 School is our solution. It's our means of social and personal transformation. It's a tool of social justice, how we can rise up in a meritocratic society and ensure that everyone is best prepared to live amongst us. The world over in international and national documents of all sorts, the answer is school. How come though we still have such a long way to go despite seeing school as the answer for such a long time? I can see you all drawn to these fantastic drawings here. Kieran is thrilled, Kieran is here over there and they'll be littered throughout the whole of the presentation. I was having lunch with or supper or something with a Norwegian colleague and I'll mention Norway a few times because I've done a fair amount of work in there. I was talking about the 20% who don't benefit from education system and he was going back to the Warnock report and he was talking about it being a place of storage. Children are just passing through and the school remains beyond them. He talks about getting as many possible, passing as much as possible as quickly as possible, as cheaply as possible. He says that in Norwegian and so that's his rough translation form. Now I think given the social inequalities that are evident around us that perhaps 20% is an underestimation and I'll think about that and why that might be this evening. So one of the things that informs my thinking around this is a study that I did with Kieran and some other colleagues looking at special education in 50 different countries which we did for the National Council for Special Education in Ireland and we looked across 55 administrations and what was clear amongst many findings was that children were marginalised in all settings, in all countries. Who was marginalised and why they were marginalised varied from system to system but they were marginalised in every system and it's not like this is a big surprise. People know about this so UNESCO for example talk about access being dependent on reading now on powerful instances of circumstances such as wealth, gender, ethnicity and location over which people have little control and so on. But I think you could probably add a considerable number of other matters to that. You could add being summer-born, you could add having a parent on military duty, you could add experiencing emotional, physical, intellectual sensory challenges, you could add societal responses to sexuality, then there's influence of parental involvement, there's family structure, home language, there's reading, how many books are read at home, the national economic policy, all of these things have been demonstrated to have an input on the outcome of students. And experiences of difficulty and mental health which seems to have risen to the fore recently and seems to have been ignored for ages. I've just seen that my show started, my slide started out of sync so I've been going for 33 minutes so my timings on this are now shot. So I now have to write down, that's 33, okay, wish me luck. So marginalisation is frequently a consequence of hidden factors, processes which are rarely reflected upon. And one of the things that we've recognised is that there are a wide range of causal factors out there that we have no idea about. One of my favourite correlations is that the more baths you have as a child, the earlier you learn to read. Now I have a theory as to why that might be, but there are a range of factors that may emerge as being, I don't think baths really probably do, I think it's about the amount of times you read if you are the sort of parent who also give baths, but that's another issue. Okay, so an issue that's not mentioned in that list at all is monolingualism and the fact that so many children are marginalised, so many young people are marginalised in the education system which is fundamentally using one language. And it's one of the reasons that I'm standing up here now and I worked in Hackney which was for 30 nods years. In the last two or three years I've worked with a bunch of refugee children, they were young adults and they were in the sixth form and some of them were economic migrants as well and they were fantastic young women. And most of them were doing an ICT entry level foundation course and none of them passed. They all failed even though they were doing work that I couldn't do with using technology. But what they would do is they had a multiple choice English test that they had to do at the end and so they all failed, they did the year again, then they failed again, then they did the year again. After the third year of this one young woman failing I was so incensed, it was one of the reasons that I left. And that monolingual business is evident across nations. It's not just Hackney, it's Spain, it's California, it's Ghana, it's the Sammy in Norway. It's all around us and it's very basic presumptions about things like language that are embedded into emerging policies, that are embedded into emerging practices and types of schooling that have been established and that reinforce the inequalities of participation and access that already exist in the wider society. So here's a cracker, here's a safe play area built for a kid in Scotland. This was to make it nice and safe for him to play in the playground. Parents raised money for this one to happen, they then had to campaign to get it removed. Now the problem is what went on in someone's head to think that was what was meant by a safe play area. It was a head teacher in a primary school. So this is permanent exclusions per 100,000 pupils in England. As you can see there's more in secondary than there are in primary. On average there are 35 children being expelled per school day in this country. There's 6,685 children were permanently excluded from all primary, secondary and special schools in 2015-16. Robbie who sat at the back has just been, my son is sat in the middle, has just been basically suspended and excluded from his school after 7 days because they've decided, Plumpton College by the way, it's really not my cup of tea at the moment. And they have done nothing that was required in the Equalities Act to facilitate his access. It's another issue. I'm sure they would say something different. The