High Performance Learning - A Conversation with Prof. Deborah Eyre

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It's quite unusual for people to do what I did, which is to say I've built a big part of my career in one place and now I'm going to reject it. If you're serious about saying that you respond to what the evidence is telling you, then sometimes you just have to know that, you know, just like in medicine, the treatment we've always been giving for this particular ailment, we were wrong.

Hi everybody, and welcome back to another episode of the Future Learning Design Podcast with me, your host, Tim Logan. This week I'm speaking with Professor Deborah Eyre, who is a global educational leader, academic researcher, and writer who helps good schools become world-class through a focus on student performance. Using her 25 years researching into how gifted students think and learn, she then created High Performance Learning with the aim of enabling all students to reach that same advanced performance. As well as being a widely published author, Deborah's career has included a variety of senior education roles both globally and in the UK, and she has advised governments and educational foundations in the UK, Hong Kong, South Africa, Saudi Arabia, the US, and Singapore. From 2010 to 2014, she was the Global Education Director for Nord Anglia Education, and prior to that served as the Director of the UK government's innovative National Academy for Gifted and Talented Youth. Deborah holds an honorary professorship at the University of Warwick and a professorship from Oxford Brookes University. You can connect with Deborah and High Performance Learning on their website or by using the social links in the show notes. Hi Deborah.

Hi, how are you?

I'm very well, how are you?

I'm good.

So, well, thank you very much for joining me. It's amazing to be able to speak to you. I'd love to start talking a little bit, maybe chronologically, about your background because I, as I understand it, your background is more in academia and working with educators in all sorts of capacities, but with a particular focus on giftedness and gifted and talented education.

Yes, sort of. It's true. I've worked in schools. I've worked and had leadership posts in schools. I've worked for local authorities. I worked in higher education for a big chunk of my life. And then I've worked for a global education company that owns international schools. And so I think I'm quite a sort of education hack really, in that I've been in all kinds of different parts of education. But the thing that binds it all together for me is I've had a kind of lifelong fascination with how people think and learn. And so right from early on, I got started in this whole business of trying to understand that and particularly how people get to be successful in thinking and learning. And so when I started thinking about that, what was sort of obvious was firstly that for some children in some schools, they just were kind of bored and there wasn't very much going on. And so in terms of becoming successful, there wasn't much in the way of opportunity to do really well. But I also thought, because that's what the literature told us, that it's only a subset of people who could get to do really well. But I was never really interested in the idea of, you know, different people. I was just interested in how success— what success looks like in a kind of abstract way. And as soon as I started researching into that, you know, some things emerged right from the get-go, which was that these people weren't all the same. If there were some sort of subset, they certainly weren't all the same. They were really different. Yeah. But over time I became increasingly convinced they weren't a subset, that actually when you look at how people get to be successful, there are things that happen in their lives, which are about the opportunities they get, the support that they get, their own personal drive and motivation, rather than what we always thought was that they had a certain amount of potential and they were fulfilling that potential.

Yeah.

So I think I had that hypothesis for a long time, but over time it just got strengthened to a point where in 2010, I just said it really publicly and said that, you know, I thought I thought far more people were capable of achieving highly, and I didn't know why we were rationing success. So the problem for me about gifted and talented education as a concept is it does ration success. It sort of says we choose a cohort and you're going to be successful, and other people, our decision about you is that you will never reach the same kind of starry heights. So what we know from the research is if you make that decision, they never will. Because you've just cut off the opportunities that would enable that to happen. You know, and in school, the most conventional way in which we do that is by setting. So once you're in the second set, you're never going to recover from it. And I don't care how much people say, well, you know, if somebody performed really highly in the second set, we put them in the top set. The reality in terms of the evidence is it doesn't happen very much.

Yeah.

