Big Picture Learning Australia - A Conversation with Viv White

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

To have the courage to say, well, enough's enough of that not knowing and not being, what might we do? And I think when we strike that sort of balance between hope, courage, and meaning, everything can change. The teaching can change, the government can change, but in particular, the young people change. Hi everyone.

Thanks for joining us again on this week's episode. I'm your host, Tim Logan, and you can find the podcast in its new home at goodimpactlabs.com. As you will have heard from previous episodes with Sandra Milligan, Yong Zhao, folks from Mastery Transcript Consortium, and Rethinking Assessment, standardized tests and assessments are often one of the biggest barriers to change in education, as these credentials and school leaving certificates often hold the key that opens up the next door of higher education for many young people. This is why I'm so excited this here this week to share an amazing success story of someone who decided that this compromise was just unacceptable for their students. Viv White is the CEO and co-founder with John Hogan of Big Picture Learning Australia. Building on the work started by Dennis Lipke and Elliot Washer in the US in 1995, Big Picture Learning Australia's design for personalized student-driven learning is being implemented in over 50 schools around Australia. And Viv has also pioneered a new non-ATAR credential known as the International Big Picture Learning Credential that is warranted at the University of Melbourne and accepted by 17 universities around Australia. Viv really is one in a million, even if she won't like me for saying so, but anyone who has worked with her I know will agree. She has served marginalised and excluded young people her entire career and was appointed to the Order of Australia in 2018 for her services to education and the re-engagement of young people in learning for life.

Thanks, Viv.

It's great to see you again and, um, have this conversation. I've been looking forward to it for a long time because there's, yeah, there's something special going on in Australia, which I want to get to the bottom of because I think you've done something that is not a straightforward thing to do. And I haven't seen many other organizations, if any, globally to achieve this. And it's just thinking about a more generative, meaning-rich education for young people, but then also not having to then make that compromise of now let's play back into the mainstream and do the exam thing. You've actually built a school leaving certificate that is being recognized by universities across Australia. So incredibly impressive. And I'm super excited to find out more about it and share with the audience about it.

Well, thank you for having me. It's a pleasure and a winter afternoon in Australia.

Yeah, good. And a hot sticky day in Bordeaux. Maybe just, there was something that struck me when I was just preparing and learning about Big Picture Learning in the US and in Australia, that sometimes it, the underlying piece is that we feels like we are just a bit skeptical about the capacity of and potential of young humans. You know, it's like so much of the language I was hearing was, well, this'll never work. This different approach to learning in a school with, you know, high school students will never work. The teachers won't adapt to it. The young people won't cope with it. They'll get lost when they're, well, this openness about following their passions and interests, et cetera. And it just felt to me that the underlying piece there is something about a lack of belief in our young humans, because when you hear them talk, they talk in a way that is completely different to young people in a traditional setting. So yeah, perhaps, I don't know, maybe you had any reflections on the human part before we dive into the big picture learning stuff.

Well, I think the whole big picture learning stuff really is centered around the notion of being human. And I draw extensively, we all do, you know, Viktor Frankl's early work around hope, courage, and meaning. And that how many young people have no hope that things are going to get better at school or in their lives, or, you know, they don't have meaning, they don't know what they're here for and what's this thing called life and the world they're in and who am I. And to have the courage to say, well, enough's enough of that not knowing and not being, what might we do? And I think when we strike that sort of balance between, you know, hope, courage, and meaning, everything can change. The teaching can change, the government can change, but in particular the young people. So we often say, when you ask about why don't we believe, there's sort of two ways of looking at it. One's a negative, and I'll start with that to begin with. If we really reflect, as you know, I'm 75, and if I reflect on my long life, long, healthy, happy life— women only got the vote 100 years ago. Our Aboriginal people aren't in our constitution even now. Young children were still in the mines in England in the late 1800s, and we've still got child slavery around the world. It's a bit of a surprise that we would imagine that young people might have something to say given what we've done to them. And education in a way is what's been done to them too. That's a 400-year-old institution that draws on, you know, well, let's be a little bit radical here, it draws on white Anglo-Saxon male orthodoxy, authority, and power. And to, for a grown woman like myself to still feel the vestiges of inequality as a woman, it's not surprising we worry less about our kids.

Yeah.

