 Hello and absolute pleasure to have Robert Peel on the Teacher's Toolkit podcast today. I've been completely battering Robert to come on the podcast for a long time now as he'll find out when we have our conversation. He's got a huge amount of experience in teaching and education. He also is an amazing author. He's a historian. He's a co-head. So we've got so, so much to talk about this evening. So thank you so much Robert for coming on the podcast. Can you just tell us a little bit about your background, where you came from, how you worked yourself up to become the co-head of West London Free School and sort of what you're focusing on now. That'd be great. Absolutely. So I became a teacher in 2011 and started teaching in Birmingham. The first admit when I started teaching I wasn't entirely sure that it was the career for me but really, really fell in love with it and moved to West London Free School in 2014, where I've been ever since, and I became an assistant head there in 2016 and then a deputy head a few years later and then very soon after becoming a deputy head myself, my fellow deputy became joint head teacher. So I'm doing currently. Absolutely brilliant. And like it's just a whirlwind for you but obviously you worked your way up quite quickly I suppose. The first time I ever met you is that I came to West London Free School because you organised a history conference and I remember sitting there and I think you were just so above and beyond anything that I'd ever seen before. And I remember going back to my head teacher and going, I just don't understand how he's done that. So I think you were saying something about you might spend a whole lesson or a whole big chunk of time reading with a class and interrogating a text together and I sort of asked you the question, well how do you showcase that to an offset inspector? And when I went back to my head teacher at the time he said, well did you look in his books? And I said, well no, I didn't and he said, well yeah, obviously that's how he would do it. But it was just really inspiring for me actually and that's why I wanted to get you on is because I just wanted to get inside your brain a little bit more as well. Either for being ahead of the curve in terms of history or the quite quick ascent at the West London Free School, both have just been biden to the fact that free schools are very peculiar places to work and it was incredibly hard work and very stressful when I was first there. We didn't decide and there were all sorts of things that weren't in place but the one massive benefit was that gave you a blank slate just to think very innovatively about things like curriculum and it meant that we didn't have any inherited ways of working. We didn't have any inherited schemes work. When I first started there was only years seven, eight, nine and ten so I could spend almost all the time thinking about key stage three. So a licence and a blank slate on which to do things a reasonably innovative way although increasingly with every year in the past it feels like what we're doing is normal which I suppose is a nice thing. Absolutely. So just I'm picking your story behind being a co-head because obviously I'm very into that so I used to be a co-head and then went off maternity leave and I've come back as something slightly different so I didn't really know what to do and I'm just really struggling to get back into that position again as co-head and obviously I'm from secondary schools in Suffolk and you're in London so I just wanted to know sort of your background and your experience of it and how it's going. So it's going wonderful and I think it's a brilliant model if you can make it work however I think it's dependent in our case my co-head teacher is called Ben McLaughlin. He's in charge of pastoral and behaviour concriculum and I think it works very well but because of quite fortuitous circumstances which are that we both joined the school at the same time in 2014 we both became deputy head teachers at the same time. A huge amount of respect for what each other does but absolutely zero desires to each other's job. We were very good friends which helps and the year on we've remained very good friends. I'm long made at last so I joked with members of staff that it works if it's a love match but if it's in a range of marriage I don't think it necessarily has the chance of succeeding so I think it has, it has to be very particular circumstances. I wonder if they're the same as when you became joint head teacher that it was someone who you'd known for some time. Yeah and so we, I mean he joined the year ahead of me but at the same age, same point in our careers, became assistant heads together. I'm on the ying to his yang so he was progress standards and I was sort of teaching and learning a curriculum and obviously we actually had somebody, somebody else to sort of run on the behaviour but obviously we both did behaviour at the same time as that. So we were actually part of a free school too within that trust and it was quite small at the time so you just, it just worked really really well for it. Obviously now I want it back. I mean I, yeah, yeah I really do think it feels like a, it also I think both of, both Ben and I thought that we were years away ever being a head teacher when we were appointed but when the idea was suggested to us that we might be joint head teachers that felt feasible. So it feels like a very nice way into school leadership as well. Yeah I think it's a, I mean maybe it's still a honeymoon period. I don't think we'll be ready either but because we did it together you just had that support didn't you? One of our... So what are some of the focuses at the moment for you as a head? Cos obviously we're coming, we're still coming through a pandemic. I've seen, you know, operationally it just became an operational