Video Episode 6 - David Price OBE on educational innovation

Hi, my name's Joe Houghton and this is the Plus One Podcast. So my guest today, David Price OBE, is a name well known in educational circles around the world, and although he lives in Yorkshire now, he's a Geordie from Jarrow. So it's going to be interesting to kind of hear the accent for those of you that aren't used to the Geordie accent and stuff. He's written 3 bestselling books on education, and we'll talk about those a little bit later on. He regularly speaks and trains and facilitates for, it seems like, all kinds of different institutions all around the world, looking at the website, David. Canada, India, Ireland, the UK. You were talking about Australia recently on LinkedIn. So welcome to the podcast, and thanks so much for sharing your time today.

Thank you, Joe. What the viewers and listeners can't see is that I was 15 minutes late because I was just absorbed in a piece of writing I was doing. It sounds a terrible excuse, but sorry and apologies for being late.

Ah, no problem. But I mean, isn't that just lovely that kind of you just got lost in the writing? Because I mean, I try and do a little bit of writing as well. I mean, nowhere near your standard, but I mean, I love that, that you just got lost in it and lost the time.

Well, it sounds It's very romantic, but the reality is I find it so hard to get into writing. I'm a terrible procrastinator. So that once I get started, I just have to switch off all distractions. Or else I'll be checking Twitter or doing all that kind of stuff, and it's just a killer for your concentration levels. Yeah.

And that's really interesting because, I mean, when I'm teaching kind of my students time management and focus and all the rest of it, that's what I say. I say, you know, there is actually an off button on the phone. and you can turn Twitter off and Facebook off and you don't have to be plugged into those feeds. So do you do that? Do you shut yourself away and just absolutely have quiet?

Yeah, I mean, right now it's odd because I'm working on an accompanying kind of toolkit for the last book, The Power of Us, and I've not been kind of contracted to do it, although the publishers are happy to publish it, but it isn't because there's not a contract, there's not a deadline.

Yeah.

So it's one of those things that I was just kind of ambling along with it, and then I thought, no, if this comes out, you know, 3 years after the first book, it's silly. It needs to come out at least within a year. So my plan is that it'll come out in the summer, but it won't be— and I find this fascinating, and my publisher's read are equally interested in this concept.

You know what I mean?

What is a book now? This toolkit will be a collection of writings, but it will also have QR links to videos.

Yes.

And there'll be as much, you know, people will hopefully work through it. I mean, it actually doesn't work, I think, as well in text. I mean, I love having a book in my hands, But if you have to then keep scanning QR codes, it actually starts to make sense, you know, for it to be on the screen. And then you can just go straight to the video that illustrates the point that you're talking about. But I think that's, that's the future of publishing. It's going to just become an amalgam of media, which, which makes for a more richer learning experience, I think.

That's really interesting that you're taking that approach, because I'm just about to release a book this month, my second book on photography. And I've taken a similar approach to that with the book. I've got a lot of links in it, web links in it and stuff like that. I've created a Google Map of where all the photos were taken so that, you know, you can go to the Google Map, click on the photo, and it'll show you the ISO and the aperture and all the rest of it, and you can kind of see whether you get the same shot and that kind of stuff. So yeah, I think this multimedia thing is where we need to go, isn't it?

Well, we've been talking about it for years, you know, but the kind of technology is now commonplace. And that's when you get, you know, rapid take-up of innovation. Yeah.

Yeah. So, I mean, you know, you write, obviously, you've got, what, 3 books? There was Open, The Power of Us is the new one, isn't it?

And Education Forward. Technically, I edited that one. It was a collection of essays. So it was a collaborative effort, as will be the one that I'm currently working on. I'm working with other people on it.

Right.

So yes.

Yeah, I read Open after The Power of Us, actually. I read The Power of Us and I devoured it in like 2 evenings. I just sat and read it cover to cover. I found it amazing, the stories, which we're going to come back to, I hope. But then kind of I went up onto Amazon and looked you up, you know, and there's this other book that you wrote, Open, and I thought, 2013, 8 years old. I mean, how relevant can that be now to kind of education today? But I thought, ah sure, you know, I enjoyed the first one, I'll get the second one. So I did, and it was— I mean, I thought it was absolutely still completely relevant. It's kind of the stuff you were talking about even 8 years later.

It's odd. Yeah, it's so interesting to hear you say that. Yeah, I think you're the first person I've come across who has actually read them in reverse order because There is a sort of, you know, in Open, I talk about the way in which learning was becoming democratized largely through the technology, and that the next step is effectively what I talk about in The Power of Us, which is once we're sharing more than knowledge, we actually get into sharing what we make. And so there's always been an assumption that people would come to the first book and then read the second. I'm fascinated to hear that it still feels relevant to read them in reverse order as it was. But yes, you're absolutely right. When I wrote Open, I thought about 18 months probably, and then it'll be out of date. Yet I still get people who are coming across it for the first time and getting something out of it. And that's great.

Absolutely. Yeah. So if that's a sequence, kind of, you know, Open took you to The Power of Us. What's the next step in your writing? Where are you going to go for the next one?