And it doesn't happen because it's structurally inconvenient. And because by putting them in the upper set, you've got to put someone down. And the research kind of indicates that if you took the kind of bottom 6 of the top set and swapped them for the top 6 of the second set, you wouldn't have any problem. So all of that kind of suggests that that sort of structural grouping is kind of insecure in its own right, but it definitely stops people from doing well. And then finally, the kind of evidence about who gets picked. So if you're going to ration success, who gets picked to be successful? It's always the same people. So that means it doesn't matter which country you look at across the world, the minority ethnic group doesn't get picked. So disadvantaged youngsters are doubly disadvantaged because they don't make the cut. And that means, you know, from the point of view of someone like myself and lots of other people in the education system who want an equitable education system, we're kind of structurally disadvantaging the already disadvantaged. And there have been schemes around the world where they've tried to, you know, do gifted and talented cohorts of disadvantaged youngsters, but the success record isn't that strong. So all of that took me to this place where I just produced a think tank paper for one of the big think tanks in 2010. I said, look, here's the evidence base across the world. It's not just me, it's everybody that says far more people could achieve highly, and we should stop thinking about people in the old bell curve and ability groups. In fact, we should stop thinking about ability as a concept. We should be thinking about performance. What performance are you— what is your current level of performance? What would we like your performance to be? And how are we going to move from A to B? And so it's quite a simple idea, but it's quite a difficult thing for a school to move that tanker to get into a different space, really. That's kind of why I created High Performance Learning, was a mechanism to help schools do that. Because when I produced my think tank paper, It got two kind of responses. One was, well, this doesn't fit with what we're thinking at the moment because we're on this flight path arrangement whereby we identify people as early as possible and set them off down a set flight path. And what you're saying is that's wrong. And it is what I'm saying, it's wrong. But other people said it's quite an intriguing idea. You know, you've made the case really strongly with the evidence, but what would it actually look like? So high performance learning is that idea made real. But you know, it doesn't mean that you have to throw out everything you've done in the past. It's about building on what you've done in the past rather than ditching it. And I think education's sort of had too many of those sort of throw out all the old, bring in the latest fad that lasts 5 minutes, and then you're on to something else. This isn't about that. It's just saying the research tells us certain things, and if we're serious about wanting to do the best by the children and young people that we educate, then we need to pay attention to it.

Well, there you go. You don't need any more questions from me. That's it.

You said it all.

No, that's brilliant. I mean, I think that's fascinating because just going back a few steps there, what you said about rationing success, I think so. So you were looking at able students and gifted and talented and in your research, and then obviously with the Policy Exchange, and you were working for quasi-governmental agency on gifted and talented.

Yeah. So originally I was in the university sector working for Oxford Brookes, and we had a research center for able students, as we called it. And then the government developed a big new initiative, which they termed Gifted and Talented, and they set it up out of the University of Warwick. And I went to run that for them. So I had 5 years of doing that, which also provided an incredible sort of— for people with a kind of academic bent like me, an incredible research base.

Amazing.

Because I had a research team as part of that. So we could explore some of these kinds of, I suppose, what people had always said in terms of the orthodoxies about the possible. And it was kind of surprising in terms of what you found out.

Exactly. And that's, that's what was interesting in a way. You're, there's a slight irony in the fact that you're looking through this lens of gifted and talented, which is an absolute rationing of success. But actually your conclusion from that is that actually we should go in quite a radically different direction.

Yeah. And I think, you know, it's true to say, you know, I'm led by the evidence, but it's quite unusual for people to do what I did, which is to say, I feel a big part of my career in one place and now I'm going to reject it and do something else. And I spent the next sort of 3 or 4 years with people keeping asking me all over the world saying, will you come and advise us on our gifted and talented programs? And me saying, well, not really, because I've really kind of moved on there. So it's quite an unusual thing to do, but I genuinely think that if you're serious about saying that you respond to what the evidence is telling you, then sometimes you just have to know that, you know, just like in medicine, the treatment we've always been giving for this particular ailment, we were wrong. You know, we don't bleed people anymore, even though that's what we did do. We just have recognized that isn't the right answer. So I think it is quite hard, not just for me as a person to sort of make that switch, but to convince the rest of the world that what you're talking about now is where they should be moving to.

