 Welcome to the British Library. Thank you for coming out tonight. I'm B Roelat of the cultural events team here. The second I got wind of this book, it became my mission to bring Fiona Hill to the British Library. Now listen to this. Over time I came to understand that the opportunities from which I was benefiting were time and even generation specific. Younger generations of Brits and Americans from similar backgrounds could not replicate my success. We're going to be exploring why and we're also going to be discovering how Fiona Hill has become such a, dare I say it, cult figure. Even a meme in the US and if you don't believe me and you think I'm joking, just take a look at this. I don't do this for all of my guests as I should help her to out. For anybody that needs an explainer of the visual gag, I've just revealed my t-shirt which says, be like Fiona Hill, words to live by. Sorry, I didn't tell you I was going to do that. Before I welcome my speakers, I want to make sure that everybody knows about our reading rooms at the British Library, which is important because they're huge research areas with every aspect of human knowledge across the planet at your fingertips and the poshest chairs in London and they're free, they're absolutely free. You don't have to be a professor or doing a PhD, anyone can go. All you need is two forms of ID. So if you didn't know that now you do, please tell your friends. Back to tonight. The fact that every single one of you found your way here to the British Library and got into this event is ultimately thanks to a teacher. The impact that education has in our lives is almost immeasurable. It's very hard to describe. And when you think about that, then you have to wonder why don't we talk about this all the time? Why isn't it on the news? Why aren't we all obsessed? Well, some of us are looking at Fiona Miller. And for myself, also outside of the British Library, I work with the Wollstonecraft Society. That's an education charity working with primary schools and human rights. Some of my teams in here tonight, so you might bump into them later. But onwards to tonight, and with a special welcome to our online audience, please do add your questions in the box just underneath the screen because we're featuring a specially extended Q&A tonight. And we want to hear from as many people as possible. Fiona will also be signing her brilliant book afterwards. It's cash only, sadly, because we've been cyber hacked, but that's frankly boring by now. And then last of all, this is, I should call this a Fiona squared event, because tonight the event is being chaired by the writer, journalist, tireless education campaigner, Fiona Miller, formerly a Downing Street special advisor. She was chair of the family and parenting institute and is author of numerous books on education. And she is chair of the Young Candon Foundation and a school governor. I'm delighted that she's governing procedures tonight. Please join me in a massive applause for Fiona Miller and Fiona Hill. Well, I don't want to start by thanking Bea for getting this event together because she did refer to their cyber hack, but honestly her work has been tireless to make sure that you're all here listening to the wonderful Fiona Hill and without her I don't think it would have probably come together in the way that it has. So I'm assuming everybody knows something about Fiona Hill and if you haven't read her book, I'm just going to give you a brief sort of potted history of her life. So she grew up in Bishop Auckland in the sort of post industrial northeast of the UK going to school in the 70s and 80s. Her dad Alf was a miner who went to work as a hospital porter in the pit shut and her mum was at Dune was a midwife. And I think your life was financially challenging but it seemed very rich in other ways from reading the book. And the book, There's Nothing for You Here, Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century, comes from something her dad said to her when she was approaching adulthood about leaving the northeast and going somewhere else because there was nothing for her there. And the book is a very sort of personal account of her life story and it's starting at Bishop Barrington Comprehensive School which is one of the first sort of, you call it a nascent struggling comprehensive school to St Andrews University where she read Russian and Modern History. She then spent a year in Moscow, went to Harvard, got an MA and a PhD, went to the John F. Kennedy School of Government, the Eurasia Foundation, the Brookings Institutional and the National Intelligence Council where she worked as a senior intelligence officer on Russia and worked for Presidents Bush and Obama before in 2017 going to work for President Trump as his senior director European and Russian Affairs on the National Security Council. And this was on one of the most turbulent times in sort of modern history. Now you call your book from the coal house to the White House and despite being a formidable Russian expert for many, many years Fiona came to national prominence when she gave evidence in 2019 to congressional hearing in advance of Trump's first impeachment hearing. And you chose to use that event to talk about your own life story and your family in the opening statement. And this, I think it was a combination of her gender, her accent, her life story led to an avalanche of public interest in the UK and the US. I think the impact was good and bad because some conspiracists decided that you were a George Soros mole infiltrating the National Security Apparatus but it also made you a very formidable role model and after the congressional hearings, one British paper called you the improbable Fiona Hill which prompted letters to you and the paper asking the following questions. Had your background held you back, what did your accent say about you? If your trajectory was so improbable, how on earth did you made it from Bishop Auckland to work in the White House? Were you just a fluke? And these are all a variety of questions that you've been asked all through your life which basically go back to the how did you get here? So I'm going to start by asking you take us back to Bishop Auckland and tell us how you got here. Well as the theme of tonight suggests I got here through education and just exactly as Bea said it was a number of interventions along the way actually going back to primary school one person actually ought to give more of a shout out to than I do I kind of mentioned him passing in the book is the wonderfully named Mr Noble Eddie who was the head of my primary school and he's still alive he must be literally a hundred and he's occasionally seen wandering around downtown with his cane in Bishop Auckland looking dapper, he was always very dapper and we'd mentioned and you mentioned that Bishop Barrington the comprehensive school that I went to was a nation struggling comprehensive school but my primary school, Adderley Lane junior school was actually a feeder school for the old grammar schools and Mr Noble Eddie the headmaster had basically kept up the academic standard so I actually think when I look back that my primary school education was really determinative because I actually went reasonably well prepared to Bishop Barrington it wasn't all downhill from there but it was a real struggle from that point on but all the way along even though there were no resources I mean Bishop Barrington at the time was literally a failing school much later on it had an off-stead intervention that has been turned over time into an academy a new building now, new uniforms and the whole thing but it was initially an amalgamation of the old secondary modern and a vocational school so in terms of facilities it was about like one Bunsen burner in the chemistry class that kind of made the chemistry class intake a little small we didn't have a library apart from we had some books, nothing like this here we had some books that had been bequeathed to us and they all seemed to be poetry anthologies or kind of a really strange collection of books sometimes it was quite useful I had known a lot of collage poetry but it wasn't really helpful for actually trying to find the books for your courses so there was a lot of just copying things out by hand from the teacher's book and the teachers had to buy a lot of the equipment and books themselves as people still do today in some parts of the educational system in some parts of the UK so I think part of the reason that I managed to persist with the education though was from that classic handful of teachers that people always refer to I had a wonderful English teacher at Bishop Barrington school, Dr Marshall he'd actually done a PhD at Durham University and decided instead of pursuing becoming a university lecturer that he would go back into the comprehensive schools particularly in some of the poorest parts of the northeast he had a calling towards education when I was about 13 or 14 and I was trying to figure out what to do with my old levels at the time and that was a bit of a random choice because it depended on what subjects you actually could take our local MP came in he was just newly elected, Derek Foster who some of the people he might have remembered or heard of who was the chief whip of the Labour Party back in the day actually under the Blair government and he himself had a really hard scrabble, very difficult childhood and he had found his way through education as well and at one point he was the head of education for Sunderland in the northeast of England and then decided to run for MP but he made education and trying to open up opportunity for children of his constituency a key factor and he came to the school and told us that education was the key you didn't have to be basically circumscribed or held back by your circumstances but if you did get an education this was a bit of a kicker here it was not just a right, it was a privilege and you had to do something with it and I remember actually thinking about that but that was really the challenge of figuring out what that would be but I think that that's really the kind of secret to how I ended up here with you today and with everybody else here as well but the path to studying Russian was not an obvious one at all in fact Russian wasn't on offer at the school or maybe at one or two schools in County Durham and that was a bit more tricky but before we get to that there were some setbacks in yours even before you got to secondary school you got a place at another more selective school that you couldn't go to because Mr Noble Eddie getting back to primary school was insistent on having kids take the 11 plus until they actually phased it out so we ended up being the last class of kids that took the 11 plus and because of the connections that he had with the old grammar schools and also some of the private schools around the area he took the kids who had the top grades in the 11 plus and basically tried to parcel us out to various schools and I was offered a place at Durham High Girls School but the unfortunate thing was of course it was without the fees but my parents couldn't afford the uniform the bus fares, the books and it kind of went on and my father got really worried that I would be the kid who got picked on I was the kid who got picked on in comprehensive schools by the way but I would certainly get picked on from going to the school