Change, Engagement and Innovation in Education (Chenine) - A Conversation with Andy Hargreaves

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

A lot of people coming out of this pandemic are thinking that technology will be the major answer, but it won't be. The essence of teaching and learning, it's not a spreadsheet, it's not a group of metrics, it's not a machine or a platform. When it comes to learning, people are the answer.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to the podcast. This week's episode is a lovely conversation that I was privileged to have with Andy Hargreaves, who is the director of CENÉEN, Change, Engagement, and Innovation in Education, at the University of Ottawa. And he is also the research professor in the Lynch School of Education and Human Development at Boston College. He is past president of the International Congress of School Effectiveness and Improvement, recent advisor Advisor in Education to the Premier of Ontario and currently to the First Minister of Scotland and founder of the ARC Education, a group of nations committed to broadly defined excellence, equity, well-being, inclusion, democracy, and human rights. Andy has also consulted with the OECD, the World Bank, governments, universities, and teachers unions worldwide. He's written more than 30 books which have attracted multiple outstanding writing awards, including the prestigious 2015 Groar Meijer Award in Education for Professional Capital, which he wrote with Michael Fullan. He's been honored with the 2016 Horace Mann Award and the Robert Owen Award in Scotland for services to public education. In 2015, Boston College gave him its Excellence in Teaching with Technology Award. He holds honorary doctorates from the Education University of Hong Kong and the University of Uppsala in Sweden. He's a fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts, and his most recent book, Moving: A Memoir of Social Mobility and Education, was published last year by Solution Tree.

Hi Andy.

Hi Tim, how are you?

I'm very good, how are you?

I'm very good, thank you, considering everything that we all have to deal with right now.

Exactly, no, there we go. Well, thank you firstly for joining me, absolutely fantastic pleasure to have you, and just wanted to start perhaps with a more of a personal beginning given your latest book Moving, that you've just recently published, but also then also thinking about the idea of social mobility and the role of education in social mobility. So perhaps you could just say something about that personally in relation to your story and your recent memoirs, and then also perhaps we can then broaden out into a wider discussion on the role of education there in social mobility.

Well, the concept of social mobility was invented in the 1920s, actually, by a Russian-American, and it meant two things. It meant, first of all, whatever your origins, whatever your background, what were your opportunities and chances really of being able to move across the social strata. So social mobility assumed there was inequality in society, but that was okay if people could freely move up and down between one level or another depending on their merits. And I think that's how we mainly understand social mobility. But the original idea also had a second component too, which was not only could individuals move, but levels could move. So actually levels could move closer to each other. And what we find is that when society is a bit more equal, for instance, like the Nordic countries or like Canada to some degree where I live now, then the levels come closer together and then it actually gets a bit easier for the individuals because the rungs on the ladder aren't so far apart. And there's more people moving with you. You're not the only one. So for me, for example, I grew up in the north of England in a working-class community in the 1960s. One of three brothers, and both my brothers did not get on to what we call grammar school or on to a university. In fact, none of my family ever in history went to university. Most worked in factories and so on. But I was the one who passed the test at 11. They didn't. It's a ridiculous age to make that decision. And you could say, of course, that despite quite a lot of adversity— my dad died at 12, my mum worked 3 jobs, she collapsed with a nervous breakdown, we went on to welfare, I lived on one side of the town, school was on the other side of the town, I had 2 sets of friends, I was trying to kind of hold them together, so I'd play out with my mates in the neighborhood and then come home and start my homework at 10 o'clock because I didn't want my homework to take me away from my mates in the neighborhood. So it's pretty hard for lots of kids to hold those things together, uh, 3 part-time jobs and a curriculum that didn't make any sense to me a lot of the time. It didn't connect to, you know, my life, my circumstances, and so on. But even having said all that and how hard it was, particularly during secondary school, I did have a school uniform that was paid for by the state. I did have full funding to go to university. I'm sure these days if, if I'd have come from a family like I did, I knew that going to university will saddle me with a huge amount of debt. Probably I would have chosen a different path and gone a different way. And if I'd have been dependent on finding a job through internships, for example, with networks of people who were, I don't know, lawyers or in business or in companies. Well, I didn't have any of those in my family. Working-class kids don't. A lot of immigrant kids don't. So we see that Often we think social mobility is an alternative to equity. You know, you can have lots of inequality, but it can be fair and everybody has the right chance. But what we learn is actually social mobility is a consequence of equity. So you've really got to pay attention to narrowing those gaps and giving people a lot more support. My generation had that. It was really like a golden age for social mobility in, in so many countries. But for 40 years now, inequalities have increased. Increased. Levels of state support in all kinds of ways have declined for kids in schools and then, and then kids in universities. So my story, I guess, is not, not the story of the working-class kid who made good despite everything, some kind of working-class hero, but it's a story of hundreds of thousands of millions, really. It's a story of how you get that kind of social mobility for people like me when you also have a lot behind you. You have the values of your family, and you have the support of the state. Take those things away, and it becomes incredibly difficult for young people to have the same kind of chances that the likes of me did.