It's fascinating how kind of pervasive and entrenched bad ideas, in inverted commas, are in education. It's very difficult to— I mean, even this morning I saw another post about learning styles and, you know, how pervasive that is, even where the evidence base is so clear that it just doesn't make any sense. There's no valid basis for it, and it persists. I think that's interesting. But I also wanted to ask you structurally, because you talked a bit about structural conditions, which clearly are a huge part of the picture and very difficult to shift. But I was interested because the policy exchange paper was called Room at the Top, right? And then you also in High Performance Learning stuff talk about how to be top. And I just, I wondered at the kind of more meta level, perhaps, is there a structural condition there where we, we're rationing success by talking about, because clearly everyone can't get to the top. I mean, that, that just makes no logical sense. So I don't know, maybe you disagree with that.

Well, I think that I believe that everybody has it within themselves to be a high performer. I don't believe that that converts into everybody will become one because the journey is more difficult for some people than others, and there's, there's certain blocks in the road. But what I do think is that an education system should be committed to trying to get people as far on that journey as they possibly can.. And also when they leave a stage of education, for example, when they leave school, that a student should still believe that if they haven't fully made that distance yet, it's still there and possible for them in the future. And you know, if you want to say, well, what's the evidence that it could be? Well, you only have to look at things like the Open University or any other kind of access level course where people with zero qualifications suddenly come back at a later point in their life and decide that learning is now for them in a way it wasn't for them at a previous time. And if they want to want to do it, they can do it. So, but I think the kind of— we've had a kind of quite a paternalistic attitude in schools towards students where we're afraid that if we make things too demanding, that will be somehow damaging. But I don't think it is damaging, not if you believe as a student, if your mindset is, you know, I might be finding this really quite difficult now, but you know, if I keep at it and practice, practice, practice, then I'm going to make progress and ultimately I may conquer it. So the kind of question, if you thought of this in a sporting analogy, if I decided, you know, that I wanted to run the London Marathon, you know, right now I can tell you that's a pretty unprepossessing kind of idea.

For me too, yeah.

And I'd have to do rather more than the occasional walk and ramble that I'm apt to do. I'd have to, you know, set my mind to it and I'd have to know what I needed to do and I'd have to move beyond just thinking I'll get some trainers and do a bit of running. I have to be really planned and meticulous and careful about it. So Part of what we're trying to do in schools is to help teaching to become more planned and meticulous about building in individual students the things that make the difference in terms of cognitive success. And so from a student point of view, kind of knowing where you are on the pathway, you're a bit more relaxed about it even if it's not ideally where you'd like to be, if you feel it is just not yet rather than I'm just hopeless at that.

Yeah, I mean, I personally would completely agree with, with all of that. My only remaining question though is this kind of the scarcity principle around the, the top universities, because in my work with, you know, with schools, particularly international schools, you see this real kind of voracious competition for a tiny number of places. I mean, I was talking to somebody the other day about just an insane number of applicants for a small number of places in top universities. And as you've mentioned, the Open University and access courses, you know, these can be life-changing for people, but they're also not valued quite in the same way because everybody's after Ivy Leagues and Oxbridge. And, you know, you're sitting there in Oxford, I mean, people are fighting over those places. And I just wonder whether that narrative, that kind of scarcity principle and that rationing of success around those places is a bit of an issue. That's the context for the larger work.

