GGGG Ep 3 – Thoughts about schooling and education

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 Through a Different Lens, Lessons from a Life in 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 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 at 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, and are proving to be a guiding light to us all. Hi Gare. Welcome back to G Gets Gritty, episode number three. We seem to be getting through these brilliantly, and I'm just loving the conversation so much. Today we're talking about schooling and education, or schooling versus education, or the difference between the two things. So tell us, what was your thought when you wanted to make that distinction in how you sort of think about that?

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:04:22

Well, it's, it's the kind of thing I remember a long conversation. Carla Rinaldi, the, the, the former president of the Fondazione Reggio Children – Centro Loris Malaguzzi, and I did a couple of things together, one up in, in Scotland and then one later on in Leicester, and one here in Sheffield where we literally sat on a sofa and talked and we got talking about lifelong learning, really. And it's interesting because we don't call it lifelong schooling, we don't call it lifelong teaching either. But there's an assumption that we can do these things. And then we got talking about, well, some people are better equipped to learn by themselves than others, and where does that come from? And if you had really good schooling, would you be able to learn better? And I think that that's probably the case. And then it was interesting, we got to the discussion about, well, so if independent schools don't have an academies indeed don't have to follow the national curriculum, but other schools do. What's this, what's, what's the thinking behind that? Is it just our governments just being kind to people and bribing them into certain positions or what, what's going on there? Because surely if the national, if a national curriculum is good for one, it ought to be good for other rather than, than this kind of weird attitude towards it. So we got to this thing about, about schooling, what we call schooling versus education. I mean in an ideal world it is schooling and education. And, and the thing's really simple. So if you, if you educate yourself predominantly, you learn all the time between 0 and 99, then schooling is only a small part of that because it's kind of, I don't know, it, it's 10 or 15 years if you, if you're lucky. And, and so what does the schooling thing do to the, to the, to the greater education piece? And I suppose the conclusion we reach is that, that schooling becomes an enabler. The better schooled you are, the better educated you can be if, if you wish to be. And then we, we got, I think Boris Johnson was Prime minister at the time. And I remember saying, well, there's a very good example of somebody who's well schooled but ever so ill educated. And, and so we were kind of drawing those distinctions, but we came back to the point that, that that Dutch word len, which is the same word for teaching and learning and, and how conceptually that that is really quite cool that you don't distinguish. So that, that became our starting point. And, and I've wondered since, you know, everybody talks about Finland and everybody was talking about Singapore for many years. But actually from my experiences, the plans that exist in India, the new education plan, the NEP in India has the potential to be very close to this one word for teaching and learning because it, it contextualizes immensely also geographically contextualizes and, and therefore it allows the, the schooling agenda to be molded around the context of the child as opposed to a much more top down, here's the national curriculum. This is what everybody must know by a certain age kind of approach. I mean India. The, the NEP even goes as far as to stipulate that schools can choose the language of instruction. And that's a really interesting one. So you can choose whether it's Urdu or Gujarati or Punjabi or whether it's Hindi or whatever you choose, or English. And we got into a debate during Didact in Delhi last year around this and I posed the question whether we wouldn't end up with a situation whereby the schools that could afford it would instruct in English and therefore would put their young people at an advantage. Although that was never the intention of the original NEP national education. But this is a byproduct of how the world is and that perhaps in the construction of the National Education Plan, whoever constructed it had kind of not sought that through far enough or was slightly out of touch with reality. That wouldn't be a first for Civil Service, for the Civil Service to be out of touch with reality. But in principle, I love the NEP very much and it comes very close to that concept of in school and out of school, of lifelong versus restricted period. And how can we make sure that everybody is incredibly well schooled so that they can become incredibly well educated over the years? And. And in my wife's school, Arbizon Community Primary School, they have a motto which, which kind of links to that, and I love it very much. And the motto is that every child is everyone's responsibility. So, because if we educate like that and if we school like this, we have to stop just pointing the fingers at the teachers, but we have to all be educators around those children. We might not all be schoolers around those children, but we are all educators and we must take that responsibility. And I see parents in particular kind of signing off that responsibility sometimes, so the school can take care of that. And then if they don't like what the school does, they're the first ones to start shouting at people. And you kind of think, well, you can't have it both ways. And perhaps we need to begin to think, in our contract with parents, we perhaps need to have a job description. This is what our expectations are of the parents and it goes beyond the get them here on time or make sure that their homework's done. But it might just be, you help us educate your children and at weekends, and we're going to send you things that you might want to do with your children at weekends in order to reinforce what we've been taught so that they can further experience and learn and to bring, to bring those things together. I mean, certainly I know that my wife in her school, certainly before every school holiday, she will send a letter to the parents saying, and these are all the things that, that you can do with the children over the holiday period for free. Because most cities and councils, certainly in urban environments, there's loads of things to do and loads of places to go that actually don't cost anything, so that you don't disadvantage children and parents because they might not be able to, to pay an entrance fee to a museum or a gallery.