Well, this was not my idea, I have to say, this was the publisher's. I work with just a wonderful editor called Claire Baud, and an editor is just worth their weight in gold. And I've worked with a number of editors in the past, and you know what it's like when you're writing, you become very protective and pretty sensitive, I guess, about criticism. But the reality is every single one of my first drafts, and I keep them all, I keep all the drafts, and when I go back to read them, I just think, oh God, that was terrible. What was I thinking? You know, I was trying to make jokes and they just weren't landing. And I guess I'm a classic kind of, you know, self-taught writer.

Yeah.

If there's such a thing as the way, the handbook for writing, I've never come across it. And I guess most people are like that. But the reality is that it's a very slow and laborious process. You know, I'm in awe of these fiction authors who, you know, they'll write 5,000 words in a day, every day.

Yeah.

I just think the discipline that that requires and the confidence in your writing to do that. So for me, it's been a case of just get the first draft done, hope that there's sufficient in there that, you know, my agent can get somebody interested and that I get an editor who understands that, you know, I'm absolutely open to criticism. I think you just have to be, you know, you can't be defensive about that. And in the case of The Power of Us, Clare kind of said to me, you know, I already knew that because of the pandemic that the book, which was actually finished in February of last year, would have to be rewritten.

Right.

It was, you know, it was just too big an event. It would be like writing a book in 1917 and not mentioning the First World War. You just can't. So Claire, the editor, said, we have a deadline of May because we want to get this book out in August.

Yeah.

So that was perfect. That's exactly what I needed. And it took me 3 weeks of just writing, you know, 14 hours a day and being absolutely ruthless. Because if you're going to then add a whole other part of the book, Yeah. Then you've got to get rid of something. And in the event, what I got rid of was the stuff that I was— I guess it was most personal to me because I started the book off talking about some of the health issues because within this community of people who are finding their own solutions are the citizen scientists. And I've got to know some of these people really well. because of my own health. I've had 2 different forms of cancer. And so working through that was really, I thought, a sensible place to start. It was also very dramatic. I was in intensive care and I got sepsis and it was all— and I thought, oh yeah, that'll grab the reader straight away. And then she kind of said, I think that's got to go and you've got to have another way to start the book.

Yeah.

Which relates to the pandemic. And that just threw me. And I thought, oh, God, so how am I going to start this book?

Yeah.

And so, you know, once— that's always the hardest part. Once you get into the flow of a book, I always feel if you get the first 10 pages and you feel like you've kind of got the right tone of voice and you've got the rhythm, it starts to write itself. And then when someone says, you know, you really need a different start, it sort of threw me. But when I look back on it now, the start that I got in, thank God, you know, I came across 2 young boys, really 17-year-olds, in different parts of the world, made contact with them. They've done remarkable things in terms of COVID tracking apps where the governments, the Korean government and the American government, were signally failing to do. And it just seemed to be such a powerful image to start with, you know, that these 17-year-olds working around the clock in 3 days did what their governments failed to do in more than 3 months. And unfortunately Claire just said, yep, that's the start, and then it became a different book altogether.

Oh, I mean, it's a writing nightmare, that, isn't it, to have your hook taken away?

Absolutely, yeah.

Yeah, because it sets the whole tone, doesn't it, and you're off to the races. Oh wow. But yeah, I mean, isn't that fascinating that you came up with that, which is so of the moment. You know, 17-year-olds, so they're young, they're connected, they're fearless, they don't know that they can't, so they do. And I mean, that's just the whole message, isn't it?

And that's— sorry, because I completely lost my track. You asked me what's the next book?

Yeah, what's the next bit?

And it was Claire, the editor, she said, you know, we do want you to sign a 2-book deal. And I said, oh God, I have to write another one? And she said, yeah. Well, isn't it obvious that you have to write another one? I said, no, what, what, what? And she says, these amazing young people that you feature in the book, the next book has to be about them and how we create the kind of education that's going to enable them to make all of these changes, you know, that absolutely need to happen. And that's, that's got to start in our education system. It's no good waiting until, you know, they've gone through university, as these 2 young men have done, you know, that have started with Ryan and Avi Schiffman. They've hated their education and kind of just endured it, and now they feel like they're doing something of importance, and they are. But my argument is that we shouldn't have to wait until you know, our education, our formal education over before we start changing the world.

So yeah, that's—

the next book's going to be about that. Okay.

Why education? I mean, if we rewind to when you were 17, you know, were you going through school thinking, I'm going to become an educator and a writer and, you know, this is what I want to do with my life? Or did you want to be a train driver or a—

Well, first of all, Joe, when I was 17, I wasn't at school because I left when I was 16.

Right.

The earliest time that you could leave school then. I went to a Catholic grammar school where they beat Latin into you on a daily basis. Now, I mean, seriously, our Latin teacher had this leather strap. It used to terrify me. And he literally, if you got things wrong, you would get the strap. You know, it's a very familiar picture in Irish history, of course, the brothers. And it was like that. It was a very traditional Catholic school. And as a result, I hated it because I was always the kind of person who— I was a kind of autodidact anyway. At that time, I was teaching myself how to become a musician.

