 I would start off by saying that I think that schools generally fail about 40 percent, that's about around about 40 percent of the population. If you look at all the different groups of people who have failed by schools. What do you mean when you say failed? They're going to come out of school without a decent entry point into society and social systems. So if you look at all the people who've got all the various disability categories, if you look at all the people who've got English as additional language, if you look at people who have had all those other areas that the research has shown are going to have a negative experience within school, I think it comes up at around about 40 percent. I don't disagree that some people are not served well by school, but there are some people who are not served well by nursery, by the family they're in, by the church they attend. All structures and institutions make a difference. They have positive consequences and negative consequences. And because there are some challenges for some people at the end of school it shouldn't mean that we say school is bad for us, bad for society. But I wouldn't think that the family and the church set out to actually separate the society up. Whereas I think schools have a fundamental role to identify those people who can achieve and can't achieve within society. And so inevitably you're going to have a large percentage of people who are going to fail within the education system. Well they're separating them often for educational purposes and there are often segregation in schools for issues of control, issues of number, you've got large numbers. I mean how was it in the first place in the 1880s? It wasn't set up for transformation then, it was set up for control, yes? From my understanding of this you set up for people so they could enter the factories, so that you could have a workforce, you could have people who could start to understand the processes that were going on within an industrial society. It was also set up because of fear of the Prussians and wanting to have social control, people who would join the army and be good military fodder. At that point they were only going up till 10, it was only statutory until 10 it became army fodder later. People in the 1890s were drilled at school so it was a requirement of that and there's plenty of people within the historians who would say that that was a key factor in producing an army in the First World War who were happy to march into the guns because not just in the UK, but in other countries too they had been regimented through the school system. I mean earlier you were saying there were kind of what you saw as two reasons for schooling, one was transformation and one was control. Are you still agreeing with that? Absolutely. Well surely the transformation is good for you if you're saying schools are bad for society. The transformational potential of schooling is good for one. Throughout history, people are getting access to reading and writing and books and other people who have pushed them to ask questions has transformed and changed their lives. But that was when schools were for a few. As we've rolled it out and we've made schools for the many we didn't start with the transformation argument. The transformation argument, school is good for you, school is going to change your life, it's something that's occurred only in the last 20, 30, 40 years. I think there are schools that are really good at that and just because your argument is they're bad for you, they're bad for society, because there are challenges for a core number and I'm not denying that there are challenges. It's challenging to organise education for large numbers and some secondary schools are very large. It's perhaps easier in primary because of class sizes but either way surely schools have got to be advantageous. They are advantageous more than they are disadvantageous. They are advantageous for the maintenance of the status quo. They're advantageous for people to ensure that we maintain our systems and our processes in much the way that they are currently. If you're actually looking for genuine social transformation, if you're looking for social justice, no, I don't think schools are doing that. I think a few people will emerge through the system and their lives will be socially transformed but they are the minority. I don't know, I don't know the statistics. What I do know is that there are many schools in this country, particularly, which I've visited, which are making a significant social transformational change for large numbers of their students in those schools, where they're committed to a creative vision opportunity for all and they're looking and mining their figures, their numbers, their stats in terms of achievement, saying how could we reorganise differently to enable this group to achieve more? So it isn't the case that they're all clutched together in one building and left to rot as it were. Actually, actually, funnily enough, there are some children who are pulled out and they're not left to rot, but there are children who are pulled out of school and spend a great deal of time out of school. School exclusions are going up and up and up. You've got experiences of children with a wide variety of what is labelled in this country as special educational needs who are marginalised. For instance, a survey of parents of children on the autistic spectrum, around about 22% of the children were being illegally excluded at least once during the week. So there are people who have been put into the corner and forgotten and it's an education system that is designed to do this. It is designed to do it. And so you may have a few good schools or a lot of good schools that are managing well to achieve social transformation, but some good schools achieving social transformation doesn't mean that the whole system isn't still going to guaranteed to produce failure. Well, it's not guaranteed to produce collective failure, is it? And there are, even for those children who are excluded one day a week and I'm not saying that's advantageous, there are advantages with being together in a context that's fostering their learning. If we focus on learning, not on schooling, then we can see there are huge advantages to schooling like being part of a community, belonging, having the opportunity to collaborate with other young people. If you're looking at home education, that's a different piece. But the things that you're talking about are things that businesses would say that they want. Businesses would say that they want collaboration. Businesses would say that they want creativity. Businesses would say that they would want to have a cultural awareness and understanding, use of languages. They don't say they want reading and writing. They don't say that they want numeracy and literacy. Those things are down the order of businesses requirements. They're up the order of politicians' requirements and they're up the order of exam boards requirements. I don't know that I agree with you because business needs a literate and a numerate workforce is where any business needs somebody who can competently. And they have that. The system produces that, but we just push and push and push at those particular things, saying that we need more of that and we need to focus more on it. I think what you're saying is part of the challenge of the schooling system currently is that the pressure on assessment in relation to the core of reading, writing and numeracy is so great that the standards and those are being pushed at the expense of the rest. Not just that. Also, we use reading and writing as the means by which we assess and create the curriculum for all the subjects, the vast majority of the subjects. So even if you're doing PE, you're writing an exam. If you're doing a practical subject, you end up having to do a multiple-choice assessment. And so we create these barriers. And that's why, you've mentioned home education. That's why so many parents take their children out because they feel the system is oppressing their children and not the... Certainly there's evidence of young people's stress now, more stress, higher levels of negative wealth. You know, not feeling very confident, feeling very stressed, very anxious in school. And the skill set that we need, not only in terms of creativity and collaboration, but certainly in terms of coping with uncertainty, handling tension is a key skill for the 21st century. We don't know what's around the corner. We don't know what jobs they're going to be able to access themselves. So handling the unknown is a key skill. Now I would say that is more easily developed in collaboration with others in a schooling context than necessarily in home. I'm against home education. I just conscious that it isn't going to be feasible to offer home education to all. So we have these institutions. We have to hold on to them. Surely what we should be doing as an institution, as a university, is working alongside. Indeed we are working alongside schools to investigate what works for whom, in what context, who's being disadvantaged here, and then try to collaborate to improve what is on offer. Surely that's what we should be doing. I would accept that there's a great deal of good work that goes on in schools. There's a great deal of good work that goes on in universities. And the research can actually point you towards some really excellent practices that schools could be carrying out. But the fundamentals of the system as it's structured stops those from being carried out. And so the fantastic work that you do on Reading for Pleasure is not something that can be easily rolled out in the context of a top-down curriculum of the sort that we have in this country and many countries have. Reading for Pleasure is an interesting example because it has been mandated. At one level it's kind of an irony. It's a legal requirement you must read for Pleasure, and all the children in the country. But actually, teachers can develop children's Reading for Pleasure and commitment to that agenda by enticing, engaging, cajoling, offering very rich texts, reading aloud. We've developed a new website that's focused on that recently. And we've got 40-odd teacher reading groups around the country, teachers who are committing time outside school to read in their own with one another in small groups but to read their own literature but also children's literature and then go back into the classroom with a wider repertoire that means they can share with children read aloud from a wider range of texts. But the key thing in that kind of frame is that's really about more informal opportunistic, still planned, still principled, underpinned by research but opportunistic spaces to develop children as readers.