GGGG Ep 6 – More than a school – measuring what we value

Mark Taylor 00:00:24

Hello and welcome back to Education on Fire and the Gare Grouse Gets Gritty series with Professor Dr. Ger Graus OBE. Now, each of the seven episodes are based on a chapter from his book Through A Different Lessons from A Life and Education, which is published by Routledge. Now details of how to get your copy are in the description and we would love for you to get involved in this using the hashtag educationonfire in your social media posts. Now you can send your thoughts, comments and messages via my website@educationonfire.com or join me for a live show every Wednesday at 5pm UK on YouTube. At the end of the series, Gail will be joining me for a live discussion with Q and A. And you can be part of that show by just signing up to the newsletter on the educationonfire.com homepage. Keep inspiring and thank you so much for being part of these incredibly important conversations. Hello, my name is Mark Taylor and welcome to the Education on Fire podcast, 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. So welcome back to episode six. We are talking about more than a school and actually focusing on what it is that we value, what it is that we're measuring, why we're doing that. And this has been a fantastic conversation over some such a number of weeks and I think we've covered so many things, but I think understanding this is going to be such a, a crucial idea as to, to why we're getting up every day and having the conversations that we are. So take us into this and, and your thought process behind this chapter.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:02:06

Well, thank you, Mark. It, it's, it's a combination of things and, and in many ways this is kind of one of my favorite themes really. So, so more than a school essentially comes from Mesca un Club more than a club and it's based on Barcelona Football Club. So if you ever get, if you're ever fortunate enough to go to Barcelona per se as a city, and then to visit the Camp Nou, the wonderful football stadium, when you, if you get the opportunity to walk out onto the pitch, you literally walk out and you see in front of you spelled as they do that so beautifully through the seats, it says Mesco un Club in Catalan meaning more than a club. And if you then delve into Barcelona as a city, but particularly as a club, it's history. Over the last, I don't know, hundred or so years around that then, then you'll soon come to understand that the club, particularly under the oppression of the Franco regime and almost an anti Catalan, people weren't allowed to formally speak that language, people weren't allowed to sing the anthem, people weren't allowed to fly the flag, all those kind of things. But the one place where people felt that they could still be themselves and actually experience their identity was in the football stadium with the club. The club, incidentally, which is owned by its members. So this isn't owned by a very rich person from whatever country. It's owned by its members. And at least in theory, the people in the leading positions are voted in by the membership. So in many ways really simply take the romance away. The club is more than a club, it has many more functions in a very large community, that is a Catalan community in and around Barcelona. And it's always struck me that schools, particularly community schools, schools that are at the heart of communities. So maybe we're talking more primary again than secondary, because many primaries, if they are not deliberately part or at the heart of the community, they have a problem. But in many cases, all of our schools are more than a school because there is this unwritten thing, particularly in England, but other places in the world too, where the minute there, the minute there is a problem that is societal and potentially involves families or children, the mantra becomes the school will deal with it. So invariably schools end up doing things that are well beyond the original definition as a place where you go to learn. So, so think, and I'll. I'll use some very simplistic ones, but when knife crime becomes an issue, when drug abuse becomes an issue, the answer very quickly from Parliament all the way upwards and downwards becomes we need to do that in school. We never really ask, incidentally, whether we need to put a bit of extra resources in and whether the people who are currently in the school are professionally and personally equipped to deal with that. I have no idea why, why there would be. There seems to be some assumption that when it suits people, teachers become like gods. They can do everything and they do it well and they solve all of our problems. So invariably already schools are more than a school. But I think we need to become better at it and perhaps we need to become more deliberate at it. Because in the end, if we are going to be more than we are, if we're going to be better than we are, then, then in my book that becomes very quickly becomes, Becomes a values issue. Why are we doing this? We tend to focus really quickly and governments in particular tend to focus on when, where, how, who buy. And the who buy is in many cases is actually already an assumption. They'll deal with that. Whereas if we want to do the more than a school bit properly, I think we need to begin with the values of why are we doing this and what is the impact and how is that good for us and how is it good for our children, how is it good for our families, how is it good for our communities, how can we make these things better? And, and that in itself becomes a really, which is what I love about it, a really honest and simplistic, brilliantly simplistic way of looking at education and schooling. You and I, Mark, we know that if, if you're hungry and you're cold and you haven't had a chance to have a change your clothing for a day or two and you haven't had a shower, you're not 100%, you're not top fit, are you? You wouldn't play in the first team, so to speak. Well, so