Accomplishment and Educational Change - A Conversation with Sir Michael Barber

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

If you thought this thing was important, surely you want to actually get it done. And that applies whether you're an individual teacher or you're running the school system in Punjab, Pakistan. In the delivery chain between a child and a Secretary of State, there's a whole lot of links in the chain, and at each level in the chain, you want pressure to make the change and support to enable the change to be made.

Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. This week's conversation is with Sir Michael Barber, who is a world-leading expert on government delivery, education systems, systemic innovation, and education reform. Sir Michael led the Prime Minister's Delivery Unit for the Blair administration in the UK from 2001 to 2005. Since then, he's worked on delivery systems and systems-wide reform in more than 50 countries. He personally leads high-stakes engagements with political leaders such as quarterly cabinet retreats in Canada with PM Justin Trudeau. Sir Michael held the first Chair of the Office for Students in the UK from 2017 to 2021. And prior to that, as Chief Education Advisor of Pearson, Michael led a worldwide program delivering Pearson's strategy for education in the poorest sectors of the world. Michael was a partner at McKinsey Company and head of McKinsey's global education practice. And he's a distinguished visiting fellow at the Harvard Graduate School of Education and holds an honorary doctorate from the at the University of Exeter. Before joining government, he was a professor at the Institute of Education at the University of London. Sir Michael has written extensively on education, government delivery, and innovation. His most recent publication, How 17 Secretaries of State for Education Through 30 Years of Constant Change Enabled the System to Improve, was published this month and is a synthesis of the reflections of the UK education ministers since 1986. Sir Michael's book Accomplishment: How to Achieve Ambitious and Challenging Things was also published earlier this year and sets out the ingredients for success based on the stories of many inspirational people and Michael's own experiences of delivering success for governments and education systems around the world. Other books he has authored are Deliverology 101: A Field Guide for Educational Leaders, How to Run a Government So That Citizens Benefit and Taxpayers Don't Go Crazy, and many others.

Morning.

Good morning.

How are you?

I'm fine, thank you.

Brilliant. Well, thank you so much for joining me. It's an absolute pleasure to be able to talk to you. So, Michael, so thank you. I've been reading your book Accomplishment with great relish. It's been a really inspiring read. So it's, um, How to Achieve Ambitious and Challenging Things, the subtitle. So obviously that relates very definitely to the work we do as educators, and I know you've also got a strong background in education as well, working with Tony Blair and countries and districts and and systems around the world on improving education. So I would love to get your take on perhaps firstly, how do you feel that the idea of helping people to achieve ambitious and challenging things relates to education? I mean, there's a very inspiring message of individual incredible accomplishment, exceptional individuals in the book, but how would you feel that that applies more generally to education?

Uh, it was a great question, Tim. Thank you very much. And that there 2 aspects to my initial answer, and then obviously we could— we can take it wherever it goes. But the first is, as young people, children and young people, go through the school system and then on into further and higher education, whatever the curriculum is, the sense that people can take on and achieve difficult, ambitious things— you want to try to unlock that belief in everybody. It's about confidence, about self-efficacy, all the, you know, all the words in the education jargon. But if you can instill that sense of actually, I can do this in people while they're young, it makes an enormous difference to their options when they join the workforce, their options when they're building a family and a social life and their leisure time. So I do think that it's a, it's not something you would have a specific curriculum on, but it is something that you would want to try and unlock in people, that sense of the possibility of accomplishment. And one of the things educators sometimes do is in order to encourage people to accomplish things, they suggest it's, it's real, it's easy. I remember I had a physics textbook called Physics Is Easy. Physics isn't easy.

Physics definitely isn't easy.

So a real accomplishment is about believing you can do ambitious and challenging things, like the subtitle of my book.

Yeah.

And recognizing that difficult things are difficult, but but there's ways of overcoming the barriers to achieving. That's the first part of the answer. And the second part of the answer is, in order to do anything really ambitious and challenging, you have to learn as you go. If you knew everything you needed to know at the beginning, it wouldn't be ambitious and challenging. Yeah. So what makes it ambitious and challenging is you don't know how to do it when you start, or don't know everything you need to know. So you've got to learn as you go. So you've got to build learning into your process.

Yeah.

That's very, very important. It's important for the government side of life, it's important for sports teams, It's important for individuals, whatever they're taking on.

Yeah.