number of fixed term exclusions in this country is 339,360. That was in 2015-16 which is roughly 4.29% of enrolments. Now you've got to accept that some of those children and young adults are going to have been excluded more than once across that period of time. But the public policy research that looks at it recently will say you add to that there's another 48,000 children who are being educated outside of the mainstream permanently, outside of secondary schools, of special schools. And that's roughly one in 200 pupils. This is happening too. And then you've got to look at a survey that was done of parents of autistic people and they were saying that it was only 365 people, it's not a huge or 370 odd or something. But it's not a huge survey but still 22% of them were saying that their children were being illegally excluded at least once a week and 15% of their children were being excluded once a day, every day, for the whole of their school career. I could go into figures in Scotland and so forth. Here's a good one. I love this one. Kieran, you're going to think- Girl, girl can't eat lunch with her friends at school because of a food allergy. Her mom says the segregation is unfair and hurtful. Nine on your sides, Brianna Harper. Talk to school officials about its reasonings for the policy. A mother is calling for a policy change here at the Children's House, a change that will make her daughter and other students feel more welcome and less separated. It's now become routine for Brandy Lynn Grosso to spend her lunch hour with her 5-year-old daughter Mia. She enjoys a packed lunch like most students but Mia's meal is gluten free. Going to, of course, the local Kroger and making sure we had the correct bread and the correct non-wheat products. These are just a few of the changes to Mia's diet after she was diagnosed with celiac disease. It's a disorder that makes it difficult to properly ingest gluten, causing intestinal pain. It's also one of many food allergies that the Children's House recognizes. Once you're identified as an allergy that you are sat at a different table alone, they did make me aware that if there was another child in the class that had an allergy that it would also sit with Mia. According to a representative from the school, this separate food allergy table is meant to protect students from sharing foods and causing a medical emergency. But Mia's mom says her daughter's condition is different. If she did happen to eat a piece of bread or something like that, it wouldn't cause a traumatic injury. Instead of having Mia sit alone, her mother chooses to pick her up for lunch each day in hopes of eliminating the idea of isolation. I didn't want her to view it in a poor light that there was something wrong with her. And she was starting to identify with that to where when we'd have family meals, she wouldn't eat at the island by herself. The school claims the food allergy table is not a targeted attack and there is a possibility that certain changes could be made in the future. Brianna Harper, 9 on your side. 9 on your side did reach out to one local child psychologist about this situation to learn more about its emotional impact on the kids. She tells us it's not uncommon for children to feel some isolation due to their food allergy. She says parents can help by fully explaining the condition to their child so they feel more accepted. That's really important. You've got to reach out to a psychologist to tell you this about that you're going to feel marginalized if you're made to sit at a table on your own. That's not onion news in case you're wondering. So this doesn't mean that dietary problems aren't an issue and it doesn't mean that they're not an issue for school. It does mean that we're probably not, this school is probably not responding to it in an appropriate manner. So one of the things I do is I've asked, say that I'm interested in people thinking about is the fundamental ways of approaching it. So I'll come back to behavior in a minute. But there are certain things that we do and that we do without question that are hugely problematic. And one of the key ones I believe is relying on the written word and our obsession with reading and writing. We seem to have, and it's because we use it as a main way. I don't have a problem with reading and writing. I think reading and writing is cracking. I think a good book is brilliant. Don't get me wrong. I'm reading for pleasure. Fantastic. It's great. But it's about it being the main means to always present, share and evaluate ideas. And we seem to have a belief that reading and writing is fundamental to everything we do as a society and that it is inherently more invaluable to individuals and society than other tools. Now personally speaking I think cooking is more important. I think probably building a house is more important. I'm reading and writing have a function to play but there are other things I think that are more important to us as a society. And one of the great things is that we haven't done it for very long. So if you went to a medieval play the ordinary would be stood behind the actor, whispering the words to the actor and then the actor would be doing the performance and the jump between actors. And I've seen Greg doing it and I promise you when he's doing it you don't see the ordinary stood behind him. You see him doing the acting and that's so easy for it to take place. And how many of you have dictated? I've dictated most of this. I don't write anymore and it can read it back to me. In fact I could go home and it could read it to you. So reading and writing is not being very important for very long and it won't be very important in the future either. It's fundamentally important to society but it's not absolutely everything that we need. It's certainly worth considering the consequences if you do. Now I'm about to show you something which is two problems with it. One is its functional literacy and people don't necessarily agree with functional literacy as a concept and they don't agree necessarily about the way the stats are drawn around it. It's also I'm not trying to say that this is absolutely certain but it's certainly worth seeing what happens around