actually what, what we don't need to do is we need to make sure that we have had enough to eat, that we feel warm, that we feel quite happy, that we feel clean, that we've got, I don't know, got some deodorant on and a bottle of water next to us and whatever it is, and then we're ready to go. It's what every sports club does with its academies, for example. I think we have a lot to learn. Looking at how, how top sports clubs deal with their young talent. I incidentally also think that they have a lot to learn from schools. But that's the beauty of partnership, I think. So let's then begin to look at that more than the school, that we focus it on the child and if you wish, on the state, on the status quo of the child in terms of learning and making the most of school and being ready for that. So there are schools, and I certainly know one or two locally here, sweater children are served breakfasts. Now, it seems a really odd thing. The government in England has quite rightly now saying we're going to have breakfast clubs because they recognize that particularly in disadvantaged areas, that many children come to school hungry and therefore are not ready to learn. So there is a beginning of a recognition now, I think with our schools. We need to now grab that agenda and not wait for the civil service, who are so far removed from the realities of our children, to yet again dictate to us what to do and why we do it and how we do it. But actually I think we need to get hold of this and go, we'll do it like this, we'll do it like this, we'll tell you this and we'll make it work for our local communities. And then what we will do is, because we love being accountable, we'll measure the impact of all of this. So you don't need to chase us and you don't need to tell us that we don't like it, but please don't that. Don't expect there to be an immediate correlation between the levels in mathematics and the number of bagels that a child eats. These are relatively long journeys that make perfect common sense. Almost like the confidence journey, that brilliant bit of research that was done by Cambridge University, the confidence journey around Children's University, for example, which was not all children who go to Children's University become better mathematicians. But what does happen is many of the children who go to Children's University and out of school hours activities become more confident learners, more confident learners by and large and attain better grades. So that it's a bit like that. And, and the more than a school agenda is very similar, the food one, the looking after young people. But we need to start it by focusing on the child, not the child as Master or Ms. Average, but, but the, the individual and that's incredibly important. And then we will measure the impact that we have and we will measure what our, I suppose, how would you term it, educational and social entrepreneurship, because that's what it is. Because there is no one size fits all, because it will be slightly different for a school in Sheffield than it will be for a school in Cornwall, for example, not least because the geographical differences, urban, urban versus rural. And I get very excited about this because what we can then do is we can actually also begin to measure for real, so that we stop comparing Macclesfield Town with Manchester City, but that we are actually looking at progress measures, for example, as opposed to absolute attainment. And there are other things, we're cleverer than that, we're better than that, but it needs to be driven by, by the school. And, and there is a brilliant bit of research that was done again by the University of Cambridge on the Children's University. They, they did a number, produced a number of reports and, and one of the reports that looked at both the Children's University as a movement, as an institution and looked at its partner schools came to some quite interesting conclusions. Now when I read those to you somewhere, have in the back of your mind current rather dull inspection frameworks and Predictable ones, be that through the Office for Standards in Education in England or KHDA in Dubai or ESTIN in Wales or wherever you might want to go. But let me just read the conclusions as they were found in this report. And essentially the organizational evaluation concluded that the organizational impact of out of school hours learning, in this case, in this particular case, the Children's University was judged on 10 A's. So there was a clear impact on 10 A's. And I'll just read the A's. One was attendance. Children who participate in out of school hours activities voluntarily tend to attend better in school. You get the drift. The second A was attainment. They do better at school, by and large, because they're more motivated and more confident. Second, the third one was achievement, achievement being a much broader issue than me, than a very narrow attainment. Attitudes were better. There was a sense of adventure. How cool is it that learners can improve their sense of adventure? Curiosity, if you wish. I think that's incredibly important. Awards are important, as are rewards. Not just at the end of the ride, the GCSE or whatever it is, certificate or international GCSE certificate or ib, but much more in between project awards. A sense of agency that develops aspiration, which becomes tangible. Adaptability, which is so important, particularly in our so rapidly changing world. And advocacy is in evidence. And those 10 A's to me in a report tell me much more about the institution than any inspection framework that I've seen. And actually, as an individual, be it a parent or a member of the community, or indeed a teacher or member of school staff, I can invent myself into those 10 A's. I feel that they're about me and about everybody. And I think the children can feel like that and the parents can feel like this. So this approach of more than a school also gives us the option to see ourselves differently and see ourselves better. And those things are absolutely