Interesting. Yeah, and it's maybe that myth of meritocracy that we imagine that story of the working-class kid who just worked hard and did well despite the system. And I think that's quite a powerful myth, but it is often a myth, right?

Of course, those are the books that really sell, particularly in America. So J.D. Vance's Hillbilly Elegy Biology, there's a movie on that now, you know, working-class kid growing up in chaos in Appalachia and then ending up at Yale. Or Tara Westover, who was abused by a family of Mormon scrap metal dealers and then describes in a book, Educated, how she eventually does a PhD in Cambridge. And these are the stories that people love. They're Angela Zashes, they're people who did it all by themselves. But most of us— I'm sure some people do, but most of us don't do it all by ourselves. And if that's all there is to rely on, you're not going to see much of a result in terms of lots of people making it.

Yeah, interesting. Well, thank you. It's really interesting. And I'd love to— I will read the book. And I hope many other people do, because I think it's a fascinating story personally, but also the broader implications for the system.

Thank you. Thank you. I've had so many people write to me who were Chinese Americans or Jamaican Canadians. Who on the face of it, literally on the face of it, look like they have lives that are totally different, but they say, in a way, this is a book about their life too, and it makes them think about their life. It's a book about the lives of many kids and their families who struggle for different reasons, and the hope that education offers to them if they can get just that bit of backing within the school and outside it to help them through.

That's brilliant. Yeah. Thank you. And then if we could then shift to now in terms of since that grammar school and then your university education, and then you've, you've then contributed a huge amount, a vast amount to the story of education and the evolution and the innovation within education for the subsequent decades. And now, just so, as you say, you're based in Canada now in Ottawa, and you've just recently established the Shenine Centre as an, as a lovely acronym, actually. 'Change, Engagement and Innovation in Education.' How far was that a response to, obviously, the recent events of the pandemic and what we've learned and what we've reflected on in relation to education, and how much of that was actually a natural kind of progression from your earlier work?

So I've always been interested in change in education, not just studying it, but also in various ways trying to bring it about in schools, with schools, with school districts, local authorities, now with whole countries and networks of countries. So in 2002, when I moved to Boston College, actually had the chance of two jobs, and I was headhunted in the same week for two jobs. One was to be in charge of all students' achievements in the UK, so I was very flattered by that, and I did— my wife persuaded me I really should go for the interview, which I did. And the other job at Boston College was, uh, what they call an endowed chair, and that was endowed, which means funded by a family whose son died on the 104th floor of the World Trade Center on 9/11, Thomas Moore Brennan. And the mission of the chair on that legacy, if you remember what 9/11 was all about, was a wonderful legacy. It was to promote social justice in education and connect theory and practice. And I was— within like a minute of them calling me, I felt totally differently about this job than I did about the other job. Yeah, even though fewer people would know what it is and what it involves. So I've spent a lot of time through my career, you know, building journals, creating centers, networks, and so on. And 2 years ago, we moved back to Canada, and I set up a little relationship with the University of Ottawa. It's a bilingual university. It's based in the capital of Canada, the world's only constitutionally bilingual, multicultural society.

Yeah.

So it's a terrific place to think about change in a diverse and inclusive way. Yeah. And I've always been drawn to community building. I think that comes back to my own narrative, actually, living on one side of town, going to school on the other, trying to hold two sets of your life together. Yeah. So most of my books are written with other people, and I began to get to know a group of colleagues at the University of Ottawa, and some of them had a lot of experience in different ways in innovation and some quite a bit in technology. So when the pandemic came along, whatever comes along, one question I ask myself is, is there anything I can do here?