But, but interesting because learning is, as educators, learning is our domain, right? Well, I'd like to think it was. Yes. And, and that's, that's a really inspiring message to remember that. Yeah. Without that learning being built into the kind of DNA of the system of how you are achieving accomplishment, it's actually very difficult, if not impossible to, to get there. Or maybe your, your goals are just not big enough. Right. But what's your take then on, cuz you've used the word ingredients quite frequently in the book. But it's not a recipe for accomplishment. How would you describe it? I suppose what you're setting out to do with the book, because perhaps it's not laying out, this is exactly the steps you need to take, because as you say, you've got to learn as you go.

Yes. So it doesn't, it doesn't set out the steps to any specific accomplishment, although I tell the stories in the book of some people who have accomplished great things, but it says there's a pattern to accomplishment, which we can all learn. And the pattern involves setting ambitious goals. So people can choose what goals they set, but being willing to set goals beyond what the evidence might suggest and going further is an important thing. Understanding the challenge— what Dave Brailsford, who used to run Team Sky and now runs Team INEOS, calls understanding the demands of the event in detail. So if you've set that goal, what intelligence do you need? What insight, learning do you need to do before you even start to try and understand the scale of the challenge? And then having a plan, obviously enough, but not some Beautiful essay that gets put on the shelf, but a real plan of the steps you're going to take, who's going to take them, when you're going to take them, that kind of thing. And then crucially, and this is very important for big organizations and especially governments, building routines in the way to you review progress. Because most governments, but it's true of lots of organizations beyond government, is they're just driven by the latest events and crises. Unless you've got routines that keep you focused on the big goal, who is traffic, and getting the routines and in the meeting or in the routine review, having an honest conversation about what is and isn't working. This is the single most important thing I did for Tony Blair and I've done for governments around the world, is creating those routines and an honest conversation.

Yeah, interesting. I mean, when you say it like that, it sounds very simple, but clearly it's highly complex. And I would love to ask you a bit about the delivery and the implementation part, um, a bit later. But just one other thing about education, is it— because you've got some incredibly inspiring, as I said, stories about individual success— is there a an issue perhaps within education? It's a loaded question, but is there an issue within education about the way that we define success? Because I wonder whether there isn't the space for people to, as much as they perhaps could, pick their own challenging goals that really connect with them, that are authentic to them. Actually, where there's a lot of setting goals for children and then putting them through, through the process.

I mean, it's perfectly reasonable for an education system to say to the parents and the children and the people of a given country or state or city or jurisdiction to say, there are some things we think all children need to learn to be prepared for the 21st century. And we're going to do everything we can to ensure they really learn that stuff, whether it's maths or reading and writing or something about the state of the world, about relationships, about how you get on with people from different backgrounds in modern cities, for example. So it's perfectly reasonable to do that. But I do think you want to say to children, young people. Above and beyond that, what would you like to do? What are the things you aspire to? It drives me crazy when I— like the famous British cyclist Bradley Wiggins, right? So he, he was at school in North London somewhere. They didn't even know he was into cycling until at the age of 16 and became the world cycling championship. From the 16th, the school didn't know. They didn't help him. And so the only way he could do that was by bunking off. So he just didn't go to school, ride his bike. Now, he, he had a real drive to do that, of course. Mother and so on. But you want to unlock those ambitions in young people. That might not be cycling, it might be dancing, it might be reading, it might be writing, it might be being in theater, whatever it might be. And what I've been saying recently in the Times newspaper, running an education commission, I've said to them that we need to look at the school year and say, look, currently there are 190 days in the school year. Why not make it 195 days and reduce the actual time in school to 185? Now you've got 10 days where children can learn out of school. They can go and climb a mountain in a group and learn how to do that, or they can go into music, or they can learn French, or they can— but you've got 10 funded days. I think we do need to unlock that sense of individual aspiration. Yeah, the aspiration might be doing something with others.