key. And I'll give you, if I may, one example of, of a more than a school agenda. So when I was Education Director in Wittenshaw in south Manchester between 1999 and 2007, I was part of. I was the director of two education action zones. They were statutory instruments. They were government statutory instruments, essentially. They. They were put in place in the. In the most challenging areas in England, starting with the first 25, and they were given control that was taken away from the local authority to a degree, and they became independent trusts. So they were there to innovate, to do things differently, because government had recognized that just more of the same. And Throwing money at more of the same wasn't the solution. So one of the things we did in Widdenshaw, there were significant issues with, predictably with attendance, with punctuality, with behavior, with engagement in general, with parental engagement, etc. Etc. So with the head teachers, and driven by the head teachers, we looked at what services are out there that are, if they were under the control of the schools or groups of schools, that would contribute to making the education and schooling of young people better. And it became pretty clear to begin with, there were education, welfare services that functioned around attendance and punctuality. There were social services, there were education, psychology, you name it. There were those services that historically had been under the control of local authorities and had been helicoptered into schools, always reactively, never proactively to stick a plaster on. And then they were taken down, they were put somewhere else. So we went to the local authority at the time and in partnership we asked them, can we manage our own services as much as that's possible? So the agreement we reached was that the local authority would manage those, the statutory aspects of those services, and we would manage the child centered and developmental ones. And my only proviso with the schools and our teachers was that when those meetings happened that they weren't talking about how bad the traffic was or how much everybody is in need of a pay rise or whatever else, but there would only be one agenda and that would be the names of children and who was going to do what until the next meeting in order to begin to make these things better. So the children became a little bit like a baton in a relay. You know, we wanted to win, but at the right time you pass them on to the next one so that you keep moving fast and surprise, surprise, within six months, education, welfare, social services and education psychology had caught up their caseload and were doing preventative work, which was unheard of, but because we were efficient and the other thing we did was, so we had, in a number of schools, ours was a very tight community, 29 schools. Most children who entered the infant section of a primary school would automatically also end up in one of our high schools so we could track the children and the families through. So the deployment of those services worked in that way too. And it won't come as a surprise that after a couple of years, because these things take time. There was, there were, there was tangible evidence in terms of attendance, punctuality, levels of exclusions, you name it, it was all there, statementing all those things were happening, but all those things were Also happening because we agreed with the 29 schools that if this was a new approach that was different and it was an education action zone wide approach, that we needed to be accountable differently, not in the same way. So each school had its statutory targets and each school to a degree had its local authority targets. But we also agreed that we would have collective targets. So the exclusion target, for example, became an agreement between 29 schools and the agreement was within our zones. We do not exclude children. We may move them round, we may help each other out, but we do not exclude. It's the simplest and easiest example I can give. There were other examples of how to make our teaching better. So if all of a sudden I had a, I was on a secondary school out of the blue, as these things sometimes happen, I experience a shortage of maths teachers, for example, then other schools would help out and that, and that collective voluntarily. So this is not like multi academy trusts where there's somebody sitting in an office moving things around as if they're playing chess badly. This came from the bottom up to serve children. Although I do recognize that some of the work of education action zones became the basis for the development of multi academy trust. But that was a very political thing. So the more than a school agenda is that. But I would urge schools and talk to, you know, have those discussions with local politicians, have those discussions with members of parliament, invite people if necessary even from the DfE into school or from any government organization. But in the end we, we are at a crossroads and the crossroads is either we continue with being done to and then we have to be happy with that, or we are more proactive and get hold of the agenda on behalf of our children, on behalf of our colleagues and on behalf of our communities. And then finally, which of course also happens, and people very often only think about that aspect of community schooling is that schools have resources that can be used by the wider community. Of course they do. But again, I think we need to be very careful that they don't become a money making scheme, but that they are actually a scheme that serves the community. So if you have got astroturf5 aside football pitches, my plea would be don't rent them out to the highest bidder all the time, but actually make sure that the local charity where off the top of my head poor or disabled people want to use those that they also can have access at a vastly reduced rate or even as part of a school's corporate and social responsibility. And that's how I think the picture is.

