GGGG Ep 2 – Children can only aspire to what they know exists

Mark Taylor 00:00:40

Hello and welcome back to Education on Fire. Now later this year marks the 10th anniversary of the podcast and we're also going to reach the milestone of 500 episodes. So I really wanted to celebrate this journey in a way that had meaning but also had a sense of purpose. And the question was always going to be, you know, sort of how and what that was going to look like. Then Professor Dr. Ger Graus OBE reached out to me about recording a series of podcasts following the release of his book the Through a Different Lens, Lessons from a Life and Education. Now, it's a real privilege and humbling full circle moment for me and a real highlight for Education on Fire and just seeming to be the perfect way to celebrate this 10 year anniversary. Now we've decided to name the series Gare Grouse Gets Gritty and it's an honest take on education in schooling. We will use each chapter of the book as the starting point for the first seven episodes, which will be followed by three episodes with expert guests covering early childhood schooling and then further in higher education. Now, while we discuss many of the issues we are currently facing in education, we want this series to be a catalyst for good. We want you to be involved and help raise awareness of the incredible kind, caring and supportive learning that has children at the heart of what we do. So whether you're a parent, an educator or a mentor, this is a chance to make a real difference in the global conversation we need to have about supporting children in their learning. As the phrase goes, it really does take a village to raise a child. So here are five ways that we can make a difference. If you have a positive story, a person or an organization you'd like to share with us, please let us know. You can email mark@educationonfire.com and put Ger Graus Gets Gritty in the title, you can leave a short voice message at educationonfire.com/message join me on the education on fire YouTube channel for regular live streams where we meet as a community and you can share those stories information in real time through the comments or as a guest. You can use the hashtag #educationonfire on your social media posts. And so that means that everyone can see how you are supporting children make that positive difference. Now to wrap up the season, I'll host a live show with Gare and it will be shown on YouTube, but we'll have a limited number of people who can join us in zoom and have the opportunity to ask Gare a question in person. Now, to be one of those people you'll need to be on the Education on Fire email list, which you can join@educationonfire.com so while we continue to hope that those with power start to understand and develop an education system fit for the modern age, not just the industrial revolution, we also want to make sure that we can make a difference together today. So my wish for this 10th anniversary year is that we can come together as a village to guide and celebrate each other and provide that learning environment every child deserves. If you haven't read Through a Different Lens, it's published by Routledge and we have details of this and how to get involved in the description. Thank you for everything you do and let's Make a Difference Together. Hello, my name is Mark Taylor and welcome to the Education on Far podcast, The place for creative and inspiring learning from around the world. Listen to teachers, parents and mentors share how they are supporting children to live their best, authentic life and are proving to be a guiding light to us all. Hello and welcome back. We are going to be talking about Children can only aspire to what they know exists. We're obviously talking about it in relation to Gare's book through a different lens. And you know, this is about Ger Graus Gets Gritty. It's about talking what's around the book in the book, but also making some of those comments, statements and thoughts which hopefully will make you think about what we're doing, how things can be not just for the status quo, but some fairly straightforward and obvious thoughts about how it could look better and why we should be making that the case. So, Ger, thanks so much for being back with me this morning. This is going to be a fabulous conversation because not only are we talking about talking about education, we've got the history of your experiences from that, but I think also how the reality of what that can look like and should look like going forward. So, yes, where should we start? What's your first instinct? What was your first thought when you started writing this chapter?