Yeah, you know, it's like you can only have individual aspiration within these particular quite fixed boundaries or 45-minute periods or whatever in the current system. Yeah, interesting. That's an interesting idea. It related to that, then maybe then I could ask you, because I'm extremely interested in this kind of tension between, you know, the more traditional view of education and the, you know, and then more progressive influences and the debate between those. And I'd like to ask you specifically about that. But one of the things you say in your section on managing relationships in the book is about 'Never underestimate the power of competition, and it drives progress in every imaginable field, and that there is a strain of— a whole strain of progressive thinking that is in denial about this truth.' I think that's such a fascinating sentence because I think you're absolutely right. It's kind of a dirty word to some people, right, competition, and— but then to others, as you're saying, it's kind of— it's the fuel that drives— I mean, look at Dave Brailsford and Bradley and Chris Froome and all of the— you know, I'm as into cycling as you, I think, and it's just— it's clearly that is such a drive for them, is that, that competition element. So where do you think that fits in with this broader view of education and, yeah, unlocking people's passions and ambitions, but then competing? And, and, you know, who wins if we're all competing against each other?

Yeah, I mean, the debate I find in, in education circles generally about competition is pretty shallow that sort of competition is bad and collaboration is good.

Yeah.

Um, but if you look at human accomplishments, I do in the book, you can see both those elements playing a crucial part. So it's not one or the other, it's both. Um, and that, that's important. And secondly, nobody should advocate unbridled competition where you trample your opponent, where you don't follow the rules, where there's no regulation. So, and that's true in, in market economies as well as individual sports or arenas, you know. But the idea of competing drives people to higher standards. And I use the example of, 'cause I wanted to take it out of the market economy, of William Pitt and Charles James Fox. And their parents, they both were very, very obviously talented people coming from families that were well-connected, likely to go on in the world. And right from the beginning, their parents saw them as likely to be in competition with each other, which they then were for a whole career. And you can see how both of them reached heights of oratory that neither would have achieved without the competition.

Yeah.

So competition is an element that— so I think the question that educators need to ask is not reject competition out of hand, but think, how can it be harnessed? How can it be used? What are the rules around competition? You know, like if you're playing school sport, you want your team to win, but at the end of it, if you've lost, you want to act with grace and generosity of spirit. If you've won, Similarly, see, so what are the rules around the competition that make it a positive force for good? Yeah, the dangers of untrammeled competition, which clearly can be destructive. Yeah, but we just need a bit more refined debate in education than we have.

There's a statement. I think in general that's absolutely true.

Yeah, no, more than just about competition, but actually, just to give that, you know, the competition between schools to improve, you can see the benefit of that. Um, Introduction of academies into Hackney transformed the place. And I used to mock people gently, I hope, because the unions were always saying, no, it's all about collaboration. And I was saying the only real unbridled competition in education is the competition among unions for members.

Interesting.

And actually, I worked for the NEETs, you know, for a while. So even they can see that competition is good if they look at their own practice.

Yeah, no, I mean, it clearly pushes people to, as you say, in a positive way, to look at what they're doing, reflect more deeply on what they're doing. You know, by examining the successes of somebody else, how are they getting to that? It's like Roger Federer and Novak Djokovic, and you know, that's how, you know, it pushes them both to achieve incredible heights, which perhaps they wouldn't have done alone.

Yes, exactly. And it raises— those two are a very good example, actually. It raises the challenge of what is the broader ethical underpinning of the way you behave as a human being, even in that kind of intense competition. I must say, The tennis players of the recent— are remarkably generous towards each other.

Absolutely.

The matches and in what they say about them, which I think is a very good example. Better than you see in football, say.

Yeah, no, interesting. So then if I could then move on slightly to this idea, like connected, but this idea of individual kind of myopic focus and ruthless prioritization that you talk about being important for individual success and accomplishment in the book, which you know, you can see that that's clearly necessary for these heights of ambition that these people achieve. And you, you know, you see it with Dave Brailsford and the example of him just ignoring the fact that he had prostate cancer and just carrying on and winning the Tour de France and dealing with that later. I mean, it's just phenomenal levels of, of prioritization, focus, etc. And I just wonder, because in the end of the book you then start talking about the challenges of the 21st century, and clearly the climate emergency is one, if not the one. Where do you see that idea of, you know, my thought was perhaps this sometimes this myopic focus and ruthless prioritization of individual goals has actually led us to some of the problems that we're now facing as a planet. So does that idea of tackling climate change, does it have a similar pattern of accomplishment if we, if when hopefully we are to accomplish that? I just wondered because you again you give the example of the, you know, the space race, the US-Soviet space race. And clearly, again, it's that idea that competing against each other to achieve this unimaginable goal, but we can't compete against each other to solve the climate emergency. We have to collaborate, like, pretty fundamentally in a way that we perhaps don't want to at this point, looking at COP26. And so what do you think about that part?