And yet in the modern world, the positive way, we're now really well connected across the planet. Uh, we're, we're working in Kenya, for instance, and young people in Kenya have got a whole lot to say about what's going on there even today with no doubt government challenges. And our young people in big picture, when given the opportunity to have hope, courage, and meaning and a voice, boy, they find them. And it's powerful. And you are right to say that if, if you wander through a mainstream school and then you wander through a Big Picture setting, our young people really are very clear about where they're going and what they're doing. And mainstream kids are not in the main.

No, so true.

But why don't we trust the kids? I think we do. We often say the kids are ready, their families are ready for Big Picture. The teachers are getting ready, but the government just doesn't know how to get on with it and help us to do the work. Yeah, because they're so embedded, the hierarchies of government and science, so embedded in an old way of thinking. To give over to thinking around the young people and their passions and interests is not an easy shift for what I call, you know, the Weberian bureaucracies that we all live under.

Yeah, absolutely.

Sometimes we say, well, why don't they change? Why, why are they skeptical? And we— the negative way of saying, you know, they just well, it can't be done. How could it be different? And yet there's also a lack of knowledge of what's possible. So if you're gonna flip to what are the challenges for us, I had 10 parents today who listened to the television show and said, is this actually happening? Wow. Exactly. Where can I send my kid? You know, this is amazing.

Yeah.

So us getting the message out is also one of the limits. And so for us to do this podcast is a great honor, you know, not the least of which, you know, I can feel proud as the leader of the organisation, but other people will hear about our work. Families are so, so worried about their children.

No, I don't. And that's exactly why I really wanted to get you on the podcast, because I just— to be able to share that this is absolutely possible. And that's so often this— yeah, the lack of— I mean, there are many examples around the world, but there, there are not enough examples of highly effective and replicated examples of things that are not just in startup mode, but things that are really established and have good strong evidence that this really does work for thriving young people and high academic standards, if that's something you wanna prioritize, right? So then I'd love to go into some of the details of that so that people listening can actually understand what it is we're talking about. But maybe I just, I was interested to hear what was the moment at which you kind of realized that this was, given that, that Big Picture Learning was already in the US context. What was it in Australia that really kind of was the straw that broke the camel's back, I suppose, for you to really go for this and try and bring it to Australia?

It wasn't one moment, like most breakthroughs are not. As I said to you and to your listeners, you know, I'm a 75-year-old radical maverick woman, and I've been teaching and working in the academe and being an activist in teacher union movements. And for the 40 or so years that I was exploring all of those questions you've just raised, you know, to be blunt, the data wasn't getting any better. So the poorer you were, the blacker you are, the more homeless you are, the more unusual you are in terms of your sexuality, the data is really bad. And we are losing our young people. We're not only losing their hearts and minds, we are losing their lives as well with the suicide rate we have and the self-destruction of our teenagers. Not just teenagers, younger ones. So I'd been looking for many years. So I worked in a program called the Disadvantaged Schools Program, which was a derivative of Chapter One and Head Start in America in the '70s, that sort of '70s radical movement, you know, the anti-Vietnam hippies and all of us sort of lefties at that time were looking for a better way of doing lots of things, including school. And I worked very deeply in the Disadvantaged Schools Program here in Australia, which was a program which gave the poorest 10% of kids in their schools and communities 10% more money to try to make a difference. And then I got in very involved in an industrial challenge around teachers' work and teachers' ability to work in the old model of schooling, you know, the 400-year-old model. What does it mean to be a teacher, and how can you improve teachers' lived experience of being lead learner in a school? And we set up this thing called the National Schools Network, and that was when I first met Ted Sizer in Brown University, who'd started the Coalition of Essential Schools with Elliot and Dennis. Elliot Washoe, the founder, and Dennis Lipke, the co-founder of Big Picture in America. And I met with them in the '90s, and we started to talk together about how could we use the coalition's work to improve the work here in Australia. And there was this, this one little niggle in one's head again and again and again. We could change the curriculum, make it more meaningful, make it more interesting, more up to date, more culturally appropriate. We could change the way we worked in our classrooms to be more inclusive and have more fun. And but the assessment kept getting in the way, you know. We'd have a real good time at school, and then you do the feckin' test. And it didn't click with me, you know, even then. We're talking 1991. I wasn't asking the big question even then. And then I went to work with the government in Victoria. They asked me to head up an innovations group, and they said, we want you to find any models might improve public schools in Victoria. Now, what was happening at that same time across Australia? Public schools were pushing the kids out of their building that weren't complying or succeeding with the mainstream, yeah, 400-year-old model. So charities were picking them up off the street. We got nonprofit schools, and we identified there were 500 alternative provisions. You can see why I'm a bit antsy at alternative.