if I was basically in the second hand uniforms and didn't have any of the equipment I just became a kind of a bridge too far and I think that's part of the lesson that I also wanted to impart in the book that sometimes an opportunity is presented but you don't actually have the wherewithal to take advantage of it a couple of the other girls from school did actually go to Durham High School and I just totally lost track of them after that I really didn't know what they ended up doing but then the rest of us all went off to the local comprehensive schools but there was an effort to try to work with us after that and Foster's constituent office would follow up with the school see if people needed any help with anything and Mr Noble Eddie had written letters to the head teacher asking to kind of keep an eye out for us to help us a lot There was a lot of individuals in your life have made a massive difference in a way individual people have popped up all the way through but there were a couple of other things that you highlighted in the book one was the school trip you went on to Turbigan to be in Germany and there's a story about what happened to you there and that was quite a formative experience wasn't it for you and then again when you went ultimately you finally decided to try and apply to Oxbridge and you had another little setback Yeah that was Those are those kind of embarrassing episodes and I'm sure we'll relate for a lot of people here in the audience so County Durham and the local education authority there really needs a shout out because even in the darkest times when you know the best of the economy in the region had literally fallen off a cliff steelworks closing down they'd maintained their cultural budget and also much of their educational funding and so there was opportunities to go on school exchanges and you know this is the kind of height of town twinning in the 1970s and Durham was twinned with Turbigan in Baden-Württemberg in Germany but also a place in the Nordrhein-Westphalia a place called Badeunhausen and I looked out by getting selected to go to Turbigan I thought I'd died and gone to heaven it just looks exactly the same I was just there a few months ago when I was spending some time in Germany it's not changed at all because it's basically a medieval city so this was an extraordinary beautiful place but it was kids from all the way across County Durham and some were still at a drama school or private schools as well this was kind of an open basically exchange programme so it was a handful of us who went on this and then just the first day where they had a continental sort of social get together a few girls came up to me and said, you know, what's your name and the rest of it and then they started asking these three questions which just still, you know, kind of give me a bit of dread you know, what school did you go to and I said Bishop Barrington comprehensive school immediately a kind of slight chill and a kind of stepping back slightly because Bishop Barrington was notorious at this point for being one of the roughest schools in County Durham we'd had all kinds of, you know, bizarre things happening to schools set on fire and all kinds of, you know, scandals around the school and then they said you know, what does your father do and I was like well, he was a coal miner and then he was a hospital porter and it was even more a kind of step back so they, you know, where are you from with the Bishop Barrington this school did you go to and I was instantly realising this wasn't a conversation starter they weren't looking for something in common they were just trying to kind of categorise me and immediately they just stopped talking to me and it was actually that kind of moment that people have that you realise you're poor or you're somewhere in a kind of a different class in a different grouping and that was it you know, here I was going to an exchange in a foreign country and suddenly the fact that I came for this particular place and I was the only one person from my school that was one other guy that didn't bother to ask him that question I immediately got ostracised and I spent a lot of the time thinking about this that didn't happen with the Germans they were just excited, oh where are you from they just seemed quite excited about it the Oxford story is another of these you know, kind of humiliating stories so as the comprehensive school progressed there was sort of a feeling that Bishop Barrington was trying to set itself up to compete with what had been the grammar school King James I school and the town and also the Catholic school St John's which was just across the road and they regularly sent kids to Oxford and Cambridge or helped them to apply they had one or two a year a needless to say, Bishop Barrington at this point hadn't had anybody and the head teacher decided that one of us from that group that had gone from a The Lillain school should apply and nobody wanted to do it it was kind of one of these standing in a row and everyone else steps back and they said well Fiona could do it and I thought, oh I don't know my mum and dad said why not why not pet, it'll be fine well of course we had no preparation for it whatsoever they got hold of a brochure I think that somebody had sneaked off to King James and snatched a brochure to kind of show you what the exam looked like and I remember looking through it and thinking okay but I didn't know what I should take the exam in so the head teacher said he would sign me up but he didn't tell me he'd sign me up for a philosophy exam and I didn't even know what philosophy was we didn't have philosophy at Bishop Barrington and one of the questions was about Schopenhauer's theory of the will and I thought Schopenhauer, is he a composer no, no, that's Schopenhauer or something like that so this is kind of trying to go through the annals of my mind from the non-existent library about what this was and I thought okay he sounds German I've been taking German lessons and this must be philosophy and I kept thinking what do I know about the theory of the will and bizarrely I'd read Warren Peace from a 50 pence copy of it dog eating from a jumble sale and I remember that Tolstoy was always going on and on about the power of the will and free will so I decided just to adapt what I had taken away from Tolstoy's Warren Peace and write this essay that was clearly not great but there must have been a glimmer enough of something in it that I failed obviously on the basis of the exam but they invited me for an interview and the interview was where things get really challenging and somewhat harrowing because first of all I couldn't afford to go to the interview but some of my neighbours had a whip round for the bus fare and then the train fare and then they would put you up in the college it was Hartford College at Oxford for a night so fortunately the neighbours had the collective push for the train and the bus fare and then I had nothing to worse and my mum said she would make me a dress and my mum had taken a dress making course at the local technical college and nobody knew what you should wear for an interview for Oxford and my mum got this bolt of a second fabric that was all heraldic and my dad said I could at least stand by the wallpaper and try to like blend in so it looked like wallpaper and she went like kuffy sleeves and I was the 80s remember and I was really bizarre skirt and I had little boots a bit like this and then my granny lent me a cardigan that she got from Marks and Spenters so I must have looked really strange because normally I'd be wearing like Doc Martens and jeans and a t-shirt or my school uniform so anyway I got on all this and wore the dress all the way down not to crumple it up on the bus and the train and everything and then when I finally get to the interview after just much confusion and getting lost and all kinds of things I find there's one of the girls who had been my interlocutor tubing and sitting on the bench and I couldn't remember her name at all because I blanked out from that awful encounter but she'd remembered mine and she said oh Fiona Hill what are you doing here and she started kind of making fun of me and the other girls who I'd never met and I started trying to chat along with them and I had a very strong northeast accent and I could tell they didn't know what I was saying and she said don't worry I'll translate for you I thought she's also from the northeast you know kind of okay and she'd put on a posh accent she didn't sound quite that posh when I met her in tubing and then as I was called forward to go for the interview and the office of the lecturer someone's leg was out now I don't know whether they put it out it was just out but I was so basically at this point thrown off my game if I had a game I fell over the girls' foot and smacked my nose off the door going in my granny had stuck a handkerchief at the Marks and Spencer's Cartigan and I had to hold it to my nose as I'm going in it's like this comedic ridiculous scene you know Billy Elliot you know kind of all on all these other things but the professor apparently the doors I thought the Oxford were pretty thick it turned out not he'd been listening to this going on outside and he turned out to be a really wonderful person and he said you okay what happened you know as I fell against the door I didn't rat out somebody tripped me sorry very embarrassing but it was kind of like an ice break and he started asking me about what I really wanted to do and at this point I'd been signed up for PPE and I wasn't really sure what this was so I was sitting thinking this isn't going to go well and he said what did I really want to do and I said well I wanted to study Russian because at this point I'd made this decision I wanted to study Russian he said well you know you can't do it from scratch here where else are you thinking of applying and I'd seen this amazing brochure for St Andrews in the sixth form room there were very few brochures most of them are black and white and this is the first year that St Andrews had put a brochure out in colour and I'd been flicking through well St Andrews I was going to basically put on my list and I went through a few other places and he said you can take Russian from scratch there he said maybe you should think about that and then he also said it's a four year course and maybe you could do with an extra year and he wasn't being condescending I just don't know who he was I could never remember his name but I actually felt like I should thank him because he then gave me some advice it was key I wasn't going to get into Oxford but I actually felt a little buoyed by the experience and again was about actually behaving like an educator and thinking that this person seems like they could make something of themselves but they're not going to do it here he didn't actually say there's nothing for you here but he was actually suggesting to me that actually I concentrate on St Andrews and gave me lots of really useful advice so I'm very grateful to him whoever he was so you got to St Andrews and you did Russian from scratch and well the rest is history in a way I did history as well what strikes me about reading the book is that you get these knockbacks quite a lot because of your background some of them are comic as well but there also could be knockbacks that would absolutely floor somebody else and