carousel of activities to get people moving around none of this is hard but it is really complicated that's the key thing to get hold of here if you don't get the policy makers to change is that you're tinkering with the Titanic you're moving those deck chairs and you may be enhancing their ability to do well in the exams but actually who cares if the exams aren't measuring the things that we think are really important is why I think the model in Australia is really interesting someone who said they're doing the same stuff in the States of actually trying out models in the way that Stephen actually did with Not School years ago with the people who the system currently isn't catering for very well and that allows you to build up the evidence base that actually this works and the challenge then is about how do you persuade the next stage up the ladder to recognise the learning that has happened so how do you persuade in the context of universities in Australia them to accept the kids who are coming out of big teacher schools with no qualifications but the most amazing portfolios and that's the big challenge because that's hard it's really easy to say oh look three A's or three nine's or whatever it is these days but it's really hard if you're flicking through someone who's got this amazing set of stuff but it's time consuming to look through and that's the challenge is how do we get to a stage where and actually people like Google don't care about your grades or your computer programmer they're going to go out on the web and see what your reputation is on the computer programming websites so that's how do we change those metrics that's the killer and it's about parental pressure it's about you voters saying hey this actually isn't okay Polly did you want to poppy sorry did you want to come in on that I don't think that's kind of my sort of area I'll leave it to these guys I was just thinking that you know about what Steven said and the fact that wearing earrings obviously makes it even worse you can't learn if you're wearing earrings have we got any questions in the room we've got one here and one over there Thank you Peter Leeson from Milton Keynes frequent public speaker and opinionated old man first of all Peter I have spent 43 years working in IT and Automation and I don't agree with the focus on IT and Automation that is currently happening in the education system and that you seem to be talking about because it is largely the majority of IT and Automation is teaching people to do strictly what they've been told to say follow them follow the rules obey the standards and don't do anything else I believe one of the things that is missing in the education system today or the training system today against he'll exclude it but largely we've given up on education we're training I'd like to see a lot more focus on creativity on getting people to think I believe that if you study foreign languages if you study Moliere, Musorgsky and Mondrian you will learn a lot more on creativity on challenging things and on making things happen which doesn't bring me to my question regarding challenging the policy makers and the authorities and the powers that be what is your opinion of education systems like Montessori which have been deployed over 100 years ago and still have not been adopted by any policy maker in the world there are lots of models like Montessori like Steiner like the big picture schools that are very effective for me there isn't a right answer there isn't one model that is the right model for everybody in every context after 100 years absolutely the challenge is how do we do that I've been working with the Labour party bless them on their new education service they have some great ideas but at the end of the day they don't dare I don't want to tam all politician we're building a school Limfield School of the Future in New South Wales Adrian Pickley who is the inspirational minister who is going to be all through stage on age which is like the rest of the world but not schools and a whole host of other things he said this is a way to look forward and then three further ministers beyond that they were all supporting the thing and it opened last January and it is an absolutely stunning vision of what it might look like you can't wait for all of them and there are bits of Montessori that are fabulous bits that are a bit odd the maths teaching I think is terrific and the BS furniture people in Hamburg have a museum of educational artefacts and the Montessori maths stuff is the strongest suit but on the other bed Steiner has lots of good things but Steiner has the problem so if a submarine comes up in the village pond you can't study submarines so they've all got good and bad things the point here is to take all the good bits but where do you do that to Peter's point of the mind really maybe we just do the best we can with the schools we've got I remember with the not school kids if you don't know not school this was a virtual school we built for children who were excluded from school we had 1,000 kids a year expelled, you don't get expelled other than for doing fairly heinous things and they got on famously as a cohort 10,000 kids went through but they said things like when you really crap at something in school they give you more of it and it's like how's that ever going to work so sometimes just the wisdom of the reflective practice of the learner themselves we've wasted, we've got a huge crisis of lack of teachers but at the same time we've got millions of children we have to engage them in the process too and that seems to me when Montessori and Summer Hill for goodness sake they all saw it from day one you know, involve the children and you'll get there quicker and that seems to me to be the key thing I mean why the hell you haven't got the vote at 12 I don't know and it's interesting because England is one of the most locked down education systems and most difficult to challenge and so you know places Australia and others there's much more scope but you should we've got to keep hitting our heads on the brick wall we're emigrate over here can you pass the microphone down to the middle of that row thank you next Steve couple of hands on the back as well oh sorry I'll come to you in a minute I'll take you first because you had the microphone already and then I'll take the lady right at the back so you in the white shirt gentlemen in the green jacket and then the lady right at the back and then I'll see where we're going after that gotcha thank you hi my name is Jason West I live and work in this city and I'm an OU graduate as well I'm also forming a new charity an educational wealth fund to help our schools become the most wondrous and inspiring places that humanity can provide why would our schools be any different our kids today are going through