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:04:59

It's a. It's a. It's a quote by an American author and thought leader. I think is the term called Roy Bennett. Roy T. Bennett. Let me read it to you. If you have a strong purpose in life, you don't have to be pushed. Your passion will drive you there. Struck me as something incredibly important, particularly combined with that fact that wherever I go, I ask to speak to children. My first question always is, why you go? Why do you go to school? And the answer, typically in about 80 to 85% of the cases, is because I have to that strikes me as a lack of purpose and therefore completely understandably and completely justify a lack of passion. How, how, how sad that, that young people feel that they have to do something for 10 to 15 years and sometimes longer because other people want them to do that. That's, that's not a good place to be, that's not a good reflection and that's very sad for our young people. So, so the Roy T. Bennett quote is one that is, that is very dear to me and in a sense is the start of that chapter of children can only aspire to what they know exists. And let me tell you where that, because I'm often asked that where that story, where that quote comes from. So it's 1999, 2000, just about that December time, 1999. I start my job as, as Education Director of the Widdenshaw Education Action Zones now under the Blair government, starting in 1997. The ticket of that election campaign was education, education, education and whatever people say. And for all the mistakes that no doubt were made and the holes that people can pick into things, one, they were true to their promise because it was education, education, education and it was a, a slightly different time to now and that there was money in the system. So, so they literally put their money where their mouth was. And not just that, but they'd done their homework and they'd effectively identified initially the first 25 and then later on another 25 areas in the country that were the most deprived, socioeconomically, the most deprived areas, but also educationally the most underperforming areas. And the Manchester area of Wythenshaw, South Manchester next to Manchester Airport was one of those. And Manchester Airport became its private sector sponsor. There were 29 schools in those days in that Widdonshaw area. There were five secondary schools, there were three special schools, and the rest were either infants, juniors or primary schools. So in a sense it was targeted investment into education. Education Action zones were exempt charities, so they did not fall under the control of local authorities. We were directly answerable to, I think, what was called the Department for Education and Skills at the time. And, and that's a very important thing because one might argue that that's where Michael Gove got the idea from, to start academy trusts for a very different purpose, incidentally, not an educational one, but a political one, to take powers away from local authorities. So the argument stands fair and square that academy trusts are almost anti democratic and were created for that purpose. Education Action Zones were different. They were last chance saloons for schools that for all Sorts of reasons were not performing well despite the best efforts of local authorities in a large number of cases. So this EAZ was created and there was always a question. My chairman, I was approached whether I would like to run that eaz. I was, I was delighted because I knew the W area from before, from my time as languages adviser in Manchester. We'd started primary languages into. Into those primary schools and W was part of that many school in Windshaw studied Italian because there's a sizable Italian community in, in Windshaw and. And my office was at Manchester Airport. And the chairman of the trust was a. A wonderful man called Jeff Muirhead, who, who was the then group chief executive of Manchester Airport and a very influential, I'd say influential rather than powerful because that gives the wrong connotation. Positively influential person. A guy who sat on the right side of things. I loved him very much. He was also very challenging, incidentally. But that's part of the game, that's a good thing. So the question came to me quite early on, why would Manchester Airport get involved in this? What was in it for them? Because that win, win thing is really important, I think. And the answer that Jeff gave me, which is completely understandable, is we want to be in a situation whereby we recruit our workforce more locally. At the moment, we are not recruiting our workforce locally, which is not good for the community. It's actually not good for the airport as a business because economically we're clogging up our car parks with the cars of our own workers. So you could see all sorts of really good reasons why they would get involved. But their recruitment locally was low, was percentage wise, quite low. So one of the first things I started to do is I started. I wanted to talk to as many children as possible, but not traditionally to 14 to 16 year olds or 14 to 18 years. I wanted to know what was going on lower, lower down in the age ranges. So I started to talk to 6, 7 and 8 year olds, 9 year olds and asked them a number of questions. And the first question I always asked was, well, we live next door to Manchester Airport. What jobs can you do at the airport? And the answer I got unreservedly were the things they could see. The visible side of Manchester Airport, the outward facing side, if you wish. Now, I kind of calculated at the time that that was probably 45% of the jobs were visible baggage handlers selling newspapers in W.H. smith, passport control, security, whatever else it was, the bus drivers, whatever else there was. And 55% were, you might want to call it Backstage air traffic control and all those kind of things. So instantly, if you think about it, those youngsters could only aspire to about 45% of what was actually going on at the airport because they didn't know about the other 55%. And the first feedback that I gave to the chairman was, you need to get out there more because. Because how can they be excited by something that they don't know exists? So, yes, very quickly we ended up, remember this is pre 9, 11. We ended up building classrooms in Terminal 2 and working with airlines whereby we brought young people into the classrooms and then pilots would turn up and cabin crew would turn up and all sorts of people would turn up. And we got mentoring schemes whereby we got airport staff going out into schools as aspiration mentors or reading mentors or maths mentors, so that the airport became something that wasn't over there somewhere, but that became part of us. In terms of those youngsters, one of the things I would always say to the children was because it was visible, look, you can fly planes. And the answer I got from 6, 7, 8 year olds was, don't you know that people from Widdenshaw don't fly planes? So not just was there a case of children can only aspire to what they know exists, the 45%. There was also a case of aspirational lids were put on jars. You know that story of the fleas, the fleas in the jar where if you have, if you have a jar and you put fleas in the jar, you put the lid on, you leave the lid for three days, you remove the lid, no flea will jump higher than where the lid was and neither will their offspring. And it's always struck me as such an incredibly powerful picture, but that bit about children from Witten Shaw, people from Witten Shaw don't fly planes, was part of that. Not just the aspirational bit. Children can only aspire to what the know exists. It was also part of, of the jar and the lid. So that's, that's, where, where the story came from. And what, what became increasingly obvious to me, combined with that Roy T. Bennett quote, was that actually the most important thing we could do for those young people in Windshaw was not give them additional maths classes on a Saturday morning, but was to discover why maths mattered and why English mattered and why school mattered. And that's not a matter of telling them from a textbook, that's not a matter of taught knowledge, but that is a matter of experienced wisdom. So we needed to create the Opportunities for them to find out. And our engagement and partnership with the airport grew on a weekly basis because the chairman and so many others, there were 250 companies inside the airport. Everybody supported this and we got to. As organizations live side by side in a very loving, purposeful way, and that's why it worked. Incidentally, the budget that we were given from the Government was an interesting one. It was a. It was quite a cool concept for us. It was because you were given an X amount of money directly from the Department for Education and Skills and then you were given match funding. For every pound that you raised from the private sector, the government would match by another pound. Now, for us, that became really easy because the airport helped us. So we raised. We would raise, I don't know, easily half a million pounds, 750,000. A million pounds a year. And it was capped to a certain level, but it was matched. There was also an interesting flaw in the government under the Civil Service's thinking, because the same rule applied to everybody across the country. I'll use this as an example. The Education Action Zone in Cornwall, rural poverty is a very different beast to urban poverty. So rural poverty, the main sponsor of the Education Action Zone in Cornwall was a very large dairy farm. But the chances of Cornwall's director or CEO raising a million pounds from the dairy farm and having that matched by government were nil. So at some point, my chairman, Jeff Muir, the night, sat down with the Department for Educational Skills and said, look, we're going over our cap. So actually we're raising more private sector investment than you can match or are prepared to match. But Cornwall are struggling. So as a gesture of, we're all in this together, we want to give our surplus to Cornwall. And they went, oh, it didn't work like that. We'd have to change the law. And you go, well, change the bloody law then, if it works for Cornwall and for the children. But we never got there. So there were elements of one size fits all thinking in there that were unhealthy and unhelpful and took no account of context and quite frankly, were disappointing even from. From that government at the time. And neither David Blunker nor Estelle Morris were to be convinced that. That we could apply that level of fairness. But. But that's where the quote came. The quote came from. And somehow that's. Over the years is caught on and stayed as my mantra. But it makes perfect sense. And incidentally, adults can only aspire to what they know exists, only it doesn't stop at the age Of, I don't know, 18 or 16 or whatever it is. It's a zero to 99 thing I would suggest.

Mark Taylor 00:18:34

And the thing that I don't know, it strikes me more and more and more is how unrevolutionary is a thought concept. That must be because if you think about anyone who's a parent, when your children are born and as they grow up, what do you do? You spend all your time doing experiences. You know, you go out of your house and you go to the park, you go to the shops, you might go to the cinema, you might go to the zoo, you might go on holiday. You don't do all those things just for the sake of it. You do because you're expanding their understanding and their awareness and the things that are going to support their learning in a very natural way. And a little bit like when you sort of have the early years conversation and then going into more sort of formal primary education, why is it that you think that something which is so sort of inherent to what we, we know as a, as in learning and a growing concept suddenly seems to stop? Because education, schooling rather sort of kicks in and sort of stops you doing that. And it, it doesn't seem like it should be revolutionary or so out there, but it as a concept it seems to be in, in the traditional way.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:19:43