the world. Functional literacy measures and tests. This one was done in 2012. They'll be doing another one. I think they're doing one at the moment. And they go around all the country and they see what functional literacy people have and they reckon that below a level two you don't have the literacy to take advantage of the marketplace. So that kind of means that you're not in a good place with your language to get jobs. And if you look across the world the best country to be in, it's around about 30% of people in Japan are below a level two or below. So that means that they're not functional literacy as deemed by the OECD and others is not at that level. In France they're up at nearly just about 50% but most of us are around about 40 to 50% of the population are deemed to not be able to access the working workplace because of their literacy. So hang on. Our main means of teaching people is reading and writing and then when we put them in the workplace we say they can't do it and then we say it's something wrong with them or it's something wrong with our teaching system. Actually, I think how many of you can dance? I can't, my wife can. Caroline's a brilliant dancer. I'm rubbish. So we can't all be great at everything. So why should everybody be great at reading and writing? Some of us patently aren't. What's wrong with that? So maybe there are better ways of doing it. GCSEs kind of fit this. I mean I know they've gone up and down. So in the 1970s we were around about 30% getting 5 to 8 Cs and then we had grade inflation and now we've tried to push it back down again. But we were around about 60, 64% got 5 A to Cs and if you include in 2015 and that drops to 53.8% got maths and English and passed maths and English. So you're at that 40% of people who are struggling with reading and writing. I can't say it's definitely the reading and writing that's causing the problem but it does seem to be worth considering. It does seem to mean that our means of delivering and assessing the curriculum might well be dooming people to low levels of achievement. We can raise this by a small amount over a period of time. We can put a huge amount of depth in and get it down by 10% and it might take us 20 years but we've had 20 years of all those percentages that have been struggling as another one. This is slightly more recent. This one was last year. This one's in Australia but what's great is you can see the musical instruments there so you can just almost touch out to do something interesting. This is a cooling off area. So then you think about schools as your response. You see the problem of that image and you recognise that schools are a social place, a place where relationships should be taking place and you see a picture like that and you immediately feel this is awkward, this is wrong. So here's something, a study that was undertaken in Norway. I've looked for a similar study more recently. I haven't been able to find one and the point of this study is cited all over the place as being evidence that people with special educational needs or special needs as a study called it have less friends in school. The point of this study as it's reported you can see it's 14.3% with no nominations in primary, 24.3% in secondary but it's only 3.9% for peers and 2.4% for peers and that's what's reported in all the literature. But they published a second paper and you don't need to publish a second paper you just look at the data and this comes out. This is, I pulled this out. Actually the numbers are seven peers and two with special educational needs felt they had no friends in the primary and 27 peers and four with, I don't have special educational needs in secondary so we're approaching, you know, five, over five, six, seven percent of children saying we don't have any friends. Forget the special needs, we've got a problem with friendship in school and when you see something like that you understand there's some people have a problem with friendship in school but when you start seeing all the mental health issues that people have and one of the things, I've got a row of friends up there and one of them would have been at school with a year with me Simon was at school with me and he lived down the road from me and he's only my friend because he lived down the road from me. Not a single friend, there's Jan sitting over there he's ancient and he's my best mate because I get on with him, we have things in interest about each other, about endless topics that's what friendship's about and my friends from school, you know, there are one or two of them who were in the same year as me we expect everybody to get on, we put them together friendship is a problem so how am I trying to explain this? Well, this is my expansive model of interdependence now with an N in it, thank you I originally had it saying A expansive model and it was pointed out at the rehearsal that I got it wrong and it's meant to be a representation of a sociocultural understanding of the world that we live in and the point of a sociocultural understanding is it's constantly shifting and moving we define it by our relationships we define it by who we are within a context and a situation and this is time to represent this chaotic, dynamic social, environmental, biological processes in which we are situated and boundaries are permeable absolutes here are always an illusion but they're an illusion of time if you spend enough time in one place it feels like you're in a permanent place but of course you're not entropy is ongoing and even labelling the components of this complex interplay reduces our capacity to represent fundamental interrelationships which are going on within there and within all of this learning is a social process it's a moment of social interplay within an ever-shifting whole so that's how I see it and the problem for that is in a world of completing, competing and contradictory, endless uncertainty what we all want is we want certainty we want to feel secure we want to believe we're in the mainstream so we have this sense that this is what we're all together we're all in this together folks and we're chugging along qualifications you could put on there careers you could put on there