Yeah.

And they were often some of the best programs, don't get me wrong, on teachers in the worst conditions because they couldn't pay them properly and very fragile in terms of their longevity. And I was tasked to see if there was anywhere else in the world that had something like you were saying, a critical mass. The business people say proof points, 100 proof points we need to look for that's doing something different. And at that time, I found the Danish production schools and I found Big Picture, and they were the only two in the world, and this is in 2004-5, which were making a major difference to a large number children. The key being for me, led by everyday ordinary people. We had plenty of superstar examples. There was a movie where the principal had to have a heart attack to get the kids through their algebra exams. Well, no, none of us were putting our hand up for a heart attack and we weren't putting our hands up for algebra either.

No, it's so true.

Yeah, it had to be possible for just everyday people.

Yeah.

To do something extraordinary. And I found the big picture and I thought, this is it. And that's when the bell rang again. Curriculum, pedagogy, school structure— you had to change the way you delivered the product for it to be a modern product. And then you had to change your assessment. We were advised by better minds than mine to start with assessment, but I didn't have the courage to do that then. I thought, how am I going to change the assessment unless I fix up the learning design? The learning design was getting in the way just as much as the assessment.

For everybody. Yeah, and I— that's the big piece, isn't it? And as you say, it's the key. It's one of the key pieces to change assessment design. But I can imagine, yeah, leading with that is impossible.

But this, I say, this little black duck didn't have the— didn't have— maybe just because I got old, I got more ballsy, but it just seemed too hard at that time. It wasn't going to make much difference anyway because the kids were still marching from room to room to room to room. The teachers were following them behind. They were still doing the same subjects and adding more and more and more subjects till it all just sort of started to meld into a bit of a crisis, really. Yeah. And, you know, Andy Hargreaves says the school is a bookcase, you know, where you keep chucking new curriculum onto it but you don't take off the old stuff, and then the case just falls down. So that was the moment where I just saw Dennis and Elliot, you are heroes. What smarty pantses you are. You've done it. You've done it. I think I can now do that too.

Amazing. But I really appreciate what you're saying about the kind of charismatic leader cult that has to set up, because it's—

that's not replicable, right?

Sustainable.

Exactly. And it's, it's, as you're saying, there's, there's something really important just about the, the basic structures and the basic context that you're creating for those educators wherever they are and the young people. But, but also what I was gonna say is that the thing that I've understood about Big Pitch Learning in the US and your work is that young people are the biggest ambassadors for the approach. And so therefore, once you've had those young people going through a few 2 years worth of that learning experience, then they become these amazing ambassadors to, for example, the universities for a shift in the, the assessment design. But maybe before we talk about the Diploma, could you just give a little bit of a, a basic 101 of what are some of those structures, just for people just to be clear?

Yeah, sure. So what we sort of say is that there's a grand old theory that was developed by John Dewey all those years ago. That the human being will learn well if they pursue something they're interested in, not something that other people decide they should be interested in. Yeah, they might come to that, but they don't start with that. And so if you have one student at a time with 16 or 17 others in a room pursuing their own interests, you have 18 curriculums, because every kid will have a different interest, from philosophy to physics to carpentry to medicine to sport. And the young people sitting one room for 4 years with one teacher who's a bit like a building project manager. They manage the curriculum for the young people, connect them to other adults who are interested in that work, connect them to learning in other settings. And so they become the learner manager, if you like. They take these young people through. So, and each year they have a learning plan meeting 4 times a year, and their families or their friends come and help them design their learning in a learning plan. And 4 times a year the same gang comes back together again and looks at the student sharing their work that they've learned that term. So 4 times a year learning plan, 4 times a year exhibition, and we try to keep the kids in their age grade because we think it's important they grow up together. You know, the Year 9s grow up together, they all have their birthdays together, they have their first boy or girlfriend, you know, they are of, of age and they become a community of learners and they look after each other, which is where the mental health model comes from. We don't need mental health programs in Big Picture. The design is a mental health strategy. Young people around a table every day, big dining room table. They have their own learning space as well, and they work together as one student in a community of learners, all doing something different. And then they go through for 4 years. Sometimes we start in Year 7, and I've just had a call today about working in a, an Indigenous community that suffered incredible damage under the floods and they've lost many of their young, call them the lost ones through COVID and so on. We're gonna come together and start a junior, be, be Unbound.