Yeah, it's an interesting one, isn't it? I mean it does, it does a number of things. One is, I think, to answer your question, I think we get hung up on schooling more than education because we were part of this top down thing that kind of goes. We have a government that thinks, has decided what children should be taught, not what they should learn, but what they should be taught. We call that the national curriculum. And then we force schools to teach that. We always had a concept that secondary is more important than primary is more important than early years for whatever God given reason. And then you get inspections and league tables to make damn sure that these schools do as we tell them. That pressure point is far greater at secondary. Also we make secondary schools bigger for economic reasons that have more youngsters in them. And all of that stuff then becomes more difficult. But also, and this is a challenge for the schools and particularly for secondary schools because primaries by and large are quite good at it. We're quite happy to alienate the parents. We actually don't want much to do with the parents. Given half a chance, we'll see them at a parent's evening. Five minutes per teacher. I mean, who ever thought that that was enough, right? And we actually don't want them through the gate. So if they drop their youngsters off for whatever reason, they can either do it in the car or they can stop at the entrance. And it's mass fence that we built around the school. I must, if I remember telling a story about a fence. And so we alien instead of engaging the parents, we alienated parents. Now I'm a great believer in purposeful homework. Not the bit that goes, I applied my lesson really badly, can you finish that off at home? But the bit that says you loved my lesson so much. Now would you please ask your mom and dad to take you to X, Y or Z? And we have to be careful with this because the minute we go into EAZ areas. I went to Chatsworth House last weekend, a beautiful house in Derbyshire, absolutely magnificent, and visited the house itself and went to the Christmas market and it cost me £36. Now, with every bit of respect in the world, the number of people who live in Widdonshaw and other of those challenged areas will not be able to afford 36 pounds. But there are thankfully schools that kind of more than a school concept, my wife's school being one of them who write to parents just before half term, for example, and say, here are all sorts of places in Sheffield or Manchester or Liverpool or wherever you live where you can take your children for free. We must draw the parents in, we must make them our co educators. We can't just expect them to sit there, be telepathic and go, oh, I know what, they've just been taught in geography, I'm now going to take them there. You know, it takes a village, the old adage, it takes a village to raise a child. Well, we need to remember that the village consists, community consists of different components and parents and grandparents are very important but we must engage them in them and in the Children's University, which we can talk about a bit later on, hopefully that became a very important aspect and evidence from evaluations by the University of Cambridge showed that that work, that fence, incidentally, I must tell you that story because it's, it's an eye opener. I was invited, I won't name the school. I was invited to visit a newly built school under building the Building Schools for the Future scheme. And the school was in the Oxford area, it was brand new, massive bill Pfi. So I got to the school and there's this huge fence around the school and, and, and, and this gate and it says press here. So I pressed there and this intercom came on and said in A very polite way. Who are you and what you want? So I said that I was there to meet the teacher. And the little door opened and then there was a sign that said, walk this way. So I walked that way. And then I got to another door and there's another buzzer. So I pressed that buzzer and I said, well, I've walked that way. I'm now here. And the door opened again and I walked into something that was reminiscent of the film One Flew over the Cuckoo's Nest. Into this immensely big, sterile environment with. With a number of people behind the desk in. In uniforms, a felt nurse ratchet, you know, that. That. That kind of stuff. So I walked up and introduced myself and I asked whether I could see the head teacher. And then I noticed a sign that said, no children. So that's odd. And the head teacher walked down this spiral staircase. So I said, hello, and very nice to meet you. And I'm just curious about the. No children, son. Are you getting any more in or. Or how does it work? And he said, no, they have a separate entrance. Felt a bit like an unfriendly Downton Abbey kind of upstairs, downstairs approach. Right. So anyway, I got the guy to tour. There were no displays on the wall that were children's displays. There were pictures that were very pretty but didn't belong to anybody. And certainly wasn't celebrating any sense of achievement. And then I. I persuaded their teacher that I might have some lunch, please with some of the youngsters. So. So they got me some youngsters to have lunch with. And it was. And they were lovely. I'm sure they were handpicked, but nevertheless, they, they. They were lovely. And so I said to the youngsters, tell me what you think of the school. And we had a bit of a laugh. And then I said, I must ask you about defense, because defense is very high. Tell me why you think defense exists. And the genuine reply I got was, to keep us in. So I asked them whether they knew who Andy Murray was. And whether they'd heard of Dunblane and the fact that there'd been a shooting in the school. And actually the fence was built to keep you safe. And one boy who was 14 said, Then why doesn't it feel like that? So it's slightly away from. Children can only aspire to what they know exists. Except that in building our aspirations, understanding our environment matters. And if I feel that I'm in an institution that keeps me in. It might restrict my thinking outwards suddenly. It might restrict my feeling outwards so. So that was, that was an interesting experience. And, and somehow now that that mantra has kind of gone and as you say, it does make perfect sense. It's not rocket science. I grew up in the Netherlands, as you know, in the south, very near the German border, very near the Belgian border. I watched German television, Dutch television, Belgian television, which was either in Flemish, that is Dutch or French. And we got English television. Many, none of it was dubbed. If there was anything, it had subtitles. So learning languages to me was, you couldn't do without. I wouldn't be able to understand what Hilda Ogden said. I wouldn't be able to go and buy schnapps or cigars from my grandparents. I wouldn't be able to understand how the money functioned because this was pre the euro. So you had Belgian francs and German marks and Dutch guilders. So it all made complete sense to me. And even the creation of the euro made complete sense because if you went to Maastricht, beautiful city, the oldest city in the Netherlands, and you sat and had a drink on the Vrijthof, where Andre Rio performs his massive concerts every year, all the waiters would have three money belts and some had four because there was a British army base nearby. So one money belt was Belgian Franks, the other one was Dutch Gilders, the other was German marks. And some had had British pounds in there. And all the waiters in Maastricht I always thought had hernias. So the invention of the euro for a place like Maastricht just made complete sense. It might not have made sense for other parts of Europe, but really, pragmatically for the waiter in Maastricht, it made complete sense. So learning a language for me was natural. Learning more than one language was natural. It just, just happened. You grew up with it. The music that we listened to was Jacques Bral in, in French, it was H. Simons in German and it was the Beatles and Simon and Garfunkel and all those in English made complete sense. Then I become a languages teacher in that country and everything makes sense. Then I moved to England. And the first thing that happens at my first school, Tavoram High School in Norwich, I get asked the question, why do we have to study German? And the answer that some people gave was, because one day you might go on holiday to Germany. You might, but it's not very likely, because if you're a hot weather person like me, Germany, for example, is not the beachy place that Spain is, right? So. So you, you get the drift. So that kind of convinced me that if there isn't an obvious purpose for the young people and their families, then perhaps we can create one together. So the German exchange that became the hallmark of Tabor High School and such a huge success, I mean, 500 children in the school every year, towards the end of me being there, we took 80 children to stay in families for a fortnight. So we, we almost took kind of a fifth of the school away for a fortnight and then grew the school later on when, when our German friends came back. But, but what that German exchange did, it personalized the learning of the language. I can now speak with Gabi or Maria or Frank or Hellman or whoever those people were. And, and I want to, and remember this is before social media and WhatsApp. Everything was done by postcard, telephone or letter. It was before emails. So we created the reason. And I'm delighted that I hear from people I taught 40 odd years ago that they're still in touch with their German mates, they go to each other's weddings and just things of their children and all those things. So my point would be, is it worked. We created this, of course, then we had French exchanges. And when I moved to Hull, an area of significant deprivation, we just took a bit longer to set it up, it took us longer to save up, but we took our youngsters to Spain and we took our youngsters to Germany and we took our youngsters to France and they came back. And then the thing I started in Norwich was to say those youngsters who really enjoyed this and who are also really good at it, we then sent them on work experience schemes for six weeks in the summer and deliberately placed them in families where nobody speaks English. When they came back, Mark, they were, it's not that they were brilliant, but they were. It was much more importantly that they were confident, they weren't scared to make mistakes because they knew how to learn from. And now I look sometimes in this day and age, in our schooling and I think when much of that's gone, in part because we have become health and safety and safeguarding obsessed and we haven't found, we haven't found the right answers because the answer we found is to stop doing certain things as if 40 years ago we didn't want our children to be safe. We worked. I worked with Franz Joseph, Hilga and Ulla Henk and Fritz Meyer in Germany and vetted their families and they vetted ours, of course. And these things should be much easier these days because we've got the technology to do it. So. So one and the technology one is an interesting one because of course, in. In my day at table my school and later at Winifred Hobby School in Hull and then in Manchester, we had pen friends and it took a long time to write the letter. It took a long time for the letter to get there and then for them to read the letter, apply and to get back to us. And quite often the youngsters would come to me and said, sir, I can't remember what I wrote in the first place. Can we take a photocopy of the letters that we sent so at least we're reminded? Because of course there were no email trails, right. So we photocopied the letters that we sent so that we could remind ourselves when we had to reply what we'd written in the first place. If I was a teacher now, I would have WhatsApp powers instead of pen friends. And this is, again, is the thing. In the interest of health and safety and well being, we must ban mobile phones from schools. We must ban what comes natural to our young people for, I don't know, six hours every day because we haven't quite got to grasp with the fact how to cope with this. I think we should do better. I think mobile phones should be allowed in the classroom, but I think there needs to be a code of conduct and the creation of that code of conduct should heavily involve the young people themselves. If you give me 20 children now of whatever age and I get some time with them, they can draw up their own code of conduct. And if I were a betting person, I would bet with you that their code of conduct would be much better and probably slightly stricter than the ones that would be drawn up by the adults and they would also be prepared to police it. Would it be perfect? Of course it wouldn't. But then nothing is. But it's not about making sure that stuff doesn't happen, it's about calculated risk. We need to be more courageous because otherwise we stop our children from aspiring because they don't know what exists. So. So that's kind of how that all fits. It's a longer story than I thought it was going to be.