peers, subjects, schools instead of mainstream all of those things give us that sense we're all together, it's nice and secure going along here at best there are metaphor for certainty and education has become positioned as an ongoing, lifelong work-related pathway that you can follow through it's presented about being about hope education is your hope for the future you never finish it you'll die and you still could do another qualification and the narrative of personal transformation and social justice is mixed up with this talk about individual employability, economic and competitiveness of yourself and of the nation all these 21st century skills that we're meant to have that are going to make us there right for the workplace and to ensure the boundaries of the mainstream the flow we currently have a policy discourse which is around choice and around efficiency and around standards which are going to define this mainstream and it's going to make sure it flows the boundaries are all clear and we're all cosy and it feels it's like that but then when you look at what schools actually look like when you go to schools actually it doesn't provide the certainty that we want it to provide Norway this is a Norwegian Minister of Education school is about politics and nothing else Norwegian Minister of Education research in an interview with a researcher and when I see this why can he say this I take it to mean he means politics is a macro level and a micro level down between us and up there in schools but partly I think it's because as much as school is about ensuring that it's about transformational learning schools are also about sorting people they're about ensuring we maintain our social structures schools are about creating success and failure if we have, I'll repeat that schools are about creating success and failure they can't be anything else if we have a system which is premised on norms, on levels ages, grades as ours is it has to create failure despite having a Minister for Education and a Head of Ofsted who said we can get everybody to be average some will be better at things than others I've got the quote here but I'm not going to use it because I run out of time so that's one of my favourite things that one and it's one of the things where you draw something and you suddenly realise you understand something I suddenly realise every word associated with school is about division not every word but our main words so here's our mainstream you know you could have local authorities, middle, private, child minors, academies comprehensive, secondaries secondary moderns, homeschooling there you go, we've got it in it could be a range of these things we could, I haven't included Montessori, Steiner special schools, buying payment category Pruse Eaton Harrow, Saturday community schools they're not in there we could divide it up according to qualifications or funding streams or a curricula for example and then when you put that on that's actually what our education system feels like it isn't a mainstream it's a collection of overlapping, it's part of the division it's an overlapping identities, emerging relationships that's situated between these dynamic processes circumstances, structures and histories and these schools disparities create economic philosophical and wide socio-cultural divisions they influence fundamental life choices for people and they they make us they divide us but we believe that in some way we're not divided and that's problematic and that's why as the Minister for Education said it's all about politics folks because it's all about jostling for your position within this so, school is also another I've got another fundamental problem which is it's about separating a child world from an adult world through its internal structures it perpetuates that and takes that further that separation and subdivision so even if we didn't have all the different types of the categories that we were talking about the notion of school itself is one about clustering people according to age I've mentioned that feeling I had about friendship but the same thing goes about age actually we try and say people are developmentally like this or developmentally like that but actually interest isn't developmental age is actually a very clumsy way of putting people together convenient for us but clumsy yeah so our school structure represents how we understand childhood we understand childhood as this place of practice we take you away into an unreal place your practice and then you come out and you're ready for the real world and you pass your tests and you come through childhood and you practice separation from people as much as you practice togetherness with people so you're identified by your difference and I don't mean that by you've got Down syndrome you've got ADHD you're identified by I do biology history and sociology you are a different human being to one who does art Welsh no they don't do trials and pressing whatever but you see what I mean you are a different or you're the person who just does art and Welsh because you're not allowed to do anything else you're a fundamentally different person and the heart of who we we study our school identity is who we study with and what we study what we study and with whom so let's start with what we study so Borgia did a review of the French education system in the 90s and one with a colleague whose name has just slipped my mind at the moment and he identified the subject as a core barrier to transforming the education system and the subject is a core barrier to this because the subject is a backbone of the status quo you can only change a subject by being an expert in a subject you're only listening to me because Mary said I'm a professor and I got made a professor and now I've risen up I've risen up through the through this technical rationality of the education system 30 years ago when I was a student my knowledge wasn't as great and I then had to pass exams and move forward and up and up and up and now I've reached this dizzy height and the thing that makes me reach the top of the heights I do research so that's kind of like places you at the top of this technical rationality ladder and you must pass