a mental health crisis by whatever metric you care to measure whether you talk to doctors or you know the people that are helping children within schools our children can recognise over 100 corporate logos but they can't recognise their natural British wildlife we are seeing an extinction of music just yesterday the city orchestra here closed its doors because of the lack of interest I just wondered how do we create the political will in a system where our political leaders are so feckless is it not time now that the solution is to decouple education from government and that question goes to number one please clearly if politicians would just mind their own business that's why the Labour Party want a national education service because the government doesn't dare tinker too much with the national health service because it would cause an outcry and if we could decouple them from making decisions about education the problem is we've all we spent years in formal education we all think we know how school works and politicians will come in and they'll decide to do things bless go jesus so I absolutely agree with you we should be able to get them to do that but I don't have an answer of how but it is complicated I'm doing work in the health service too and you won't be surprised that one of the issues say in pharmacies is the very high level of error they just keep giving you the wrong stuff next time you're in boots or other pharmacies are available you just have a look at how dark the rooms are there in and how gloomy they are of course they're making blinking mistakes they're being sort of artificial coma really by the building they're in and hospital wards are not places where you would be bright and alert they're places where you just walk around like a zombie and fall over and end up back in the ward so what's interesting here is where do you get the change from time to medicine where people, you know, the barbers pole in every haircut shop in the country is the bloody rag round the pole and for a long time people bled you, you know, if you weren't very well I had a whole chart of places where I could bleed you and where you got bled for your liver you don't want to know, you know and they were judged on not whether the patient survived but how many times they were bled and I think we were a bit like that in education at the moment never mind what happens to the kids when they're 30 and driven crazy about all this how many tests did we give them, you know well, the change didn't come from a minister saying I'll tell you what, hygiene is a way forward a change came from people saying you know what, his patients aren't dying his are, I'm going here and in the end people see and people understand and kids in particular and for me the genie is out of the bottle with kids because they're all over Pinterest they're all over the social media that's part of their life swapping ideas about what's effective and what isn't we won't have genie back in the bottle and there's change right there no matter who the minister is I'm going to take two questions at once so I'm going to take yours and then the lady right on the very back row Peter, in your presentation there's one slide and I don't know whether it's been responded to by anybody really and it suggested that the function of schooling and particularly assessment in schooling was to produce at least 30% failures that slide was in there I hope I read it right I spent most of my professional career outside of this institution working with some of those 30% failures and try to say my I was one of them at that point and things turned around I just wonder how we are going to address the question of the reproduction of inequality that schools and all formal education systems are engaged in including, I'm afraid this all stear, egalitarian institution it is in the business of producing successes and failures all formal education institutions are involved in that business what do we do I love that question it is PVC students who are responsible for student success in the university I think that's a very well made point to respond I just want to take that other question Hello I'm just somebody who's wandered into the lecture so forgive me I don't have an education background but you'll understand why I've tried to summarise my thoughts someone who studied in Nigeria both in private and state public education and also in the UK both in private and state school I'm a bit conflicted when people talk about how education is terrible in this country and the problems that you're having it's a real privilege to be in the room where people are actually criticising the education system and expecting some real change so two thoughts the first one being that the traditional model enables children students to understand social codes and norms to develop a level of grit to work in a structured environment which I think is important for children in the alternative sort of system there is the focus or preference for experimentation, diversity and self development so I understand the benefits that both provide and actually what this brings to mind is the actual divide between private and state school education so like the lady who went to Summerhill private education allows exactly the model that you're talking about where there is a classroom environment but there is a lot of focus on experimentation and learning outside of the classroom I just don't know that we should be doing away completely with or talking about this the traditional version as a completely broken system the focus more on improving the traditional system rather than doing away with it completely okay I think those two questions can be linked quite nicely because they both really relate to the kind of reproductive nature of our educational system so can I start at this end with James do you want to respond to either of those yeah or I can try and respond to both at the same time maybe thank you I think you made valid points that stick things about our state school system and in my previous job I was director of a boarding house in Burford in West Oxfordshire and we used to have hundreds of children come across as international students because they valued British education and because they compared it to the education systems that they had experienced as they were growing up and they saw how valuable ours was and therefore wanted to pay for that kind of privilege I guess is the word that you would use and that balance we were a state boarding school so that balance between boarding and day school children you could see the benefits that they were getting by the additionality of being part of the British educational system but also what boarding life brought to them and the opportunities for the extra curricula and learning outside of the classroom was really