Yes. I mean, it's quite a complicated question that, that in a way, I want to start by saying that I don't think the school system exists to help universities make easy choices about which students to select. I think those two things are separate, and in some countries in the world there's no connection between the two. You have to sit some sort of assessment which is set by the universities, or a national university qualification or something, which is how that decision is made. It's completely separate from schools, and universities forcing schools to operate in a way that it's beneficial for the university, I think, is not a good line of argument for the universities, even though that's what's happened traditionally in the past. But the kind of question of, you know, I do, I live in Oxford, I've got an attachment to St Hugh's College, and I could tell you for certain that everybody who comes for interview is perfectly good enough to come to the university, and there's an oversupply of high-quality candidates. And that is the case for all Russell Group universities. And I think the kind of the question within all of that is when we're talking about high performance, you know, that may be in relation to something like Russell Group universities, but it should and could be broader than that. So it could be high performance. I mean, we already value high performance in other contexts, going to a conservatoire or going to art college, or, you know, there is a broader panoply of what success looks like. But I think we could be even broader in that kind of sense, in terms of, you know, what high performance in different kinds of domains could be more widely valued by society than it is. And that means that you would have more people who are looking for excellence in their domain rather than just global excellence. And it's just that sense of global excellence which puts the pressure on places. But, you know, for systems, you know, it's kind of— if you think about, for example, the UK system, just to use this as an exemplar, that, you know, the UK system in terms of examinations, obviously Russians a number of top grades in any given year and moves the grade boundaries accordingly. And that is based on this kind of idea that somehow you should only have a finite number of people getting that kind of grade. But we don't apply that in other sorts of contexts. Like, we don't say only a certain number of people can pass the driving test. We say if you can perform at the level we want you to perform at, then we award you the driving test. So there's a line of argument that says that in terms of how examination systems should work in the education system in the We should reconsider whether we have to ration the numbers, and instead we should be more celebratory as the education system skills people, the whole population, to a higher level. Because at the moment we've got this kind of juxtaposition of saying, well, all low-skilled jobs are disappearing and AI is taking over the world, etc., etc. But by the way, we're still controlling how many of you can actually get the sorts of grades which would enable you to go on to do other kinds of things. So, so, and in terms of assessment, you know, Tim Logan, the assessment kind of guru, and I've had this discussion, and his kind of take on it is that assessment's a very blunt instrument. Basically, there's only two forms of assessment that are kind of really robust. One is a sort of yes/no, you passed or you didn't, and the other is to spot everybody on a very long spine, a bit more in a way like the American SATs, although there's some issues about that because it's a historic assessment which has been there for a very long time. But you know what we do in at the system level in education we find a pragmatic answer. I'm just saying that the pragmatic answer that's been there in the last half century is probably not fit for purpose for the future. And I don't think I'm the only person saying that. I'm just coming at it from a particular perspective. It's just not right for now. But I think part of the what's not right is that it is putting a cap on how many people can do well in whatever domains. And as I say, the entire university admissions and selection systems are sort of a bit of a different question, they need to figure out how to do that as a separate issue from just looking at the grades. Because when they started that process in the UK, there wasn't an oversupply of people coming forward.

No, good.

Now, now there's an oversupply, and not only that, they've got a different objective, which is to have greater diversity in the cohort that they select. So now they've pushed themselves into a kind of position where they've got to kind of consider the whole idea of prioritizing people and, you know, kind of creating these ideas about if you come from a particular kind of school, you get extra marks. And all of that, which I think they're just tying themselves up in knots. The system needs a rethink.

No, I would totally agree. And I wanted to ask you, I mean, you've said it already in a way in the earlier answer about the choice of the word performance. And I think in a way that is the logical conclusion of what you've just said with the driving test as a good analogy. There is a kind of a logical conclusion for where the assessment structures and systems should go if you take that down the line of performance and meeting a certain level of mastery in that performance, irrespective of other people next to you or in front of you, or who happen to get there first or happen to have a, you know, an easier starting point to get there.