through the levels to be respected and you can't be just the fact I'm a I'm a professor I can't go and tell the physicist how to do their job yeah I've that in that area I've got no knowledge at all I'm useless so I'm only good if I'm in my place so there's a wonderful story Caroline and I were attending a local church which had been invited to go to there was a friend there was someone we knew and they wanted to speak to the to the congregation before they died and he told this story and the story he said is I started at school and I was doing O-Level physics and they taught me about the atom and I understood about the atom and I did my O-Level exam and I passed my O-Level exam and it was fantastic and I got to my first year of A-Level and they told me that what I'd learnt about the atom in the first year of my O-Level was wrong so they re-taught me about that and then they got to the second year of A-Level and they told me what they taught me in the first year of my A-Level about the atom was wrong anyway I passed the A-Level I got to university I knew about the atom and in the first year at university they told me what I'd learnt at the A-Level about the atom was wrong and then the second he said by the second year I'd got it and actually I spent the whole of my life as a low orbit astrophysicist not him it was his topic area he was studying in the atom and he died or he said I still don't know what the atom is now if he had done the O-Level he knew what the atom was or if he was a really bright physicist who wasn't going on through A-Levels he probably didn't but he'd be fairly convinced that someone up there did and the problem with subjects is it really does encourage us to think there's an expert out there who's got the answer now I'm all for expertise not knowledge you get from a book as much as your capacity to do something in the moment that's useful your capacity to be an expert when it's needed not this thing that I've got because I'm now a prof I'm no good at French folks don't get me into do French teaching and subjects also this creating this cellular view they also who studies what subjects girls study certain types of sciences these are more like study arts particular art subjects particularly science subjects particular types of children study vocational subjects so the subject again defines the identity of us and I haven't started on ability grouping which all the research shows fundamentally if you put a child in a low ability group what's going to happen is you're going to have lower expectations and lower outcomes if you put them in a higher ability group you're going to have higher expectations higher outcomes and there's going to be some kind of impact on their social identity now it's an awful lot easier for teachers it is much easier to teach you know if you group people up it's actually it's not it just feels it once you've actually done the other you realize it's not but it feels it's really quite frightening it's about certainty I think but that's another paper that John Perry and I are working on and I'm not allowed to talk about it so so the other thing that does it is class and the class separates us up it's a vehicle for the subject it separates us up according to age it separates us up according to ability subject area it's the realm of the class teacher it's where long term relationships take place between the people and the teachers it's hierarchical traditionally it organizes the daily timetable and at the heart of it are the attitudes of the teacher which they exemplify to the other pupils so this is the means by which the teacher expresses how other children should respond to a child within the class and the other children demonstrated as well and there's so much research evidence to show that teacher characteristics and teachers understandings of difficulties and identities of children within their class can initiate can exacerbate can resolve can mediate problematic behaviors and there's strong evidence that Kieran and I we did a review of looking at special educational effective provision for children with special educational needs and one of the key findings was that teachers who take responsibility for all children have a profoundly different way of communicating with the child to the teachers who see the child as being the responsibility of someone else which is what a huge number of teachers do in this country often not because they don't want to have the time with other children but they don't feel they've got the time to be with these other children so they will say things like get your pencil out sit down, have you done your homework whereas the teacher who sees the child as their responsibility will say so then what do you think we mean by 3 plus 2 how do you understand that so how are you going to make that happen let's talk about learning in a completely different way another one that's lovely disabled children frequently taken and put out they're given their therapy sessions in break that's great or they're taken out of the subject that they're good at so that they can do because there's a lovely piece of work where the guys taken out the stairs go nowhere and the guys taken out of maths because he's good at maths so the classes are I've got loads of stories about that but and this is the thing is that the fundamental problem with the class is this need to control the teacher has to control the situation we just saw a video earlier on we were just looking from India how many kids do you reckon were in that class 50, 90 one teacher, 90 students and he hadn't control but your problem if you're a teacher is you face children who have difficulties you've got three options you either get the kid out you change your practice or in some ways you change the child's behaviors and the easiest one is to get them out put in an intervention program to change their behaviors the hardest one is to change your practice and the problem is that the behaviors that are causing us problems in school the main reason that people are suspended and kicked out is because they don't behave school in the school way so how many of you put your hands up before you speak how many of you call other people sir or miss one