Mark Taylor 00:23:06

And I think that's interesting in terms of. We haven't really spoken about that too much about the school's corporate responsibility going outwards as well as the community coming into the school. And like you say, there are resources there that are really key. I think the other thing that really strikes me is the proactiveness of it. And I think because everyone feels quite insular, they feel like if they're going to get isolated, they're going to get into trouble and takes us back into all of the, the testing and, and all of the Ofsted and all of those sorts of things happening. We need that collective idea that we're doing it as a larger community. And I think that's where right back towards the beginning of these episodes, we talked about sort of the hashtag of education on fire. It's like if you can do it under an umbrella, if you can do it in a way that we know there are thousands, million millions of people doing this because we collectively believe that there's a better way, there's a. There's a way that we can do it as a society, as a group of people that believe and understand that we're doing this for the right reasons. At that point, it doesn't feel like you're so isolated and actually, for a better word, you know, there's a peg. You can put your hat on and say, look, we're doing this together and I'm not going to be left on my own. And the consequences will be much less, one would hope.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:24:23

And Mark, just to say, if, if somebody, if somebody from some civil service organization were to come along and say, oh, but this already exists because we've got local authorities or we've got multi academy trusts in England, then, then you have to just really politely turn around and ask them whether they've been living on Mars for the last 40, so 40 or so years. Because just because you create something doesn't mean it functions. These things are so local authorities, multi academy trusts, they are both political and administrative tools and you look at the documentation that's produced by many of those organizations and if you did one of those wordle things, then the word child would be very small. So. And so just because organizationally there are certain things in place doesn't mean that they, you know, your question would immediately become, so they're accountable to the child, then, are they? And somebody would go accountable to the child. Where does that come from? And I think, I think it's. It's around that. So, so that nonsense that it exists and therefore we don't need to. It is about. It is essentially, it is about the profession, those who know best taking back the reins on behalf of the children, their parents and their communities. That's what this is, because they know best. And if you have a large local authority, wherever in the world you are, or a large grouping of schools, wherever in the world you are, yeah, we have a group with 300 schools or 60 schools or 50 schools or whatever it is, there is not a cat in hell's chance that the CEO, the fairy at the top of the Christmas tree, will be able to know precisely what's going on at ground level. No. And very often they're not interested either. Yet that is where this needs to work. And that is why the true professional need to get hold of this. And we need to provide. We need to provide them with the enthusiasm and the goodwill, and we don't need to provide them necessarily with the expertise, because that would be very patronizing. And I also believe, and I saw this working in Wyden Shaw, that, you know, we have this thing about when we have a problem, we always go and buy people in and spend a lot of money on consultants and whatever else. And sometimes maybe that's necessary, but for my money, if I looked at our 29 schools in Windshaw, there was no problem in seven years, none whatsoever, where the answer didn't lie somewhere within our community. We just needed to get much better at looking for it, that's all. And once we got good at it and we knew our schools and we knew our teachers and we knew our children and our families, it became a joy because somebody would come and say, oh, my God, I don't know what to do with this. And one of us would go, come and get in the car. This was before FaceTime, thankfully. Right, come and get in the car. We'll go and see so and so we'll go and have a chat. I think they've got an answer. I think they're doing some of this already. And part of our role became that brokerage, that bit that goes. I know. And if I didn't know, I'd go to one of my colleagues within the zone and said, tell me about how does that work there? And we would find the answers. And then the trust existed for us to turn around and go, if you need us, you know where we are, but I think you can work it out amongst yourselves. And then we caught up, and that was our checking and accountability. You caught up at some point during a review conversation and said, how did that work out? Oh, brilliant. Or I'm sorry, that didn't work. Do we need to look at that again? But what, what you developed over time, you developed an outward looking attitude culture. People would not just do, oh dear Google or whatever. Although that didn't exist in those days either. But anyway, people would not all consultancy yellow pages or whatever it was people would instantly do, I'll go and get in touch with so and so. And what was really interesting was I only discovered that later, that before. So there were 29 schools in a fairly tight geographical area, primary, secondary and special denominational, non denominational, before the Education Action Zone came into existence. They never had meetings as a group of 29. They had meetings of smaller clusters, the Catholic cluster or the New Green cluster, as it was called at the time, Parklands cluster, the Brookway Cluster. They never met as a group of 29. So the zone became an enabler. We didn't need to tell them how to do it, we just needed to put them in a place where they felt comfortable and confident to find out for themselves. And that professional trust thing, I mean, we're so far away from this at the moment. And the other thing was, and this was not always easy because of the pressures of national inspectorates and local inspections and all those kind of things. Transparency and honesty, people are nervous of, particularly if you work in what are known as challenging circumstances, because you are more likely not to hit your target if you work in challenging circumstances. So you're a bit more guarded for somebody who's going to come and tell you off. And in the end your job's on the line, particularly as a head teacher. We forget that, but it is, because I've never seen a Director of Education at a local authority or a multi academy trust CEO going, oh, that school failed its offset inspection. The book stops here. All of a sudden they find all sorts of places where the book stops, except at their door. Weird, because when it comes to pay rises, all of a sudden they're back to the front of the queue. There's kind of somewhat, not really honest about it, I think, and that transparency and honest. So we did have conversations between, particularly with our secondary colleagues that were about off rolling, quite frankly, that were about cheating. Yeah, and we know. And cheating, especially around youngsters who were difficult youngsters who had special needs. Because actually, deep down, statistically it's a bit of a risk to have too many of those on your books because the inspector is going to come and slap you on the wrist. So we had those conversations and I think, was it Perfect. Of course it wasn't, but I think we got pretty close to being very good. Whereas now I see these, you know, you get the annual reports such and such a school in London school, you know, such a. Such percentage free school meals sends 40% of its a level candidates to Oxbridge. That's just not true. The figures are massaged because the percentage of free school meals are based on 11 to 16. Then they become incredibly selective and they take from across London. And then quite frankly, it's not ever so hard to then get a large number of those youngsters in Oxbridge. If I was, I live in Sheffield. If I had the top 5% of youngsters from Sheffield coming for two years to my school at the end of their schooling career, that's a fair chance I'd get a number of them into Oxbridge, if that is the Holy Grail. So I think that we got pretty good at honesty. I think the current climate worldwide, from the Pisa league tables to whatever league tables you want to look at, actually encourages people to be dishonest, to not be collaborative, and to act not in the interest of the child. And we need to turn that round. And we can do two things. As I said earlier, we can wait for somebody to turn it around for us, or we can sometimes, a little cheekily and naughtily, we can begin to turn it around ourselves. A little naughty is quite good.