Yeah, I do. I mean, it is very deliberate, as you've picked up the word performance, and we, when we're working with schools, that's one of the things that we ask schools to do, which is to stop talking about ability, having ability groups, just the whole concept of you being in one box or somebody else being in another box, and instead just focus on the performance at the particular time. And in a way of sort of explaining that a bit more, when I first started teaching long ago, we used to talk about some children as being naughty children, and that now sounds really, really alien. Because what we then went on to agree is that it's not the child that we're criticising, it's the behaviour. So now we talk about, I don't like to see that behaviour. And so we've separated it, the behaviour from the person. And in a way, that's what I'm saying is the same thing. Instead of labelling people as being, you know, you're one of our most able, or you're one of our special educational needs, or whatever, what you need to be saying is that the performance level is this level of performance at the moment. And that that does in no way is a particularly strong indicator of what future performance might look like. Because we've also tied ourselves up into this kind of conundrum whereby we're now predicting. And, you know, I do think that those sort of predictive assessments are valuable. And in fact, you know, there's a time in my career where I spent a long time trying to get NFER to produce them because I felt there was nothing which enabled schools to look forward. But now it's almost like we've become data obsessed. So It's kind of like the student, Year 7, the student comes in, they sit the test, they get their predicted grades, and if they're there or thereabouts by the time they do their IGCSEs, then we're all happy. But actually, that's just— if you, if you deconstruct that for a minute, they sit a predictive test, the algorithm of which was created across tens of thousands of people sitting that same test at a similar time. So the very first thing you could kind of say is that there are two factors in any situation that you might think about. One is you've got a given school our school is probably, you know, not your average school. It's a much better school than the majority. So, you know, there's a sort of factor that says, well, how do we take account of the fact you're in our school? And then secondly, you know, you're not just anybody, you're an individual person and you've got something to say in all of this as a person. So you've got control over your own destiny. And if you choose to work hard, you'll probably outperform that prediction. And if you choose to slope off and go to a lot of parties, you maybe won't even get to that prediction. Yeah, but even at the simplest level, that entire dialogue is a bit flawed. But, you know, I think they're useful in the sense of saying, well, you know, if things just jog along in the way you might expect, this is probably what would be the outcome. But we're not satisfied with that. You know, you personally could do better than that, and we as a school are not satisfied just to be in the mediocre. We're here to make a difference. We're in the brain-building game here and we're good at it and we're going to go further. So I think one of the things about all of this, which is incredibly positive and why you get really strong wellbeing in the— with this kind of an approach in school is because, you know, in, in research terms, it's in the constructionist kind of paradigm. So you're building forward. And that means that it's students feel positive about themselves. And teachers feel positive about what might be possible. So instead of, you know, kind of thinking, well, I'm teaching that particular student, they've always found this difficult, they're always going to find it difficult, it's inevitable, they're kind of thinking they're finding it difficult now, but let's look at what we can do to break down those particular barriers and see if we can make more progress. So it's the sense of optimism, which I think, you know, just makes a more comfortable and positive culture in schools rather than, you know, we've got a set of predictions and either you're hitting your predictions, Mrs. Jones, or you're not. And that's, you know, somehow you've done your job well or you've not. I think it's some framing all of that in a different kind of way.

Absolutely. Yeah, no, I completely agree. And I, what you've said there, I mean, you used the word culture and referring to contextual conditions really. And many of these metrics are context-free, they've pulled out of context. And as you said, that child sitting that test in Year 7. I mean, who knows what was the weather like on that day? How were they feeling? You know, had they had just some bereavement in their family? You know, there are obviously an innumerable number of contextual conditions that you can't go there, because as you said earlier, you need some level of pragmatism to get something to work. And I had an interesting conversation with Sandra Milligan from University of Melbourne recently about utility. And, you know, we end up trusting educational metrics when they're useful. And I think that's a really important thing. It has to be, as you say, the flight path. If it's useful for a school, then it will persist. But for me, that context is so important. And as you're talking about optimism and the kind of language that teachers might be using in a school, and that sense of the culture around teaching and learning that emerges out of the contextual conditions and the choices that everybody's making, it's difficult to kind of identify the impact of that, but you can see it. I'm sure you see it in your schools. Probably a huge part of what makes the real difference in raising levels of performance.