Yeah.

How to write songs, how to read music, although I was very poor at that. I preferred just kind of, you know, being in bands and spontaneously making music, although there is a technique. My whole open was all about how the process of informal learning works because that's the kind of driver now, it seems to me. Why education? Because I just felt that my experience which was when I walked out of that door, and I'll tell you a little story. When I walked out of the door of the school, I had one thing under my arm, and it was a plant holder, which I did in woodwork. I was considered not smart enough to do O-levels, GCSEs now.

Yeah.

So the equivalent then for kids in, you know, Grammar schools were supposed to be for the brightest of the bright. And if you were like me and struggling academically, then you got shunted off into the workshop basically. And I was terrible. I've always been useless. Ask my wife about DIY and it's just a litany of disasters. But I managed to somehow put this thing together. And I remember I lived about 200 yards away from the school and I remember walking home giving this to my mother and saying, there you are. That's what my education has done for me. And she said, is that it? And I said, yeah, that's it. That's all I'm going to bring back. And I said, I'm never going back there again. I had done with education. I didn't want anything more to do with it. Fast forward 30-odd years.

Yeah.

And I was I'd just become a freelance consultant, so 2001, and dear friend and mentor Ken Robinson had got me a job. And it was a job in South Tyneside, a part of a team where we were looking to essentially revitalize the area that I grew up in. So it was partly about schools. Will Alsop was doing something on architecture. There was a whole team. And Ken got me this gig to review education. And because I had a background in music, I remember my father saying, so why do they want music? I said, no, no, it's not about music, Dad. It's just about education. And he looked at me and he said, what the hell do you know about geography? I said, yeah, not a lot actually. But I went in and one of the schools I had to visit, was my old grammar school.

Oh, wonderful.

Yeah, it gets worse. They'd given me an office and I thought I was meeting the headteacher in the office, so I thought, great, I don't have to go to the school. Then I realized I wasn't. I was actually supposed to be at the school. So just like you, I was late. But unlike you, I wasn't terrified at the prospect of being late in school, in trouble with the headmaster. And I remember he'd gone down to the office by now So we'd swapped over. He was furious. I was waiting for him to come back and I thought, oh God, it's just like it was when I was 16. I'm sitting outside the headmaster's study.

Of course.

And I looked across, Joe, and there were these same bloody plant holders that they were still making 30-odd years after I left. And I thought, oh, I don't feel so bad now. If that's the level of innovation that's going on in this school, And frankly, it hadn't really changed.

Yeah.

And so I just got to the point where, you know, when you have kids and when they go through the exact same experience that you did, as reluctant as I was to work in education, it was just this gravitational pull. I just kept thinking to myself, this is wrong, it needs fixing. And I can't really fix it for my 2 sons. They hated school just like I did. But I thought, you've got to try and do something. It's no good just complaining about the education system. Get in there and do what you can to change it. And that's been the story of the last 40 years, I guess.

And so, I mean, your career seems to be working almost on education rather than necessarily working in education. You do work in education, you're an educator and you teach and you lecture and you facilitate and do all that stuff, but you have this other level, don't you? I mean, most people work in education and, you know, I teach project management or, you know, business or whatever it is. You do that, I mean, you've taught music and you've taught other things and you still do, But you also, you have this systemic holistic view and kind of draw to move the dial, to change things. And that seems to be the difference between perhaps you and, if you like, a classic teacher who is sitting in the system but not changing the system or trying.

Well, yes, and for a long time I was that teacher, you know, and I didn't I didn't actually teach in high schools, but I taught pretty much everywhere else. So I started off in community education and I loved that. I did adult education, I loved that. And I ended up in further education, not through any great desire, but effectively what happened in Manchester, which is where I was working at the time, We had this amazing— it was unique when I think about it. I worked in this— I worked as a community musician, I was one of them. You know, I would just work with whoever came through the door and we'd make music. I'd get them to write their own music. I had my own studio. It was just fantastic. We had this theatre, there was a writer in residence, there was a director in residence. It was absolutely incredible. One of those life-changing experiences. And then Maggie Thatcher's poll tax meant that everywhere in the UK, councils were just hacked to pieces in terms of their budgets.

Yeah.

So effectively they said, we're going to have to close that down and you're going to be made redundant. And someone said to me, well, it was my line manager, um, said, there's a, there's a job going as a senior lecturer in a further education college. I think you should go for it. And I was so naive, Joe, I said to him, What's a lecture? Yes, you know, I really meant it. And he laughed and he said, don't worry, you'll pick it up. And, and I got it. And it was, it was remarkable. My, my musical hero is a guy called Stephen Sondheim, great musical theater.

Oh yeah, yeah.

And he, he wrote a song called I'm Still Here. And there's a line in it, which is, it's very clever wordplay. And he says, then you career from career to career. And, and that has been my story. None of it was planned. So how did I end up working systemically? It was because I got this job as a senior lecturer. So I started having to manage people. I'd never done that before. I found it fascinating. And then something else just happened to come along, which only I could have gotten this job because Paul McCartney, The—

Well, this is Liverpool, isn't it?