probably would have floored a lot of other young people so what is your kind of secret power that means you get knockback when somebody trips you over even if you're wearing a feraldic dress and you still get up and move forward I found that dress recently we were cleaning my mum's house because I've never worn it again so she was probably going to cut it up for cushions or something at some point and got round to it I think he's actually keeping his sense of humour my dad and his father and my sister actually some of my sister's friends in the audience I will attest to you that they all had a great sense of humour my sister I was usually the butt of all of her jokes my father had a kinder sense of humour and it was always just keep your head up and keep on laughing things will work out I thought it was the kind of view that life is full of adversity but you would always kind of find a way to get around I feel it's more than a sense of humour I think you've got something else in you you've got a resilience and a drive I think my family did have that I talk about my mum's mum who was the most resourceful person I've ever met she could make something out of nothing I also think that growing up in the northeast of England is quite character building because also it's very tight communities it's not just that everything is grim up north tend to talk about there is that sign that just says the north you kind of move out of London or you kind of go up there with trepidation wondering what's ahead of you it's like here there be dragons the north I really think they should change the signs if anybody has an in on that perhaps be a bit more directional but there is this sort of sense a really strong sense of community that kind of all of this together the fact that people in my street had a whip round for me to have the bus fare my car would drive me to places that kind of thing you always knew that people would help you and I do tend to think as many people here in the audience really appreciate that life is a team sport sometimes it's an individual effort but it's always in this kind of team context and every single person here has moved forward because somebody else has helped them one way or another as well you didn't do everything on your own okay so you get to St Andrews and I mean you move on to this absolutely flourishing career although I noticed when you got to Harvard you noticed that the PPE crowd had followed you there we're still asking you about your accent how did you get here I know we've got to be I want to give the audience a good chance to answer questions so I do want to move on to the broader issues that you raised in the book but there's something about gender as well that comes through as well I know it's true you'll talk about but your clothes issue is up again and again and again it's something that women have judged on far more than men what they wear so obviously when you went to Oxford interview and then there was a story with President Trump wasn't there when you arrived at the National Security Council and you were a senior expert in Russia and you were invited into a meeting that you didn't expect to be going to and he thought I was the secretary because I wasn't dressed up like a Fox News remember well actually you were wearing trainers and I was wearing trainers because I'd forgotten my shoes I've actually remembered some shoes today but you know it's the very most women my daughter had been sick the night before thrown a ball of me all night I just had no sleep and I realised I was going to be late for my first day and I thought I was going into an orientation session and I put on my trainers to run to the metro and I left my shoes by the door and I got then I thought oh god I've got my shoes you know I've got quite big feet and I thought well I'll be alright I mean I'm supposed to be in orientation and I'd been in five minutes and I was pulled out and said you need to come and breathe the president on the terrorist attack and I said what terrorist attack you know first of all I'd been up all night and I'd been on the metro I didn't know there'd been a terrorist attack there'd been a terrorist attack on the St Peter's Berg metro my first day in the office and they said and I thought what am I going to say to the hometown of St Peter's Berg there's not been a terrorist attack in St Peter's Berg before thank god for general knowledge and I could at least say to the president well this would be personal for Putin it's his hometown perhaps we should just go straight forward to just the straight forward condolence and I thought I've got my shoes and I asked the woman who was coming over for me what size are your feet and they were a size too small and it's like Cinderella I was trying people's shoes on and actually a McMaster a McMaster who's the national security advisor then he said he haven't got any shoes and he went it's like but this is a man who'd stared down a tank a regiment in Iraq and be in Kandahar and all these kind of things he said well worse has happened he just swung me and he said just stick your feet under the chair against the desk and he won't even look at you he said which was true he didn't even look up so I've got my feet stuffed against the resolute desk and thinking god I'm in the White House so I'm going to hide them and anyway Trump never looks up and I thought I delivered my little spiel he calls Putin says it's the first terrorist attack in your hometown and it's to be very personal for you Putin makes some mumbling noises and that's it and I thought success it's a great start and then Ivanka Trump comes in and she sits right next to me and she's wearing heels that are about this high and she's wearing some diaphanous flowing white dress and she just looks at my trainers so she looks at my master and my master said let's go but that wasn't before that was after you'd been asked to take the notes that was the next time so the next time I went in I'd been properly introduced this time but he thought I was the secretary because you take notes as the senior directors in these jobs so in many respects you are sort of a glorified secretary and Trump was of the view that everyone was the secretary secretary of state, secretary of defence secretary of the secretary pool so it wasn't all that extraordinary but I thought I was going to be asked to speak about Putin in the phone call and I'd made all these clever notes about it I was going to say and I said he said and I just heard him saying well can she do it and I thought she who what Ivanka was in the in the Oval Office again and I thought it can't be she and I thought is he talking to me and he says hey darlin are you listening and I was like whoa oh my god it is me and then everyone's looking at me I mean nobody helped me out and I got that deer in the headlights look this was not my best professional moment and Trump saying you know going out and typing the press statement I thought typing the press statement is there a type right there the whole kind of my brain is worrying thinking what am I doing it's like second week on the job so I kind of get up looking really confused and what towards it on then Ivanka thinks I'm being rude and kind of apparently complains about me that I because I didn't know what I was doing and I didn't realise he was talking to me and then after that it was kind of disastrous for a week or so but I was actually taken aside by one of the other women very senior women who worked there and said look will try to reintroduce you again just don't wear the same dress because he will never remember you but he'll remember the dress and I actually had to have my husband go into these flash sales in the evening and find me dresses so that I could have a different dress every time I might potentially be going into the Oval Office so that I could just be reintroduced over and over again you know it's a different person in a different dress so we wouldn't hold it against me if it's time before for the sneakers or being the secretary well I'm sure it didn't happen to the men utterly absurd no it didn't but it was absurd okay now I'm going to move on a bit to the other theme of your book which is about the parallels you found this is a bit more serious than the clothes but I had to raise the clothes between the community you grew up in left behind communities in the States and in Russia your husband Ken and getting to know his family and your in-laws so if you could say a little bit about Ken and also just the thing when I was ticking the corners of the pages while I was reading I kept going back on my notes it said transport transport geography it's fascinating how much of this story about education social mobility etc isn't only about what schools do it's about in your account it's about residential geography the digital divide and transport almost as important as education in your account of your own life no that's very true and I just wonder how you feel whether schools can really overcome these things on their own or whether this is really a much broader issue if we're going to give everybody else the same chances that you did well I think it's a much broader issue and as I said in the book I draw these parallels between the kind of de-industrialising declining places of Russia that I saw really mirroring what I'd seen in the north east of England and also in the United States and realising that all of these things were intertwined now if you're in somewhere like Russia and you want to go to opportunity you're talking thousands and thousands and thousands of miles so if we think back to the supposed Norman Tebbett statement that people should get on their bike and look for work whether we really said it or not but it's certainly stuck to him if you're thousands of miles out in Siberia you're not going to get a new bike and get anywhere in particular and also it's the same in the United States and my husband's family his father had grown up as the oldest son on a farm in South Dakota and the nearest town was miles away and his father dropped dead in the fields of a heart attack and my husband's father had been the one who was trying to run the farm at the same time and he also wanted to have an education and American education had expanded after World War II with the GI Bill for servicemen who had returned from the war but also then more broadly for it was mostly men, younger men and Ken Stard then in that kind of period of the 1930s it was almost exactly the same age as my dad in fact as a year or so older and in the kind of 1940s and into the 50s wanted to basically get an education and he hitchhiked from the farm to the nearest college which was Wesleyan College in South Dakota in a very small school back and forth so we could manage the farm at the same time and I just couldn't get my head around that actually because he was basically hitchhiking in managing the farm just these vast distances but he's got this amazing story that eventually gets a degree in sort of food sciences applied chemistry he ended up with lots of patents and helped to invent shellac that strange greasy stuff he put around apples it was kind of a very odd thing so every time I see a slightly waxed apple I think of Mr Keane in his breakthroughs in shellac for farmers he got this job off the back of a cereal box because he didn't know himself how to go about getting a job after he got his degree and he