Nice.

Whatever it is that can have a positive impact. Yeah. And the pandemic is the most remarkable disruption and change in education in over 100 years, really since the very creation of large-scale public education. And, um, I was on a range of networks with the World Bank, OECD, UNESCO, different countries who were asking me to speak to this. And what I was hearing was really an enthusiasm for technology. Indeed, not just an enthusiasm for technology, but an exuberance about technology. So there was a paradox in the middle of this pandemic where we had to turn to technology. It's been a lifesaver in lots of ways, but, but at the same time, there were just a host of problems with it that teachers will be totally familiar with now. Not just devices, but conditions of learners at home, trying to get your kids connected when not everybody has connection, trying to connect emotionally with, with your kids, which is the essence of what teaching is about. And we felt that there was nowhere which said, well, let's look at the technological possibilities, but let's be honest and strategic about the risks, which are considerable: excess screen time, digital addiction, reinforcement of preferences that become reinforcing prejudices, actually, surveillance, anxiety of particularly adolescent girls constantly checking their images. So let's set something up that is is hopeful and optimistic about the possibilities, does not give up on physical schools and in-person teaching, and is candid and robust about where all the risks are and can create strategies as to how to deal with those risks. So the point is, is we grew up in the middle of this pandemic. I think what we've achieved so far is we've created a thing called the Shanine Charter that talks about things very clearly, like every school, every district, every technology company should to have a group that pays attention to risks, to identifying them, to managing them. Technology access should be universal, public, and free as a human right everywhere. For it should be like water everywhere. It's as basic now to human existence. Some countries like Estonia have that. And it should use technology like anything, glue, paper, pen, science equipment, soccer balls. You use it when you need it, when it uniquely adds value, and don't just use it because it's there. And we're in fairly advanced discussions about partnerships with a major technological company in education and also an international children's organization. But first, for us, the important thing is, is not chase the money and then think what your vision is, but actually be clear about who you are, work together around the vision, and then look for people who align with that rather than the other way around.

Yeah, very interesting. You become a connector in the network, kind of intentionally bringing key players together. Yeah, very interesting. Then if we could move slightly, because another aspect of your work which I personally very much loved and got a lot from was your book with Michael Fullan on Professional Capital. And I just wondered, again, in relation to the pandemic, perhaps, you know, because you've already mentioned the ways that it's disrupted and the way that it's challenged many different aspects of a teacher's life, but what are your reflections now in terms of how professional capital has been affected or changed by the recent events of the pandemic?