Mark Taylor 00:33:10

There you are the epitome of Ger. Ger gets gritty there in a nutshell. And. And I just wanted to sort of, sort of coin a phrase from Richard Osborne and on his podcast, the Rest Is Entertainment, they talk about having a sidebar here in Marina. And. And it just struck me there that he talked on a podcast once about counseling and actually going to see someone. And what I loved about it was the fact that, you know, people go and get expert advice and expert support, and it might be for a myriad of reasons, everyone's different. Everyone has their own personal circumstances, their own personal experiences. And he explained about how he thought it was, it was supposed to work, you know, being given the answers, all of that kind of thing. And the thing that just struck me, which I loved at the end of this particular conversation that you had, was the fact that the response was, and how's that working for you? And of course the answer is that sooner or later you have to take responsibility or you have to understand what you're doing. Is it working out as you'd like it to? And if the answer is no, then you have to do something different. And I think, as you were speaking, that's exactly what came to mind here. If you have someone in authority that comes and says, why isn't this working? Or we've got a system in place that you have to abide to, the same thing applies. How is that working? And I think we all know within this particular world that it's not working. There are children just not being supported, there are people working in circumstances which just aren't conducive to helping children and actually have a system that's going to be proactive and supportive and protective of our children moving forward. So how is it working? Well, it's not. So, like you said, let's do it differently in whichever way that we can point out the fact that it's not working and actually demonstrate, as you so sort of beautifully put, how that can look by actually doing it and actually saying, look, for us it works like this and here's the reasons why and here's the evidence and all those things you said, because it's important to us and we can actually affect the children that we're looking after today because they don't care what's going to happen. In five years time, their primary education would have been and gone, or they would have been through, done their exams and secondary and will be in the workforce or whatever they're going to be doing afterwards. So it has to happen now because we're responsible for the people and children in the here and now and for the people that work in education in the here and now as well.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:35:30