Yeah, yeah. So he was setting up a performing arts college in Liverpool in his old high school, the Mechanics Institute in Liverpool. First person to speak there was Charles Dickens. Amazing history. And he wanted someone who didn't have the classic academic background. And suddenly all those years of playing in working men's clubs and, you know, playing piano and down in County Clare, they all I thought, oh, it had a purpose. Because he said to me, you know, oh, I see you've actually been a musician. I said, yeah. And we hit it off and I got the job. So again, you know, I didn't plan for any of that to happen. And I was very happy there for a while. And then I just realized, you know, I'm not an institutional kind of guy. But by then, I was in a position of relative seniority. And I was effectively the dean of this college. I had 100 brilliant, creative academic people to manage. They were an absolute nightmare to manage. You know, I used to start meetings by saying, okay, let's just get one thing clear here. We're not curing cancer, okay? We're getting kids up on stage so they can show off. That's basically what we do. So let's not treat it as though our lives depend upon it. Total waste of time. Within 2 minutes, they will be vehemently arguing with one another. And I loved them. They were just so creative. But I also knew that, you know, we were in this little hermetically sealed bubble. As great as the performing arts are and were, and as important as they were to a city like Liverpool, what was even more important was that, you know, hundreds of thousands of young people were coming out without an education that was going to serve them well. And so I started thinking, yeah, like, I need to try and do something which is about innovation.

That's—

I didn't think of it as innovation at the time. But it just so happened that one of the main contracts that I got, and again, I just fell into it, was with the Paul Hamlin Foundation, who wanted to bring a sense of innovation to music education. That was a project called Musical Futures, and it did astonishingly well. It's still around the world. It, you know, without boasting, because I, I, I didn't— I, I was no longer associated with it. I handed it on to this brilliant woman called Abigail DeMory who built it into this global movement for, um, for informal music making in school. And it's, it's been, um, it was so successful that essentially the foundation then said to me Is this just about music? And I said, no, no, it's not about music. It's about how we learn. And they said, well, let's do another project. And so we did something called Learning Futures, which was about how to bring innovation in order to enhance student engagement. That was my big thing and always has been. Why are so many— when you do a kind of yardstick of students being engaged around the world, it's— you could pretty much predict that about 30% of students will consider themselves to be engaged in their learning.

Great.

I was not one of them. 30% are— they're neither engaged nor disengaged. They're just kind of getting along with it. Australians call them radiator kids. I said to them, what do you mean radiator kids? They said, well, you know, they're in the room, they keep it warm, but they're not doing anything else. It's a horrible way to describe 8 years of your life. And then the other third are those who are actively disengaged, and that was me. And there but for the grace of God, I could have ended up in all kinds of trouble. So I just felt that the key, it seemed to me, towards transforming the education system was and still is to get kids really engaged in their learning.

And my—

the lesson that I had— well, there was hundreds of lessons. One was it's relatively easy to be radical and innovative when you're dealing with a subject like music because largely it's seen as it's not core, kids are enjoying themselves, off you go, do what you like. Apply that to literacy and numeracy and whoa, that's very different. So once you start encouraging schools to be much more radical about core subjects, then you come up against the system. You come up against the, you know, the high-stakes accountability schools that say, you know, I'd love to do what you're talking about, but we can't because we've got Ofsted crawling all over us. We could get closed down. So I realized, you know, that you can't just— if you— because at that point I was working with a group of people called the Innovation Unit in London. They were formerly part of government but then became independent, and their thing was to change the education system. And so all I was doing for a while was working kind of strategically top-down, as it were.

Yes.

And, you know, it's a frustrating experience, put it that way. You can write your pamphlets, you can take people to great examples of learning and go, see, it's possible, you could do this. But at the end of the day, you're not in their shoes, you know, ultimately, you're going to write the report, and then you just hope that some of it sticks. And it's been wonderful to see, even in that difficult project, which is called Learning Futures, that some great things happened as a result of it, the ripples just kind of go out. But About 8 years ago, I thought, you know, this is going to drive me nuts. I'd rather just go into a single school and train them in something, which just happened to be project-based learning. But I've done training in lots of, you know, design thinking and lots of different ways of approaching education. And it's enormously satisfying to go in and spend a week in a school. And by the end of it, you know that that school has changed. But life's too short. If we change the education system one school at a time, we're all going to be dead. So my own way of kind of living with this is to work both ends at the same time. And it just so happens now that in the UK, the idea of radical innovation in education, it's just laughable. You know, because we've got such a conservative government. So I do it through books, you know, and I hope to influence leaders through books, that will bring change. But I also continue to go in, which is how I've come to meet you, and to work with educators on really practical, getting your hands dirty, learning by doing. And I find that enormously satisfying. And a lot less lonely than sitting in a room writing.