Mark Sylvester 00:11:10

So.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:11:10

So that's the kind of the. The nutshell piece of it. And I'll come later on to some thoughts about what I think are some core principles around this. But, but there's a quote that comes From a friend of mine, James Bradburn. James is a museologist and architect. I love that title. And he was in charge of many of the big museums, the Pinocate Cabrera in Milan and. And the Palazzo Strozzi in Florence, where I met him. And in one of his studies he quotes and says 85% of all learning takes place outside school. That's it. That's a staggering percentage considering how little time and effort and investment governments worldwide make into that area and how. How proportionately or disproportionately an enormous amount of money goes into schooling, but very little goes into. Every child has an entitlement to go to a museum or be in a play or performs music or. And of course, we have increasingly begun not just in England and the United Kingdom, but worldwide, partly, I think, driven by that whole OECD agenda and PISA agenda. League tables is. Our focus has narrowed. Our schooling focus has narrowed very significantly to, in our country, English and maths and science and technology and the rest is second best. And I'd say it's the same in many other countries. Yet the education experiences have widened enormously through, through the Internet and through all the tools and toys that we have, be their mobile phones or iPads or whatever these things are these days. So on the one hand you have the growth of experience and on the other hand you have the narrowing of curricula and there's a mismatch. So that the whole invention of Children's University in 2007, I suppose, was a little bit of a forerunner of that, because even then, before the technology went the way it is now, but even then there was a. There was a gap between the education experience and the schooling experience. And I think we need to have a look at this. And also in terms of the personalization of learning and the personalization of teaching, it may of course well be that we need to begin to look at experiential learning as a means that suits some children better than, Than the mere academics. If we're brave enough to do that. I think we're. We're in a very interesting place because of course, you know, the Lores Malagutsi thing, Reggio Emilia, which always was that the environment is the third teacher, as Loris used to say, the physical environment is the. Is the third teacher, the first teacher are the adults, the second teacher are the children themselves, and the third is the physical environment. Well, we now need to take the word physical out of that, you know, and Loris's mantra really only goes back to the 19 to the early 1990s, late 1980s, so it's not that old. But now we need to take the physical bit out of it and say any environment, including the virtual environment. And we have little regard for that. It is because we, we don't seem to really be that bothered politically, at least in many countries, how children learn or why they learn. Eve we focus entirely on the where in school, on the how by being taught on the when five days a week. And on the what, the national curriculum. But the bigger how doesn't reach you and the why doesn't get mentioned at all. And, and, and that's, that's not a good, not a good place to be. And of course then you have this, I always have this picture about the national curriculum and I'll use the English one as an example. But, but you can, you can easily talk about Australia, you could talk, you could talk about the national education plan in India. But essentially what's happened is that education is no longer part of a dialogue, of a societal dialogue, it is a prescription. It's like going to the chemist and you go, this is for you and this is what you need to do three times a day with a meal. Yeah, it's exactly the same thing. So I have, so you have politicians of whatever persuasion who, with the support of the civil service, dream up this thing of what every child should, should be taught. They call it a national curriculum. And here is, and the means of delivery become the schools. But we don't trust the schools. So we need an inspectorate to make sure that the schools deliver what we want them to deliver. And then in order to see how well they do it, we'll have lead tables. And actually what we also do is we get Mfield Town playing the same game as Manchester United, just like we get schools from very state schools in very affluent areas play the same game as state schools in the poorest parts of the country. You couldn't make that up, but they did. And, and, and essentially so what you end up with is, and I say this to her teachers quite a lot, will you just please get rid of these ridiculous banners that say outstanding school. Because you're not, because what you are is you are outstandingly compliant to the system. You're not wonderful, you're not magical. Doesn't mean any of those things, it just means you are, you tick the boxes better than most. Now, if that's what you want to be a box ticking establishment, then good for you, I think less good for your children. And, and I think that's that's where we're at at the moment. And then you hope. I've seen glimpses of the thinking around the national, the new national curriculum in England and, and I picked some things up and they do talk about purpose and they do talk about it, connect to the real world and, and, and, and maybe they have read some books by people and maybe they have talked to some people, but I fear so much for the execution because this is where the apparatchiks can hold of it and they can't think beyond the current thing. So it will be tested again and it will be league tabled again and it will be inspected again and actually that bigger how is so much part of it and just gets completely ignored. And, and so the why will also be pushed back into a corner and, and that kind of makes me very sad. So the schooling and education agenda I think is an incredibly important one and one of the things that we've not done. Is it deliberate, Mark? I don't know. But we're not taking parents and communities with us. We don't explain it very well. We tell them what we do but we don't tell them why, we don't tell them what their roles in this is. And I think there is a much. When you reorganize, restructure, rethink things, you have a, you have a duty, I think not just to folk to rethink the little bit in front of you, but to also rethink everything around it. And, and that's where governments fail. You know, there should be things written and I, I'm a great believer certainly in primary schools, but also in secondary, but definitely in primary there should be family homeworks. So you actually say to the parents, these are the things we would like you to do over the weekend and during the holidays with your children so that when they come back they understood the Pythagoras thing because you've taken them to an exhibition or to some games or you played certain ways of you, you played the Johan Cruyff, Pep Guardiola finding space kind of football, playing triangles, whatever it is, but actually get it. And so when I say this sometimes and people say, and parents need to, we need family homework, people kind of go ashen faced and they go oh my God, I'm no good at science. And, and, and we, we absolutely should not do that to parents to actually go, you now need to sit down and do the science. Because I would, I'd run a mile or the maths would be even worse. But if somebody said we've done this and this in, I don't know, in science. And here are 10 places you can take your children over the next couple of weekends that just to visit to a place like that would reinforce that, particularly with the arts of thinking and the humanities would be such a cool thing to do and in that dialogue with the parents. So actually, even when you come to write the school reports, why then the parents not contribute to the school report? Because, because they have also co educated the child in partnership with the school. We just need to think differently about this rather than more of the same, but just tinkering at the margins, which is what we always end up doing. So that was a long answer. I'm just aware. Mark, I'm so sorry.