Yeah. And I think. And then you have to follow that through. I mean, of course, I mean, we were fortunate and our schools were fortunate in Wythenshawe in the sense that we were set up as a separate organization. We were funded, we were well funded and we could do work with, for, on behalf of, through whatever our schools. And one of the things that we were very clear about was that if we do things differently, we need to apply our measures differently. So I'll give you a very simple example. So one of the things that we knew from our baseline work was that at the point of entry into the schooling system, our youngsters were well behind the national average, whatever that phrase means, but they were well behind it by all tests and other assessments. So we got talking at the time to, God blimey, Mike Treadway and Mike Fisher, who had set up the Fisher Family Trust, which was essentially an individual pupil level database. And we created in Widdonshaw, with their support, an individual pupil level database. So what, what came out of it was this, our entrance point. So if this is the national entrance point, this was our entrance point. Okay, so what you then expect, as the years go by, you expect the national average to progress at a certain rate. And you might expect, and the expectation was nationally, by government, that this line would overtake or at least match the others. And we went, not quite sure. That's ambitious and it's an ambition we have. We're not quite sure how fair that is, but let's see where we go. So one of the things we began to do was progress measurement. Really sophisticated for its time, very sophisticated. Even Her Majesty's inspection, during the Ofsted inspection of the Education Action Zones, looked at it and commented on it. And what effectively began to happen was that whilst our schools, in crude terms, after five, six, seven years, were not yet meeting national expectations, in every single one of those schools, progress was greater per child. Individual pupil progress was greater than individual pupil progress nationally. So our prediction was, eventually, we'll catch them up, we just need a bit of time. So we didn't have to do that. But we were quite sure that this was the route we wanted to go. And in working with the schools and particularly their teachers, we were also quite sure that we needed a means of measurement that essentially was value added and DSON put itself in there. If we're the additional resource with quite a bit of money, what's the difference to your school? Can you demonstrate that our existence matters? Can we do that through measuring progress of children? And the answer that the schools gave us was, yes, here it is now. We had. I was there for seven years in total. They probably had about 10 years of it before the Conservatives came into power and got rid of all of those things. But the bottom line is, there was very clear evidence that had they allowed this to continue to be developed, become much more sophisticated, I mean, imagine what you could do now, right? The way the technologies. It would be breathtaking, but it was also fair and it was transparent. So the one thing was, we produced a folder that had all the information, of course, anonymized, but all the information of 29 schools in it. Each school could see the others dat anonymized data sets. Why? Well, one, because it seems like a reasonable thing to do if you're part of a project, and secondly, if you are doing your analysis and in your school, you have a particular issue, it allows you to find who to go and talk to. So as a result of those things, each school then thought it was a good idea to appoint its own Education Action Zone coordinator, somebody who, who manage that on behalf of the schools and they could get together so you didn't need to bring everybody out all the time. And that worked too. And incidentally, I can only of course speak for the Wythenshawe Education Action because that's where I was. But there were 25 and later 50 others. And to some degree or others contextualize, they all made similar differences. But what it did do is empowered schools locally and for those who like control structures, top down structures, that became very uncomfortable. And it was one of the reasons why, why we found ourselves knocking on, on closed doors sometimes, particularly when it came to government institutions. But we made that difference and we proved our point and our youngsters were better for it. And as I often jokingly say, you only have to look at Marcus Rashford. He was one of ours and I always see him as an Education Action Zone boy. Right. So there we are. But we could make those differences. And the thing that was very interesting about those communities, if I reflect on that now, so when I started in Wythenshawe in 1999 as Education Action Zone Director, I think it would be fair to say that Wythenshawe at the time, I think it was about 80,000 people lived there and probably 95% of those were white British. If you went to windshield now, probably slightly less than 80,000 people, but I would say 45% of the people who live there now are not white British. They may be Eastern European, there may be Somali, there may be. And that incidentally is not Witten Shaw's fault. It is. All I can conclude is it is how the demographic has changed as a result of changes in our society and as a, as a result of political decisions. But in terms of contextualization, what we did in 2007 would no longer work. We. You would have to adapt. Yeah. And incidentally, sometimes you'd have to adapt. Adapt in a really. I'll tell you a funny story in a really cool way, right? Because what happened was Initially in the mid 2000s or about 2005 onwards, there was a not insignificant influx of people, families from former Eastern European countries, initially mainly Poland and the Czech Republic. What happened was that typically speaking, those families had, were educationally very highly motivated. They wanted their children to go to school, they wanted their children to do well at school and they would back the school. They backed us. There were very interesting discussions going on. We started to meet with some of the representatives of those particular communities to see what else there was that we needed to do. Guess what happened to the league tables in Wythenshawe? They all went up within two years because the attendance figures rose very significantly and the GCSE results rose very significantly because every child coming from Poland would sit a Polish GCSE or a Czech gcse. Right. So if you wanted to be transparent and honest, you now you, from about 2000 and I would say 2010 onwards, you probably would have needed to produce a number of league tables. League tables without the influx of the Eastern European children and families, league tables with the influx, in order to explain what was going on. Because in fairness, the secondary schools, they got better, but they hadn't got that much better that quickly. And our attendance figures were improving, but they weren't improving that quickly in that short period of time. So your change of demographic can have all sorts of influences. From the short period of time that overlapped with my directorship there, I found them incredibly polite, positive, because they, they started to set, certainly in terms of attendance and, and attainment. They raised the bar. Cool. What more do you want? Raising the bar is a good thing, right? We all jump higher. It's good. So. So there's, there's interesting things in the mix there, but you have to be honored. You have to know your school, you have to know your children, you have to know your community and you have to have to look at contextual value added.

Mark Taylor 00:45:26

And it really is why, like you say, the trust is important, why actually people working together collectively is important. Because then all of those things aren't suddenly a surprise because you've all been in that particular community understanding all of those things as well. And then it's easy to explain, it's easy to have those conversations and actually make positive, purposeful decisions, isn't it?

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:45:48

And you need to have constant discussions about what works, what doesn't work, why it doesn't work. So I keep going back to. So our secondary schools in Wyden Shaw were not massive. They were around, I would say, on average they were around the 800. One was much smaller, it later closed, but because the other three were around the 800 mark, they were in a position to know their children. Well, I've often been. I'm convinced if we'd had three secondary schools with 2000 or 2500 youngsters, our way of working would have to have been very different because we would have lost in inverted commerce, we would have lost the knowledge of a lot of those children and we would have. Our resourcing, our investment, our whole strategy would have had to have been very Different. So you can conclude that in secondary schools with around 800 at that moment in time, in that place that worked.