Well, indeed, because there is that, isn't there? I mean, it's one thing to write books and, you know, be influencing from the top down. It's quite another thing to be in a classroom with people who are either learners or educators who want to teach better. And I mean, that, as you said, that's where we met with the Innovation Academy at UCD. How did you get roped into that?

Um, I forget now. I think Susie Jarvis, yeah, who set the Academy up, she'd read Open and, um, she liked it and thought, yeah, we'll get this guy. Didn't really know. I mean, the, the thing I loved about the Innovation Academy was it challenged everything.

Um, oh, sorry, I'm just looking out the window. We have these red kites here. Have you— do you know the bird, the red kite?

Yeah, the hawks. Yeah.

Beautiful.

Aeronautical. This one, it hasn't flapped its wings for— I'm fascinated. It's gone like half a mile and it hasn't yet flapped its wings. Sorry. Um, so Susie said, um, yeah, come over and we'll do a fireside chat. And I thought, I, I am anally overprepared. I, I overprep everything. So this just felt really scary, and I just thought What are you going to talk about? Oh, we'll think of something.

Yeah.

And it was fantastic. I absolutely loved it. And I loved being confronted about that level of overprepping that I do. Now, as it's gone on, I think I've had some influence in helping some of those approaches become a little bit more codified. And that's been great. We've found a kind of meeting in the middle, which is, which has been terrific. But I love the program. I love the enthusiasm that these educators bring, um, because they're in the system, you know, they're having to do their day job. And, and especially over the past couple of years, that's been really hard for educators everywhere. And I just have to tone it down, you know, because it's, it's easy for me to say, you know, you're working in the system, the system's all wrong, you need to change this. They're just like, you know, Are we socially distancing the kids? Is it safe to— I mean, it's a nightmare. So, and of course, it's been the same for me. You know, I've gone from being in a room with people to this, you know, doing webinars. And okay, you know, I mean, everybody's adapted and it's been great. And, you know, I had to, like everybody else, effectively turn the office into a TV studio and do all that, but it's not the same. And there is a school, a private independent school down south near Brighton, and they wanted me to come in. I've done some work with them before around innovation, and they wanted me to come in a year ago. And then I said, well, I can't, can I?

And they said, no.

I said, well, we can do it on a webinar. No, we don't want that. We'll fix up another date in 6 months. And God love them, the date just keeps being pushed back. Yeah, but I'm supposed to be going in there at the end of August and I can't wait. I would crawl over broken glass to be in a room now with educators.

Yeah, it's crazy, isn't it? Yeah, I mean, in September last year, I got to see my students at Smurfit, the new master's intake, for one day. I did one session, one intake session with them, and they were all in this huge lecture theatre, 6 feet apart from each other, wearing masks and stuff like that. And we did a 2-hour session split with a kind of 20-minute break in the middle because we couldn't be in the same room for more than an hour. And that's the only time I've seen my students this whole year. And I'm going in tomorrow because the lockdown has just been released in Ireland so that we can at least now travel more than 5 kilometers. And I'm going in tomorrow to do headshots for them because, you know, I do photography as well. And I always do headshots for all my students. And I've been saying to them all year, like, You know, I've not even been able to see you. So we're gonna, we're gonna meet up on the front lawn of the college and do headshots.

Oh, brilliant.

But I'm so looking forward to it. Yeah, you know, but that'll probably be the longest car journey I've done in 6 months.

Wow.

And it's like 20 minutes to college, you know. It's been, it's been around the corner to Lidl and back has been, has been the limit of it recently, hasn't it? So it's, it's just Yeah, the distance, the separation has been very difficult, hasn't it?

Well, and the disruption, you know, and it's— me and my wife do the project-based learning training together. And, you know, the rhythm of our year has always been the first 3 months we're in Australia. And we've always built up a network of schools that we work with, and they're fantastic, you know, and you effectively send out an email and say, we're coming over, shall we work with you? And we've got like 8 to 12 weeks of work and we love it. And of course, that's not happened now for 2 years. And it's kind of, you know, the whole rhythm of your year has been disrupted. And so what? You know, I never got sick. I'm now fully vaccinated. So I count myself lucky.

Yeah.

You know, people are far worse off than I am. And, you know, at my age, I'm kind of at the tail end of the career. I look at young people now who are, you know, disproportionately suffering as a result of the kind of economic fallout of the coronavirus, and it's going to be really hard for them. Which, you know, brings us back to they've got to have skills that are—

Yes.

That have currency. And right now, our education systems are still not providing them with those skills. And teachers know it, principals and headteachers know it, but they just— their hands are tied. I sometimes think that there's a bit of Stockholm syndrome at work. They feel like they can't do things when they actually have a lot more power and autonomy than they think they have. But, you know, if you spend 25 years being, you know, hit around the head, when it stops, you're going to kind of go, is it okay?

Can I move?

And I feel like that's where schools are at now. And the pandemic's been really interesting, I think, because I see not just in this country, I've seen this now in several countries around the world, that it's kind of emboldened school leaders a bit more. That they say, no, we're not going to you know, drill and kill our kids to catch up on lost learning. You know, the language of it.