engaging with different communities and cultures in all sorts of different ways that you don't get from our bus date to our bus 3 and I think that's really valuable and I think makes a massive difference and just coming back to the point that was made earlier about political interference I think you've got the assessment systems there is based on political interference and the measuring of children as they come out the other end they have to prove that they've got value for money and I think you would see a massive cultural change in schooling and education and what is measured if there was less political interference and I think people would be a whole lot braver to make those decisions about what is right for the children in front of them rather than am I going to get hammered by Ofsted if my progress 8 figure is not good enough or am I going to get hammered by Ofsted if I've taught subjects that I think are really valuable but don't count in those progress measures and that's the reality of what we face day in day out we make curriculum decisions based on the accountability measures and within that the 9 to 1 grading of GCSEs the SATS results all those kind of things the bell curve of those that succeed and those that fail is really in my view a bit of an arbitrary measure imposed by Government as to whether a 4 is a pass or a 5 is a pass and all the kind of fallibility that sits around that so I don't know whether I've answered any of those questions or all of those questions but I suppose that's the reality for me on a day to day basis Could I ask both Poppy and Mike to say a little bit about this success and failure and how it's defined and particularly Poppy your experience at Summerhill did that get you to think differently about what success was so which one am I answering whichever one you like so yeah I mean even now what is success I mean I'm 18 now actually so I'm 18 can you guys hear me I can't hear myself I'm 18 I got 2 GCSEs and a vocational course at like a merit I'm working full time with 3 different jobs plus doing things on the side and what is success is success getting all your GCSEs 11 GCSEs getting very well not everybody getting maybe depressed, anxious you know harming yourself as I've heard a lot of people do going through that stress to get 11 GCSEs and end up where do people go all my friends that have stayed in the state school system they're doing nothing they're working in cafes they're serving tea and letter dropping you need to look at that the 11 GCSEs or the girl who had the freedom from a young age got hardly any GCSEs sorry not intelligent what's the word academic I'm not an academic person but look at the balance so success I can't really define what that is but what did you say earlier there was a question you asked about the point I was trying to make was that I don't think dismantling the existing school structure is the answer to make this point properly my daughter who's 5 goes to a school now where she's the only black person, not child person in the entire school so it's not representative of the society that she lives in we recognise that that's a problem that the school has to fix or find a way of managing proactive systems to manage that but I would not then say we throw away the baby with the bath water because the school is a good school so if we do away with things like structure if we do away with learning nonsense so the things that you don't think are useful but later in life actually become quite useful I did medieval history which I don't use now but when I watch the news it comes back to me so no knowledge is lost and I think this conversation about the things we learn in school being un-useful or irrelevant is paradoxical because at the same time we're saying all knowledge is useful suggesting that we do away with all structure we're just saying we need different structures and we need more flexible structures no one is saying we do away with any curriculum we're saying we need different curriculum part of the problem that Steve's talking about is everyone has to do the same thing and that is something that someone out there has decided is valued and they are from a particular context and the system serves some people really well part of the reason it's difficult to change is actually those politicians are quite happily with the system they've done okay in it thank you very much and why would they change it because that might disadvantage their kids we need a system that has different metrics for different people that say we're all good at something but not if you go to school because at school only the things that have been predefined by somebody else is being important are the things that matter but everybody is good at something even if it's just been a pain in the ass when they're little all sorts of creative ways of being a pain in the ass when I was little too which actually end up being put in books about law and stuff because everything has got some value you've just got to recognise it and recognise we're not all the same God help us if we all were the same we'd be in deep trouble and I do think also I agree there and I don't think I want to take away the whole system because I do agree with what you said it is a good system I think that the educational system in the UK is it's got two opinions I'm happy with it in a sense but I then go to loads of different other countries and I go and visit schools and they're so free and they're running about and they're climbing trees and it's just like Summerhill it's like my home but in other countries so I kind of have this mixed feeling between not being happy and the success rates are good A's, A's, A's, A's but then you need to look deeper into that I need to think is that person self-harming is that person wanting to jump off of that mountain is that person hating their life is that person getting on with their parents and I think before Summerhill I was the most dreadful child you could ever imagine and me and my mum even speak about it I was so bad, me and my mum had a bad relationship now we're best friends but we get on so, so well and I get on with everybody and I'm 18 people look at me and they're like wow you're 18, I thought you were 25 I don't know why that is but I think that's because I had the freedom from young age to then learn what I want and what I actually want and the decisions I make and just speaking openly and not caring what other people have to say I'm sorry I'm going to have to close it there because we are right out of time but I think it's quite right that Poppy Poppy has demonstrated that she's really happy and it's a great success so we can continue the debate over refreshments which are available downstairs I just want to say thank you to Peter and to all our panellists for a really interesting discussion