Mark Taylor 00:47:04

And do you think, really, I think that's the exciting thing about all of this is the fact that when you need to make a change, when it needs to be different, we have the people in place that can do that. So like you say, it would look different because the schools were bigger. You know, our teachers weren't trained to do a school when there's a pandemic going on, but over the literally overnight managed to change the way everything happened and did what they needed to do. And so you can't predict what's going to happen next year or even tomorrow sometimes. So actually say going back to that trust element of kind of why are we doing this, who are we doing it for, what's the reasons for all of this and how are we putting this together? And now go away and do it for the best that you can within the setup that you have. We know that's possible in the most incredible circumstances. So just imagine what could happen on a daily basis just based on the small little tweaks and understanding of what's

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:48:00

possible then the magic, you know, obviously worldwide, there are post covert analysis and reviews and navel gazing and critiques and there's all that stuff going on, not just educationally but in general, as we know in the UK for example, where there is a kind of, of a parliamentary or a public inquiry, isn't it? But we haven't. It's trust and respect. I mean we could really do as a society, but being a little bit more respectful of the almost Hogwartesque magic that happened in our schools at that time. These people who literally pulled the magic out of their sleeves and did things that were quite unheard of. And in typical 2025, 2026 fashion, we look at the negative, we're very good at looking at the negative. But I urge people to just make themselves a coffee or a cup of tea and just sit down for five or 10 minutes and actually make some notes about the magic. It was amazing. And in a sense I regret that we haven't taken enough of that magic and in a sense put it in a jar and carried it with us into the future. If there is for me a shortcoming professionally that came out of COVID it was that we haven't harnessed the brilliance as much as we should have done with the benefit of hindsight.

Mark Taylor 00:49:50

And why do you think that was? I know there was that pressure to get back to normal and do it as it was and imagine it didn't quite happen. But it did seem to me a watershed moment of we could keep going down this way because we've seen the positives, we also understand the negatives. And this new way of being could have been just so incredible. But there was no kind of real will for that to be the case.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:50:16

No, I think. I think one is. I think governments worldwide didn't want it because it was disruptive and it would have allowed disruptors to become important. Firstly, I think. Secondly, there wasn't. You keep coming back to this trust thing. Yeah. And I remember politicians here initially, of course, because they were in government of the Conservative persuasion, but. But I didn't hear any loud noises from anywhere else either. People instantly were saying, I just working from home bit, and we can't trust you, and they're all watching cricket. And, I mean, I don't know whether those politicians were judging everybody else by their own pretty low standards, probably. Right. So all of that was going. So I think there was. From on high, there wasn't the will to make that happen. I think there was a fear of it happening. Oh, my goodness. The masses are taking control. The professionals. Remember we had a Secretary of State for education in Mr. Gove in England who basically came out with his statement that he didn't want any more experts, which is a terrifying statement. And I'm very glad that Mr. Gove never became Secretary of Education for Health, for example, because it would have been a serious disaster to turn around in an operating theater and send. Send the surgeons home because he didn't want any more experts. I just. I just don't get that mentality. But I think there was genuinely. There's a lack of trust, There was a fear, and as far as the teachers were concerned, they were on their knees because teaching was one of the very few professions that didn't just keep going, but kept going and it became harder and they kept going. And it was quite right, incidentally, that people would stand outside for what that was worth. I had my doubts about it, but I understand the sentiment that people on a Thursday or whatever it was, would stand outside and clapped. The nhs, I think they should have given them a few quid. There might have been slightly more. Send them flowers, everybody or whatever might have been better than keeping your hands warm. But I always regret it that nobody actually, either virtually or metaphorically or in the real world gave a round of applause to our teachers and our educators because, my God, were they amazing or what? And. And I, as A father of, of a child. My youngest one was in year nine. Pretty key kind of years, aren't they when you're 14 and some, some big decision years coming up. Stupendous. Stupendous. And people go, oh well, she got good grades then at the end of it. Not, it wasn't about the grades, it was about something much longer term. It was about the nearly 21 year old woman she now is and who she has become and what she is doing at the moment. This girl, this 14 year old girl who is now studying Spanish and Italian at Oxford University, about to go on a year abroad. Graves there were bigger fish to fry and her school fried them with her. Brilliant. Quite brilliant.

Mark Taylor 00:53:48

So if we're gonna sum up our sort of last hour, it seems to me, like you said, the trust is important. The essence of we know that the people really are more than a school and it's a sense of how do we want that to look going forward and what are we going to do about it? I think to make that assessment, I think there's a.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:54:15