Amazing.

Yeah, just today, just before I called, you called me. Really? So, so not in the building. Yeah. In a community learning. And then we just plot all our way through and then the kids at year 10 decide where to next, stay at school, go to work, go to technical college. And we give them a little graduation certificate at that point. But most of our young people stay all the way through to year 12. Of.

Yeah.

And that's in the last 2 years where we start to develop the credential.

Yeah.

The school kids are in school 3 days a week and out of school 2 days a week, so it's an inside-outside design. The young people will leave the building and go off and work with mentors who are also interested in what the kids' passion is.

Yeah.

So we had a young boy called Toby who's done astrophysics, and his mentor was at the Commonwealth Serum and research group, CSIRO, and all of that was done on Zoom except one occasion Toby met his mentor who's also an astrophysicist. So, or they just go down the road and work with a carpenter or over the shop and wash pets, whatever they're passionate about. Yeah, and that's inside-outside learning. That is unique internationally.

That's fantastic. I mean, I love what you're saying about, and with the Be Unbound thing as well, about breaking down some of that, because I have such an issue about this narrow idea of what schooling is, but with this broader idea of what education actually is, and it involves the community, it involves industry, and it involves local entrepreneurs and all of, yeah, and academics and all of that as part, and parents, of course.

And look, I was in a school the other day, and most people would be very proud of the school, you know, it's clean and neat and the chairs are still in rows and there's no pretty things on the wall. Even in my office, you know, I want beautiful things around me when I'm working. And children are in these bare, barren classrooms. Some of the heaters are from the 19th century. And I just think, why would you want to come every day and sit there and look at the back of the same kid's head for 6 years?

Exactly.

No, counting nits and seeing if they've got dandruff. For God's sake, who would go place like that if you were asked and you had power to say no.

It's such a weird design, isn't it? When you, when you put it like that.

It's really weird.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. And yet we're on this podcast now, right? I was in a big picture class the other day.

Yeah.

And there's a guy like you teaching all our kids how to do podcasts.

Oh, great.

And I said, well, I've gotta do a podcast on Friday with this famous bloke in Bordeaux. And I said, what's your hint? What's a hint for me? He said, well, if you can't think of an answer, just be really quiet and think about it. And Tim will cut the silences out.

Beautiful. Well, he's way ahead of me.

Yeah, but this is the children's world.

Amazing. And it's also really important for me, and I think for you, to call out the fact that too often these kinds of progressive educational experiments are the preserve of elite families who can afford it, or at the other end, they're just, as you said, they're the marginal alternative provision because, you know, it doesn't really matter what we give those young people who are excluded already. Already very problematic perspectives like that, right? It's too often that polarization around what this is. And I'd just maybe, if you could, love you to speak to the context in which big picture learning is coming, which schools and where and across Australia. So I think that's important from a demographic piece.

I'm a sociologist by training, and so the whole question of social class and racism and gender issues is just my bread and butter in a way. But we often say in Big Picture, when the elites start to use our design, we're probably in trouble, right? Interesting, because at the moment nobody really cares about the kids we work with. Now that's, that's a deep sense, but true. However, we're now so strong that the elites are approaching us, and if I can be really frank, we're saying no as often as we 10 because we set this up for the young people in the country in public education for whom the system was doing least well.

Yeah.

So of the 50-some schools we have in Australia, 40 of them are what we call low SES schools, and the others are middle ranking and a couple of elite privates. So we have a balance. We're not being totally exclusionary. We've got a very wealthy Chinese family who wants to set up a school for 2,000 kids in the Northern Beaches in Sydney, a non-government school. They want to do it with Big Picture, and Elliot and I are thinking deeply about that one. So I also think too that when the elites buy alternatives or new things, they're not all that new. They're still pretty traditional. I mean, even the IB really still has exams and still has the typical subjects, whereas our, our design doesn't do that at all. Each kid is the curriculum, and each experience is measured. So we have schools in the desert, you know, the land schools in Western Australia, 100% Aboriginal kids, where their culture and their country, on-country business counts towards their assessment. So the boys do men's business, the girls do women's business. That business is acknowledged and counted and represented in the curriculum. That's amazing. We have a higher proportion of Indigenous kids in our schools than in any of the schools across Australia. We have a higher proportion of kids disability than any schools in Australia. 100% of our kids with disability who wanted to go to uni went and got in. So our results are really very good, uh, for all the diversities that we work with. So we've got city schools, country schools, regional schools, big schools, little schools. But in the main, we have a thing called an academy within a mainstream school. So typically you might, you know, have Brighton College down near the beaches in London, or, you know, somewhere in the middle of Montmartre in Paris. And a school could be 2,000, and we'd have 150 of those kids in academy within the school, because that allows us to buy the curriculum that we want in the mainstream setting. So if a kid is doing astrophysics like Toby was doing, he can then access physics in the mainstream curriculum, or he can go down the road to the Sorbonne and do physics there while he's still still at school.