of the things I love is the golden rules that are in class which supposedly are always written with the children and they're always exactly the same every year and one of them will always say do not interrupt we do not interrupt it will say in the class it says right be quiet so the first thing a teacher does is interrupt and break their golden rules golden rules don't apply to teachers should bells, hands up to talk sitting in silence and listening to one person talking at us this is education collective punishment you could say that sitting and having to listen to one person talking is collective punishment but we don't do collective punishment but we do in school we're drafted into school we have to follow the rules perhaps this should not be a surprise though so much of this is rooted in history other things that we've done so one of my favourite ones is drill in the 1890s drill was introduced into this country and schools were paid on the basis that they did drill it's in the law and if they didn't do drill then they had to charge children and this was Swedish drill I was in school we were still doing it in the 60s and 70s weren't we Simon we were doing drill and drill is amazingly I was just checking this out thinking this is still going on so in Queensland earlier on this year a high school has implemented military classes twice a week to tackle behaviour and it's very common to hear that what we need is more military in school this emerges from a fear of the Prussians and other countries were fearful of other groups and that's why they put it in the legislation and it's still here it's still there in our behaviour what we believe is the right behaviour in schools our notions of punishment and yeah so we seek control over the collective but because it's education and because we're humans so we have to do it through the individual but as I said earlier this learning process is social so we've got all these contradictions so here's the one that really bugs me it's an obsession with individuals so what I've got here is a research project Alice Page Smith sadly not with us she died a couple of years ago Alice was great and she and I did a research project and we went away and we did some research with families over a five month period and we went to hang out in their house it was great we took them for pizzas it was fantastic and they were doing early intervention in all the places they did early intervention we went and watched them and we interviewed them, we interviewed all the practitioners we had a really good time and fascinating project and about a year later we were starting to think about the importance of context and we came up with this way of thinking about it and we went back to the data to explore it and Rogoff's lens and that you look at the world one of the things to recognise is that if you hold up a lens what you've got is all this other stuff is around you, it's still going on you just happen to be looking through the lens at that moment so this is what you're focusing on and in talking to the the practitioners what was evident was that when they talked about the child and the child's learning context they were aware to a certain degree about personal, professional, cultural, situational values, beliefs, practices knowledge, underlying assumptions that was implicit in their conversation they referred to this stuff and then when they talked about the child they talked about the community, the services the self, the pedagogy, professional practices peers, funding, everything the child was just one factor and then we went away and we got one child's paperwork nine years old 5.75 kilos of paperwork and we went through it all and we found the paperwork that mentioned context and it was 150 pages around it was 75, 750 grams of paperwork that was and we went through all of that and we looked for context and in that we found the only mention of context was a focus on the child's performance in an activity noting the presence of an adult discussing issues of behaviour generalising mentions of other children only once was their mention of how a child's interaction with his peers supported his learning and only one mention of policy so this is what emerged from the paperwork there's the child nothing but we all know it's this all the teachers know it's this all the health workers, all the parents everybody knows it's this but this is what our system makes you focus on and exams do exactly the same thing your GCSEs, your A-levels they do exactly the same thing so how would you represent I wanted to think of a way to represent you oh rubbish, there we go this is the biopsychosocial model a World Health Organisation use it it's very popular, I don't necessarily agree with it but it's a way of understanding the person, the individual who's got a problem so it's a way of understanding disability and impairment and so you look at the biological aspects of someone's life their psychological aspects of their life the social aspects of their life and then you use those as the basis for your assessment what's brilliant is that there have been research projects that show that when it's applied this model for instance, there was one in Portugal I saw people just didn't bother with those two they just took the biopsychological they just bothered which was a traditional stuff this was the bit that was added to try and radically change things in the model so you take this model of the individual and you do all this assessment and you spend a great deal of time and money doing this assessment and then you do that what was the point of it? everything's just moved all you've got, the best you've got is a momentary snapshot of this person and it's the same when you do your exams it's the same when you do because the idea that I've stopped growing I have this argument with my daughter the other day that I haven't stopped growing you're aging, it's different you're aging, it's different I'm still an ongoing process and this creates the other that's the other thing, this creates separates us we are now the other you do different exams, you've got a different label and our school system's doing it so the other thing is you can't rely on it so this