Thanks, Tim. Well, this is a book that Michael Fullan and I wrote almost 10 years ago now, but it's still got a lot of legs in it. People are using the ideas around this all over the world now, including networks of schools based on professional capital and collaborative professionalism and and so on. The first thing is, in the middle of writing this book, not before it, we realized what's the big enemy of professional capital. So the idea of professional capital is quite simply, if you want a return, make an investment. If you want a return from your people, you've got to invest in your people. And what's the opposite of professional capital? It was business capital. It was really trying to find ways to privatize schools, to lower the cost of teaching, to lower the quality of teaching, to make, make teaching kind of for younger people, temporary, in and out, rather than a lifelong commitment like, say, medicine is, or architecture, for example. And what we saw in lots of countries was educational reform was being driven by money rather than being driven by quality of people. Not everywhere, but we know there are many counterexamples. And so I think the first thing about the pandemic is that there is a danger of business capital coming back onto the agenda, particularly through technology. So again, I think we're We've learned a lot about technology. I think everybody's capacity in technology, including the kids with learning, has increased phenomenally. I go across with my grandkids in Ottawa and help them out with virtual school. So I sort of see that end of it as well. So it's good. We have more capability, more, more capacity, including in my university here. So that's the good thing. But the danger is policymakers like simple solutions, and you can count machines and you can count the number of people online, and a lot of people coming out of of this pandemic are thinking that technology will be the major answer, but it won't be. When it comes to learning, people are the answer. And things like technology can back that up, but the essence of teaching and learning is really, it's not a spreadsheet, it's not a group of metrics, it's not a machine or a platform, it's the relationship between two people and the learning that comes out of that, and then the tools that surround that. So first we have to be wary that the enemy of professional capital is alive and well and lurking and waiting to come back in, in a, in a very big way. Professional capital itself has 3 components: human, which is about individual skills, qualities, capabilities, rewards, satisfaction; what we call decisional, which is about judgment and expertise; and social, which is about how you are together. I think during the pandemic, what we've seen with human capital is huge threats to teachers. A lot of teacher surveys, including here in Canada, have been heartbreaking, really, where teachers are teaching in ways they don't really want to teach, but they're really doing the best they can. They're being heroic, inventive, but always feel they're falling short compared to what they can usually do. And to see lots of teachers filling in surveys saying they feel every day they're falling short of their own professional standard is heartbreaking. Teachers have well-being too, and we thrive off feedback, the sense that we're having an impact, we are making a difference, the light bulbs are going on, people become better because of us, and that's so hard. So I think there's a massive threat in this kind of digital environment to the psychic rewards that teachers need themselves. I think in terms of judgment and expertise, we know that the systems that have done best responding to the pandemic have maximized teachers' capacity to exercise the judgments in relation to the kids that they know best. And the systems that have done worse haven't trusted their teachers. So I think teachers' judgment has really been highlighted. But the real big benefit all round is we know that the most important aspect of professional capital is social capital, who we are together as a— however good you are as an individual, as a teacher, if you have strong people around you, you'll become even better. And that's a real sort of profound difference. And the evidence everywhere in the pandemic is no matter how much or little teachers were collaborating before, they're definitely collaborating more now. And when we've not known what to do, we've turned to each other. And every day you get up and you're facing new things you've never faced before. And so, you know, you turn to your mates, you turn to the people who've got expertise, and that is something we've got to keep hold of when we come out of the pandemic, you know, build on those collaborative habits that we've established now, make sure that they persist career-long, basically.

Yeah, absolutely. That's really interesting. It's an interesting lens actually to think about those different things. And I had a really interesting conversation with Olli-Pekka Heinonen from Finland.

Oh yeah.

He was reflecting on exactly that idea of that decisional capital and the autonomy and the trusting the teachers, because it's quite a high level of autonomy. In the system in Finland, and he said it was a really interesting test in the pandemic in order to look at whether a highly autonomous group of teachers in a highly autonomous system would actually move together in quite a unified way facing a common challenge, which they did. He said it was a really interesting validation of that, that trust of the teachers, just as you're talking about.

I think that's true, Tim. I know Finland quite well. I did with the OECD probably the first external review of the Finnish system in a long time ago now, 2007, which was one of the first to explain what was going on in Finland, why it seemed to be as successful as it was. And it's hard to pin down in this policy or that policy, but it's embedded in the culture and the politics and in the society that you start from a position of trust, not an absence of trust. And in schools, you actively build it all the time. You don't just hope for it or wait for it, but you actively build You give your kids increasing levels of responsibility. So this building trust is, is deliberate, relentless, and effective.

Wow. Such an important concept, isn't it? And yeah, very underrated sometimes in compliance systems.

Yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And perhaps that's a nice kind of segue to this idea of engagement, because you've been talking, I know, about about that quite recently, and I like this phrase, I think you were speaking in Sydney about the engagement being the new frontier of education. And that idea of engagement and trust and all of those kinds of aspects of social capital, perhaps the interactions and the collaborations that are so important, but often we have quite a narrow focus on achievement and the outcomes of education. So I wanted to ask you, by that phrase as a new frontier of education, what do you What do you mean by that in terms of—