Yeah.

So we go where we've got to go to get what we need to get to do what we want to do and be who we want to be. And we round up curriculum wherever we are. So I mean, our attendance rate during COVID was really high, in the 90s. And why was that?

It's not surprising to me. It's really not surprising to me.

No, you've got 18 kids that you're looking after for 4 years. You know every kid, and you make sure they all get out of bed. You blow the You ring them on their mobiles and you have breakfast together in your jammies. Well, in COVID. And we do our learning plan and we pass them along online and we, we do our exhibitions online with 4 people sitting around the exhibition, the mums and dads in their jammies while we're doing our exhibitions. And we're a retention program for teachers because once the teachers get in Big Picture, they do not want to leave. They love it. It's what they joined the profession for.

Yeah. Yeah, no, it's amazing. And one of the things I heard from some of the US testimonies I was listening to prior to this were just that idea of relationships and family. They kept using the word family, right? And you don't often get that word family coming up in a formal school context, right? And that tells you a lot, I think, about what's going on.

As I said earlier, the families just love Big Picture. I mean, I get letters that even my crusty old, you know, tough outer brings me to tears. Is, you know, you saved my child's life. Yeah, I got last week.

Yeah, I heard the same thing in the US.

Yeah, I, I just get embarrassed about it because this is such a simple idea. If, you know, really, if we applied ourselves. And one mum ring— I've got the letter on my wall here. She says, I didn't want my son to wait until the end of school to start his life. He can start his life in big picture at age 14.

Amazing.

He wants to be a pilot. That's, you know, little but big rewards in a way.

Yeah, no, absolutely. So let's maybe, let's talk about the credential piece, cuz I think again, as I said at the beginning, that's one of the things that is most significant cuz all of this is amazing, right? Everything you've described is amazing as a learning experience. But as I said, so often people doing this kind of more generative work will then get to a point where they have to say, well, okay, now we need to compromise because these young people have gotta go through the formal pathway to the next stage of their education. And you didn't take that choice. I think you did something different.

I remember I said I wasn't bold enough to start with assessment, but it finally caught up with me. Yeah.

Tell us some of that story because I think it's a really powerful story, just how that came about and then what you learned.

Yeah. I was in one of the poorest communities in Newcastle, a school called Hunter Sports High School, and they were the first school that started an academy inside a mainstream school. And very, very poor community. And the Big Picture was set up as an alternative to the sports program because the sports was, you know, all the kids who did sport were getting all the special treats and the rest of the school who lived in the town were not. But in the end, we got 50/50 sports kids and town kids came into Big Picture. It was just fantastic. Anyway, one of the sports kids, uh, 3 sports kids who'd come to the school to be selected for sport, we got to the end of year 10 and they said, we don't want to do do the crappy exams. Viv.

Yeah.

Pointed their finger at me and said, we want you to fix this. And I went, oh God, here it comes. Yeah, here it comes. I said, okay, get all your work in a folder, make it look pretty, do some chapter headings and an index, and I'll take you up the road to the university. So I rang the Vice Chancellor of the university me and said, I want to talk to you about 3 children in your district. She said, I'll put on the kettle, you know, in English.

Yeah, yeah, cup of tea.

So a week or so later, the 3 of us all arrived. She looked at the little portfolios, we got together and said, I will take these kids in 2 years' time for law, medicine, and physiotherapy. That's what the 3 youngsters wanted to And I went, oh wow, but you've got to go away and get me some standards because all the alternative entries to my university are crap. They're principal recommendations, they're mums buying their way in. You know, we all know about that. And none of it was based on any good set of standards. So we went and found a good set of standards and in Australia from, you know, the National Office of Standards and we applied those standards to these 3 kids over the 2 years. At the end of which they did an interview like a viva in the baccalaureate, and they were all accepted into physio, medicine, and law.

Brilliant.