was literally eating Cheerios and he sees the address of General Mills the company that made Cheerios and he decides to write a letter saying that he was a young farmer who got this degree hitchhiking backwards and forwards to college and he wanted to help farmers to have additional products more value added to their products he's got a degree as a food chemist would they give him a job and they gave him a job didn't even go for an interview they gave him a job I mean it's one of these crazy American only in America's stories and so then they move across the country to all these different players in General Mills my husband's one of 12 and all of their kids went to school on Pell Grants which was the expansion of assistance for people also first generation going to college because you can imagine with 12 kids and Mr Keen wasn't making an awful lot of money and they all had these great breaks also through education and I ended up meeting my husband who also got a scholarship as I did to go to Harvard and he's my next door neighbour it took a while for us to kind of grow on each other but he's literally my next door neighbour at Harvard so you brought the same backgrounds but across the pond and also one in a very remote agricultural area and I was always kind of struck that they really went nowhere and you couldn't drive the tractor down the road to the nearest town they didn't really have a car when you were on the farm you were really stuck and I kept thinking about that and I remember once getting my parents and my in-laws together and they were kind of swapping these stories it was fascinating listening to them because my father had been limited in how far he could go by how far he could cycle in terms of finding a job after the mines closed Mr Keen had eventually got a job and moved all the way around the country and his mobility was eight miles away from where he'd grown up because it was just that limitation of distance and of course there wasn't as many jobs you could get from the back of a cereal packet in Northern England back in the 1960s but you feel very strongly about the fact that other people you feel that you're still the exception to the rule and I think we have some head teachers and teachers in the audience and I hope we'll say something about their own personal experience of this how easy it is for somebody from your background to do the things that you've done and your book is a bit of a rallying cry for change at a time when you say I assume talking about America the anger and hopelessness exists even amongst graduates now we've had the levelling up but the disadvantage gap is still suddenly wide we've had Covid we've had UN special rapporteurs coming here and commenting on the poverty in this country what do you feel are the solutions then? the end of your book has seven or eight ideas about things you talk about a sort of martial plan for social mobility to get people from those communities the same opportunities you've got the kind of larger scale issues but you've got a lot of things that we ourselves can do I think that for me the power of mentoring people just paying for my bus fare it's actually something I'm trying to do with the book the money from the book I already am putting it into hardship funds for students and internships and things that I wasn't able to do brilliant trying to get other people to think that these are things they can do as well and also some of this peer-to-peer there are a few of my friends here from St Andrews and elsewhere who just actually knew a little bit more about things than I did and actually gave me advice that you can apply to this did you know about this job or did you know about this internship and these are things that you can do give people a bit of career advice a different background and also we need as I said in all of a societal approach to this I think we have to just recognise also that one size doesn't fit all my dad actually became relatively well educated over time left school at 14 had no qualifications at all didn't even take the 11 plus because his parents thought what's the point you're going to go down the coal mine I mean who knows how it might have turned out but they didn't even give him the chance to do that but he did get the chance through the Worker's Education Association and the Durham Miners Association he had to basically get education as he went on and by the time he was an older adult he was actually pretty well read and reasonably well informed I mentioned my mother taking this dress making course at the local technical college but she was trained as a nurse there was kind of opportunities for her at age 16 she was one of the first cohorts of midwives in the NHS that was kind of a way of pushing forward but if you think about the societal benefit of education I think we need to rethink not just to see it as an individual benefit or something that really is only for individuals to sort out for themselves in the United States there's been quite a bit of research recently by Angus Deaton is originally from Scotland and Anne Case at Princeton University they won the Nobel Prize of the Work that they did on the deaths of despair and they've recently shown basically how much mortality rates are linked to education and life expectancy and there's at least a 10 year difference between all the life expectancy of people over 2 or 4 year college education in the United States and some parallels here in the United Kingdom and those who do not and it's widening all the time it's kind of a scissors moving outwards now there's a series of different theories about this they actually think that it's not just the college education but the fact that and then how people might think about their health and their wellbeing all the various things that they should do but it's also because we've got into this knowledge economy where the sorting for getting a job is really about whether you've got a degree or not or some kind of qualification just like my dad experienced back in the day so they're also advocating that education, lifelong learning adult education, the further education colleges and also giving people the opportunity to be educated and go to college technical college vocational school on university but also get work experience so they've only just started in this career themselves now and I think that we need to have a national debate and I know that George Johnson is somewhere in the audience because I saw him in the way in and we were part of a discussion at Ditchley Park out in Oxfordshire a year where he made a comment about education being a UK superpower and that kind of struck with me because if you actually look at the UK and the United States we were together basically the pioneers in education the United States set up even during the Civil War in the 1860s through into the 1890s these public land grant universities that's Michigan, Ohio Wisconsin, the big state universities and their goal was to have mass education as well as specialized education in engineering and in agriculture so that was a kind of a mini version of one of these that my father-in-law went to and they remain the most affordable education for people in the United States and they do a lot of full-on grants and subsidization for first generation students you know I spent six months in Germany and in Germany an education's free and that really makes a huge difference because the thing that worries me the most is how much getting into debt puts people off I would absolutely not have gone to university if I had gone into debt we had a great grandfather who had died in a debtors prison in Durham and everybody would talk about oh great grandfather Henning who died in the debtors prison and so you know could not possibly go into debt and that kind of barrier and that kind of thought about what might happen would really put a lot of people off and in Germany and China and all kinds of other countries Canada people invest in education because they see it as being of societal benefit it's not to say that you wouldn't have you know some kind of modification to this we need to have a serious discussion about it but we clearly in the United States the United Kingdom now lagging behind where we could have been and think about all of the elites of the world that are educated here in the UK and the United States was a recent report 50% of the world's elite has passed through either a UK or a university or a US university and many of them are paid for by their governments I mean when I was at Harvard and I was getting a major scholarship the government of Kazakhstan, the government of China many other European governments were paying for some of their best students to study there and big private institutions like Harvard actually can give everybody basically a free education so for many people here in the audience who are advising some of their students to think about university think about applying to Harvard for undergraduate if people get admitted they will get a full ride and that's an irony right I mean it might be easy for people to go to Harvard and then it might be easy to go to UCL for example Well I think that's a very good note to open it out to the audience who've been asked for their views just now I can't really quite see any of you because of this light but I know we've got some heads here and I think you Sarah yes I've had some communication with you Sarah please ask the first question please say where you're from and what you do I'm the Askel rep for Yorkshire and Humber as well as being the head teacher at Headland School in Bridlington so first question from me within our context, coastal and northern the social economic challenges being faced by our community are rapidly increasing for example 110 people are living in tents not by choice between January and March of this year that compares to 25 in the whole region in the same period in 2021 in this context there is only so much schools can do to effect positive change for our young people living in extreme poverty with no access to hot water heating and food it's a daily occurrence to what extent do you think the government needs a holistic and interconnected strategy around improving and funding all services around young people and what do you think the key priorities outside of education in northern England could be to potentially positively impact children in our school communities thank you Fiona okay have we got any other I'm sorry I'm struggling here with the lights a bit I'm going to ask my colleague please can we bring up the house lights so that the audience is more visible can you quickly put up any hands here people in the education world okay lady there gentlemen at the back hand up with a pen I'll take you in threes so I'll come back to your promise I'm afraid my question won't be about education actually it's more about the political kind of situation and things I'm Russian I've been living here for over 20 years I'm a doctor initially degree in Russia I mean that's one point you might actually point out in the Soviet system the education was free including co-education and it's pretty good level and very comprehensive but my question is so having such a varied experience on various levels one who out of modern political figures you would feel like worth looking at and supporting and in relation to that how do you feel about the possibility of Trump winning