nightmare so every day your focuses weren't necessarily implementing a long, a long haul plan around teacher learning and curriculum. It was more about you know figuring out the cover and figuring out who's going to stand in front of the staff members for example. So what's, what's your focus at the moment in the West London Free School or as a head? So just getting up to speed with that and also keeping our heads above water with duple absences, absences, cover being harder than that. Yeah that, that has kept us occupied for the most part this year. We have done new things at the school but I think it has been mostly operational and I think even if it weren't for Covid that would have been the case because we just be sort of getting our feet under the desk and getting used to the role. And the other thing is the school is in a pretty good position. There wasn't a burning platform for change to what we were doing. So goodness I think in the years, in the couple of years we've actually booked out some time over half term to have a, to probably have a think about this and write to the school's development plan ready for next year. But the, in terms of teaching and learning, the big thing that we're really focusing on this year and we'll continue to focus on next year is pupil dialogue in the classroom. So one of the things that we've always been very clear about at the West London Free School is that we like teaching led lessons and we think that there's a good evidence base to that. We think from what we see around the school that that is for the most part the best way for pupils to learn. However, we are aware there is the danger that pupils become mentally passive. It is easier in those sorts of lessons perhaps to fool the teacher into thinking that you're learning when you're not actually. So we've been doing a lot on encouraging teachers to check for understanding, encouraging teachers to get pupils not just to speak in lessons but to speak well. We have various initiatives for that. It feels like something that we, I think we've improved this year on, but there's still some way to go. And even if it's one of those things that even if it had zero impact on pupil outcomes, we would still be wanting because, irrespective of what pupils get, the confidence to be able to speak in front of their peers and the willingness and ability to project their voice in a room is just one of those benefits that everyone should have from being at school. So that, I mean, in terms of teaching and learning, that's one of the big focuses. We, I think we still got work that we can do in helping our lower prioritizers. We, I think at the top end pupils at the West Anne Free School do really well. We have pupils getting into Oxbridge every year since the sixth form started. We've had four Oxbridge offers in history this year, which has been wonderful, which is 50% of the Oxbridge offers for the school, which we're very happy about. But I think that there's more work that we could be doing with the low prioritizers, particularly when it comes to literacy. We've got someone who's starting new at the school in September who's going to have responsibility teaching literacy to groups of low prioritainers, but also a better common language throughout the school and how we talk about sentence construction and paragraph construction. So then, yeah, those are two teaching and learning things that we're focusing on. And we have, as a third one of the big focuses that we've had this year is rewards. So we have a very tight, very effective behaviour system, which is integral to the school running well. But I think it has in the past been at the expense of recognising pupils doing things positively. It's a much more system. And I think kind of tied in with the pupil voice thing as well. We want pupils to speak more in front of their peers. So we have had, we've done more public speaking events at the school. But I would love if I could find the time in assemblies every week for pupils to their peers in assembly. That's something I've been quite a lot of reading on oracy. And especially yeah, because we're from Suffolk as well. And it's getting students to be able to go to a dinner party with anybody who goes to a public school and to be the same as them. So, you know, so that you've got exactly the same sort of vocabular and you've got exactly the same, you're exposed to the same types of texts and anything so that you're put in the right place to compete with them when it comes to Oxford, when it comes to Cambridge and things. I really agree. And if you go to, if you go to a public school, especially with a Church of England public school, which most they will have readings in chapel. And I would love for our school, which doesn't have a faith affiliation to have a secular equivalent of that to put together a selection of readings that could be read and repeated kind of year on year. So pupils get to know them. And, you know, we have 39 teaching weeks in a year. We've got 130 pupils. So if you have an assembly every week in three years, you could give every pupil the opportunity to speak in front of their peers in assembly, delivering one of these readings. So that's something that we would would love to put in next year. Yes, that sounds absolutely brilliant. I'd like to come and see that. That'd be absolutely really great. So can you talk us through a little bit about you as an author? So obviously you've published some textbooks, you've published a very good book called Progressively Worse and obviously more recently Meet the Georgians. So what's sort of your inspirations behind those, those things? Where do your ideas come from? The common thread is they are all in effect in history books. Progressively Worse, which is the first thing that I wrote, is is really a modern history methods from the, from the 1960s