Mark Taylor 00:34:56

This message is from Sergei Kozoretsky, Vice Rector for Research, Moscow State University of Education and Psychology.

Prof Sergey Kosaretsky 00:35:03

Ger is a very important person for me. I've met him about seven years ago. He was a speaker on one of the most important event in Russia, in Moscow, and I was really impressed by his speech. I have never heard about gear before and it's really my mistake because every year I got A conversation With Ger I've got a lot of wisdom, a lot of interesting insights. I think we have a huge gap in terms of age, but for me he was the same, or maybe younger, maybe because he works close with children and children made him younger.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:36:10

And.

Prof Sergey Kosaretsky 00:36:12

I've met him and we've got a conversation and I think I believed that we've stayed friends and then we have different activities. First of all, I'm researcher and we've started research. We've started study study about Kidzanian's experience as an entertainment, as a model of entertainment. We found that Kidzania's practices are based on modern theories of play, communication, organization of environment that stimulates motivation, the development of social, emotional, intelligence and financial literature. A lot of very important things for students. But nobody before studied Kidzania in this way. We've organized such sort of study with my colleagues in High School of Economics University, the leading university in Russia. And we've published a paper with the results of our study with Ger and other people. And it's rather popular paper among researchers. And insights from this paper are very important for researchers who is interested in this field of pedagogical psychological studies. But also a lot of gears. We have conversations, to my regret, last gears remotely. But for me also, remote communication has influenced me a lot. Every talk with Ger has a lot of inspiration for me. His stories, his thoughts. For me, all these things are very important for my thoughts about education, for my thoughts about the future. And I suppose we are good friends, good partners in terms of research, in terms of professional dialogues. And I think he's a teacher for me.

Mark Taylor 00:39:09

I just want to sort of just touch on that, like you mentioned about. We all are in that position. It's not just about children. And I'm curious on your thoughts about the fact that so many people in education now, whether they're teachers or even people that are sort of further on, whether they're head teachers or people involved in governors, governorship and that kind of thing. All they know that exists from an education point of view, because it's been like it for so long, is the sort of schooling that we've been talking about. Like you say, it's got the fences, you know, you've got a national curriculum. Ofsted comes in and it looks like this, they don't remember a time pre that. And also I'm not sure that anyone, like you say, because we're not doing better, they can't imagine what a school could look like. In a way that's going to be forward facing and embracing all the opportunities rather than just. It needs to be square peg, round hole in terms of what we're trying to achieve and how we're trying to deliver it.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:40:11

And whether we like that or not, Mark, we must also recognize that the good old British class system is still around. That stuff about people from here don't fly planes comes from somewhere. That's not something that the children have made up. They've heard that from people and that's why you still get dimensions, still get dimension in not just in the UK but everywhere in the world. I am the first one in my family to go to university. Well, congratulations. But at the same time, what a shame. Yeah. And there's a, there's an interesting story that links to that and again it's linked to aspirations but this time not of the children, but of the parents and the adults around those children. So when, when, after the 2010 general election in the United Kingdom, the tuition fee levels were reset and reintroduced because the leader of the Democrat Liberal Democrat party lied to the electorate, essentially Nick Clegg, and, and came back on his promise, which is a terrible thing to do. There was a real worry that the number of young people going to university would drop and we'll never quite know whether that was the case or not because our data is not sophisticated enough because it isn't about overall numbers, it is about segments of those overall numbers. So did fewer people from very poor areas stop going to university because of that? And I remember doing some work with Exeter University. No, it wasn't Exeter, it was Essex University meeting with parents of six forms and they'd asked me whether I want to go along. So, so I said I would and I tootle along and was there and one of the parents, a dad, was, was very, very vocal about my daughter's not going to go to university because she's not going to end up with that debt. So I've got to be careful now because, because I would not want to be a. Accused of being patronizing. So I'm going to, I'm going to try it telling as factual as I can, but the intention is to be factual about it. So, so this guy was, was a bricklayer on a bricklayer salary, lived in rented accommodation because he couldn't afford to buy a house. So a debt of £30,000 to that man was. £30,000 was an unimaginable amount of money to have because if he'd had £30,000, as he said to me later, he would have bought a House, you would have put a deposit down. He was never in a position to do that. So all of a sudden he is confronted by, through poor communication from the government side and the DfE side, thinking that his daughter automatically has to pay back this £30,000 or whatever it was at the time. So I, I kind of unpacked that for him and said, look, the ruling at the moment is, I think it was £21,000 at the time. If you earn less than £21,000, you don't pay anything back. And if you earn between 21,000 and 28,000, I think it was, you pay back 21 pounds per month. That's how it works. And initially, if memory serves me right, it was, it was interest free or nearly interest free. So those goalposts hadn't been moved yet. So, so he became less vocal. And then I said to him, because I'd seen him have a smoke outside, I said, how much is a packet of fags these days? And he went, well, it's about £8. I said, well, I'll do you a deal. I said, you let, you, your daughter can go to university, you encourage her to go, and you don't even have to give up smoking. All you need to do is smoke three packings a month, less you can pay for it. And all I did with that example was I, I'm, I'm, I was trying to make clear to somebody who didn't understand what a large amount of money was, that when you break it down into certain things, it becomes manageable. And, and that too is about. Adults can only aspire to what they know exists in terms of possibilities. But again, much of our communication is one size fits all. It is aimed at, dare I say, just the middle classes, by which an enormous chunk of people, adults and children, are left to one side because nobody's had a word with them. I just think we need to get better at those things. So you're quite right. You know, adults can only aspire to what they know exists, not just on their own behalf, but also on behalf of their children. I mean, there's a whole range of questions as to whether everybody should go to university and whether those targets were right, but simply within the context that I described, that man loved his daughter so much, he didn't want her to end up in debt. Brilliant. I get that. I admire the love. I feel the same about my kids. The difference is that I understood, because all the PR was targeted at me, that you didn't have to pay back the 30 grand in one go. Nobody'd explain that to him. Oh, well, he should have found out for himself then. No, no, he shouldn't because we need to give people a hand to understand how some of those complex things work. So it's an interesting, an interesting thing. And also we need to remember this is an interesting story from my very personal perspective in terms of aspirations. So my granddad, born in 1891. My granddad couldn't read or write. So I have memories of my grandmother reading the newspaper to him on a Saturday evening. And he would sit and listen and she would read the paper. And I remember him signing with a cross. My father went to school and my father became, to all intents and purposes, a. A finance manager, a bookkeeper. He was literate and he was numerate and he made both his job, as it were. Iinen came along and I became the first one in the family to go to university. And sadly, my granddad was no longer around because it would have been such a proud moment for him. It's not that many years ago. It was 2019, November 2019, that I was at Oxford University and I watched my son graduate from one of the top universities in the world. So I sometimes think I stood on my hill, my. My little personal hill, and to my left I watched my illiterate granddad, who I loved so very much. And to my right I watched my son, who I love so very much. And I. And he was. He was more literate, still is, or infinitely more literate than I am. So social mobility is not something that you can fix over five years either. And aspirations is not something that is just like turning on a light. These things take time because they're cultural, they're deeply personal and deeply personally cultural. They're about confidences and they're about widening the horizons so that children can aspire to more things because we've shown them more and I suppose we've led by example. My. My youngest daughter is also. She's in a second year of Oxford University, and I'm pretty certain. I mean, she's. She's a very bright cookie and all those things, but I'm pretty certain I'm not, I'm. No, that's wrong. I'm not sure whether she would have ended up at Oxford had her brother not gone. These things, you know, these things that you put on a desk, the tick, tick, tock things, you. You move one thing and then the rest. It's a little bit like that, isn't it? Once you set something in motion, the motion continues and it affects other parts of the equation. And so that's really important. That's all about role models, the leading by example and opening curtains and, and opening doors and windows and letting them experience and see. And that is all beyond schooling.