the next election yeah who's had big sharp intake of breath there hold it for a while okay we'll come back to that one and then finally yes gentlemen in the back so please say who you are with the microphone sorry oh okay yeah bring the microphone down to you wait for the microphone hi there my name is Andrew O'Neill head teacher all saints catholic college in labrote grove I suppose want to know a little bit more about what you think about the British education system specifically your book talks about you being the improbable Fiona Hill how do we reduce that probability in the UK and create more Fiona Hills they're actually as a Fiona Hill in here as well so there's a few of us with cloning okay we've got three very different questions there one about the context in the coastal towns which is something that I know everybody in education policy is always very worried about one about the ghastly possibility of Trump coming back and one about the British education system how it looks from your point of view really very much linked together because I think as you laid out here that schools cannot possibly tackle the poverty that exists in so many of the regions and part of the reason that my school was struggling was because of the poverty in the town the drop off of employment from 1981 onwards pretty much every business around in Bishop Auckland closed down or nearby concert steelworks the Sheldon Wagonworks the last of the coal mines just even before we got into the minder strike a lot of the industry had been in decline beforehand but that was kind of the real drop off a cliff it was quite like shock therapy to be honest in Russia in the 1990s or what happened also in East Germany in the same time free period so it was just this abrupt shift and of course coastal towns had the deindustrialisation the decline of the fishing industry the ports and then everybody going off to Torimolinos instead of Toki or Benidorm rather than Bridlington on their vacations and so even more you have this shift there's also frankly just the whole structure of the system in the United Kingdom which is very different from the United States or Germany where I've been spending the last 6 months taking a look at some of the education and other systems there because we had a hyper centralisation I would say of finances and authority in the 1980s as well so I mean I talked about the local education authority in Durham and their kind of ability particularly in the 1970s to keep the cultural budgets alive but by the 1980s that becomes very difficult because of what is it just between about 5 and 6% of taxes I actually kept by the local authority so that's a problem in itself because in the United States you've got obviously the states and the cities the municipalities have a tax lefying authority and they can also make a lot of decisions about how educational money is spent which is something that you can't really do in the United Kingdom and in Germany it's very much the same as well they get a lot of infusion from the state or the federal government the national level money but they also are able to set goals themselves and to raise money so I mean that in itself there's nothing of poor tax base over time so many hits the economy the austerity measures after 2008-2009 financial crisis hitting things even harder I mean that's when you got the UN coming out to look at poverty but really it's kind of multi-generational problems and I have people that I went to school with who were my age in the late 50s who never got a job and their kids didn't get a job and their kids have not got a job because they're in basically the council states where all of the jobs kind of disappeared and they're not able they don't have the physical mobility they can't afford a car, the bus routes have been cut off to be able to get there we had kids walking to school because the bus routes had been paired back maybe three or four miles in all kinds of weathers so I think exactly as you laid out here there needs to be a holistic approach it's tied to basically the patterns of employment it's tied to how can you give mentorship and support not just to kids but also to their families and there was two programmes that I went to look at in Germany that were very interesting in the rural region they've got this professional mentorship programme that's tied to the local university system where they have trained mentors that go into the schools to work with kids from underprivileged backgrounds to quite capable academically but have all kinds of problems maybe they're in a caring situation where they have to look after family members or their family are very poor or they've got some other barriers there to being able to pursue their education and they try to work with them in small groups or one-on-one that's quite expensive and it's kind of funded again by the local authorities but then there's another group called our bike kint which is nationwide and they try to pick up all the kids not just the academically gifted but they try to actually set up volunteers of mentors in a basically country wide and they're basically getting a lot of traction because it turns out that there's a lot of people in the German system high levels of the government who also from first generation are going to college but the whole goal is to try to prepare people for college not just for other educational opportunities and I was thinking particularly at the back of the book that there's kind of some of these ideas that you can pick up on in Germany after I'd done the book but it was more about how could we create these kinds of networks getting back to your question about creating more people who can move forward to these opportunities how could we can all do it so maybe we're already doing it I'm trying to kind of pay back trying to meet with as many school groups as I can, I do a lot of zooms basically civic organisations trying to encourage people to just sort of think about how you can engage with someone all of us can go back to our old schools we can basically reach out to kids and try to help them I try to do as much as I can connect people with other people because it's also giving people a kind of sense of a pathway forward but then you also got to think as I'm trying to do with the book Money Now how can you actually set up these hardship funds to give kids a chance if my neighbours hadn't given me the bus I would never have gone to the interview I'd never have had the professor who told me that I was going to be a writer and Andrews but there were many times when I just simply didn't have the funding to do something and we need to sort of think about that the schools need to have the support for teachers because teachers can't be everything but maybe within the school system to have these mentorship arrangements and Germans are already starting to do that and I know a lot of schools do it already so I have gone back to my old school which is now Bishop Barwickan Academy it's part of a network of real signs of progress but as you've pointed out there's still real pockets of deprivation in the UK that are really for a large part untouched and so we really have to have interventions but it really also depends on devolution of authority to local education authorities and also to local governments I know in the north east now there's the discussion about creating a combined devolved authority but we're going to have to think about this more broadly across the rest of the country but it's not an easy fix in terms of Trump coming back I did have a inward shutter unfortunately there's a very strong possibility of him coming back and so there are an awful lot of the things I'm even talking about here where there's been a lot of attention being paid in the United States too about education there are many people around Trump and others who are actually denigrating and talking down education you may have seen Ron DeSantis for example who is the governor of Florida I mean I've paused for a moment cos he's told it really hard to think of Florida as such a nice sunny place to be in such a dark spot at the moment and it says it's really Florida and it may be that actually Mickey Mouse and Disney will serve us from a lot of this because they're in a fight with Ron DeSantis over his various attempts to intervene in the education system I mean literally trying to turn teachers and parents against each other probably but it sounds very reminiscent of the Stalin era in the Soviet Union where parents can denounce teachers for picking particular books or students can taking books off the curriculum attacking libraries education at all different levels in the United States has been under attack and I'm afraid would be more likely to be under attack under Trump and there's all kinds of other issues that would be extraordinary problematic so the election potential election of Trump it's better than 50% at this particular moment should give all of us pause for thought I'm going to come back to how do we get more Fiona Hills at the end but anybody got a slightly more optimistic question yes gentlemen there with the glasses and we promised you a question too one, two, the third I think it was in the green jacket you're getting a mic now okay and young lady there with her hand up with the glasses or both of you we'll give you two quick questions from you okay who's going first hi I'm Tommy Gale I run inside Uni and we're an organisation that helps get children from state schools into top universities by peer to peer work and Fiona kindly mentioned us in her book which I was listening to in the car and it was a complete surprise so I nearly crashed but that was a really nice surprise and unfortunately lots of the stuff that Fiona's talked about about her own experience of the Oxford interview being quite an alienating and difficult process I think is still the case and you kind of see that in lots of the statistics about state school versus private school admissions to Oxbridge so I was interested to know when you mentioned about students going to America as actually a more realistic option for them with scholarships that's been something we've been seeing a lot with the students we work with that they feel more comfortable to go to America than ten miles down the road I guess I was interested to know what could our universities be doing to be more inclusive and to get more children from state schools coming in and is there anything that we could learn from America and perhaps other places like Germany with their universities and how they do it Okay thank you Shall we take the next question Just before I put that gentleman saying 1% of the population this country go to Sorry please can you talk into the microphone because people are listening online Okay 1% of the population of this country go to Oxford, Cambridge 25% of judges have chosen for that 1% of people but my question follows on from the gentleman down here about education Me and a few friends John Burko, Andy Burnham and Greg Dyke we've got a bill going through Parliament to get rid of the 11 plus Do you think this is a good idea? Very good question Yeah it is a great question Ladies here you are They're going to share a mic and ask a question each Put your hand up I'm going to come to this side of the room Hi My name is Chloe and I really appreciate this little lecture You've talked a lot about systemic barriers such as gender