Mark Taylor 00:20:44

Not at all, not at all. I mean there are loads of things that I thought about as that was going, as you were chatting there. And I think let's, let's start with the homework one, because that was the most recent one is like you say, I hear so often parents say I have to do homework with my child and let's take maths as the classic example, but I don't understand what they have to do or I understand I can tell them how I would do it, but not how it's supposed to be done today. So therefore I wasn't able to do it. And then you suddenly get that mismatch between what's supposed to be happening at home and what actually can happen and on the national curriculum. I think even in a worst case scenario where we've decided that the national curriculum should be really narrow because we have to do mass English, science and technology, like you said, if you had that conversation about the fact that all these other things could be around that and we can support you of how that's going to be done, which to be honest is kind of what happens in more affluent families in more affluent areas because they're providing instrumental learning, they go into drama things, they're, they're going to museums, they're going on trips, they're going on holidays that are actually supportive of, of their children. But you can't do that unless you know what those things are. And like you say, you get that mismatch then between different social classes and, and, and where they live and all those sorts of things. And it, it just seems to me you just really sort of hit the nail on the head about the conversation part of it. Because if you understand all of those things and you feel like you're part of this learning environment with your school, then that Just suddenly breaks down all those barriers and then you can start to where you want to move forward. And I think in sort of the new sort of version of the national curriculum, they talk about this sort of more expanded learning, but it is very much in the, in the delivery of how that's going to happen. So we want you to do this, but you haven't had training in how to do whole class music, or we'd like you to do some music, but we haven't got the funding for you to actually give each child the chance to learn something properly. You know, they can have a go and then that's a bit of an experience. But you wouldn't say, let's have a go at maths or let's have a go at English. We need to have a proper program to make sure you fully understand it and you take it as far as it's going to go. And so like you say, it's just the, it's the lack of complete thought process about what we're trying to do and what we want each child to experience. Because then those conversations.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:23:09

It's about entitlement, isn't it? The big word is entitled.

Mark Taylor 00:23:12

Yeah.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:23:12

So, so, so compare independent schools, good independent schools with, with state schools, even good state schools. And, and there is a massive gap. And the gap is very pronounced in the experience field. Now, as far as I'm concerned, there are issues of entitlement and there are issues about what's good enough for one is good enough for the other. So I think that's a government issue and I think they've got that fundamentally wrong. And I think so have local authorities and people go, oh, we haven't got any money. Well, if it's that important, you'll find the money. Right? Education, education, education. And find it. And I think on the homework front, I always struggle with homework. If any of my children comes home, came home with the homework, is finish off what we did in class, I. I'd turn around and go, don't bother. Why would you have to do stuff at home that your teacher should have fitted into a lesson in the first place? But, but if somebody comes and says, there's an exhibition in Sheffield, or can you take your daughter to the theater because there's a Shakespeare play on that we're going to be studying next term. Yeah, yeah. I mean, I'd prefer it if the school took them only because that means that everybody can go. Because, because you're very quickly in that money thing again. But, but if, if those are the kind of homeworks that you're given. Brilliant. Do things with your kids, play things with your kids, even the homework that says, quite frankly, in terms of their well being and their physical well being, go for an hour's walk every weekend and make sure that you leave your phone at home. I don't. All of those things have validity. It's about doing things together. The expectation, as we saw during COVID the expectation of me helping with maths, for example. My daughter would just laugh if she was here now. You'd hear a real belly laugh in the background going, he doesn't do maths, he can't spell maths, but I can help with other things. And. And so. So you try to work, but that's not. We're not, as parents, we're not teacher replacements. We are. We are co educators, we are auxiliary stuff. And you wouldn't all of a sudden turn around as a teacher and go, oh, I happen to have another adult in the room, I'm now going to go for a coffee. They can. They can teach whatever. You're quite right. But it needs to be worked out. And parents and parents and families need to be seen as a resource in that sense. And I don't understand why that's not possible. I don't understand why some schools have to follow the national curriculum and others don't. Just like I don't understand why some schools are inspected by Ofsted and other schools are not. I think this is just pandering to the upper classes. I can't think of it any other way. And also, if I were an independent school and I keep telling people how brilliant I am, I might want to be measured by Ofsted, because it depends who I'm comparing myself with. Because I would say if you're not inspected by Ofsted, then you're not as good as the other 30,000 schools in the country, because you've got a different regime that, quite frankly, hasn't got the same rigor. There's nowhere near. So there's these oddities and you can't blame the schools for these, incidentally, it's the lack of leadership or it feels corrupt to me from a government point of view. And whether that's the labor government or a conservative nobody, nobody tackles that. People then go on about whether there should be VAT on fees. And I always thought that was a bit of a nonsense. If you really want to create levels of equity, there are, dare I say, better ways of doing it. So. So the schooling agenda is messy, it's muddled. If you had to start from scratch. You wouldn't do it like that. So why aren't you changing it? And that's not just in this country. That's pretty much everywhere you go. But it works to the advantage of the advantaged. And that's the bit that strikes me as unfair.