Well, in a way you've already said it, which is to know what the new frontier is, we have to know what the old frontier is. What was the old frontier of education? And it was achievement, exams, data, tests, resilience, grit, just relentless, stoic, driving up the results to raise performance and to try and narrow achievement gaps. And what we've learned being on this frontier for 20, 30 years now is it just hasn't worked. So we can argue about it ideologically, but one very simple thing is 20 or 30 years of this have not narrowed achievement gaps, have not created more mobility, they've not created more equity. That is true in England, it's true in Australia, it's true in the United States, for example. And as this realization started to dawn on a lot of people, my colleague Dennis Shirley and I, who've now just written this book called Five Paths of Student Engagement that's coming out in June, were invited to join a government project in the Pacific Northwest, five states of America. And for 20, 30 years, all the resources around equity had gone into urban districts, so large cities, often with big racial divisions, oppression, inequities. But at the same time, much of the poverty of many of the inequities in America is rural, as indeed it is in some other countries like Australia, for, for example. Nothing was being done about this. Some of it is white working class, some of it is indigenous, some of it is Mexican farm laborers. So It's all kinds of poverty and all kinds of rural. And because Dennis and I had done a lot of work with networks, which I know we'll talk about in a few minutes, building them, supporting them, they asked us would we help them build a network of schools across the Pacific Northwest to address issues of poverty, to narrow the achievement gaps, to create more equity. Um, they were interested in professional capital. So their idea was, is not only these schools poor, but they're also isolated from each other. So how could we connect their teachers to kind of make some value added, really. So we did, and we didn't come in with a network for them, but we built a network with them. And part of building a network with people is they have to decide, not you, what the network will be about. Now, a non-negotiable was it had to be about equity, it had to be about learning and achievement. And then they, they said, well, you know, the way to do this is if we can engage the kids with their learning and engage the kids with their community and engage the kids with their life, then we've got a chance of getting them achieving. It's a very basic teacher's conception. But then, so we followed them and we said, okay, well, we'll go and hunt out, like, a lot of the literature, see what the research says, see how we can help you with this. And a lot of the literature is very psychological. It's good. And it says— every teacher knows this— if you can motivate your kids, kids and get them involved, they're more likely to succeed. You have to do that emotionally. You have to do that cognitively, which is, you know, do you feel you can do it? Are you intrigued? And you have to do it behaviorally. You have to be there and you have to have your eyes on the teacher. So this is what the psychologists told us. But we also learned that actually what psychologists are telling us is not enough. This literature has been around for 20 years. Levels of engagement are not increasing. Their levels of disengagement are quite high in the US, about 40% in high school. In Europe and other countries, a bit lower. It's about like 20 to 30%, but it's still a fifth to a third of your kids who are not engaged. So all this knowledge about how to engage kids wasn't getting kids more engaged. So then we started to look at sociological literature, which tells you really, okay, so unless the teacher is really stupid, they know how to get their kids engaged. Like, this is why they came into the work in, in the first place. So what's getting in the way? And this really brought us into looking at what we call the enemies of engagement. And they are— sometimes things make learning disenchanting, like testing takes the magic out of learning. Sometimes makes kids feel disconnected from the curriculum, like I did from my curriculum. I had no connection to my culture. If you standardise the curriculum but you're Indigenous or immigrant, it's, it's hard to connect with what's there. Sometimes there are distractions. Adolescents By nature is a distraction. Absolutely. You know, you put in digital distractions in addition to that and you've got a lot more. And I'll not go through all of them, but there are 5 of these. So to get kids engaged, we really have to think about the things that are getting in the way and have strategies and policies in our schools and in our systems that can help us deal with that.

Very interesting. And it feels to me, just listening to you talk, it's a much deeper analytical approach than than perhaps previously when it was just, let's get the kids engaged, let's do some group work, and that would be, that would be the answer, right? And actually this is, of course there's all sorts of strategies you can use in a classroom pedagogically to engage children, but actually there's all sorts of other dimensions to this, as you say, psychological, sociological, content of the curriculum. Yeah, very interesting.

You know, all teachers of any worth or value at all are always looking for new ideas to get their kids engaged. You know, pop into the teacher's classroom next door or talk to your mates in the pub, right? Go on to TeachMeets now, which is really just the same thing on a global scale. So teachers are always looking for ways to get their kids more engaged. What we have to avoid is now, if in a way the light bulb's gone on in a systemic way, is the systems and administrators don't use engagement in a way that disengages their teachers by wagging their fingers at teachers and saying, well, we've got an observation instrument that says your kids aren't engaged enough, or a survey Here's a survey that says your kids aren't engaged enough, or here's a rubric and you're only on level 2 and we need to get you to level 4. So this is not what we need because the theory behind it, the implicit theory is, well, if teachers aren't getting their kids engaged, it's because they're not trying hard enough.

Exactly.