Mark Taylor 00:49:10

And I think one of the things that struck me, like you said, in terms of the, the cost and the debt in terms of going to university and, you know, you're not talking about a conversation you had this year, you're talking about it in the past, is that every year I hear Martin Lewis say exactly the same things on all of his channels about people not understanding the cost of what it is to go and actually have that opportunity to go to university and the, the real cost as opposed to the practicalities of a loan and, and also what that education will then give you. And you can talk about it in terms of degrees and masters, you can talk about it in terms of social experience, in terms of personal growth, in terms of just opening up the world to you to see what's available. And all these decisions are personal. But like you say, you should be able to make those decisions based on all the information and everyone should have access to that information and we should.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:50:07

Become more innovative, we should look around more. There's this brilliant thing. So in the Netherlands, for a good number of years now, the housing shortages in the Netherlands are at least as acute as they are in the UK and elsewhere. And, and it particularly affects, like in most places, affects students. They've got limited budgets in the end. And I love, I love that kind of that thinking. So somebody somewhere in Amsterdam at the very university went, there's lots of lonely old people in Amsterdam in old people's homes. And the old people's homes invariably have spare capacity and there are lots of young people in Amsterdam who can't afford or find housing. So how about if we offer the spaces in the old people's home to the students at cost price on the condition that at least two or three times a week they have dinner with the old people. Now look at that. I mean, apart from being moved by that thinking and the kindness behind that thinking, I think it's a stroke of genius, right? It's a stroke of simplistic genius. But of course, it's easier to do when everything is nationalized. Still, the minute you've privatized those things, it becomes a bit of a. It's not, it's, it's not that you can't solve it, it just becomes trickier. And, and I think we just need to be Slightly more creative at the same time but, but, but you're right, I mean, you know, there is something about the practical application of the consequences of government actions and that's how I see Martin Lewis. He is, he is the ultimate explainer, isn't he? In a language that is, I mean I, I, I, I, I, I'm not mathematically very literate I, I, for some reason it's not how my brain works and at school I hated it and my teachers I don't think were that good and I was not that interested and all that kind of collided. When he talks I understand what he's saying. He uses the words for example, a lot like a good teacher would. Right. And so I think you're right. I think we need hooray for Martin Lewis, we need more Martin Lewis's who will help people to understand that. Because the minute you understand things you also become more confident either for yourself or on behalf of your children. And that's aside to the fact, I mean, you know, one of the big mistakes I think the Blair government made for the many things it did so well in education, one of the big mistakes was that it started setting targets of percentages of youngsters who must go to university because that is the ultimate outcome of social mobility. Well, it's not for somebody in sanctuary buildings in London to determine what the ultimate outcome of your or my social mobility is without engaging us in this. And again it became a matter of you treat everybody the same and I'm very happy to see that starting under the previous government and certainly continued now, not fast enough for my liking is one the reintroduction of apprenticeships, but also the building up the value of apprenticeships, that apprenticeship degrees are not second best. And I'm hoping that we see in my lifetime the polytechnics, the vocational universities, which is what they were, who were allowed to call themselves universities so that the government could meet its targets of percentages going to university. I hope we will see them revert to becoming polytechnics again because they had a very clear purpose and they were, yes, they were seen by many as second best, but I would argue there will only see those many who saw them as second best perhaps had a rather gigantic chip on their shoulder and it wasn't the fault of the polytechnics but rather by rather of the people who judged them. So we need to have that discussion and I'm glad that we've made a.

Mark Taylor 00:54:33

Start Just going back on your old people's home story. Another story I heard along along those lines was a school that used to bring the children to the home so that the old people could spend time with them because they needed people to help them listen to read. And in exactly that same way the company actually of the, of the people in the residential home and the children communicating across generations was beneficial for both because the, the young children really enjoyed the fact they were able to read and have different conversations and different experiences and it made the people that were more lonely in the residential home the opportunity to share time with the children. And of course that brings all sorts of sort of human things coming through because some, some people would pass on, some people would, would move or all those sort of sort of natural things that occurred. But it opened up conversations and experiences and also like you say, that win, win on both sides. It doesn't have to be a financial thing, but everyone getting something in a, in a, a sort of a joint project, if not for a better word actually then means that it's easier to sort of move forward with ideas, I think. And it's those sorts of conversations where we can all benefit. It sort of gives you that sort of green light just to sort of take that next step totally.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:55:55

It struck me, for example, post Covid, it struck me as part of the kind of social entrepreneurship work experience agenda, if you wish, in a school, and I'm talking upper primary now rather than secondary. How cool would it be if we encouraged our schools to form links with old people's homes, for example, whereby our 9 and 10 and 11 year olds and 12 and 13 year olds can go to those older people and teach them in the use of technology, teach them how to FaceTime, teach them how to. That will probably be the older ones, but teach them how to online bank, teach them in those things. So, so that you not just go and say, well just go and have a cup of coffee and talk about how badly Man United are doing or whatever, but actually go and have a cup of coffee and teach and learn from each other and, and, and in return the old people will talk about the wartime as part of your history lesson. I'm just making that, that bit up. But, but you can create those things and what you then should do, I mean, heaven forbid that creativity crept into Ofsted, into inspectorates ever anyway is you should make, you should actually make that thinking about being more than a school, you couldn't. You should not be able to get the label outstanding unless you prove that you're more than a school and that you affect other parts of your community. Rather than having older kids getting the same high Grades in maths or whatever, because schools are about more than teaching tests. And, and I like the idea, some of the noises of the new national curriculum. We'll have to see how that works out in practice, of course, but the new national curriculum in England is starting to talk about what I in my mind call applied mathematics, applied applied technology, applied language learning. And you might argue that the example of the children and the old people, so help teaching older people had FaceTime, that that is part of applied technology. And, and that would just be a good thing, but you'd have to then change inspection frameworks with that. And, and I think I'm normally a very optimistic person, but, but since 1992, since the inspection framework in England has been around, I've not seen that level of creativity or willingness to even embrace that.