Mark Taylor 00:27:37

Many thanks to Mark Sylvester for this message, who is an Executive Producer, TEDx Santa Barbara, USA

Mark Sylvester 00:27:44

Looking back at how I met Ger, it was one of those great Covid relationships where you get introduced to someone and we've gotten so used to using zoom or gotten good at using zoom, we don't even think about it that it's. Of course I want to meet someone who's however many thousands of miles he is away from me in California. But we started right after Covid because the person who introduced us knows that I have a deep and abiding love for education, specifically early childhood education, and have done that. I've had been involved in that here in Santa Barbara most of my life in one way or another. I'm not an educator. I just hold teachers up with nurses. My mom was a nurse. And I think if we paid our teachers and our nurses more, that would be money well spent. That's a different conversation. So when I met a guy who is, who is literally at the top of the food chain as it relates to that, as a thought leader, global thought leader, I felt lucky to have gotten that introduction. I'm a big fan of origin stories. I'm a 35 year member of the TED community. And so I look at how origin stories wrapped around a big idea are much more palatable and have a better chance of making some movement, whatever that movement is. And so understanding in detail Gare's background when he fell in love with education, I think the story with his grandfather is true across a lot of the stories I run into where it's the grandparents who had this significant impact in the person's life. I loved all those stories. I loved also how he circles back, he'll tell a story, but also how later in life he was able to go back to a given place or he recalled that story as a, a very good sense of. Or rather maybe it's a different, it's a storyteller sense that he's telling us that particular thing because it is indicative of the impact it made on him. And so when we tell a very, very personal story, which his is, it is universal because we all have personal stories and we all, you know, I didn't live that life. However, I can relate to A lot in his life. And I think people who read the book will find that they can relate a lot.

Mark Sylvester 00:30:33

What's interesting for me as an American is it's so completely different. So I loved that part of it because we're of a similar age. And so understanding his origin story and growing up so wildly different than mine, just the languages and the cultures. For me, it was east la, west la, Pasadena, the beach, all different communities. But I'm not gonna say it's even like him traveling to eastern Germany, for instance. All conversations about education, the future of education, what we're doing with education, are important in the home, in the school, in the legislature, at the country level, they're all important and we don't have enough of them. So that's a point of view that I have. So I'm glad he's representing a point of view that I agree with, a very practical point of view around education. I love his. Kids don't know what they've wanted to do until they tried it on, you know, and at an early age. The work with kids ain't. Is inspired. The fact that we don't have it in the United States except one location is. Is, you know, a shame on us that we don't have that.

Mark Sylvester 00:32:02

There's one thing. Two things come to mind. One is the whole conversation around AI and the dramatic changes that's going to have. I think that is still on the table in a very, very large way.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:32:20

But.

Mark Sylvester 00:32:20

But the other part that I think is really good is Gare is very funny. He has a very, very good sense of humor, and it's very educated sense of humor. As an American, I. I kind of say, gosh, all Brits are that funny. Probably not true. Just like not all Americans are funny. But I will say that I, I did. I don't read. I didn't read the book. I listened to the book and so it. I can. It's. He didn't do the narration, but I can hear his voice. We. We talk all the time.

Mark Taylor 00:32:59

And are there things within schooling that you think should be separate? This is the sorts of things that children learn at home, and these are the sorts of things that should happen in school. And I. That kind of, you know, I'm gonna learn to cook at home with my family as we're doing dinner. But there is sort of cooking in school, but it's not in the same way for the same purpose. There's just not the amount of time, the amount of depth that you, that you would go in and things which should be separated or have to be separated and what areas they might be or complementary.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:33:34