So really, it's really a question of how we together figure out what is getting in the way of us being able to get the kids engaged. And, you know, if teachers are going to get the kids engaged, teachers have to be engaged themselves. So you also need to think about how you get your teachers motivated, how you get your teachers excited, how you trust them, involve them, connect them. These are critical too.

Absolutely. Do you feel that there's a tension there between the kind of standardized approach and engagement? Because in a way, the logical end of engagement is that you are personally connected. So there's a personalization comes in at that end where every individual, whether it's a faculty member, a teacher, or a student is enabled to connect personally to the learning experience?

Well, I've got twin granddaughters, they're 6 years old. They're not the same. You know, anybody who's a teacher of twins, you know, it's good not to have them in the same class and it's good to treat them as different, as their own unique. So if that's true of twins, you know, imagine any culture. So in Canada we've got, you know, refugees from Syria, Indigenous communities, all of which are different from each other. We've got We've got Franco-Ontarians, we've got Old Order Mennonites who are like the Amish, and these appear in all kinds of different combinations. And the idea that you can have one standardized curriculum that will fit all these kids is just, of course, utter nonsense, except in, in the broadest sense of a few things, skills, areas of knowledge that we all have to pay attention to. So in a diverse, rapidly changing society, We have to be able to be responsive to our kids, and our curriculum has to help us to do that, not get in the way of our ability to do that.

That's such a powerful statement. Absolutely. Yeah, brilliant. And then connected to that in a way, we've kind of been touching on this all the way through, is this idea of networks. And I've been personally quite interested in in this. So I think it's a really kind of important emerging area. But I was really interested to read in your— the Scottish government report you did with ICEA.

Yeah.

You were talking about shifting and recommendations for Scotland shifting from a self-improving system into a networked learning system. And I thought that was really interesting as a kind of conceptual framework for the way that we start thinking about some of these interactions, as we were saying before, with social capital and decisional capital and different agents and trying connect them into the network. So maybe could you just say a little bit briefly about what that means as a network learning system and what benefits that might bring and kind of from theory to practice in terms of what it might actually look like?

Well, you know, even before the pandemic, we have a world characterized by the acronym that the business community calls VUCA: volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. And you can't manage those kinds of things in a top-down way. You can manage a literacy and numeracy strategy in a top-down way. You can. And you can see some results. So if you're really just trying to achieve simple things in a simple way, you can have a fairly hierarchical, top-down way of doing it. But as soon as things get as complex as they are now, it's impossible. And the pandemic has just added to that. So the World Health Organization tells us that we're going to get more pandemics, not less. And we're going to get more other stuff as well. We're going to have more floods, more fires, more storms, more hurricanes. Life is going to be defined by the interruptions to it. And so we need to have a system that is as good when there are interruptions as when it's not. And to have that, you have to move more of the decision-making capacity closer to the action. And then in education, that means who's closest to the action? It's teachers and schools. But you can't have everybody making their own decision with no reference to anybody else because you'll get inconsistency and incoherence. Things literally won't, won't make sense. So you have to have high capacity for local decision-making, but networked with other people. And we need to do that deliberately, not just accidentally. And there are all kinds of ways to bring this about. I think over the course of about the last 10 years, I've worked with, studied, supported, advised, and helped build about 7 or 8 different networks now in the UK. UK, in the US, in Canada, and in Europe. And when we build networks, they can't be clones of each other, but they all have to pay attention to a number of basic things. So if you're part of a network learning system, do you have access, resources, platforms to other people who can be good sources of advice, inspiration, ideas, is moral and emotional support in your teaching. Quite simple. So 40 years ago, at its best, if you worked in a really good school, you'd get that in your school. And now you need to get that not just in your school, but anywhere you can get it. And that might be in the country or it might be in the world. Part of what systems need to do is build platforms and networks that enable people to do that. Those might be across schools. They might be like they are in Scotland and Wales, across school districts. Districts. So you cluster school districts together so they don't actually learn from each other, but they help each other. They take responsibility for each other's problems and for each other's successes at the same time. When you're in a network, it's important early on that you don't just talk about things, but that you do things. If you just talk about things, eventually nothing will happen. We're all busy and you'll move on to something else. If you do things, if you plan a lesson together or a presentation together or a unit of work or your kids do peer reviews of each other's work, which is great for teenagers, by the way, because teenagers are much better, we've learned, at getting peer review from kids they don't have to sit next to every day rather than kids they do have to sit next to every day. So, so it's figure out early something you'll do that is of value, that'll have an impact, and that'll make you want to keep showing up in and connecting with the other people. You have to decide who's in and who's out because you can't have everybody. You have to decide how big you'll be and how fast you'll grow and how big you won't be and how fast you won't grow. And those, those have to be quite deliberate. If you're a pilot project, you have to figure out what's going to happen when the money's gone and how you'll sustain it. And in the best cases, people decide they'll sustain it themselves because it's of value to them. So they'll find money from other places. Places. You have to decide how much is in person, how much is, is online. Usually some blend of the two works. And the better a system gets, the more it will rely on these networks, not just to implement government policy, but really to start to drive what is the policy, what are the ideas. Because where do policies come from? Usually what people see at the front first, long before they appear in the minister's office. And the more, right, the more vibrant those networks are, the earlier they'll appear in the minister's office so that you can kind of create coherence amongst them.