Mark Taylor 00:58:30

And the first thing that struck me about large amounts of children going in and out of an old people's home was the people in school going the health and safety risk assessment time. And immediately you're thinking it's a heavy prospect rather than something which is. Is a beautiful thing and an experience that everyone would really benefit from. And then I think you start to get a real sense of sort of where we emotionally feel about the possibilities of doing something different rather than just getting through the school day.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:59:01

But Mark, I struggled with that mindset. You know, when, when the car was invented, my granddad used to tell the story that in the village, he remembered the first car and belonged to the doctor. Somebody walked in front of the car with a red flag to warn the people and so that the animals wouldn't be scared. Right. The car then developed, and eventually there was a company called Volvo in Sweden and they developed the seat belt as we currently know it, the kind of the triangle seatbelt. And what they did, which was, which is beautiful, was they didn't patent it. They said, this is such an important thing for safety, health and safety. We don't patent it. We give the know how away to all the other manufacturers. So there are so many walks of life where we are confronted with issues and problems, if you wish, if that's the right word, and we go, do you know what? We're clever. We're going to invent the answer. Except when it comes to children enjoying education and having experiences, we shut up shop. And I think we should be made to stop to do that. You know, good schools, good teachers find answers. So let's just change the mindset that goes from. In my day, that was a can do mindset. Yes. Take them to Germany? Yes. Do the work experience. Let's just sit down and make sure of all the things that we need to make sure as a calculated risk exercise that we need to take care of. Nowadays people would go sending 14 and 15 year olds to Germany for six weeks of work experience. Oh my God, not possible. Yes, it is. Just be smarter about it and actually be more child centered rather than systemic. And I think there's a big issue is that in our schooling we have become accountable to the system and no longer to the child. So in a new inspection framework, it should ask the question in its actions, is the school accountable to the child? Be an interesting loan. That would scare a few people. Good. I just think we need to. I cannot accept that for health and safety reasons we cannot do certain things. We need to find answers. Might take time, it might cost money, it might not be easy, but we fail our children in their education and their schooling if we don't try.

Mark Taylor 01:01:32

So in terms of aspirations and experience and what children are aware of and what they can aspire to, we've sort of talked about the school itself, we talked about that kind of trying to support parents to being engaged, involved in knowing more about their education and what they may be able to go to from a free sense or what's around it. Again, that becomes a more societal thing, you know, keeping museums free, keeping certain organizations and things free for people to go and take part in. So in terms of sort of concepts which then change that in terms of Kidzania, those sorts of things, the Children's University, where you're suddenly like, right, we want to make something different, something which changes the experience for children in a way that wouldn't have been possible before this thing existed. So that's a very exciting thing and obviously something you've got all that experience with.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:02:30

Yeah, so. So the Children's University would be a good example. So children aged 5 to 14, predominantly targeted, is for all children, but predominantly targeted at children from disadvantaged backgrounds. Why? Well, children from advantaged backgrounds more often than not are taken to museums and galleries and zoos and parks and have experiences through their school, particularly in private schools, which children from disadvantaged backgrounds don't have. And of course, the original concept of Children's University was the brainchild of the great late Sir Tim Brigham. As the founding CEO of, of the national organization. I used to talk to Tim, pick his brains and then developed the framework. And, and there's a funny story behind that, because the framework came to me in a pub in Cheshire called Divine. Sorry, in a pub In Norwich, called Divine. It was a Norwich. And whilst I was in the pub, I was visiting Norwich. And whilst I was in the pub, I noticed that they had a sticker in the window. And the sticker in the window said campaign for Real Ale. So what that means is that somebody's decided, judged that the beer in the pub is really good. And then people would turn up with a little like a passport thing and they would write in the passport which beer they drunk on which day in which pub, and then the pub would stamp that little passport. And then I remember sitting there thinking, oh, this is it. Just replace the pub with a museum and replace the beer with a learning experience. The sticker is still in the window. And by then, on a website and you give the children. I've still got one here for, for memory sake, you give the children a passport to learning. And they go and visit, they go on the website with the help of their teachers and their parents, and they go and visit the museums, libraries, galleries, zoos, farms, sports clubs, whatever it is that have been validated by the Children's University. And they go there and they get a stamp in their passport. And when they have an X number of stamps in their passport, they will graduate at a university wearing a cap and gown with their mums and dads who probably had never set foot in a university before. So you are making the social mobility thing a family thing and a wider family, because the grandparents would turn up and aunts and uncles would turn up, brothers and sisters and God knows what. And that. So that is where the Children's University concept came from. And looking back at it now, after all those years, I'm not surprised it became popular and that it went international. And my last deed for the Children's University was to go to the first graduation of the Children's University in Australia, in Adelaide, where, where I'd been given a. An adjunct fellowship at the university to work with them on this. Of course, we worked in partnerships. I, by then had developed a very good relationship with the Fundazione Radio. Children had become personal friends with Carla Rinaldi and people like James Bradburn to actually, well, so what does validating good learning look like? So we wrote this guide called Planning for Learning. We trained the Children's University managers to apply that guide. And then we had the University of Cambridge evaluating the Children's University provision. And what was interesting about their finding was, I remember a conversation, one conversation with David Blomkitt, who was then Secretary of State for Education, and his question was, well, does it make the maths results better. And my reply was indirectly it does. Because the findings from Cambridge University were that children who attend the Children's University do better at school. And the more they attend the Children's University the better they do at school. Because what was happening was they became confident learners and give me a confident learner and I'll bring you the grades. Now the bit that we used for our PR purposes was the fact that it said Children's University but it could have said Playing for Success. It could have said University of the first age. The point was it was about the participation in out of school hours, activities and learning that were of a high quality. And so, so that's kind of how that worked. The parental role was to go with the youngsters at weekends or and the school roles was to help the parents and the youngsters to make that happen. But those graduations were, were, they were magnificent and some of the universities did it beautifully. So some universities would have the children's university graduation on the same day as the grown ups graduation. So the halls and the venues would look truly magnificent. And those youngsters wouldn't just walk into a university, they would walk into a university graduation. Their graduation where the grown ups had graduated perhaps four or five hours before the Vice Chancellor would still turn up. It is important that side of it, the hype if you wish matters and the success of the Children's University was that it got all those things and all those partnerships together. It was about right place and right time. I suppose the Kidzania thing where I went to from the Children's University. Widened that agenda because all of a sudden it wasn't about university anymore. Kidsania was about the university of life. It was about the possibility of employment, it was about destinations, it was about futures awareness. And we had the research working with a significant number of universities including National Research University, Moscow, Oxford University, Tech de Monterey and others. We had significant research that backed up that those experiences made a difference. So it wasn't us saying was eminent academics from very good universities.