Now, those standards were pretty ordinary because they were the standards in generic terms that the other boards of studies used to set standards for maths, English, science, etc., whereas we had 6 learning goals that were not subject-based. And our learning goals, you know, things like empirical reasoning, personal qualities, knowing how to learn, you know, subjects embedded in the goals, not separate to. So I found in a meeting somewhere in Melbourne, I forget where, Sandra Milliken from the University of Melbourne.

Yeah.

And she— how are you going to scale this thing? By this stage, we had 40 kids had gone to uni with a portfolio against those standards. I said, I have no idea. Have you got any idea? She said, no, I haven't either, but together we might be able to work it out. So that was the beginning of a journey together. All my teachers and our kids and her psychometricians. And ironically, through COVID, because we could never have afforded to take our people cross-country to do this work, you're right, we did it all online. And we created a new credential called the International Big Picture Learning Credential. And last year we graduated 300 kids. Using that credential, going to work, going to technical college, and going to uni. And of the third of the kids that applied for uni, every one of them got in to the uni of their choice. Now, by this stage, we were knocking on other vice-chancellors' doors. Will you take our kids? Will you take our kids? And we ended up with a pile of about 18 universities. Some of the superstar universities haven't yet acquiesced and taken our kids in, but we're getting very close to that happening too. To do. So we have this warranted matched credential. It matches to what the kids can do. It doesn't rank them against each other. That's the breakthrough.

Amazing. Yeah, I know. I mean, as we've spoken about before, we— Sandra's been on the podcast a couple of times, and, and she's obviously doing incredibly impressive work there. But it's—

I know, no gold standard, this one.

Yeah, but it's, it's amazing. And it just— everything you're speaking about just feels feels full of relationality, right? It's like you're building relationships with the vice-chancellors, with Sandra, to build the thing, going on the journey together. Again, it's just, that feels like it's part of the magic of what's going on as well as this incredible thing that you've built.

And it's so interesting because Sandra's main work is around providing an additional credential on top of the existing learning designs.

Right.

Very cool. But it's not, you know, there's this big campaign in Australia and beyond around beyond the ATAR, beyond the rank score to get into uni, beyond your SAT test, you know, similar. But nobody really deeply talks about, well, what do you replace it with? Yeah, we've got the replacement. We've replaced the ATAR. Most people are fighting to abolish it, but what are they going to replace it with? And the best people have seemingly been able to come up with is to learn a profile. I just don't reckon that's good enough. You got to change your learning design.

Well, exactly, that's what I was just going to say. It's also just somehow a superficial shift if the actual underlying learning experience and design isn't also changing.

Yeah, because the conservatives will round up again and abolish the learner profile. That'll be the next thing it'll go, because it's not based on pedagogical and curriculum practice, which our work is.

So here's a question then, if I may. You've been pretty transparent about the fact that you're a radical lefty, right? And then you're invoking the conservatives. So this is something that I'm really interested in, because I think one of the challenges with this kind of approach is that crudely, let's say, dismissed by 50% of the population who have a politically right-leaning attitude, right? And for me, there's something else underlying all of this because I think if, if it's overly politicized as a critical radical alternative to this traditional conservative elitism, I think that's not what's actually going on. I think there's something else going on, which is a bit, I don't know whether I would say deeper or, or more of a longer term slowish shift away from this kind of Weberian bureaucratic approach towards something else. But it's— my worry is that if it's overly politicized, then it will only ever gain a certain amount of traction. I don't know, I don't really know what to do with that, but it's an interesting problem, I think.

Well, for me, I could not have done this work if I had been within the system, and that's, that's the key. Yeah, I had a set of values that, as I much more accord with Viktor Frankl than, you know, Karl Marx, let's just say. And I couldn't imagine smashing the system within. But when we first started Big Picture, we made a conscious decision that we weren't gonna fight the system. We weren't gonna critique it. We weren't going to say, and still don't say, the HSC is not a good certificate or the IB is not a good certificate. That's not helpful. We wanted to show there was another way. Come join us, try it with us, see how we go. So in it, in essence, the New South Wales Department of Education, for all intensive purposes, most people in the world would say it's one of the most conservative education systems in the world, right? And they've supported Big Picture big time because they too know there is this shift. And when I speak to retired principals who are wise people, they say we need the outsiders like you, Viv, to show us how we can incorporate it in our current system.

Yeah.