It functions on a number of levels. I mean my big call out would be, is respect your teachers. The call out to the teachers is are you ready to be respected? Because when people start doing it then we have to live up to it, don't we? I'm sure we can, but I think it's an interesting thought. So to everybody, respect your teachers. My call to government and those in charge in whatever organization structure you are would be trust your teachers as well as respect them. And then we need to begin to think about what does that actually mean? Because it's easy to say, isn't it? So I'm the parent. My child comes home and moans about something that's gone on in school. Perhaps as the parent I need to change the way that I engage. And instead of instantly knocking on a head teacher's door or even worse, threatening, I'll ring off, stand to actually have. Because some parents have experienced this or they keep telling me that they've experienced this. During COVID when they were teaching their children at home, they were all saying how hard it was at the time. So they're either they've got memory issues. Engage. Teachers are there for you. They are actually. They stand behind your child, they want your child to do well. And you know what, they're the professionals and you're not. And let's just do a little bit of navel gazing on that front. But, but if it comes to it, if it comes to it, I would in Most cases you can't. You've got to be careful the generalizations, of course, but I would in most cases stand with our teachers as opposed to stand with our parents. When it comes to the schooling and education of our children, parents do not know best. They may love more, but that doesn't qualify them. So I think we need to, when we say these things, we need to actually ask ourselves the question, and that was one example. We need to ask ourselves the question, what does that mean for me? Because these platitudes are easy, aren't they? We need to respect, we need to trust. So what are you doing about it? Are you writing a thank you note at the end of a difficult week when it snowed and you've had your offstedt inspection and God knows what else has gone on? Do you actually spend two minutes ripping out a piece of paper from somebody, making sure it looks nice and tidy, and write a note saying, this must have been a really tough week. Thank you for what you did for my Imogen. Respect, it's easy, but so important. So I think we need to, like Carla Rinaldi used to say about learning, we need to make learning visible. I think we need to make trust and respect visible. We owe that to our teachers. And when I say teachers, I mean the teaching professions, all of them.

Mark Taylor 00:57:56

And I think for me, that idea of that small touch that you just said, like a note to kind of have those small conversations that are going to make a big difference, are really important. Because one thing I would just say, to put this in context from a parental point of view, is that in a primary school, when one of my children was there, that a new head came in and there was a conversation about what was important, the whole child, the bigger picture wasn't just about testing. And then not long after that, my child came home and said, oh, we weren't able to do PE today because we hadn't done well enough in our tests and we've got our SATs coming up. So they cancelled our PE. So we had to do this. And I as a parent went in and said, but you've just literally told me I was called into the school because they wanted to actually talk to me when the new head came. And I said, you gave me all this. And this is the react, this is, this is the response that I've just seen from that. And I think had there been more cohesion in general, small conversations about that, it would have been a. My reaction might have been different and my conversation might have been different because it would have been on a more community left basis as opposed to this is what we're going to do. And then my immediate understanding of what had happened was completely different. And so I think like say a combination of those small things and that ongoing dialogue and that sense of what are we collectively doing is the is makes a difference and changes those perspectives.

Prof Dr Ger Graus OBE 00:59:30

And, and also, you know, humility and honesty are, are good things, aren't they? The conversation that I think every head would would have, I would like to think would have with the parents would be, would be along those lines as you first portrayed. And then also say, and by the way, there will be times around test times when sometimes we just need to have them in for a bit more because we want them to do well in tests. You're not going to go, oh no, no, no, no. I want them to have pehal or high water. But, but it is talent as it is. But take people with you. That's, that's the role of the profession, the role of the parent is to be taken with the school for the benefit of the child. I think this thing where parents really think that they know best I think is just ludicrous. And I would want to give more powers to head teachers and actually turn around at some point and say, well, if you dislike our school so much, I mean you signed up to all the values when you joined and if you now dislike it so much, we haven't changed, but clearly you have. Let me give you the addresses of all the other schools in the area. And then to quote Corporal Jones, then all of a sudden, Mark, they don't like it open, right? And so I think there are issues around that level as well, because I think there are issues that's disrespectful and that is a trust issue. And if the shoe were on the other foot and if the teaching professions conducted itself in that way to the parents and the community, all hell would be let loose. Well, these things work both ways. And actually if we put the child in the middle and we have agreed what everybody's job is and is really clear and we keep talking about it, we won't go far wrong, it won't be perfect. Right? So, so the thing that always needs to improve is the quality of communication and the intensity and focusing on the child. And finally, I, I'd like us, I'd like to just use this quote from, from the author Isaac Asimov, which, which I love, which is that education isn't something you can finish. So in a sense, whatever discussions that we have, there will always be. Do you remember the news programs with Trevor McDonald? There will always be. And finally and because it's never done, just like Whidden Shaw wasn't done because it's changed, our youngsters will change. My my eldest daughter is 10 years older than my youngest daughter. It's a generational gap in many aspects. So it's never finished. It's never done. But what's quite interesting, and if I use my two girls as an example is that in many ways the oldest, the elder one can learn as much from the younger one as the other way around, particularly in a sphere of technology, for example, and the use of phones and iPads and whatever these things are. But it's never done. So there will always be. And finally and ironically, the last kind of small chapter of the book was of course called it Finally

Mark Taylor 01:03:02

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