Mark Taylor 01:09:35

And I think that's going to be the key theme I think for all of our conversations is the fact that no one's doing this on their own. You need brilliant people with great ideas or adapting a great idea like say from the camera thing from, from beer and, and I think there's, there's an excitement about that, there's an understanding about that. But you can't then just do it on your own. You need people to buy into what you're doing to be Excited about that. To see the win, win on both sides and to want to support people in a practical way and like say the research and, and the universities being involved to say, no, this has a difference. Because like I say, you always have to justify these things, things to somebody who's either got the purse strings or the policy or the ability to kind of give it a little bit more flight. And I think that's one of the reasons I thought this podcast series was going to be so important, because we want people to do the same thing. You know, tell us what it is that you're doing, what is it that you've experienced, what are your ideas, how did this work, what made a difference in your life? And you know, use the hashtag education on fire. We just want people, you know, contact us. Yes, but you know, just things that you're just posting already, put those, put that hashtag on there because then people can start to see that it's, oh, it's not just about me in my school, it's about me and my community. It's about the business that's actually doing something in supporting a school in some way. It's the next county, the next country worldwide. It doesn't have to be. This is to fit into the curriculum. That's kind of not what we're talking about. We're talking about. Everybody's standing up and saying no. We know this is important because at the heart of it, we want our kids to have the best learning and growing up, example and experience and way of life we possibly can.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:11:19

It is exactly that. It is about. I'll come back to the partnership in a second. But it is about connecting what is being taught with experiences. It is extending that and then it's challenging that. Is there more? Is there better? Is there different? And it's not us doing it. It is putting the youngsters and their families in a position to do that for themselves. The partnership thing is key. I remember one conversation, one of the kidsanias, the one in Dallas, it took a while for them to get an airline partner. And so the airplane in Dallas had Kidzania Airways on it. Every single time I was there, the youngsters would come and say, that's not real. And when we did a piece of research in London and we talked to youngsters about what was important to them, there's a group of how old will they have been? Izana and Matti and that crew, there must have been about 10 or 11 at the time. And they literally said, the most important thing is that they're branded because it makes them real. That it is the Metro newspaper and that is British Airways and that is Al Jazeera television and that it is all the Hay Children's Hospital. And so the kids made that link for us. And incidentally, those things. I'll come back to the research findings and the consequences of those in a minute. But also to say when back to Windshaw and back to Roy Bennett and purpose in Windshield we also developed something for older youngsters. It isn't just for the younger ones. So what we discovered in our secondary schools in Windshield, there were a number of youngsters we'd identified. About 30 were bright sparks but in danger of falling off the edge because they'd given up on schooling. So with the Royal bank of Scotland at the time, this is going Back to about 2002, 2003 with the Royal bank of Scotland, we developed the RBS Diploma because the Royal bank of Scotland was struggling recruiting and the RBS diploma we identified in the end 25 youngsters from across the secondary schools. Year 10, so 15 year olds, they would go to school three days per week studying English, Mathematics, IT A language and PE because there was elements of physicality and physical education that get ignored. Health and well being and all those things. They would then go to college one day per week focusing on life skills and they would go to the RBS in the center of Manchester, the new RBS spinning fields. And they would there they would do what we call the junior apprenticeship. If they did that successfully and they met all the criteria over a period of two years and the criteria range from being on time and being there to being presentable and working hard and all those things, getting the grades in the five subjects. If they met all those criteria, the RBS would offer them an apprenticeship and in two cases pay for them to go to uni. The RBS were winners, the youngsters were winners, the schools were winners. And how did we do that? By knowing our children beyond the grade and thinking outside the box. I know that's a, that's a, an overused term, but I can't, I can't think of a better one. But it went to show that you can do it at all ages and that and that the Bennett quote about purpose and passion, out of the 25, two dropped out. That in itself, had that scheme not existed, out of the 25, 20 would have dropped out of school. So actually we need to think alternatively we need alternative appropriate curricula that are not about dumbing down but that are about purpose and passion and the Kidzania research just this is such an important piece and it has consequences well beyond schooling. So when you come to Kidsania City's built for children age 4 to 14. Each KidZania has about 60 activities roughly and they range from window cleaning to being a pilot. There's a real aeroplane in there with real flight simulators. There's a hospital in there, a theater, a sports stadium, a television studio, a radio station, an automotive, a car experience, trying to think, a hotel. I'm just going through a newspaper. So you all those things. And when the children come in, they get a bracelet and they log into every activity. So because, because the adults are there to be seen and not heard. And it's about independent learning, it's about self initiated, self directed and self sustained learning. But if we need to get hold of them, we know where they are. That's why they're login. So I sat down with the technical people, the data people in Mexico City headquarters and said, can you tell me the first choice a child makes on their first school visit? Yes. Can I have a very large global sample? The sample standard just under 600,000 thousand now across eight countries. So I had the sample and then my question was, can you tell me whether they're boys or girls? Yes. Can you tell me whether they're rich or poor? Yes, by postcode. Can you tell me whether they're black or white? Yes, by postcode. And school information, Remember, all the data is anonymized, right. We know which country they're from and we know which city they're from, again by postcode. So all of a sudden we got pictures not just of the choices made, but about who was making those choices. We then got universities to analyze that, from Techno Monterey to Oxford to National Research University Moscow and others. And the key findings were all stereotypes were set at the age of four. So at the age of four in the airplane, the pilot activity was 95% boys and the cabin crew activity was 90% girls. At the age of four. In our schooling system, we don't talk to our children about futures until they're 14. So we allow the stereotype to cement for 10 years and then we kid ourselves that we can still make a difference. Second finding was that the choices made by 14 year olds were identical to the ones made by 4 year olds. So whatever stem was purporting to do, it wasn't influencing their thinking. They may have passed exams better. Girls are outperforming boys in tests. But when it came to making Career choices, they reverted back to stereotype, perhaps because the poor black girl from an rural area had never seen a black female pilot. Who knows? I guess that there is much in that. The third finding was that globally girls made choices below their age range, about 2 years below the age range. So 9 year old girls chose activities for 7 year olds, 9 year old boys chose activities for 9 and 10 year olds. So there's an issue with lack of confidence, lack of self esteem, however that gets packaged in there. The fourth finding was children can only aspire to what they know exists. So children from the poorest backgrounds would never ever choose the airplane, the operating theater, the television studio or the theater as their first choice. They would clean windows, work in the supermarket, make beds in a hotel, or be the postman or postwoman. And it would take four or five visits before they entered the airplane or the operating seat. There are lessons in there. There are hugely important educational lessons in there. The fifth finding was that globally, whether you were in Moscow or Mumbai, or whether you were in Dallas or whether you were in Mexico City, the choices were very similar. So there was something about the globalization of growing up Peppa Pig in 40 languages and everybody's watching YouTube and all the shopping malls look the same and whatever it is. But imagine if you have that information, you're a teacher. 20 children enter your classroom, 10 boys and 10 girls. You now know that girls choose activities below the age range. So your planning towards those girls needs to be more aspirational, needs to be more encouraging. Their independence, their self directed and self initiated learning and indeed their self sustained ones. Imagine if you're the teacher of the youngsters who come from a deprived background, you might go to your head teacher and say, I don't need to take them to Kidzania once, I need to take them five times. Or we need to focus much more on out of school experiences. I could also, incidentally, I was speaking at an HR directors conference in New York not long after we did that research and said to the HR directors, are you surprised that you struggle recruiting if the stereotypes are set at the age of 4? So stop talking to 18 year olds and start talking to 8 year olds. So instead of careers education in secondary schools, we need futures awareness in primary schools. And again, it's as part of that widening horizons, that twitching curtains and opening doors agenda. So that's kind of how that all fits. And none of it, Mark, I'll say it again, none of it is rocket science, but we found the evidence. So I remember my very early conversations with the founder of Kidzania, Javier Lopes, who constantly used to say, kania is educational. And I used to say to him, you have no shred of evidence for that because you've never done any research. It's your gut feeling. And my gut feeling is that you're right. But unless we engage with some serious people who tell us that we're right, we actually have no right to make that claim. So that's what we did.