class access to transport I grew up in Ohio my grandparents were farmers I really appreciate your thoughts on this topic but I also came to London by way of Belfast to study migration so I'm very interested in intersectional links between migration, mobility, citizenship and educational outcomes I was wondering what parallels or maybe contrasts you see between the US and the UK in terms of race and citizenship and educational outcomes The US of course has quite a specific history with segregation in schools including my own community in Ohio and there are tremendous regional discrepancies West Virginia being run on the outskirts of DC I'm just curious about your thoughts on that Thank you Have your friends got a question? No We've got inclusion in universities the 11 plus I touched a bit about geography and transport and the race issue comes through in your book which you think is more powerful in America In America and as you've just pointed out it is a very important factor in the United States but getting first to Tommy and his question I want to give Tommy another shout out not just in the book because I read about what Tommy and his colleagues and friends from university were trying to do in an article and then heard them mentioned on a radio program that I was listening to and I thought God if only Tommy had been around when I had got this opportunity to go down to Oxford for an interview because what Tommy and his friends from university were trying to do was basically guide people through the process it's like a maze you were not already in the system and just like a maze there's all these dead ends and sometimes you just need some signifying to turn around and not just keep walking to the bush and not be able to find your way out and I was just really intrigued by what they were doing it was grass roots it was just students doing this I mean eventually you've got the Oxford and then Cambridge bureaucracy in the solar system to accept what they did it was very difficult it was all on a shoestring it's actually the same what the group in Germany our bike kind did it was also set up by students who were the first generation going to German universities but again German universities are free so there wasn't the kind of financial aspects of this and they also set this up and I know that you've been trying to expand this out to other universities because it's not just the 1% of people going to Oxford and Cambridge I mean the United States in fact I think there's 12 universities in total which the whole elite end up going through and the country it's all the Ivy League and a handful of others just like the Russell Group here in the United Kingdom and it's really kind of a question about how you can widen access now part of this is also financial so Oxford and Cambridge have actually spent quite a lot of money fundraising obviously not coming in from the government to try to expand the financial aid to students who otherwise would see this as too much of a barrier and there's all these big campaigns at Oxford Colleges Durham University where I'm now the Chancellor is starting to do this as well St Andrews has a mixed system because Scottish students go for free under the Scottish system but they are now trying to expand out bursaries and hardship funds for English students and others who might otherwise find it now difficult to go to St Andrews but in the United States this is really key and the big state universities like Ohio State as well as the private universities all spend a lot of time trying to kind of think about how they can expand access to education and also to create bridging programs because I mentioned that the lecturer at Oxford who interviewed me said I could probably do with an extra year which was probably right of educational bridging because of coming from a pretty straight and a comprehensive skill and my A-levels were all over the place I didn't actually use any of my A-levels that I got to university because I couldn't really put together a basically a degree program of the A-levels ended up taking because I just took the A-levels where there was a teacher who could teach A-level and so I wanted to do history but the history teacher resigned or retired rather the year before and so I had to do art history which actually you know history it's art and there's lots of museums in County Durham so I was actually able to get access to some amazing collections by cycling off to various museums and there was courses at the museums to prove to be very helpful I did geography which was kind of, we had a great geography teacher and she was absolutely amazing and then I did English with this great English teacher I mentioned before and then I did French and French proved a bit disastrous because my French teacher was stabbed with a compass which I mentioned in the book and needless to say left the school and then nobody else wanted to come back to teach French and so I was ending up teaching myself French with those reel-to-reel equity repete you know the whole time one French teacher suggested that I just read the Michelin guide to France and just kind of get in the mood and I was like great that was kind of really lovely but I read all about Brittany and later wrote a little essay in French about Brittany that I'd read about in the Michelin guide so I suppose it came in vaguely useful but I mean this was actually kind of part of the problem so yes I did need a bridging program and the St Andrews the Scottish system you get that extra year for students who have been doing hires but now places like Amherst college was one of the first to do this but Ohio State, Harvard's doing bridging programs now all of the colleges and universities in the United States are raising money basically for these kinds of programs that's another way of addressing this issue of expanding opportunities making people less probable helping people bring in but it requires funding and again there's more propensity for universities in some places to raise money through the private sector or from foundations and the raise for maybe other universities in rather benighted parts of Britain and again even in Germany where it's funded by the state there are these charitable organizations and foundations that do this as well when it comes to the 11 plus yes actually I do think that those kinds of rigid selective exams should be done away with a lot of people they're late developers I don't know how other people feel about it but I know I did the 11 plus my dad didn't get that chance to do it I know a lot of people who got the 11 plus and ended up going off to a grammar school but I also know a lot of people who weren't quite ready for the 11 plus and these exams at that particular time there were people I met later who had been penalized and not get into a grammar school because of the fact that it was only reading there 13, 14, 15 people basically come into their own at different stages in their lives which is again why we should also be emphasizing continuing education further education it might be that somebody in their 30s suddenly then realizes what it was that they really wanted to do with themselves and get an opportunity to continue their education and retrain and also there's a lot of anxiety in examination taking as well there's a lot of them basically now analysis and data that shows that girls in particular have a lot of anxiety particularly over subjects like math I might have general anxiety I didn't necessarily have it over math but I know a lot of people who do they see basically a math test and their brain just goes blank and a lot of people have a hard time with the time test and if you think about it in life there's not a lot of time unless you're defusing a bomb or some other critical issue where you have to do things in a certain rigid time I mean there might be one that's kind of racing against the clock for an operation but most of our lives you're not being asked to answer 20 questions in an hour and a half it's more of a test of your ability to kind of overcome some anxiety rather than kind of a test of your skill so I do think that we should be rethinking that and being a bit more circumspect and also in the United States case I mean you do have the standardized tests but there's actually now discussion on phasing them out because there is an acknowledgement in the United States now that people coming from all kinds of different backgrounds minority backgrounds rural backgrounds people have different educational experiences and that we're really not giving people a chance by having a one size fits all and obviously race has a big impact in the United Kingdom as well and gender and other issues but place also plays a very important role I think as you're talking about Bridlington there are the large parts of the United Kingdom that are not very diverse I mean in Scotland it's kind of what 96% white, my hometown is 98% it's kind of really a question of poverty and socioeconomic issues and the place itself now that issue is in the United States often amplified because you have the racial underlay and overlay and additional barriers and I think that what we have to be able to do is overcome all of those barriers at the same time, gender, race ethnicity language barriers and place and geographic barriers at the same time it's not on either or we have to figure out how we tackle all of this at the same time and I do think there are a lot of answers in the United States again the public land grant universities in the United States the big state universities are actually very impressive and perhaps I might suggest a trip out to some of these places I've been to a lot of them over the last couple of years and researching the book and then since then and there's all kinds of different ways in which we can look at this I mean I know there was a fetish at one point for looking at Finland and its educational system but I think we could do a lot by looking at a combination of the United States, the UK, again it's our superpower and also Germany and interestingly the Germans are now looking at the British education system which I was a bit surprised about actually because apparently we've done a lot over the years and creating more flexibility perhaps doing more with less and the Germans are worried now that their systems become too rigid and in fact getting back to the 11 plus question that they're streaming people too early and pushing people in different directions and not giving people an opportunity to come back and the Germans aren't that great at adult education they do a lot of retraining through their unions and the business councils, the workers councils but they don't have FE colleges and they don't also give people a chance to go back and retool and reskill and so they're actually now looking at the United States and the UK as well I'm giving too long question We've got quite a lot to get through so whilst you pick your next one I'm just going to read out a question Janet Berenson asks thank you for your insights if you could implement through central government one single programme that could have the biggest impact what might it be I think actually we should take a row up a sea of hands here as well for lots of experts here and I just make sure the other two people get their microphones excuse me taking you halfway back into international politics but a question I chair a group which