I mean, so, so the school. Let's stick with the food thing. We. We have. We're blindly walking into an obesity crisis. So at some point the National Health Service is just going to collapse. I think the way. The way things are going. So the healthy diet side of things and the cooking healthily and eating healthily and doing exercise side of things is something that, because of the expertise perhaps ought to be led by schools. But that's not to say that quite rightly the expectation and is that the homework influences how the family works. Because it's a big thing, isn't it? There's a danger. So. So I think, I think that's a real partnership thing and particularly around the gen. I mean, and then you could. There are some interesting things out there. So. So things which perhaps sit under the pshe agenda. I'm not sure, but. But things that are around the respect agenda, the kindness agenda. Now what I would hate to see is that we're kind in school and not out of school or that were kind out of school and not in school. So I think that again is part of. Is part of an. Of a. Of a partnership agenda. I. It always sex education. Sex and relationship education, I think, as it's called now, quite rightly so. Why. Why should the school do that? I. I think the school should do it. I think you should have an involvement in it, but I think there should be a very clear expectation that the school only does it if the parents turn up. I would. But it might be a bit cringeworthy at times or whatever. Or in my thing I might go, oh my God. You know, it's a bit like when you're watching the telly as a family and all of a sudden there's a naughty bit that comes on and everybody goes on their phone and goes a bit red in the face. I'm sure that some of that would happen, but I think sex and relationship, because it's about how we are together, what we stand for as a family and as a school community, that, that we don't behave in a misogynistic way, that we don't do this, that and the other. Well, we have to be. We have to be in that together. So I would say those kind of agendas are a must, whereby. So instead of kind of saying this is what the home does and this is what the school does, I would go and say this is what the school does and this is what we do together. Because I think that song sheet bit is incredibly important. Life is tricky enough in 2025, 2026 for young people and for parents and for schools. So if we get to hang in there together and we sing from the same sheet, then I think we've got a better chance of getting it right. And the parents go, but I'm really busy. Well, you might have thought about that before you had children and perhaps I think we should be quite hard nosed about that. I can't do that. Really. What's the most important thing in your life then? That dialogue we also need to have. And we need to have the dialogue. You know, our system is so incredibly punitive, isn't it? Because we all want to take our children on holidays, but we're not allowed to. We used to be able to, used to be able to, with the head's discretion, take them out to school for 10 days. Memory serves me right. And then that was it. Brilliant. Bring that back. Because they could have a bad, they could have a bad flu and be in bed for 10 days and you don't get fined and taken to court. So, so again, everything is punitive. Everything, everything comes from the assumption that it's a deficit, that everybody is deliberately out to wreck things. Children deliberately behave badly. Parents are deliberately uncooperative. Not think so. But if you show no respect, why would they pay you respect back? If all you get as a parent in a secondary school is one parents evening whereby you get you shuffled into some shitty little hole, quite frankly, you're not even served a coffee and you're given five minutes to be told things that you already knew. Quite often I, I have no time for that whatsoever. And so I think we just need to be a bit more grown up about this. And, and, and, and, and which is. I think the theme of the book is it's about being child folk. So if you had a number of basic principles, let's just try and list some. Right. So the first principle in the schooling agenda would need to be that you're child focused, you are accountable to the child. I don't care about Ofsted, I don't care about the DfE, I'm sure schools do, but I think it is possible to serve both. But make your main mission to be accountable to the child. In order to do that you need to personalize your, in order to, to personalize beyond the grade, you need to know your children well. Right? You need to be child focused first. Secondly, you need to get the basics right. And I mean not, this is not incidentally a secondary school or a primary school. And so this is the totality, the totality of those 15 or so years. You get the basics right. What are the basics? The basics are about reading and writing, because without those you're done for. Yeah, I would say that one of the basics these days is technology, Even more so than mathematics and science because it so permeates every aspect of our lives. I think the core basics are about high quality teaching and high quality learning. I think they are about, about the courage of measuring what we value. And as well as literate, our young people also need to be numerate. And I think being numerous is more than being good at maths. It's also about the appliance of the science. So that's, that's the second one, get the basics right. The third one has to be. In order to serve the personalization agenda and be child focused. And to get the basics right, we need to allocate the resources equitably. And that means that some schools will get more money than others and more resources because they're poorer. It also means that some children in that school should get more spend on them than others. And it means that as parents, we're aware of that and that we've signed up to those values and principles because some kids need more than others. And in order to do the best by all, that's just the way it is. We, we, we really need to stop this same size fits all nonsense. We need to. So that's the third one. Allocate the resources. Then the fourth one has to be about rethinking school structures and systems and policies. We've got all these schools and they are, they are identical. But if we're going to personalize and if we, if we recognize contexts are different, then their policies need to be different, their systems need to be different, their structures need to be different, be different. Because otherwise, how can you serve all your children? How can be you, can you be accountable to those children? I think we then need to support our children holistically and I think we need to do that as a community. So I would like to see the formal return of community schools. And the community includes in, of course, the parents and the families, but also the business world. It, I don't mean just a geographical community, I mean a community in all sorts of senses. So, so I could include.