onwards. Well, that's what the good half of the book is. There's sort of two halves of the book. One is a potted history of teaching methods in schools. And then the other half is a sort of critique of child-centred learning. And I had the misfortune of the book being published in the same year as Daisy Chris Dulley's book, Seven Myths About Education, which did the critique of child-centred learning much better than I did. So I say to anybody who reads Progressively Worse, read the first half of it, the second half, just read, read Daisy's book. But yeah, the first half, which is the history of teaching methods, I just felt when I was teaching in Birmingham, I was teaching a school that had, that was, it wasn't just a knowledge basis to the curriculum, it was absence. It was positively discouraged. It was really the imbued the whole curriculum design and teaching approach. And a real, a real a version to teacher-led methods as well. And I had, I had read, I had this sense, had this feeling that these weren't new ideas, and that these were ideas that have been around for a long time. And, and I had read during my degree and during my masters of history, I'd read some 20th century history about sort of 1960s and 1970s culture wars. A term that has come back in vogue, but was very much used back then as a classroom was a real centre for it. There's a sort of turn in the 1960s and 1970s was the wellspring of a lot of these ideas. And what I wanted to do progressively worse was just to say, these ideas that often are sold in a very utopian way and are often said to be the avant-garde are actually 40, 50 years old. And for 40 or 50 years, failing to fulfil their promise in the classroom. And, and I hope that, I think particularly for people who are sort of bent to the way they like to think about things, it was a useful perspective on that debate, which I'm sure you remember from 2000, you know, around that time was really raging. There were so many interesting conversations going on at that time. Definitely. So what, if you, if you had to say what the best ever CPD you either hosted or ran or went to yourself would be, what would that be? Gosh, I always say that the best CPD is going to visit other schools, which may be a cop-house answer. It's one of the things that, it's one of the things that Ben and I bought in actually when we became heads of the one of our inset days to mid-November. And we had a day in mid- November where every member of staff got to go and visit another school. And it's something that we're going to keep now as a yearly fixture. Because I just, you know what, going to that conferences and things like educational festivals and things like that, the CPD is always really beneficial and enjoyable. But it's the incidental conversations that I often remember most and come away with most. It's the sort of, you know, the pub after research, ed, environment. And obviously a lot of the conversations are excited and talking about the sessions that they've seen. But I often think that the nice thing about those events is as much who you meet as the things you go and see. I just think that, yeah, visiting schools and having the ability, having the opportunity to go and do that just gives you so many ideas. And often it isn't even directly related to the things that you're seeing. It's just the mental space to sit in a school which isn't your own and reflect about what you do. Yeah. And yeah, and just to think, oh, I think this would be really good, or I think this would work really well with our staff. It's just, you know, people like you doing what you do, but in a different way. And I think there's as much we said about that, yeah. And there are tiny things that I now walk to the Son of Peace School and see. And if I think hard, I can think back to where we got that idea from. And they now just seem blindingly obvious. But all of them are things that I saw in another school and thought, oh my God, you've got to do that. I mean, a tiny example would be, I remember going visiting a racist south bank and they had their duty list on the stairwell on each floor. So if you were just checking who's on duty, you didn't have to kind of go on to the files bit of your phone and try and find it out. You knew that there was a physical copy up somewhere. And I remember that was such a good idea. And now it would seem mad to me that that wouldn't occur to you. But it hadn't. In all those years it hadn't occurred to us until we saw it being done somewhere else. So what is the best for you, the best bit of educational research or reading that stands at the test of time, that you would say perhaps to an ECQ, read this? Apart from the one that's... So I couldn't recommend that. I think it's under the book that I most enjoyed reading. It probably hushed cultural literacy because it's so well written and it's not written by a teacher. I'm not saying that's a benefit, but I think it's about more than just teaching methods. It kind of made me think about just like everything in general. I think it's a really profound book about the nature of knowledge and the nature of class and society and lots of different things. So I think in terms of reading experience, I still very distinctly remember reading that when I was first training to be a teacher and that sense of scales falling from your eyes has been really there. I think the most is what in students like school, Willingham's book, Daniel Willingham, and I think to any new teacher that would be very high on the list. In fact it's a sort of... It's quite easy to read isn't it and it's quite relatable to what's going on in front of them as well. Yeah and I think it also it's really good if you're ever in a school where you're being asked to do things that you know aren't working and you just want to find a way that book often is a real help. But then I think