And that's what we've managed to do. I was able, because I wasn't beholden to anybody, to show a new way of doing something. And I made a conscious decision to be outside the system for as long as possible. To give us our evidence to get the design done robustly so that when it comes inside to the system, like it did last week, I was there with the Deputy Secretary of Education in New South Wales. She said, 'How many more schools are we gonna do this year?' What a great question. You know, this is working for our young people. It's a new design. It's not an alternative. It's another way, another pathway for our young people. People, and she is really proud about that. They fund the credential.

Amazing. No, that's so good. And I would also just reflect that for me, it's actually really important that we are explicit about our values. That's coming up again and again for me. I mean, I, I hear what you're saying about it becomes a politicized conversation, but at the same time, I think there's something really important about being really clear and open that actually these are the things we care about, right? And call them political or call them values-based, whatever. But there is something important about having that conversation because if we don't have that conversation, then it's just, it becomes a technical conversation between which program's better or which evidence is more robust for the outcomes. It's not, that's actually not what's going on as well. It's something deeper than that.

I'd say, I'd say, I've got two prizes. I wanna be able to lie straight at night because of who I am, without over-romanticising it. I have to be tough and I am tough. But secondly, the eye on the prize are young people. And if this is making a difference in the way that we now know it does, then I've achieved— we say, John Hogan and I, the co-founder and I— 10,000 young people's lives have been better because of us and this design. That's not a bad epitaph, really.

Absolutely not.

Incredible. And influenced systems like But some very conservative systems, I mean, the Tasmanian government, for instance, has just commissioned us. They've got terrible data down there, and it's not as bad as it's publicised because of the way it's collected. The kid goes from school to TAFE or technical college, they count it as a loss, not as— but they're asking us to set up a Be Unbound strategy across the state. They know there are youngsters who are just not anywhere. They call them NEETs. Have you heard that language?

I have. They use that language in the UK as well.

Well, yeah, not in employment, education, or training. There's 3,000 of them in Tasmania. Where are they?

I mean, yeah, even the, even the language is, is just so offensive. It's like you might as well call them nobodies, right? It's, it's, it's horrendous.

Yeah. If only people would remember who the Pied Piper was. I, I could call myself the Pied Piper. I'm telling nobody remembers that.

No, I've got a vision of you. Yeah, with your little whistle, skipping across Australia.

Rounding them up and putting them in a non-school setting. Yeah. Anyway, doing what they need to learn. Yeah.

But no, but, but you're so right. I mean, again, coming back to the US examples, the, the young people's testimony about their experience is just so incredibly powerful. And of course it's really important to talk about the university recognition and, you know, the robustness and all of that. It's all really very important. But like you say, you gotta protect the integrity of the thing. Thing as well, which I hear you strongly.

It's good for every kid. Like, it's— people say, oh, it's an alternative for some kid, and oh, it's a school refuses program. I just refuse to engage in that discussion. For starters, I think the language of the refuser is just shocking. What happens in the media, and if you're talking about wicked problems, what's hardest for us to fix, is that sort of view that the next crisis amongst our young people— it could be literacy, it could be numeracy, it could be not coming to school, it could be vape, keeps, you know, we've always got a new crisis every week it seems. And some journalists, they firstly, they blame the kids, then they blame the mums and dads and their families and sisters and brothers, and then they blame the teachers, then they blame the principals. But nobody ever says maybe the design of schooling and learning is the problem.

Yeah.

And I just cannot get that through to people. So 180 kids for every maths teacher every week. That's just nuts. How can a maths teacher seriously engage in the beauty of mathematics every 40 minutes with a different group of kids?

Yeah, I can't do it, let alone build the relationships right with those kids.

Yeah, exactly, exactly. So the design's wrong. 30 kids in a room, room after room after room. That's so not right for the young people and their families of today. And I, I want the commentators to understand And they wouldn't be advocating using a steam car now on a major highway, but they are imagining we still can do school like we did 400 years ago for the sons and daughters, mainly sons of the factory workers. That's the model. We keep topping it up with old fuel. We're now gonna do explicit teaching or we're now gonna do more phonics and like, hello?

No, there is a real doubling down in lots of places based on the evidence supposedly, in inverted commas, right? And the UK is the same, but, and then New Zealand, I think too. What's interesting to me about having engaged in conversation with some of the people advocating those kinds of approaches is there's almost an inevitability about it. Like this is the way it has to be. So they've kind of drunk their own Kool-Aid so much that they think this is the universal approach to the way that we have to do education. It's really fascinating.