Mark Taylor 00:41:52

I don't.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:41:52

Know if I'm in Sheffield, I could include a London business into my community because there are also virtual communities. But it, but the reason we need to, to support our children holistically and move to community is in order to, for that to happen to, to connect better with education in our schooling has to be the purpose of that. We need to move to experience based learning. We need to move to, for examples, we need to move to. What was it Einstein said, you know, that, that knowledge is not the same as information, is not the same as knowledge. Knowledge comes from experience. Yeah. So we need to make that connect. And here's an interesting one that I remember spending some time in Blackwell's, the bookshop in Oxford, with the late Professor Sir Tim Brigas, writing on the back of what wasn't quite a beer mat, but it was something like that, and actually writing down 11. This is about entitlement. 11 things every 11 year old should have experienced of this is, this is not getting grades or level fours or level fives or whatever it used to be, whatever the currency is. This is about, here are 11 things that everybody, every 11 year old should have experience. And then you contextualize that because, because sometimes this is easier to achieve, perhaps in urban environments than it is in rural environments, for example. So you contextualize it. But you might turn around and say before the age of 11, every child has to have been part of a team. It's just one example, right before the age of 11, here's my controversial one. Every child has to have had experience of social media because to do anyway and, and if we turn away from that, we just, I don't know what we do, we just disconnect. But those. And what I used to do sometimes if I was in a staff room and I had a whiteboard and staff room is to carry one of these marker pen things with me. And I used to write my 11 points on and then leave the rubber next to it and go right, they're mine, they're not yours. They're not telling you that they should be in, but they're mine. If you disagree, rub them out, change the order, whatever you want to do. And it leads to quite a lively debate because we don't have that anymore. Because the entitlement seems to be the national curriculum. God help us. It needs to be about more than that. And then my, my final, my seventh point after, let's just have a think. After being child focused, after getting the basics right, after allocating the resources equitably, rethinking school structures and systems and policies, after supporting the children holistically, after moving to experience based learning, we have to have fun. I Walk into schools, particularly secondary schools, and there aren't enough smiles and there isn't enough joy in evidence. If we can't enjoy what we do, that's a miserable life. Right. And, and it's not that long ago that I taught, I enjoyed teaching. Did I enjoy it all the time? No. Did I enjoy it most of the time? 85 of the time, yes. Would we expect children to enjoy all their learning? 100%. No. Is 85% a good number? Yeah, I think so, maybe 80%, but I like the 85 because the minute you go 80%, somebody says that's four days out of five. Right. So I just like to go slightly higher so that the Friday doesn't become a washout. But basically, and, and, and, and I think they are key points of beginning to get it right because you can talk about these things for a long time, but I think at some point you need to translate them into practicalities because otherwise you'll be talking about them for a long time. As, as we sometimes seem to, particularly with governments and, and government agencies. And so to me that's kind of it. So that we asked it when we asked the children the question in years to come, why do you go to school? Many more than the 15% that I've encountered. Give you a very good reason. The answer, 85% of the youngsters. 80 to 85% of the youngsters I talk to go because I have to. It's such a sad thing. And that needs to be improved. And if we improve that, then we will improve the dialogue with the parents because we need to. It's a wider agenda that, that adage. It takes, it takes a, it takes a village to educate a child, it's true, but it also takes a village to school a child. It takes a community to school a child. And we need to go back to that. And I need to be careful here when I say we need to go back to that. That doesn't mean that it was perfect in the past. Absolutely not. But, but we used to have many more community schools than, than we do now. That's what I mean by that. I, I'm not a believer in the good old days. I certainly, my days as a teacher, I would never stand up in front of everybody and go, mine were when I thought it was perfect. The schools were so much better. There was just be really clear. I started working in Manchester in the early 1990s as an advisor and we had secondary schools with 4%, 5A to C, I think as it was at the time and with 60 plus percent attendance. That's the reason Ofsted came about. And it was quite right that it came about where the teaching was not controlled, so the National Curriculum came about. It was quite right that that thinking existed. What's not been right has been our implementation of Ofsted and our implementation of the National Curriculum as a dogmatic exercise that takes no account of the young people, no account of the professionals and no account of the parents. So if I've created the impression that I go the good old days. No, no, no. But we do need to go back to the concept of communities and schools and do it better than we did it in the past.

Mark Taylor 00:48:54

And it seems to me that there's no world that I can see going forward where it would ever look like the past anyway, because of the technology, because of just the way life is moving from forward anyway. I'm curious as to what you think about when we look back at this sort of recent history era of schooling, because we. We sort of spoken off the recording schedule about well being and how important that is. And I'm curious as to what you think about what we will think of as our schooling based on the well being of our children and the staff for that matter. Because I think if, like you say, if 80% or so of children say I go to school because I have to, and I would say a large proportion of those children will maybe, certainly at some point in their school life, feel like, say they're not happy to be there, there's. It's not fun, they feel overwhelmed by what's going on. And you could that whether that goes into the testing side of it or just what it's like to be in school. I'm curious as sort of how responsible we'll sort of look at governments and the system of what we've created on. On the sort of the real issues that have been created from that. And I think what strikes me most is that even the basic things like, you know, cutting down play times and lunch times and having somewhere to sit to have lunch, and then you have someone like Jamie Oliver who comes along and says, look, we need healthier meals in schools because children need to be given proper food, which was then shut down. It sort of came. He made such a big thing of it, quite rightly, and it, you know, went so far into it, it could look like this. And then it wasn't possible for whatever reason that was. And I just think we're going to look back and go, actually we created something which was inherently bad for Our children wasn't child focused. It was completely the opposite of that.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:50:43

Totally. And, and it's an interesting one. I mean the reasons those things don't work because we've talked about it in other episodes is that we don't make, certainly in England there are better examples I would suggest than England. We don't make education decisions. We meet, we make economic ones. The Jamie Oliver thing was brushed under the carpet because it would have cost too much, or so we were told. Right. And I think that the well being thing is a really interesting one. So let me just throw a couple of things at this point. So well being is not new and that concerns me a little bit that it almost. That there doesn't get any recognition. I, I use a slide of chewed. Do you remember the pencils that had a rubber at the end?