is looking at I did this in 2013-2015 I haven't done it again since to be honest I thought I'd proved the point to myself these are the diagnosis that is used by local authorities nowadays they have four categories of special educational needs that's included within the code of practice but these categories are still being reported backed by the local authority because these are the ones so they're still being used or they were in 2015 and these are the top ten local authorities that used a diagnosis and the bottom ten local authorities that used the diagnosis because you had some wacky outliers for instance autism an autistic spectrum disorder in one local authority 3.47% of children were diagnosed with autism in another local authority was 22.37 are you telling me there's the water difference is that great between those local authorities and this is in any single one of these categories it's four times more in the top ten local authorities that use it than in the bottom ten local authorities that use it even a physical disability or a hearing impairment the only one that's not, which is 2-1 is to do with behaviour now called social emotional and mental health I could show you so many more things like this that just show you can't rely on these ways of evaluating and measuring and I would say the same thing applies to our education system or generally of course individual support see Kieran, it gets to people Kieran Kieran hates him of course individual support and diagnosis can be useful but understanding it's stupid if I've got a problem I want a doctor who's going to be able to say there's something wrong with me if you've got someone in the class who's struggling in a class or with a group of people to have someone who's got experience of working with someone to help them, enable them to engage in that process that's great but to spend all your time doing the assessment before you do it or whilst you're doing it just seems daft which is a technical term and more importantly to me in many ways and I think Janet was talking about the political earlier on today is it doesn't provide a mechanism by which we can challenge the legacy practices or the wider social context if we're always focusing on the individual we can't challenge this bigger stuff and it's the bigger stuff that I'm trying to point out today so let's finish this little section the Simpsons because let's do it to it grammar that is everybody write down the sentence and circle the nouns as far as the newest addition to our menagerie you have the honors um well let's start by reading the sentence two winterman jolly words so have you never learned cursive well I know hell damn it script multiplication tables long division I know of them you know Bart I think you'd profit from a more remedial environment I'm sure you'll feel right at home in the leg up program so what are you in for I moved here from Canada and they think I'm slow eh jam and when I woke up I was in here I start fires ok now everyone take out your safety pencil in the circle of paper this week I hope we can finish our work on the letter a let me get this straight we're behind the rest of our class and we're going to catch up to them by going slower than they are stop it stop it warren melvin gary dot gordy lady I'm supposed to be in the fourth grade sounds to me like someone's got a case of the suppose does everyone's a winner ok so we are going to come on to discuss this in the in the session afterwards as well but I'll just spend the last few minutes having a look at this we may wish to be education schools to be about transformation we may write about that in our policy document but it is also fundamentally about sorting and control that's the purpose of the education system and our processes of sorting and control control constrain the transformation of individuals and wider society so how can we move beyond the limitations of our pedagogy our curriculum our assessment which are inextricably linked to these processes of sorting and control we need to look beyond the taking for granted skills and behaviors of school to ask what do we want people to learn what is the best way to support them to learn it and we've got to remember that people have been saying what I've been saying for an awfully long time nothing that I've said really is new I've just updated the examples so it's not like we haven't heard this message before so we can do something about it and really it comes down to we need to consider how we group people how we group learners how we enable them to learn together how we evidence that learning so it's trusted and to do that I would maintain that we have to look beyond the individual we need to build on the social learning practices the social learning the social nature of learning processes so we need to break open the class now schools are already doing this there are plenty of schools and I'm sure James will talk about how schools are doing this now all around the world but there are plenty of schools that are not and we must allow for individual work we must allow for small group work we must allow for large group work we must allow online virtual work people need to have public sharing it needs to have an opportunity to be authentic and real but people also need privacy they must have that ability to get away from the public of it in different places they must be used to that and they must work with different people for different reasons not just because they're the same age or theme to be the same ability but because I've got a list here so I might as well read it they share an interest they like each other they need to get on life is random for support to support to learn from each other to want to achieve the same standard because you still have people who want to you're always going to have people who want to work trying to do something together and you need some people are going to need specific or regular support to be able to do something and that's cool you don't need to throw the baby out with the bath water some people want to avoid distraction, time, privacy and school space comes up again we keep coming up today in our conference today we've been having it's a physical place