But I think some people need to unpack what that evidence is because it's I mean, there's— there was a crisis in Texas in 2000, and there was one in Mississippi in 2023, and it's the same. What is this? In the one in Texas, they talked about it was more hat than cattle. The data was just so bad. No, the kids who were— did really badly in Texas the year before, they all left school, so the data got better, of course.

But, um, maybe just to finish up, a last forward-looking question. I suppose I'm interested in how other people sitting now listening to this in other contexts all around the world could then engage? Because clearly you've been on your own journey with Dennis and Elliot and the team there in the US. And what would you say, or what advice would you give to someone who's kind of feeling the same things in a different context?

Well, it's a bit like we pursue the interest wherever it is, and we had a person interested in Kenya. So we— she did our training, she read our stuff, and now she's got a school. In Nairobi, and we're all going to visit her if that violence stops. Yeah, my team here with their tickets and their bags packed, but we're not sure we're going. So a phone call— this model is transferable to all cultural settings. I've got a call today from South Africa, right? People hear about our work, they start to interrogate it, and they go, oh yeah, we can do that. Highly personalized, 17 kids, one teacher, students of the curriculum, assess the real learning meaning you can buy the credential, or if you're in Nairobi, we give it to them for free.

Yeah.

But if you're in Barbados, you pay a bit, you know. And this credential has been proven now to be culturally inclusive no matter where it is. That's the beauty of the credential. Yeah. We thought, oh my God, it won't work with Aboriginal communities. Oh my God, how could it possibly work in Nairobi? We were the ignorant people in that conversation. We just waited until they told us, now come on, shut up, we can do this.

Here.

This works here too. So just start, go on the website, get cracking, give us a call, and we'll help you. And that's how we started here, really. It's how we started here. And I think the central success factor, people want to look at that, is we started with a really good design. The learning design that Elliot and Dennis created built a robust house, but you can't cherry-pick you can't not put a window in, you've got to put the 10 or 11 design principles in practice. Highly personalised, families are enrolled too, active curriculum, active assessment, you know, really strong robust design principles, communities engaged too, work out where you want to go to next. There's a good set of design principles and if you implement those then you can't really go wrong. I know it sounds a bit Pollyanna and a bit romantic, but that's how we found it works best. Highly relational, highly personal.

No, it's so powerful. And obviously I'll share all of the links to any of those kinds of resources in the show notes as well.

I just want to get it out to as many people as possible, you know. And I, as the leader of the organization, I try to live that life. I try to be personalized, personalize the stories. Might I suggest though, I often get almost metaphorically patted on the head. Oh, she's so passionate, about it, and I fair wanna smack them because I'm smart as well.

Bloody right.

It's that, it's that matronizing behavior of often so-called highly placed people in universities and businesses that says, oh well, you know, you know who Viv is, you know, she's just passionate. Yeah, well, bit more than that. So I still wear that because I am informal And you know, I just get on with it and do it.

And, but I would also reflect, I mean, not, not having known you for long, but we've had a couple of really great calls and you have a, a grit and determination to do the work as well as the smarts, of course. So maybe some of that passion, a language of passion is gesturing towards the fact that you clearly a lot of what you've described, you've had to push hard against a lot of constraints pushing back the other way, right? Mm-hmm. So it's, this is not for the faint-hearted, right? This kind of work. No, because of of the entrenchedness of the system as it is, or the many kind of systems, or mainstream systems. Yeah, you've got to, you've got to push hard sometimes, and that's— and, and not take no for an answer. And it— so there's some of that grit and resilience that—

but I think that's the same with a lot of the people you've interviewed. I mean, we are sort of outside the restraints of the system, and we don't create new systems in order to deliver. It's mesh work, Elliot calls it. We're really into mesh work. We mesh the world together, our ideas together, and we don't try to over-bureaucratize the work we do because that's what's held everybody else back.

Exactly. Yeah. And there's some— exactly that. I think there's something about embodying the thing that you care about. Like, the medium is the message, right? It's, it's not good enough to— I always think, you know, stand on a stage as a keynote speaker and tell everybody they should collaborate and be in dialogue, and it's, you know, it's just so often such a junk between the message that's being given and the way—

by the way, ring my PA and make you get my slides.

Exactly. So no, I think that authenticity to being the work as well as doing the work is really important and powerful. So no, thank you. I so appreciate everything. Pleasure.

And really, maybe one day we can bring our kids on.

I'd love that. Exactly. Exactly.

Do a kid podcast about schools.

That'd be fun. Hear from them. That would be amazing.

Thanks to you, Tom.

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