looks at the ethics of conflict which is currently engaged in a difficult subject as you can imagine and previously we have found common ground between Christians and Islam on many of the principles about what is not an acceptable form of warfare today I heard that MSc students at a college in university in London had said they were no longer able to write essays about the situation in the Middle East because they found their backgrounds were inhibiting them from addressing the issue at all like they'd come to a halt so how could we find a way through education bridging some of that understanding which is clearly so missing in an important part of the world which must have featured in your White House life Can we just pass the mic along the road yes then we've got three questions you've got the intervention one intervention I'm trying to think about that I'm not sure if there would be one but I'm trying to think but actually I think we should probably solicit from some of the teachers and educators in the audience about what they would think as well here so what's going on in higher education with tricky political questions did you want to take another question as well can you hear me so I'm asking a question for the three of us here we're all long term campaigners on education and I think it's fair to say that we all feel that the debate generally for the last I mean from new labour onwards in this country has been about exceptionalism it's how do you get the talented from disadvantaged backgrounds to an Oxbridge college and you are a wonderful example of exceptionalism and your story like all these stories are always fantastic and interesting but that doesn't seem to us to be the problem with the system the system is the forgotten third that Askle talk about who fail whatever tests the Tories have set up for them or new labour before those who fail the 11 plus in the selective counties who are written off at the age of 10 those who don't go to private school we haven't mentioned private schools but they are the big problem at the centre of all of this do you agree with any of that these things are actually all very much tied together and it was something that I was very mindful about in the book I didn't call myself the improbable Fiona Hill that was actually when it was FT but I did feel like I kept being asked about being a fluke I was very conscious of that because look I went to school with people just as smart as I was and I think that the difference for me was that my parents were really engaged in the idea of education because they felt that they hadn't had one in the way, well my dad in particular leaving school at 14 extremely interested in things not having any opportunity and basically being written off right from the very beginning but wanting to still have access to knowledge and then finding it later through the Workers' Education Association the Germanus Association it's just personal reading my mum was always extraordinarily happy with her vocational training to be a nurse when I asked my mum would she ever do anything different she never would so that was somebody who was extremely pleased she didn't pass the 11 plus in the top girls in her school to go to grammar school she was number four and only three girls got a place in the local grammar school where she grew up in Billingham but she was actually unfazed by that because she loved being a nurse she was super proud of being one of the first midwives in the NHS so it's actually there's different pathways to basically getting satisfaction out of your work and I don't think that the education system should be set up just with this pipeline when I went to university back in 1984 only 10% of kids were going on to that kind of higher education at that point of polytechnics as it was then and then universities I mean 90% of people were doing something else in fact there was a very high youth unemployment problem in the early 1980s as well I mean 90% of people weren't actually initially going on to very much it took them a long time to find vocational training and I think that precise what you're saying here that we can't have a one size fits all education system and we have to really kind of think and listen to people I read some really good reports by one of the youth voice UK I think that's kind of one of the titles about how people would actually like an education where they give an opportunity to have practical training as well to basically have work experience I mean I did get work experience all the way through because I had to work I mean I cleaned in the hospital most of my connections got my great cleaning job but I also worked in pubs and bars I eventually when I was learning Russian I did some translation a call centre I did all kinds of things and I got enough work experience to know things I didn't want to do but I didn't get a lot of the work experience I didn't have any fancy internships I didn't have any of these kinds of opportunities but I also then worked with an awful lot of people also trying to find their way there as well who would have loved to have different ways of fitting back into education to get some training and I think that that's what we have to be thinking about as well in the United States there's a lot of thinking about public private partnerships so I personally think we have to reinfigurate the labour unions again as well and the workers' associations and invest a lot in workers' education associations so I think we ought to be having a conversation about this not just nationally but internationally and looking at various things that work because I do not think it's good for any society to be basically writing off vath's words of your population and we will not be competitive either in the UK or the United States in the international marketplace that's not what the Chinese are doing they're putting in a lot of emphasis on education the Germans are panicking about education right now and they've actually got a whole programme of leaving nobody behind at all the United States had the head start and no child left behind and they've actually been failing a little bit basically expanding all of this but many other countries are realising that having an educated population not just an educated workforce is going to be the absolute key to the future and the critique that you've had there is very well founded and we need to be creative and we need to be creative all the way along we can't write anybody off at different parts of their lives either my dad losing his job and the mines in his 30s there's no opportunity to that point to retrain and it was always his 30s and I have friends and relatives who've lost their job in their 50s and could retrain my sister lives in Spain and got money to retrain after her job folded under Covid so there's lots of places that are actually investing in this and thinking that people can do various things so maybe getting back to that question about the one thing that intervention was thinking about education in a holistic fashion again as a continuing lifelong learning and giving people the opportunity I mean I'm extraordinary lucky that I work in a place like the Brookings Institution where I'm a senior fellow but you know we have institutions like City Lit where I was speaking last night I actually talked to a couple of people here were taking courses local technical colleges you know there's all kinds of things that we should be really investing in and trying to pump up and I've missed one of the questions with your foreign policy hat on about why does some students feel that unable to deal with contemporary look I think we've kind of got an atmosphere right now in higher education and establishments that we didn't have when we were there when you had all kinds of open discussion I mean I must have had incredibly uncomfortable conversations where I was at university with people and you know now we have a kind of a culture where everything is out on social media where people get attacked for you know expressing divergent views you know all the way back in school I mean I remember back in most of my elementary school teachers encouraging us to take on hard questions obviously it's somewhere like Bishop Barrington at the time we were kind of living a lot of the hard questions so there wasn't really much of a debate about it but it was one of the things that I really appreciated at St Andrews is meeting people who were not like me who would come up with divergent points of view and I think you know you've hit the nail on the head there it's extraordinary difficult and the kind of covent environment on college campuses here in the UK and in the United States to have just open debates that are mediated you know by people so this is, it's happening more in civic organisations I was also very interested in Germany seeing how debates were being handled it's more open debate actually there in university with a lot of civic groups that go out to basically structure and shape discussions you were mentioning this from the religious perspective in the United States where there was interfaith groups that actually still sit down about various issues there's a number of them and I don't know actually how much they've been affected over the last few weeks by all the tragedies in the Middle East but definitely civic groups can play a role as well it doesn't just have to happen in universities but I think you've just put your finger there on a major problem where the educational environment was supposed to be expanding inquiry and you know people basically having to face up to the fact that people don't always think like you have very different perspectives you're all going to have to deal with as you go on through your life OK, I'll take a quick round of final questions Joe at the back and this lady in the front two ladies in the front you can ask quick questions chat there and this lady here has had a hand up with a black scarf one OK Joe Thank you very much and thank you for a great talk Fiona my question is to you I'm a foreign policy practitioner and whether you think the decline in the sorry whether you think the decline in the teaching and learning of modern foreign languages is making it harder for us to understand how other countries see us and also making it much more difficult for us to anticipate changes in countries such as Russia and China Yes I think it is but anyway I'll hold that thought about the Hi my name is Shazia Haye I'm an Afghan journalist I'm here because of education there are a million Afghan girls in Afghanistan that they have the same dreams like you they want to read, they want to write but they are not allowed to study so what's your message for those girls and also related to Afghan girls' education what's your message to the world Thank you That's a good question A couple of things Thank you very much for your talk as well I'm a teacher, maths is funnily enough First of all I just wanted to touch on your point about exams I feel like we should be quite careful in dismissing them where you only have to look at what happened to private school grades over COVID to see quite how catastrophic that was for a lot of students from underprivileged village backgrounds Secondly is your point about broadening the broadening the sphere for what you can do in terms of education and what points you can enter the workforce Why do you think this has taken