Well, I mean, I think you've expressed it very well because it is complex and not immediately obvious what the right answer is. But I think there are certain moments in a big endeavor that I mean, Climate change is as big as it gets, as you were saying, where somebody within the overall spectrum of hearing that does need to be myopically focused on it, but it doesn't mean everybody needs to be myopically focused. So if I take my own experience with Tony Blair, he's dealing with September 11th, 2001. He's dealing with a war in Afghanistan. He's dealing with a war in Iraq. He's dealing with all the various comings and goings in the EU during all that time, as well as the sort of standard crises in the media and ministers getting in trouble and all the rest of it. Oh, Prime Ministers have to do that. But he knew that I could not be distracted from focusing on his 20 most important domestic policy priorities. So my job was my epic focus. I am actually capable, I was capable, sitting in the Monday morning meeting in Number 10 of understanding that there's all these other things going on.

Yeah.

But don't distract me.

Back to that.

Yeah. So in climate change, we need globally within each major sector of the economy and within each country, some part of that system that is my myopically focused on getting to net zero as fast as we possibly can. And that's a really urgent thing. It doesn't mean everybody has to be myopically focused all the time, but I'm not suggesting this is easy to do. But what I find frustrating with the climate change debate, and I'm hoping will change after the COP26 in Glasgow, is that you get these big events like Paris in 2015 or the big Nick Stern report in 2007 or whenever it was, and everybody writes about it for a while and thinks it's all interesting, and then, and then they go back to doing what they were doing before. I'm slightly exaggerating. We've got to change the trajectory now where this is a constant focus for every government. And every government now has a net zero target, or nearly every government. And there is now $100 billion per annum available for— from the rich countries to the developing countries. So we've got to make sure that people are focused on those goals and that money is spent wisely to help countries achieve those goals. And in Britain, we've got to make sure, you know, we hold governments' feet to the fire, that they get on and do what they've committed to doing.

Yeah. And I mean, almost need a delivery unit globally to be myopically focused on delivery.

Yes, absolutely. It is. I mean, whether it's delivery unit, but the idea that at the center of this global system that put together the COP26 in Glasgow, but also the previous COPs and the ones to come, the center of that system, somebody is focusing on delivery. Is really, really important.

Absolutely.

Because it's the biggest delivery challenge humanity's ever faced.

Exactly. And as you say, maybe some of these— I don't know whether the COP events are sufficiently frequent routine of checking progress that we need. I mean, that seems to be what happens. We come back to this.

Yeah.

How are we? How did we get on since 2015? But actually, we need something more routinized, more regular to actually keep us focused.

That's absolutely right, Tim. And you may remember at the end of the COP in Glasgow, Alex Sharma, who was hosting it, he said we're going to meet again towards the end of next year precisely for that reason, to speed up the routine. And that coincides exactly with what I've been writing about, how governments deal with crisis. The more something gets towards a crisis, the more you have to speed up your routines. So if you've got a real day-to-day crisis, you're meeting morning and evening every day, and then, but then for routine things, you might do it every couple of weeks or every couple of months. And what the next task. So speeding up the routine is one way of encouraging. Exactly what you're talking about.

Interesting.

And his, his emotion in that moment seemed to be that kind of his sense of responsibility, like the world was on his shoulders at that moment to kind of be the one guiding that process. I mean, incredible responsibility, actually.

Incredible responsibility. And he's, having met him a few times while I was doing the work I did for Boris Johnson earlier this year, I can say he's a man of deep commitment and integrity, and he really wants to enable the world to make progress on this in short order. So he's actually very— he's quite low-key in an impressive way, quite humble, but very determined and deep integrity.