in terms of the books that really make you think and reflect quite deeply what does this mean for my morning book when I'm back in my lesson period one. Sean Allison and Andy Farby's book, Making Every Lesson Counts. Yep I haven't read it but I've definitely heard it yeah. Yeah I really like that. It synthesises a lot of the things you know more her, sure, whoever it might may be and gives them... It's written by two teachers, it's written by a science teacher and English teacher so it gives really good classroom illustrations of those ideas. Brilliant, sounds good and that's why I like doing these podcasts is because you get different answers from lots of different people and it's really interesting to get into your brain and to find out you know which one worked for you because there's so much out there. So what we're going to do now is we're going to do a little quiz if you don't mind this so that we get to know you and then I'm going to ask you the last question we're going to build up to an answer as well so you're only allowed to pick one and you're not allowed to think about it for too long okay. So it's just really silly things like dogs or cats? Dogs. Chinese food or Indian food? Indian food. Staff room or your own office? Oh that's unfair now I'm mad. You're allowed to say your own office. Do you know what? You know we have a coffee machine in our staff room and I still use it because the coffee is excellent and I find I have lots of the most important conversations of the day waiting the coffee queue so for that reason I'm going to say the staff room. Your staff will be very proud. An Android phone or an iPhone? iPhone. Hiking or jogging? Oh jogging I think. Okay primary or secondary? Secondary. Obviously. Beer or wine? Beer. Swimming or sunbathing? Sunbathing definitely. I've got to figure out what kind of plan you have when it comes to your family. There you go. And marking or no marking? Oh marking. Okay talk to me about that because marking is everywhere at the moment. Yeah and we've actually been rewriting our homework and feedback policy at Westerner Creek School and we it started the draft version started as our homework, marking and feed and then it became our homework and feedback policy because marking is a form of feedback but it's a subsection of feedback we felt, we felt the um and I think I what do I think about marking? I think. I'll jump in. I think it's important. I think it's important but you have to you have to put yourself first so because I think students like like to know you've looked at their work. And I also yeah I think students like to know that they that you've looked at their work. We've got an English teacher at our school who always says whenever if anyone says to her she's one of those teachers who who marks a huge amount and pupils recognise it and pupils will sometimes one year and have another teacher the next year they'll say oh why why isn't my work being marked like it was by such and such teacher. And she always says even if someone would say to her it has no impact at all that zero evidence of the impact that she has she says it's an act of love. I love the pupils who I teach, I respect the pupils who I teach and if they're writing to me it's incumbent upon me to read it. And I think I think really actually what I really I still teach an A-level class um two-level periods so four hours a week and I still mark an essay a week um from each of them. And I think actually what I'm doing really I'm writing a few things on their work but not exactly. I'm reading and it tells me so many things. Not only does it tell me how they're doing it also tells me how I'm doing. You get a real sense of the success of your lessons by looking at the pupil outputs um and it immediately informs what I do the next lesson reading what what they've done there and I think that's I think that's vital I think teachers they're the most important ideas they'll have for how they're going to do something different the following year should come from when they're looking at pupils work. So really I think what you're often what you're doing is especially in a subject like history um and you'll be kidding yourself if you think marking is what actually takes a long way to you know a tick and a kind of why is that question mark that sort of thing that doesn't take up the time is the reading and I think it's an important thing to do to read and review pupils work um and and I think the more experience you get the quicker you get to doing it um I know I know exactly how long it takes to get a to get a pile of that year 12 pupils work marked and and it's not you know and it and I can make it manageable but the key is just being so strict to yourself and just not spending any anywhere longer than its nexus area on it. Absolutely and I've to start teaching geography or a bit of geography and obviously I've been teaching history for a long long time um I have taught a little bit of geography but not not in this much detail so I know when it comes to marking it's going to take me a lot longer than it would usually when it comes to my my history work just because I'm just I'm not an expert in it although yeah a lot more words and a lot of the history work that you would do in comparative some of the geography work so it's it's vice versa isn't it um yeah we're going to end it there um and I think as I say we could talk for hours and hours and hours and I think you're absolutely wonderful and I think um I'm really really inspired by what you're doing at the West London Free School as well and I think if anybody out there wants to go and visit a school if you're allowed to uh go and go and visit it because there's some fantastic things and some really great practice to take away with there too so thank you so so much for your time thank you that's my pleasure thank you for your time