Yeah.

I just find reprehensible that we talk about lost learning. And a lot of them are just saying, we're gonna look after these kids first, we're gonna make sure that they're okay, because they've had a hell of a time, and I don't care what you're saying, I'm not gonna put them through tests when they all come back, you know. So I do think that it has emboldened them, Whether we get the change, you know, at the start of the pandemic, I took part in so many webinars around, you know, let's not go back to normal when this is all over. And as time's gone on, I kind of fear that we probably will, you know, and some of that's exhaustion. Some of that's just a desire to have the old life back. And it frustrates me, you know, I'll be honest, because I just think this is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity for real change, and there will be changes, obviously. We'll have to rethink how we design schools. I think the idea of blended learning, you know, the argument's won now. We've seen that it works, you know, it's not great, but blending is okay. So I think we'll see more commonplace use of technology, but, you know, the real opportunity is for a root-and-branch review of what's the purpose of education here, what is it that we're trying to do, and I feel like that moment is in danger of being missed.

Yeah, I mean, I play a video that's back from the early '20s by a guy, Paul Welsh, I think his name is, an American educator, and he said we need to move students from being, you know, knowledgeable to being knowledge-able. And, you know, and that's the case really, isn't it? They don't need to learn kind of the times tables now. They need to know where the times tables are to be found and how to kind of connect. They do need to learn times tables, but the bits of knowledge are less important as how you connect them and how you access them. And the problem-based learning, scenario-based learning, experiential learning, stuff. I mean, my students tell me at the end of the Master's in Project Management program— I mean, one thing we put them through is this charity assignment, and we say, right, teams of 4 or 5, find a charity, engage with it for the next 12 weeks, do some kind of either fundraisers or awareness raisers or whatever, document your process, and, you know, treat it as a real project. So they get all the project management learnings and stuff, but they're also dealing with the messy stuff, you know, of because it's a charity, you know, things take longer and people aren't as focused and things go wrong. But they also get connected and they start to care. And by the end of that 12-14 weeks, that is the one. And when I talk to students 5-10 years after the programme and I say, what do you remember about the programme? Oh, do you remember that charity project? That was brilliant. Yeah, and it's the practice, isn't it? It's the practice-based learning.

Yeah, and in The Power of Us, you know, even though the book is ostensibly not specifically about education, there is a chapter in there which I looked at how these principles of kind of user innovation play out in the field of education. And so I visited some schools that I'm already very familiar with, but I also visited some new schools, and one of them was the Laiga Leadership Academy in Cambodia, in Phnom Penh. And it is, it's probably the most remarkable school I've ever seen, and I was lucky enough to spend a week there. And, you know, the school— Jeff Holt, one of the 2 founders of the school, talks about how we tend to use the word scaffold in terms of learning. We talk about how we need to scaffold learning, you know, you learn this bit of knowledge and then you can build on top of that. He believes that what they're about is about scaffolding experiences. So when you first start off at that school, it's a kind of senior high school, you may have come from the most remote village in Cambodia where you couldn't speak a word of English. Until the day you walk through the door, and yet within 6 months, because all of the tuition is in English, you're absolutely fluent in English. But more than that, within 6 months you've gone out and you've interviewed somebody about their personal history. It might have been about the Killing Fields and the Khmer Rouge. Within a year you've put that knowledge into writing Cambodia's first economics textbook, which is now in every school in Cambodia. You've done that as a student. Within 2 years, you've then— and I saw when I was there, I saw these kids getting a check from a local early years center who invited these 15 and 16-year-olds to come in and redesign the curriculum for this early years center based on their experience in Liger. And there they were, curriculum designers, and working just like your students were. on a real-life project with all the tensions that go with that and doing an amazing job and getting paid for it. You know, and this is a school that says to its students every year, at the end of each year, you have to write an essay saying, how have I changed Cambodia this year? Because they are. They're not waiting until they're out of school before they change Cambodia. They're working on government-led projects. They're doing marine conservation projects. They're launching Cambodia's first ever bloody satellite. You know, it's just astonishing. And this kind of tyranny of low expectations that we have with kids. You know, sometimes when I tell people about these schools, they kind of go, oh, well, yeah, you know, they are handpicked schools. We could never do that. Our kids couldn't do that. It's nonsense. The more responsibility, the more challenge you give kids, the higher they rise to that challenge. We just don't do it enough.

That's, I mean, that's amazing, isn't it? But I mean, I think that's the thing, isn't it? It's almost resetting educators' expectations about what they can ask of those that they are teaching. And I mean, it doesn't just have to be a boring curriculum, you know, this slide deck and these slides and these bullet points and stuff, does it?

No, because I think, Joe, the thing that has changed—

the reason why I wrote Open was because I saw what my kids were doing. They were kind of adolescents at the time, and it was like a whole other world.

Yeah.