Well, that's good. Um, it leads nicely on then to a question about leadership, I suppose, because there's, there's leadership qualities there that we need more of perhaps, but also in, in some of your talk about leadership, I've heard you talk about the populisms on the right and the left that are deeply unhelpful. So these are like the leadership mistakes as you've set them out, the populism on the right and the left, and then this techno-exuberance, which you've, you know, this idea that technology is just going to come along and solve all our problems for us and we don't need to change our behavior. It's just actually, it's just going to silver bullet of technology. And that struck me as a really useful description actually of what goes on in education as well, because you've got not right and left as such, but you've, you still do have quite this, this debate between the, let's say, traditional and progressive kind of wings of education, and hopefully less so, but it's still, still quite strongly there, particularly in the UK. And then these other people saying, well, it's all going to be solved by technology, technology is going to replace the teacher, etc., which is, you know, of course is incorrect. But I thought that was a really interesting way of framing it from a leadership perspective. And in your conversation with Peter Hyman about School 21, I thought really cut through that. Um, sorry, this is a rambling question, but I'll get there in a minute, I promise. That's good because it connects quite a lot of your work actually, because then if you go back to Oceans of Innovation in 2012, you talked about avoiding these false dichotomies within education, particularly related to innovation. So not best practice or innovation, it should be both, or technology or teaching, it should be both. And I just wonder, so I suppose there's two parts to the question: what, what role for leadership in that, but also how, how more generally can we get away from a more polarized discussion and actually focus on the nuances of educational change and the things that we really need to address in order to improve outcomes, improve equity, improve social mobility, etc., all the things that we know we need to make progress on.

Yeah, I mean, these are very complex, challenging observations that you're making, and they, they, they're important. And to, to say something really obvious but often missing, so I'll say anyway, is one of the things that's missing, not just in education, but it is true in education, is people don't listen deeply enough to what I'm saying. And they're, they're very quick to condemn an opposing point of view and that limits the room for debate very, very often. And it's probably the most quoted thing I've ever said in education is the road to hell in education is paved with false dichotomies. And the, you know, that, that you see that all the time. Somebody says something contrary to your view and you just condemn it.

Absolutely.

And I think we, you, you would hope and believe that educators could be better than that, even if the rest of the world can't be. So I do think that's something very important. And it, and if you want to role model things for the next generation, that seems pretty important as well. So I do think, I think the ability to listen, hear, and understand before condemning is really important. Yeah. And that would, that would help a lot. Very often the dichotomies we debate are false dichotomies and we need to get beyond them. You listed a few just now and they're all essentially false dichotomies. It's not to say there aren't any tensions there. Of course there are, but there's ways through where you, you hold onto both sides of the dichotomy. So I think that is really important as well. But the, We do need to try and get to a world where it's easier and better and deeper to understand other people's points of view before condemning. I spent time going to Russia in the first decade of this century. I went 20 or 30 times. And my Russian friends taught me little bits of Russian. And they said, really, with government, there's only two phrases you need. One is, who's to blame? And the other is, what's to be done? So it's "Кто винуwat?" and "Што делЯ?" And if you ask who's to blame straight away, which is get straight into condemnation, it's very hard to have a productive discussion. And therefore, that in itself gets in the way of learning.

Yeah.

Because you can't have an open conversation. Whereas if you ask what's to be done first, so we've got a problem, what are we gonna do about it, you can have a conversation about that. And then you— there may be people to blame, but you can come to that later.

Yeah, no, interesting. And because you also talk about stewardship being an important part of leadership, but also, you know, in the book about bringing people with you as part of accomplishment as well. What's, what's the role there of that leadership part, or just or if you're not overtly in a leadership position, but you are trying to achieve an ambitious goal, clearly you've got to have people around you that are supportive of that. And that's a skill in itself to create that community.

Yes. And you can start, if you're going to do something ambitious, accomplish something fantastic, you can start with quite a small group. Probably not just one, but it might be a handful. But then you need to build ever-widening circles of leadership. This is a great— that I've had with Michael Fullan, the well-known Canadian educator. So that you can start with a small, what I call, guiding coalition, using a phrase from John Kotter at Harvard, and then build the guiding coalition out. In Accomplishment, I tell the story of Shahbaz Sharif, who was Chief Minister of Punjab, who starts off wanting to reform the education system. Basically, it's only him and me that think this is possible. But by the end, there's hundreds of people, and they're doing it out there, and you can see it. And he systematically, as a leader, has encouraged, cajoled, challenged for that 10-year period. That is definitely one aspect of it. The other aspect of it is what I describe in the book as the implementation dip. If you start on doing something really difficult, there'll be a lot of excitement at the beginning, and then it gets really quite hard.

Yeah.

You start learning a language, you get the first few words and then think, oh God, I've got to do the grammar, past tense. So any, almost anything, when you just get into it, you suddenly realize the degree of challenge. And so in any great human aspiration, there's usually, once you get started, an implementation dip, and leadership is crucial because that's when people lose heart.

Yes.

And you've gotta carry people through.

Yeah.