so long because I don't think this is a particularly new phenomenon I know when I graduated there was still all this talk about these massive multinational companies doing entry from 18 even some from 16 I look now and it's actually no better in fact it's worse so what's been holding back all of this goodwill because it clearly hasn't happened Okay thank you So lady here with the black scarf Again echoing everyone else's opinion of the great talk thank you I'm a transport planner so I'm with you in terms of mobility but I'm also going back to university next year and I'm 50 so I'm with you in terms of continuing education but my question is my stepdaughter is at Oxford her best friend came from a comprehensive and what really disappointed me was when I heard that she is going through medicine so obviously really difficult course to get onto and she was told so she's got all the way through to Oxford and she's told if you don't understand how to answer the questions that's kind of your problem and I just wondered when you finally got to your fantastic university did you have that issue in terms of trying to sort of adapt your knowledge and your education to the way in which this great institution had decided that you needed to learn okay we're going to be quite quick with these answers question about modern foreign languages limiting our understanding of other parts of the globe question about Afghanistan and the world more generally question about these other routes into education at 18 which seem to be narrowing rather than widening look I think on languages personally I think everyone should really have some exposure in some fashion to modern languages because it's not good just using Google translate and getting the literal translation of something or Duolingo as great as it may be I actually was trying that in Germany to try to improve my German I got very good at being able to go to a grill party at the barbecue but it wasn't really helping me to actually go out now in one of my professional meetings so there are limitations here because learning a foreign language it really does expand your mind it's a bit like mathematics and music and all the other kinds of things that help you to broaden your perspective on the world but really to understand the context and the way that people think and I have to say that studying Russian was one of the best things I ever did and I did take advantage when I was at St Andrew's of the opportunity to just go and take classes in another language for a couple of weeks or a couple of months you could have these free language courses and again you can do that now too but it really did help me on understanding the way that people in other countries really thought about things because it was just the whole conceptualisation of language and you realise a lot of things are lost in translation and I would actually really advocate that even though we're trying to put an emphasis on STEM people should take humanities courses and should have some exposure at least to a foreign language I know it's easy now everyone speaks English English has become a tool it's really no longer a cultural signifier but that's not an excuse anyway in terms of Afghanistan and the world women's education girls education is so important it's just an absolute tragedy what's happening in Afghanistan I really wish that I personally could do something about it it's amazing that you're here I hope that we'll collectively be able to help you to be an ambassador for girls education and I think that all women and all people at large have to do their utmost to make it possible for girls around the world everybody at large to have access to education in some forms we have to be really creative about that and I think it's just fantastic though you're here and if there's any way that I think myself and anybody else here in the audience can help you figure out your path forward and how to help people like yourself I hope that we will be able to do that and I think it's also part of thinking about these other pathways into education it's a good question why haven't we done this in fact if we go back to 1918 and 1919 there's some of the first big reports that the British government did on education there was already these ideas that we needed to have a well educated population and adult population as an antidote to demagogy that was kind of one of the lines in the 1919 adult education report and here we are again at a time of demagogy not just Donald Trump but this kind of post-truth environment that we're in this was after the Bolshevik Revolution getting back to the Russian idea again when people were worried about the rise of totalitarian systems and the best antidote to that was people being educated and having access to an education around across their lives we have an opportunity now to certainly rethink that I think it is will, political will I think it's often the Germans themselves were realising they thought that they were doing extraordinary well for a long period of time and now they're suddenly realising that their own social mobility was actually grind into a halt 70% of Germans in some recent polls said that no matter how hard they worked they couldn't see themselves getting ahead and that is in a country that you think about having great educational opportunity so it's a common problem and I think now that we're recognising that I'm actually been so surprised by how many people are writing about this right now it's not just you've been writing about this for a long time but everyone is waking up to the fact that educated here have known for a very long time that we do have an issue private sector, the future of work the whole debates about AI and where we headed from now this is the time to try to make a change so we've got to basically start rallying people together and I think when you talked about your daughter's friend yes I did actually have a lot of those issues when I got to St Andrews and again I've got some friends from St Andrews who actually helped me out at the time in the same background I have to say that I was very lucky and perhaps that's one of the reasons now that St Andrews is ranked so high as it is in the university rankings that professors actually took some care and attention I actually found that the were people I could go and talk to hidden behind the scenes are often some lecturers at the university that actually also come, they'd come through the grammar school system but they'd come from more impoverished backgrounds and they understood and they actually did take the time to get right into their office hours so what your daughter's friend is hearing is obviously pretty dispiriting but hopefully and people like Tommy are here right now who did go through the Oxford system there might be some peer-to-peer support groups or some actually really useful faculty members who actually could give some advice and I think people are more mindful of that now I think medicine is a particularly hard very hard discipline and as you said they're really pushing people very hard so maybe outside of the medical faculty there might be some assistance elsewhere we do have to think about college counselling more of these bridging groups people are more aware of that there's not again one size fits all and often just having a linear path towards examinations or not understanding the questions I often didn't understand the questions at all either because they're geared towards people with a different kind of cultural awareness there's a kind of cultural capital that people have again it's like that maze and you don't know I actually didn't even know what terms meant and it wasn't just that I could look them up in the dictionary or use Google translate for you know kind of something from another English term I just simply didn't understand the context and I would often have to have someone explain that to me because you have to code shift you know from different backgrounds it's actually been in a way you are learning a foreign language or just from kind of a different context the way that people think OK we've just got one very quick quick quick quick Thank you Hi I'm glad you brought up code switching because I was going to ask you education is just one step in the pipeline and in say the foreign policy world IR world that you come from it's very elitist, very male pale stale what can institutions and we see in the UK with the cabinet being very like in the Palsytonian what can be done institutionally to ensure that people who go through the education system and take those great steps when they reach the great institutions that they actually stay that they aren't turned off and they don't leave after a year or two because they don't know the codes they don't get the support they need et cetera et cetera et cetera Well there's some really good because we still come back to the question about how we get more Fiona Hill's one minute we've got one minute and I think that is how we get more Fiona Hill's is tied up to that because how do people keep going in a way in a way that you did? Yeah because I do think it's like the dropping out because there are people who do drop out on the way because it's just too hard and just you know they feel like they're on the way They get knocked back by them and it's really setting up all of these support mechanisms and I think there's a bit of good news here in the fact that actually the UK government in particular there needs to be more diversity and they need to work harder at it in fact over the last few days I've been in London and I've been asked to speak to social and mobility networks inside the UK government and I was actually surprised to find that some of them have been in place for the last 10 years it's just they've been going along in fits and starts because Covid you know threw a lot of things off as well but there's a real determination now to bring people in from different backgrounds but you've got to start with schools and I did one event for the national security system and I kept thinking what are they going to explain in schools about the different kinds of jobs that you could have because when I was in school I had no idea that there were jobs like this so you could be an engineer, you could be in software, in an IT in a national security context but you wouldn't know that those kinds of jobs are out there so the key is basically linking into schools like my MP Derek Foster did when I was 13 or 14 coming in but it's also what he did is he followed up his constituent office followed up so I think actually when we do start to think about local government and MPs maybe they just need to do some of the old fashioned work of actually doing constituency work which is not always attractive to those who are parachuted in from somewhere else into the local area but to really engage with their constituents it's not the case that congress people do that very often in the United States thinking back to local congress person from Ohio they're probably doing some kind of performative strange politics in Congress at the moment I don't think Marjorie Taylor Greene is doing a lot of constituent work for example not that she's from Ohio but you really do need to have all these different levels of interaction and follow up and support its mentorship offline now aren't we so we're going to have to close Bea's waving at me Bea's giving us that