You mean that education ministers aren't at the forefront of education innovation? Is that what you're saying?

They are.

What a surprise.

You know, what I often say to ministers is the first thing you need to understand about your job is that the teacher is much more powerful than the minister, because when the teacher closes their door, you've no idea what to do and you can't control control it. So if you begin from that understanding, you'll have a chance of success in your job.

Brilliant. Yeah, the idea of bubbling up the innovations and the change from where it's happening, the coalface or the grassroots, whatever.

Your job as a minister is to support that, but also to bring it together and to make sure— you know, an elected government mainly says we're going in this direction, we're not going in that direction— so to make sure it it's mainly moving in the direction that the country is trying to move and trying to go.

Yeah. And the other thing I thought was interesting about it was, and I spoke to Andreas Schleicher as well for the podcast recently, and he was talking about something similar, which is that kind of horizontal accountability within the system as well, rather than trying to keep some kind of top-down accountability or external standards and measures. Actually, you're trying to create accountability within the system system in that kind of horizontal challenge way. I thought it was interesting.

I'd say there's 3 kinds of accountability, actually 4, not 3. The first is yourself. So look in the mirror, be professional, and ask yourself every day, are you doing the most you can? Are you doing it with integrity? And are you doing it for the right reasons? And that's the first thing. And the second is what your student's telling you, what your kid's telling you, and what means do you have of knowing? And are those means deliberate, or do you just hope every so often somebody they'll write you a letter 10 years later saying, you know, you were the best teacher they ever had. But so they have very deliberate means of getting that feedback from your students. And that includes policy. So what we learned from Ontario, when I was a Premier in Ontario, they have a group every year of students they bring together who talk about what's happening to the policies. And they have an RSA kind of style animate person who comes in and draws it. And you can see year to year when you look at those drawings how the policy is shifting shifting at the level of the school in the eyes of the students, or not shifting. And that is really quite helpful. Third are your peers. What are you learning from your peers? What are your peers telling you that's sometimes a bit difficult? You know, great peers are like great brothers and sisters, will sometimes tell things you might not immediately want to hear, as well as ones that you do. And the job of a leader is to build a culture where that can happen. And then the last is what people think of from above. And it does matter. You do get corruption. You do get sexual harassment. You do get people who aren't up to the job. And so you do need that fourth thing as well. But it's really the last thing that needs to come into place once all the other three have not done their work.

Yeah. Amazing. Well, thank you. I think it's such— I personally feel it's such an important thing to have strong voices like yours with real strong beliefs out there in this landscape to help people navigate and, as you say, not always agree with, but sometimes to make them think. And I think absolutely brilliant, and such a privilege to be able to talk to you, and I really appreciate it. Thank you for your time. And yeah, it's been a wonderful pleasure to meet you. Thank you, Andy.

Thanks, Tim, and thanks for this podcast and putting yourself out there in the, in the public domain and bringing all these people to all the networks that you connect with. And, uh, hope to, uh, reconnect with you again at some point. Thank you. All the best.

Thank you, Andy. We hope you've enjoyed this episode. Please feel free to continue the dialogues with our guests, with us on our blog or on social media, or within your own networks.