So if I, if I go back to my time in the education department working with David Blunkett and Tony Blair on, you know, implementing the literacy hour.

Yeah.

So at the beginning, so I, I have to try to think how are teachers gonna react to this? And yeah, so we had a, a kind of emotional trajectory. We thought, we thought they'd go through. So at the beginning they'd say, I don't see why government should tell us how to teach reading. Yeah. And then they'd say, this is what we hoped. Then they'd say, I still don't think government should tell us how to teach reading, but the training's fantastic. And then they'd say, I never thought I'd hear myself say this, but it's beginning to work in my classroom.

Yeah.

And then they'd say, God, I wish we'd done this years ago. Now that turned out to be optimistic, but you see what I mean? That you've got to carry people through.

Yeah. Yeah.

To see the benefits. And that often in big ventures that are public, that means communication with the supporters if it's a football team, with the public if it's a government, or with the business, with the people internally and externally.

Yeah.

And stewardship is fundamental that because you always got to remind people of there's a long— and we've got to, whatever we do and whatever goes right and wrong, we're going to leave the system better than we found it. If I run a school, I'm doing a whole set of specific things that are in my aspirations and development plans and all the rest of it, but I'm also going to do whatever else happens, leave the school better than I found it. I'm going to have recruited better people. I'm going to have better relationships with the community, et cetera, et cetera.

Yeah.

So the underpinnings will be strengthened.

Yeah, nice. Yeah, no, that's, that's really interesting. And I suppose that's coming back to the idea of populism. That's why that superficiality of populism doesn't quite work, because people start to see through this thin veneer of, oh, hold on a minute, these elaborate promises that were made at the beginning don't seem quite to be coming true.

Yes, I mean, I do, I, yeah, that's true. And I, I worry about this relationship. You, you described it beautifully from something I've written previously where you get a growing populism of the left, populism of the right, and then this techno exuberance that people like Mark Zuckerberg going around saying they can solve the problems and leave it to them and government gets in the way. Those three challenges to classic liberal democracy rule of law are quite substantial at the moment and they're at risk of growing. So the question is how you push them back. They're always going to be there and having an honest conversation and freedom of speech and the values on which liberal democracy is based, it's fundamental to that, which is a real challenge. And it's, you're right, populism in the end catches itself out because what it argues, whether it's of the left or the right, isn't in fact true and won't in fact happen. Yeah, but their hope will be to move the debate on. And you can see if you're the populist leadership, the fact that there's a trail of failures and unfulfilled promises behind you doesn't matter if you're still generating influence. So it's a real challenge.

Yeah.

And the other thing you, you talk about in the book is that need, or the kind of the dynamic, or you talk about the story of Professor Jane Mellor about experimentation and being willing to challenge that received wisdom and find ways to do it. So I think, you know, educationally, that's one of the things that's really challenging is we need that energy and dynamic of let's do something different, you know, like Peter Hyman, you know, let's set up School 21 and let's— it's going to be daunting and ambitious, but we're going to do it and we'll see where it goes. And incredible successes. But I think that dynamic isn't perhaps always as encouraged in certain, certain domains. I mean, education being one of them, because it's, you know, we end up being a little bit stifled by fear of either or and what might happen if, you know, these are children's lives. Where does that come in, do you think?

I love the— you mentioned Jane Mellor, that she's a professor of biochemistry at Oxford and a fellow of Queen's College, Oxford. And she— I interviewed her in the book because that are the two women scientists featured in Accomplishment. And all the people I interviewed, like Dave Brailsford and Gareth Southgate and so on, and Justin Trudeau, as well as Jane Mellor, I asked them questions like, well, what do you do all day? And Jane Mellor's answer to that question— it's a great question, by the way— They always give good answers. Jane Miller's answer to that question was, "I go into the lab every day with an open mind." Now that is a really striking observation, and it represents to me the, the kind of thinking we're talking about, of being open to other possibilities. And she describes in that story in, in my book, the how when she published some results that were surprising to the field she's in, quite a few of her peers condemned it and asked her to withdraw the research. She didn't do that. And it turned out later that her experiment was replicated again and again. So she'd actually been right. But even in what you'd think was a very evidence-based field like science, that sense of something that surprises the status quo, that it's very quick for people to condemn it. And so we, we have to keep working on that. And in education, in the way you run a school, but also in the way you educate the young people, that sense of an open mind. Is really important. Curiosity is, you know, is the word, rightly, because it's a beautiful word.