Mark Taylor 00:51:30

Yeah.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:51:31

Do you remember? And the big pens and I, I use a little slide with, with the chewed pencils and, and the chewed lids of the big pan. Anxiety and well being or lack thereof has been around as long as I've been around. Is it worse now than it's ever been? Probably, I would say probably. Probably more than probably. And, and, and the technology has a part to play in this. And the fact that we don't know as adults what to do with the technology because, because we always must remember, you can't blame the technology. Just my mobile phone's done nothing wrong. It's a lovely little mobile phone. Right. I've done wrong and others have done wrong with it. So we just need to get that into perspective. Otherwise it's a little bit like saying we've invented the car and people die because we drive cars. Let's get rid of the cars. But, but the car is a good example because what we did was when it got dangerous, we put in speed limits, speed bumps and pedestrian crossings and 20 mile an hour zones near schools and seat belts and all sorts of wonderful things. And we haven't started that properly with technology yet. We haven't got seat belts yet. We haven't got pedestrian crossings. We've got a policy that pretends that they don't exist. Between nine and three we're going to pretend that they don't exist. I can't, I literally can't get my head around this. Right. So, so there are all sorts of aspects around that well being agenda. I do have a fear about well being and the fear about well being is that it is the next dyslexia or the next autism. We, we do operate in fads in education and then once, once we've identified the issue, we move on to the next one without solving or investing in the previous one. And I remember John Bishop, the comedian once saying that he, he's dyslexic as John, and he, he talks about his, his parents feeling so helpless because they didn't, his dad in particular didn't quite know what, what to do with it all. And John says, but it also was a world in which once you were diagnosed and somebody could put the sticker on you, everybody walked away because that thought had solved the problem by identifying you, not about doing something with you. So there's, there's another thought, but I think there's something systemic also wrong in all of this is, and that is that when there is a problem in our society, if that's the right way of putting it, there's a problem in our society, we turn to our schools to provide the answers. Knife crime, we need to teach it in schools. Whoa, just a minute. Nobody's just talked about the parents and however tragic these things are, and you cannot just turn around to a school and say, solve the obesity piece, solve the knife crime, solve the drugs, solve the misogyny, solve this, solve that in isolation. So two things need to happen. One is it needs to be really clear that communities, parents and families have a role to play in this, undoubtedly, and can't just go off on one on their own. It needs, needs to be joined up 100%. And then what also needs to happen from a government angle is you then need to attach more services to those schools. So when I worked in Wittenhaw all Those years ago, 1999 to 2007, we, through the head teachers, developed something called full service schools. So we brought into our school other services to work with our children and the schools as much as possible. The schools manage those. So social services, education, welfare, working with the police, Ed Sykes, all those services. Instead of the schools going out to the services, we converted caretakers homes in all sorts of places and they became the offers and working spaces for those services to come into schools. And the way Whiddon show worked, it was a pretty tight cluster arrangement. So if you had one secondary school and five partner primaries, 90% of the partner primary school children would then go to that secondary school. So we didn't actually have full service schools, we had full service clusters. See whether we could identify some of the issues earlier, whether we could become preventative. And was it perfect? No, of course it wasn't. Was it better? It was because we got to a Point fairly quickly, quicker than we thought, whereby some of the services that are under tremendous strains like, like exykes and social care, they were starting to do preventative work because essentially we created a system and allowed economies to develop within that system that I didn't have. So in those days we had New Green Infant School, Newell Green Junior School and Newell Green High School. Education Welfare. Had an education welfare officer for each one of those schools. And we went, well, actually we don't need three, we need one. But with a pure focus on those three schools because that's where 90% of the children follow through and then they can start to do preventative work. And it worked. But what we can do about the well being agenda. Well, and then well being in its broader sense, I mean, I'm only using some of the examples, but well being in its broader sense cannot just be left to schools as they are now. If governments and communities and parents and others are serious about this, they're going to need to come off the fence and join in. They're going to need to roll up their sleeves and play their part. And governments are going to. And local authorities, local authorities are going to redirect the way their services work and governments are going to need to invest more. And then people go, but there isn't money in the system. Put up the taxes. Yeah, or stop complaining. But what you can't have is you can't have Scandinavian style education provisions paid for by American levels of taxation. The calculator doesn't do that. So if we're serious about it, let's have a chancellor who turns around and says, I'm going to put up income tax by 2 pence in the pound. But all of that money is going to go on education. Very little on it is going to go on admin. Some will need to because otherwise nobody's got a clue what's going on. And we can't report back. But out of every pound, only 15 pence can be spent on admin and those kind of resources. And 85% needs to be spent directly on the children. And then the public, the electorate, has a chance to decide whether it wants good education provision that is transparent in its spending or whether it can't be bothered. And if, if the vote is that it can't be bothered. Mark, it's time that we packed our bags and went elsewhere. Yeah, because, because what you can do, and you and I have been around long enough where you kind of think there's another thing to do for schools and if something goes wrong Tomorrow, somewhere. Yeah, we need to teach them. You. I made a list once and I kind of got to two sides of a four. From riding bikes to knife crime to obesity to, you name it, it all sat in those lists. And you kind of go, they're all important, but they can't be done by schools on their current resources, end of story. So if they're all important, which they are, then we need more resources into the system and we need more hands on deck.

Mark Taylor 01:00:11

And I think for me, this really kind of, you can see why these conversations go round and round and nothing happens. Because it needs, it needs a movement, it needs a mass group of people to say this is important enough that we want to make a difference. And that comes from, like, say, having those conversations, standing up and saying it, creating this podcast so that people can literally follow and share their experiences. Because I think, I think as we mentioned in a previous episode, you kind of feel like it's a really hard tanker to change because all you see is this version. But we know there's some brilliant things going on. There's amazing members of staff in schools, there's amazing community things happening and collaborations that are doing brilliant things, but you never hear of it or you hear about the headlines, but you don't hear about how that actually really works. You know, so how can I make that happen in my classroom? How can I make that happen in my family? How can my school create this learning environment? Because we've never had that experience before, because it's always looked one way in, in our sort of living memory of the staff that have been there.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:01:16