but it's a place which creates identities and routines local identities and routines and space is socially, culturally historically situated and constructed it's an interlink and it's between people as well as around people and it frames our actions and our understandings and we frame the space by our actions and our understandings so these new schools are open they're supposed to encourage collaboration exploration self-direction they're created in this way because it's understood that relationships, structures and routines and educational support create and emerge from space but it's not just walls and breakout spaces old practices can re-emerge in a new space old buildings can be re-understood so nowadays when you do reading for pleasure when you do the reading sessions in class people are not to sit at desks and look like traditional readers but they're still all reading in silence you've all got to do it so we've gone one way but we've still got a problem in there in the way that we've constructed that space so we need to reconceive the class space and the relationships within it it needs to reflect those permeable boundaries, those dynamic relationships that we were talking about and the pedagogy, it's really interesting what we're talking about today is about how teachers have lost their ability to talk about curriculum because it's been taken from us curriculum is something that comes from above now so I've put curriculum in some ways in a bracket but pedagogy is things that have emerged from sociocultural social constructivist viewpoints ideas around scaffolding, zones of proximal development learning communities communities of practice, these things are all language that's used in relation to schools frequently now it's understood teachers get this and lots of policy makers get this as well I mean particularly outside this country it's gobsmacking to read policies that recognise this and the the pedagogies that emerge for instance when Kieran and I did our study is actually good teaching for all the pedagogies that don't require specific expertise they move from the teacher at the front model they're rooted in social relationships so the things around collaboration, feedback peer support multiple literacies and I think like routines, creating routines it comes from a behaviourist paradigm but even that's about a social relationship it's about creating those social moments in the learning situation and showing outside is a way to create the space within the curriculum for this which is far more open-ended activities so we've got a film that's showing out there fabulous one from Finland about how deep do fish swim in winter which hopefully will have subtitles there's one from the states about equity in science another one about art lessons I'm coming to I'm nearly at the end so this is my almost but last slide the bit that I think is probably the most important to enable this to happen it shouldn't be but is assessment we need to get away from this individualised subject-based model of validating learning and I mean that in universities as well although we probably have got more of a get out clause because we have this entry point you have to pass to get into us we're supposed to be academic so maybe we can argue about so final assessment subject-based model of validating versus what I would suggest we need to do is to focus more on collective activity and key social interactions and capacities to do that and this would open up the pedagogy and the curriculum for teachers if we are evaluating understanding and behaviour in context we give ourselves time and space to step back we step back as learners and as teachers we're encouraged to plan for the social participation to plan to include people in the collective and participation therefore becomes about a meaningful engagement in process school becomes less about dividing and more about and dividing to achieve a goal and more about seeking whatever will bring people together to enable learning of course we need to evaluate the collective endeavour fairly and representative in a way that's trusted and that's a key thing that schools have got to do they've got to send this person out into this world so that the world can feel that they know them and start to situate them in the world outside now personally speaking I would advocate a CV I can't understand why we can't have CVs we have them in the workplace why we can't have them coming out of school I've been working with Peter who we'll be talking later on a sociocultural way of evaluating professional development that could also be used in a context of a CV I would also be moving away from a collective model of planning and I wrote a paper in 2007 which is outside which was a model for just a completely different way of social education so that it looks at the collective and how you fund the collective it would reduce lots of things and free up the time for the professionals to actually work with children rather than assess them it seems to me that we have a lot of simple things that we could do that would actually just require a change in understanding about how we want to assess and evaluate and that would open up the space for the pedagogy and a change curriculum so school and I think teachers want to do this that's the other thing I think teachers are constrained yeah so school is our decent social response to social injustice but it is also our response to the need for social control when we look at our individualised divisive model however we can see how we perpetuate injustice and disharmony if we embrace the social nature of learning in our community spaces our pedagogy and our assessment we will get much closer to achieving both the social justice and the social control we seek and I think that's really important I think actually it would make schools better at what we say we want them to do which is to have that control I think if it comes from people they're going to be much better at it and it will also provide all those skills of collaboration and so forth that governments say that they want and are seeking so school is our solution and I'm back at the beginning and you've got that on my final slide thank you very much