It is, but it's easier for everyone to agree about that for the children. But when it comes to how do we move forward as a school or as a school system, you know, in the sense that we need to make fear a positive, which is, you know, a phrase you use in the book as well. It's like, yes, we're worried about where this exactly will go, but we've got to innovate in a way that's balanced and looking at all the evidence, but we've got to move things forward. And so that openness and that curiosity, I think, sometimes gets— yeah, it's too scary, I think, sometimes for when you're running large systems.

Yes, you need openness and curiosity, but also if you're a school trying to go somewhere, you do actually have to make decisions on incomplete information, on consultation, sometimes under pressure. And that's where the quality of the leadership matters. And that's why, you know, there are some people people, we've all met them, that you might not agree with them, but you think, actually, I really trust her, or I don't question her motives. I'm sure, you know, whatever. So there are some people like that, and there are some people who aren't like that. And so that the human being of a leader, the person they are, the ethics they hold, the way they behave, the way they interact, these are fundamental things. Because at those moments of decision, it's their job to make a decision. It might not be popular, but if you kind of trust them, it'll be okay. You need the same in political leadership, actually.

Yeah, that trust, that trust element is huge, isn't it?

Yeah. Interesting.

Thank you. And then lastly, if I could ask you then specifically about delivery, because obviously, you know, a lot of your work and working life has been about successful implementation of strategies and, you know, change with Deliverology and delivery unit, et cetera. Within education, there's been a huge amount of talk of change because of the pandemic, you know, inspired a lot of conversations about transformation in education. Sure. There were things going on before that, but it really I think those conversations were amplified and accelerated because of the pandemic. But one of the things that you talk about is this idea of transformation doesn't happen without quality of execution.

Yeah.

Because you've got this lovely 2x2 with, if you don't have quality of execution of the change, you just end up with controversy without impact. So, you know, you throw everything, becomes debated and controversial, but you're not really having any impact, even if you've got really bold ideas, actually, if you don't have quality of execution, you can't bring about transformation. So I'm probably badly summarizing your ideas, but that was— if we could end on that, because I know a colleague of mine, James Mannion, is working a lot on implementation science in education, and there's an increasing awareness, I think, within education that that idea of implementation and that guiding coalition and these kind of these different aspects of successful delivery really crucial, whatever the idea, and hopefully they're bold ideas, but whatever the idea, and that seems to be where educational reform has often fallen down, is lack of quality of execution.

Yeah, it's a really important question, Tim, and sometimes my work, and deliverology was a kind of mocking word that the Treasury invented to describe the way I went about it, but I quite like the word, and it doesn't matter, the word isn't important, But the idea that you have a systematic approach to getting things done, yeah, to making them happen, is really important. It gets sometimes condemned, often criticized as being technocratic and top-down and all that. But my answer to those criticisms is, if you thought this thing was important, surely you want to actually get it done.

Yeah.

So, and that, that applies whether you're an individual teacher. If you think, I need to do this for the children in my class. You want to make sure it actually happens. Or you're a head teacher, or you're running the school system in New Orleans, where I did some work for a while, or you're running the school system in Louisiana, where I worked for a while, or Punjab, Pakistan. If you think your idea is important, and if there's support for it, and there's— and it's got the, the backing of the, the political decision-making process, whether it's at the classroom level, the school level, or more broadly, if you think it's important, you've got to, you've got to try and make it happen. And I often say on education reform, and you see this time and time and time again that people announce reforms, talk about reforms, and this can be at the headteacher level in the school as well as a government minister. But unless your reform changes what teachers and children do in classrooms all day, every day, it's not going to have any difference. The place where children learn is in those classrooms and the relationship within the teacher. And so unless your reform affects the way teachers and children interact and what they do, the content they discuss, the way they teach, all of these things, Actually, reforms are just swirling around above the action level, and that is both obviously true when you spell it out, but it's also a challenge for teachers because it means when you do a reform, you actually do want to change what the teacher does. And some teachers will be doing whatever it is brilliantly, and some will be doing it okay, and some will know they're not. So you've got to take reform inside the classroom, and at that point it becomes edgy for teachers. So the way you communicate this. And the crucial thing in, in the delivery chain between a child and a Secretary of State, there's a whole lot of links in the chain. And at each level in the chain, you want pressure to make the change that you consider important and support to enable the change to be made. So it wouldn't be no good me in 1998 saying you've got to teach reading better if I hadn't provided that beautiful pack of materials and the really good training for everybody in how to do it. So Yes, there's pressure to change, but also the support to make the change. And thinking through, in whatever system you're running, what is the delivery chain, what's the pressure for change, and what's the support to make the change— this is crucial.