But you also have a situation, though, Mark. Think of our politicians. We haven't got that many political parties in this country. So if I were Bridget Phillipson now in England and you, you can do this worldwide. I would create a working group, a cross party working group, and I would involve representatives from the Conservative Party, the Liberals and others in that working group if they wanted to join. And the aim would be to reach a consensus because at some point, you know that there will be a change of government. And the idea of creating the consensus is that then once there's a change of government, we're not back in that scenario where we have to reinvent the wheel. So if that list of two pages is so important, knife crime and obesity and cycling, and you name it, then let's, between us all agree that we're going to deliver that list. Now, when you then get a change in government, it might just be that somebody pays, puts more money towards knife Crime and less towards cycling, but none are allowed to disappear. And incidentally, that list should include music and all those things that make us be well. That's because what we've actually talked about, or what we talk about a lot is we don't talk about well being, we talk about not well being. The entire conversation is never about, oh my God, I feel so great. The entire conversation is, I feel so lousy. So it's always about not well being. Let's also turn that debate to saying, right, music is an entitlement, right? That kind of participation. You have a choice to say no and then you can come join later at some stage, but it isn't entitled. Why? Because it makes us. Well, we know that there, there's ample evidence. So we need to. Not just so one, we need cross body consensus on these things and then deliver, but also we need to change the dialogue away eventually from not well being to well being. Jamie Oliver for me was not, was not about not well being. Jamie Oliver was about well being and perhaps that's why they couldn't handle him.

Mark Taylor 01:03:34

I think that's probably very true. And I think the thing that people get frustrated about, and I'm lucky enough to have sort of been involved with people and work with people who have been very influential throughout education at different eras and the number of people that I have conversation with and they say, we thought it was going to be brilliant because they got these great people in a room. We started advising, we gave them opportunities, processes, thoughts, understanding from our personal experience of people who really, really understood children and what was important and especially in the early years and at the moment there was a policy to be made when something could be changed. So much of it was ignored, overlooked or just went the other way because they'd done the bit which was important probably politically, which is to have that conversation with the right people. But it then, like you said, it doesn't fit the agenda of what you want to do politically, whether that's a financial thing, whether it's a political thing, if it's a forward thinking thing. And I think you can understand the disillusionment with so many people. But I think that's why, like you say, the, the conversation needs to happen in all of these areas that we've spoken about today, because then you can make sure that you're part of that becomes a positive one.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:04:50

Yeah, I mean, and, and, and we have to also remember that. And I'd say that to everybody out there, the bar in England in that sense is set unbelievably low. Right. So please do not look to England as an example of best practice when it comes to those aspects because what you mentioned there, Mark, the bar in that sense is set so low that we go back to debates we had 50 years ago and didn't resolve then. And at election time debate that is 50 and sometimes 60 years old comes back this 60 years since the introduction of comprehensive schools, if my memory serves me right, we still have the debate about getting rid of them in some sections and bringing back grammar schools. Now my first thing about this is it's wholly inappropriate. I'm not saying the grammar schools were bad or good at a comprehensives are. But if you're going to change something, you can't change it to something that existed 70 years ago and didn't work. And then the other bit is you couldn't afford it even if you tried it. So to stop the political posturing, but ABBA is really, really low.

Mark Taylor 01:06:14

And why don't we finish this off with the education side? Because there are so many people who are taking schooling and education into their own hands. Whether it's virtual learning, whether it's a hybrid of the two, if it's taking people out of school because they want to or whether they don't want to, they feel there's other options there. And our next episode is going to be about technology and I think this is going to be such a key thing because I think this idea of life learning, understanding what you need to be as a human, as an experience, because the actual learning part, the schooling part, is going to look different very quickly. So what do you think that education side will look like moving forward? And what should people maybe be thinking about now to sort of have the right mindset or understanding what would be supportive now, ready for that sort of next leap?

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 01:07:07

I've never understood why it doesn't work, except that the introduction of the national curriculum, which, which is also an age old now, and, and, and the narrowing of the national curriculum has a gone, has gone against the education agenda. So, so I, I use it as an example quite a lot. If you are going to study Shakespeare in secondary schools or even in primary schools, why would you not do Shakespeare if you're going to do Shakespeare, which we should in England and, and worldwide, because it's such a phenomenon, you should not be allowed to study Shakespeare with children and young people, unless at the end they either get the chance to see, see the play or to be in it. Right now you can turn an inspectorate round and say you could not be in an outstanding school if you don't adhere to those things. So I think there are ways of forcing it, is my point, and I think it's a good way to force it. The other thing is we have God knows how many brilliant libraries and galleries and museums out there, theaters and music performance areas, Royal Norton Colleges of Music and all those wonderful places. They're all crying out for audiences, yet nobody seems to be having that debate that it would. I think it would be really easy to bring them together. Yeah, but you'd probably need to restructure the Department for Education. So you might need to start to call it the Department for Education and Schooling, simply to place that into people's minds with the education side and the schooling side working to the same goal. Serving the child and being complementary, but the education side. And if that's a job that's available, I'll have it, thank you very much. Would then look at working with almost Children's University, like with all those providers to enrich the learning of the children and to enrich the teachers. Teaching. That's what it is really. And. And there is no and, you know, I've used museums and libraries and galleries, places of work, lots of NGOs that are around. I can't think of anybody who doesn't fit into that. So I think the jobs a good one and I think it's easier than we think. But we need to be courageous enough to refocus. Refocus back on the child, refocus back on the complementarity of education and schooling, of learning and teaching, and actually go back to the Dutch and decide that we want one word for learning and the same word for teaching.

Mark Taylor 01:10:08

Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.