Mark Taylor 01:22:08

And I think that's really important for people to hear. And the thing that strikes me, and this comes back to the. Everybody being in this together, is the, the example that you gave about the Royal bank of Scotland, for example, you know, 25 children that got involved in that. There's no reason why every bank in every city can't do that, because then you've got 25 children across many opportunities. If you think about all the different companies, all the different institutions out there who could do the same thing, should they decide it was something which was important. And again, we go back to that win, win situation, but it's already happening.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:22:47

You see, it's already happening. But the mistake we made is that banking does this. Yeah. Airports do this, retail does this, hotels do this. Everybody is inside their own box. Look at La Masia at Barcelona Football Club. Look at the two comps in, in Amsterdam. Look at the class of 92 at Manchester United. Those football clubs are signing seven and eight year olds. They're not waiting till they're 18. And there is very clear evidence, I mean, I would still, for all sorts of reasons say, could do better, because unless you make it, they don't look after you very well, I think, or not well enough. There's all sorts of discussions to be had, but there are precedents there. So why the banks use them as an example. Can't look at La Mesilla in Barcelona or the two comps in Amsterdam and say, right, so that, that's how it's done. And then you contextualize that and you localize it and says, right, every one of our branches gets engaged with a local primary school. That is our csr. Our CSR is not writing annual checks to annual courses. Our CSR is part of our own development, business development strategy, recruitment and retention. It makes perfect sense. But because we live in such a boxed world, it's quite hard to break down those walls. And I'm hoping, my hope is that our podcast will, for some people, if not break down those walls, at least knock some holes in them.

Mark Taylor 01:24:34

And so again, I sort of Reiterate, whatever your experience in this, whatever your positive experience or indeed negative experience or thoughts, put a hashtag on it. Education on fire. Let us know what's happening so that we can kind of share these stories, that we can actually point people in the right direction. Because I think it's very easy for anyone who's got an earbud in, who's watching this on YouTube, who goes, oh, that just makes so much sense, but then can't see it around them or doesn't know what's happening in their local area, it just becomes another, oh, wouldn't it be great if. And in. In that aspiration way, in terms of what you want the world to look like, whether you're a child or whether you're an adult or just from a societal point of view, I want it to look like this. And I can see it happening. So at no point can I say it's not true anymore. And we've been talking about those real examples, and if I know it's true and I can see it happening over here in my local community, then more people are likely to do that, and I can share that conversation. And. And then we can start to talk as a. As a movement, if not for a better word, that just says, no, this is real, this is happening. We just need more people to be aware of it and to start to take that forward, because those are the changes that we can do, whether we're in a school, whether we're in a business, whether we're someone in our local community, because we can make that change. While we might not be able to change the national curriculum or take the fences down from a school or whatever that happens to be, there are conversations around all those things. But what we can personally do in Help Share is going to the thing that probably moves the needle more than anything else on a, you know, on a populous kind of level.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:26:04

And that takes us back to the first episode as well. Mark, the importance of storytelling.

Mark Taylor 01:26:08

Yeah.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:26:09

Tell the stories. And, And. And I, you know, the whole thing about more than a school and schools being what we talked about. Every. I have to tell you this. Every time I go to Manchester Airport, which is my. My go to airport from where I live. Every time I go to Manchester Airport, there is. There are posters around Manchester Airport, and one of them has got children from St. Anthony's Primary School in Windshawne. And at the bottom of the posters, the words are more than an airport. And every time I walk past that, I. I have a quiet moment and go, yes, because it lives on the education actions I left there in 2007. But there are legacies of practice and thinking that have continued and so I don't enjoy the queues and the skews at security, but I like the posters at the airport very much every time I walk past.

Mark Taylor 01:27:13

And I think maybe, maybe this is a final thought. I really like what you said there about the legacy because of course nothing stays the same. Because you could argue if there was a pot of money and there was an action zone recreated and it worked in an, in a, in a, in the modern day setting, that would also be brilliant because it would do the same thing. But I think the fact that it has happened and it's not the same today as it, as it won't be in 10 years time or 20 years time, but understanding the philosophies and hearing those things means that whatever the today's version is, even if it's not for a generation, even if it's only for the next few school years, it makes a difference to those people and then that adapts and it morphs and it changes as it goes through. And so that creates that positive momentum, I think, without saying the whole thing needs to look a certain way.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:28:01

Yeah, there is, I agree. I mean the mistake the government, successive governments made is that they didn't continue with the education Action results not as they existed, but in the concept of supporting the poorest community. Because I did and I did do this exercise. If you go into Google or chat, GPT or whatever and you ask the question, what were the 25 most deprived wards in England in 1999? You get a listing 1 to 25. If you say what, what are the most deprived wards in England in 2025? You get a listing 1 to 25. They're the same. They're the same 25. And even the listing is more or less the same tendering and Blackpool are still towards the top. Windshaw is still in there, so is heightened, so are parts of lead, so are parts of Sheffield. So. So I agree with you. Whilst the content and the approaches need to change the focus, changing deprivation and disadvantage is more than a five year exercise. It goes beyond the lifetime of a parliament and what you would want is certainly a cross party agreement that that focus should exist. And I think there needs to be societal debate about this. What is right and what is wrong and what happens to our taxes and what is fair and, and, and debate. Which is why I love podcasts like these. We don't debate enough, we don't talk Enough, and therefore we don't think enough. I think also in conclusion, we talked about learning outside the classroom, we talked about experiences outside the classroom, we talked about learning in school, and we talked about probably more being taught in school as opposed to learning in school. And our approaches with. And everybody is familiar with our approaches because everybody's been to school. We may not have thought about it a great deal at the time, what's happening to us, but with the benefit of hindsight, we see these things and they happen. And it always strikes me as special. Do you know that in Dutch the word for teaching and the word for learning is the same word? It's the word, Leon. And the reason I like that is that it almost shows, means that there shouldn't be a difference between the two, because somebody is kind of going, well, we don't need to wear words, we just. We just have the one because it covers both. And, and when we come to talk about that kind of in school and out of school and whatever else, learning outside the classroom, and we, we and 0 to 99, almost by our semantics, teaching and learning, we distinguish between schooling, education, and the bit I love about the Dutch thing is it at least tries to pretend not to do that. I'm sure it's not always successful. They have lead tables too, and they have tests too, although at later ages and quite different to ours. So. So when. When we talk, which essentially is what we've done today, we've talked a lot in exemplification about schooling, education. Perhaps we should end with the Dutch word lehr and think about having one word for teaching and learning would be a good starting point and perhaps leads us nicely into the next episode as well.

Mark Taylor 01:31:52

Absolutely. Perfect. Can't wait for our next bit of conversation. And thank you so much for, for all these insights because I think for so many people listening, it just makes you feel like there's hope and positivity and knowing out there collectively. And I think that's something which we can all take forward. So, yeah, look forward to the next time.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:32:14

Perfect. Thank you, Mark.