Yeah, and I suppose there's a great distance between those two things, isn't there? The Secretary of State and the experience of the child in the classroom, and a lot of vulnerabilities in that chain where it could fall down. But also, I think maybe historically— I mean, I know the UK context better than any in that sense, you know, many teachers, and I was one of them, you kind of get to the point where you know that this new reform isn't actually going to quite ever filter down to you in the classroom, so let's just carry on doing what we're doing because there'll be another one along in a year or 2 years or 3 years' time in terms of a Secretary of State.

That's true, in terms of the— that cynicism does and can emerge and is quite common in systems around the world, and that makes the next reform much harder to do So to me, if you're going to do reform, do it properly. I've just written, um, it's being published soon, about 10,000 or 15,000 words based on interviews with the last 16 Secretaries of State for Education.

Oh wow.

Two of them actually I couldn't track down, so it's 14. And I've got them talking about the experience of doing the job and what advice they'd have for their successors in the future. And it's quite moving actually. They loved the job. They wanted to do it. They can see what they sometimes got right, what they didn't get right. But here's the thing. We had 16 Secretaries of State since 1986. We had 6 Prime Ministers in that period. We had, I think, 10 Chancellors of the Exchequer, roughly that order. And you think, well, how with all that turmoil are you going to get anything done? But if you look at what happened to the system between the early '90s and now, it's got better. Pakistani children really caught up with the national average. Bangladeshi children have overtaken the national average. There are many, many more good schools doing fantastic things, many fewer really bad schools. Dramatically changed. Girls have blossomed, which in the mid-1980s looked like a challenge. You see this huge progress that the children or the young people now going into university are in many ways the most talented generation we've ever had in British history. Now, the pandemic set that back clearly. That's been a big setback. But the fact that we were able to do that in the previous 30 years shows us that we can do it again if that's what we have to do. Nobody wanted the pandemic. Now we have to just get back on the bike and ride into the future with the confidence. If I describe what we did in Britain in North America, which I've done many times, people are in awe of it. The fact that you can narrow those racial achievement gaps is actually quite fantastic. So it's not perfect, but, but in international comparisons, we're roughly level with Finland now, which used to be held up as this wonderful— we're going to have to recover from the pandemic, which was tough and come out of it. But we have lots of people in the system who can do this. The education system in this country is full of great people.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of my work is focused on international education and, you know, the International Baccalaureate and schools, international schools around the world. So that's, that's kind of different kettle of fish, different challenges, I suppose. But just out of curiosity, just one last thing: in those conversations with those Secretaries of State, how much resonance did you find for your, your key ingredients here, the pattern of accomplishment? Did you see it there coming up again and again?

Yes, largely. I mean, the, the— yes, it did. Although I didn't actually take them through all that, but you'll see it, you'll see it when it's published in a few days' time. But they nearly all say that you need to decide what you're going to do and prioritize and really focus on it. You need to build relations. They don't use the word delivery chain, but they talk about relations with teachers and key stakeholders and reviewing progress. So yes, they do. And 8 of the 16 were in post for less than 2 years. And almost without exception, they all wish they'd stayed longer. They loved the job. They, it's not that it's easy to do with all the stakeholders in education, it's difficult, but they just loved it. And they're, we're quick to condemn our politicians for whatever reason. And maybe that's the way it has to be in a free society. Party. But actually, these are, generally speaking, very good people trying to do a good job in often difficult circumstances. So a bit of empathy for the politicians, or sympathy for the devil, is worth a thought.

Yeah, very good. Wow, interesting. Thank you very much. A lot of covered ground, I think, but fascinating insights from a national system. But also, I think, you know, there's all sorts of implications internationally in terms of delivery and implementation of reform. So thank you so much, Michael. Really genuinely a privilege to talk to you, so thank you for your time.

Same for me, Tim Logan. Thank you, I enjoyed it very much.

Amazing, thank you. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with us on social media with the hashtag #futurelearningdesign and on the Intrepid Ed News website intrepidednews.com.