I had no idea. Like, when my eldest son was about 15, I couldn't get him out of bed in the morning. Well, you know, big surprise, all 15-year-olds are like that. But eventually, he told me why he was so narcoleptic in the mornings. And it was because he was taking part in internet radio station panel discussions around libertarian politics. He was fascinated by libertarian politics. Wow. Yeah. And because they were based in America, they were happening at 2 or 3 in the morning over here. And I said to him, well, that's great, but couldn't you just record it and listen to it in the morning? He said, no, you don't understand. I'm not listening to it. I'm a panelist.

Yeah.

And I just thought, wow, what? I had no idea. And I said, does your school know about this? And he laughed and said, of course not. And I don't want them to know. And that's what has changed. And that's why I think the rate of change in education is now in danger of falling so far behind what our young people are doing so that You know, when I write this next book, it's about going to see these amazing young people who now, for some reason, you know, word seems to have gotten around that I'm the guy who champions these young changemakers. And so a lot of the time, I don't even have to look for them. They kind of get sent to me.

Yeah.

And one such happened shortly after The Power of Us was was published, and I forget who told me about it, but somebody said, oh, you need to talk to Sofia Leal. And I said, who's she? What's she done? And they sent me this video. And Sofia is— she's now 16, so she's come at the end of high school. She's probably going to go to university. Incredibly bright, you know, Colombian but absolutely fluent in English. And her school project was to design something that would be of use to people in an emergency. And she's come up with this amazing design. It's a carbon fiber igloo. She calls it Nigloo. It's new igloo.

Right.

And it kind of opens up as a fan-shaped thing. So if the weather's okay, you can peel the roof back and you can house a family. And it's extremely lightweight. It's extremely portable. It's cheap to manufacture, and it's perfect, of course, for earthquakes or, you know, natural disasters. And she's taken it to the UN, and this week she'd entered it in a university innovation competition for the whole of Colombia, and she won. She's 15 years old, and she's now set up a foundation. She's doing the whole Kickstarter thing now to get people's donations so that you can get it, you know, off the prototype and into production.

Will you send me a link to it? I'll put a link in the show notes as well because that would be brilliant.

But my point, Joe, is that, you know, there was a time when I would meet these kids and just think, wow, they're amazing, but they're what Nelson Gonzalez used to call the beautiful exceptions. But that's not the case any longer. You know, because these young people are now globally connected in ways that, you know, my generation just can't comprehend.

Yeah.

They are entering into kind of socially purposeful projects, you know, at a distance, and they're just getting on with it, and they're doing it largely outside of their school. Sophia happened to go to a school that believed in project-based learning and, you know, in putting students into the real world. But a lot of the time, they're doing it outside of that. Now, the threat, I think, to educators is that's going on at speed now. And that networking isn't going to slow down. You know, kids like Ryan and Abby, who, you know, Abby got Webby Person of the Year for his COVID tracking app. And Anthony Fauci presented him with it, you know, because Anthony Fauci says it's the most authoritative COVID tracking website in the world. He got Webby Person of the Year, which is like the Oscars for web designers. And he said to me, I've got a grade point average of 1.7. No university will have me. And I said to him, Avi, You don't want to go to any university that's going to look at your 1.7 and rate it higher than the fact that you've changed America. So that, to me, is the dilemma that we've got now as educators. They're just going to go ahead and do this, these young entrepreneurs. They're not doing it for money. Avi turned down $8 million for his website. He said no, because you'll put advertising on it. You'll do all sorts. That's not what it's for. Same thing with Ryan in Korea. He got offered a fortune for it. They're not driven by money. They want to make the world a better place, and my God, we should be helping them do that. And we can either do it in our schools or they can do it in spite of us.

So if there was a secondary school teacher listening to this podcast and thinking, oh, that's all very well, but I can't do this, what can they— how can they make that first step? Give them something to move them forward.

So they don't have to be the big, huge, you know, launching a satellite in Cambodia or creating, you know, emergency housing in Colombia. I always show teachers a great video. You've probably seen it. It's the equivalent of a kind of viral education video. And it's a guy called Ron Berger, and it's called Lawson's Butterfly. And it's the story of how a kid, by doing multiple drafts, which of course we never do in schools, it tends to be the first draft gets marked, it gets thrown in the bin, and then you move on to the next thing. Well, this kid does 6 drafts of this scientific drawing of a butterfly, and it's an amazing thing to see, to see kids offering critique, which is, you know, standard art school practice, but not in kindergarten. And, you know, these kids are being really kind and generous about offering the critique, but they're making this drawing better and better. By the 6th draft, it is phenomenal. But the point that is missing from that video is that Austin— this was a 3-week project in a school.

Wow.

And Austin's drawing was on the back of a postcard, a series of postcards that that school did for the local conservation center. around endangered species. Now, every school has those kinds of places in the community. So instead of, you know, doing the science project or doing the science learning, why not reach out to your local council, ask them what kind of issues they're dealing with, and can you be involved?

Yeah, you know, every school has green initiatives and sustainability initiatives and Green Flag and all this kind of stuff these days, don't they? So it's just tying that into something real.

And this school that I work with in Sydney, I've worked with them now for 9 years, and we started off and they did initially Project Bissellon was the first thing that they did. Now they've developed all kinds of wonderful community initiatives. They've got adults learning alongside kids. They're just doing some amazing things. But last year they did a project which was fantastic, and it was about an endangered species. It was about this dragonfly. Which is only found in this area of Sydney, and it's a fairly run-down area of Sydney, probably the only deprived area in the area, and it's full of migrant families. It's a very rich, ethnically diverse place. Anyway, they decided that they wanted to do something, and they reached out to their local council, who it just so happened had somebody And that was his thing. His thing was looking after this dragonfly. And they rang him up and they said, we want to do a project around this dragonfly and raising people's awareness of it. Would you come in and talk? He said, yes, absolutely. Couldn't wait to get out of the office. These people, if you ask them, they'll come.

They'll come.

But what do we do? We tend to get the token visit from the local bobby or the guard. And they come and it's— It's not built into any kind of initiative or project, and that's the extent of the kind of adult-world connections. Seymour Sarason, great American educator and writer, he once said, the best way to prepare our kids for the world beyond school is to put them in the world beyond school as soon as possible and as often as possible. And it's easy to do. And so, you know, that's what I'd be saying to teachers is to think about how you can genuinely answer the question that every kid asks. And by the way, I think has every justification in asking, which is, so what?

Yeah.

You know, so you've taught me this piece of knowledge. So what am I going to do with it? And I think we have to be able to answer the question and we have to be able to answer it well, not just because it's on the test in 6 weeks' time. That's not good enough. And so I think that's— it's by thinking like that, how can we tap into— because I don't know about you, Joe, but I look at young people now and I just, I'm in awe of their moral and ethical compass.

Oh yeah.

You know, the BBC is running this documentary currently about Greta Thunberg, and it breaks my heart looking at it because I see her and, you know, she's had this year out of school where she's been going around, you know, banging her head against a brick wall trying to get these people, being humiliated on social media, you know, being absolutely ridiculed by Putin and Trump and all these world leaders. And at the end of the day, she's a 17-year-old kid. You know, and as she says, she shouldn't have to do this, but I look at those kids and I just think, you know, when her Friday strike went global and it became the second biggest public protest— by the way, sorry, no, it became the biggest public protest. The second biggest was the March for Our Lives kids in Florida. So the 2 largest public demonstrations the world has ever seen were organized by school kids. Don't tell me that they're happy filling in worksheets when they can do that. But the fact that they did it, and we had, we had school leaders and politicians in this country saying, your future is more important, you can't take a Friday off to go out in the streets and protest. And the kids were saying, my future means jack shit, because if we don't do something about the environment, there isn't going to be a future.

Yeah.

And they couldn't see that. You know, they were trotting out the same ridiculous line like, whose education is going to get ruined because you took a couple of Fridays off? Nobody. That's not— I know people who take their kids around the world for 6 months and the kids learn far more than they would have done in school. So it's not so great what you're offering on a Friday that these kids can afford to pass it up. So why not tap into that? They come with all of that burning intensity within them. So why not tap into the power of that and redesign your curriculum so that they feel they are doing something that's socially purposeful?

Yeah.

Oh my goodness.

Sorry, I feel like we could— I've been off on a rant. Yeah, that's great.

I love it when you go off on a rant. It's fantastic. I feel like we could go on all day, but I know I can't keep you all day because you want to get back to your writing and you've got to do your stuff. That's fabulous, and I think that's a really good plus one to kind of give people that, you know, connect with your local community and connect with something real outside the school or outside the college. And I mean, that's what I try and do in my kind of programs as well, and it works every single time. It's always challenging as a teacher because you kind of— you're outside your comfort zone a little bit, aren't you? Because you're putting them out there into that messy real world and things could go wrong and things you know, aren't kind of like in a box, but they're not in a box.

No, of course not. And when you said at the start of this that you wanted me to think about the plus one, that actually wasn't going to be mine, although I think you are— it's a good enough one. But I would also urge people, the plus one that I immediately thought of when you said it is the motto of what I think are some of the best schools currently in the UK, and they're called XP Trust. I feature them in the book. And their school motto is this: above all, compassion.

And I just think right now that is so important. So yes, get out in the world, change it. There's a lot of it needs changing. But let's do it with compassion. And I just think right now that's the single biggest thing that schools need— compassion for the students, compassion for the parents and compassion for the community.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's got to be okay not to be okay, and particularly at the moment.

Absolutely.

Yeah, yeah. There's a lot of hurt out there after this last year or two, isn't there?

Sure is.

Yeah.

Isn't that a great place to stop? Thank you so much for your time today.

Um, you're welcome.

I'll put your website and books and things up on the show notes and stuff. Is, is there any last kind of call to action you'd like to share with everybody?

Oh, I think I've— it's been one long call to action.

It kind of has, hasn't it? Yeah, so that's fantastic. No, I mean, that's been really valuable, I think, David. So thank you so much for giving us the time today.

Lovely. I'll send you some of the links to the things I've talked about, Joe.

Brilliant. Great to talk. Thanks a lot.

Have a good day.

Bye.

Take care now.