Yeah, because we measure with our schools the sort of hypothesis is, first of all, you need to change the mindset of both staff and students about the idea of, you know, it could be possible that everybody could come out of the school performing highly. That's possible. And that's the objective we're trying to work towards. And it's not that you've failed if you don't, it's just you've, you're still on your journey. So first of all, you've got to get that. And then the second kind of piece is that that causes all the professionals in the school to work in a different kind of way because they're, they're traveling with greater optimism and not creating, you know, 3 sets of worksheets and giving them to different, different sets of people. And what they're doing is saying, we're all going to master this sort of more demanding and put in the structural support that's kind of necessary. But you also get a different response from the students because they've now got this kind of belief that it's it's buried in there somewhere that they could do well, they're more likely to give it a go and take a chance and not be too concerned if it doesn't work out. So they're better placed to take the kind of risks, you know, that we've all said that good teaching and learning means that students take risk. But you, they can't take risks in a vacuum. They've got to take risks in the context of kind of feeling safe to do so. And when you get that dynamic working in an interactive way, then you start to see real step-change shifts in terms of student performance because, you know, they're getting— the teacher's getting increasingly ambitious about what they think that student might be able to do, the student's getting more and more confident about giving it a go. There'll be some setbacks along the way, but they're kind of okay with that, learn from that, self-regulate a bit, move forward. So for everybody, they're kind of improving their personal best over time in a way that is satisfying from all sides. It's satisfying for the student, but it's satisfying for for the teacher too, because the teacher's suddenly seeing something in that student that they haven't seen before. And for everybody as a teacher, that's what gives you the greatest pleasure, when a student surprises you and does something you thought, you know, I would never have thought it would be that student that said that thing. And that's why it makes it all worthwhile. So, you know, setting up the dynamic to make that more likely, it's a kind of virtuous circle. And over time, you know, students they get more confident and make more progress. And when you look at, you know, because my background, as we said at the beginning, comes into understanding fully how people who are successful become successful, that is part of what they do, is that when they're introduced to something and they can't see how to do it immediately, I mean, there is a bit of a fork in the road. Everybody is when that happens, and it often happens in exams. You get a question and you think, I don't really think I can answer this question. Well, the people who are successful is when they're faced with that fork in the road, they don't just say, well, we didn't do that, I can't answer that question, I'm done for. But what they say is, goodness, I can't answer that question, what am I going to do? Oh, I know, let me look at again, it's a little bit like something we once did in something. And maybe, you know, if I kind of try that one, you just apply that and see what happens. And those risk-takers are definitely the people who do well in exams because 50% of the time they'll be right. Whereas if you just, you know, close down and said, you know, I can't even begin, then you don't get that 50% benefit. So there's a sort of feeling sufficient, and we call that intellectual confidence, which is different from social confidence.

I've also heard you refer to it as being cognitively enterprising.

Yeah, exactly.

You've taken this notion of being entrepreneurial and adaptive and all of those things that come with that into the cognitive domain to not give up, you know, keep moving forward, trying different things, seeking patterns, recognizing is this is a bit like a previous situation and how, you know, so using different strategies. That's interesting.

Yeah. And I think that's, you know, it doesn't mean that I'm totally against other forms of approaches that are around in the learning sciences at the moment, like, you know, retrieval theory, those kinds of things. They can all be supportive. In this, but what you need is the learner who can make use of it rather than the learner who is sort of dependent upon the teacher telling them how they should interpret their learning rather than them having their own kind of toolkit for interpreting their learning. And that's one of the things that, you know, I think High Performance Learning does is it provides a language for teaching and learning which enables everybody to be explicit about what they're thinking and doing. So teachers can be explicit and students can be explicit in their responses.. And it's interesting that, I mean, in almost every domain that anybody ever works in, you need a technical language because it's the way in which you get that precision about what you're really trying to express. So having a kind of technical language in cognition, it just really helps that whole discussion and debate that goes on in classrooms, in schools all the time, you know. And I think one of the things we get back from schools is that's one of the most powerful things, is that it just allows people to talk to each other, you know, whether we're talking about, you know, the early years people are talking to sixth form teachers or, you know, teachers talking to students or students talking to their parents or parents talking to their children's teachers. It's just everybody knows what they're talking about. Unlike most things which are kind of really beneficial, it's a very simple idea. It's just that good ideas are always— they're obvious when you hear them.

Exactly. But often they're not done with fidelity and with such kind of persistence. And I think you're absolutely right. The language, the shared language allows you to move forward more quickly because you have a shared platform on which to stand without over-talking and talking past each other and missing each other. If you've got a shared set of language, that creates a stronger set of cultural and contextual conditions to allow people to move forward more quickly.

Yeah, and also that's one of the reasons why, in terms of the kind of how did I decide to introduce high performance learning, as it were, why I took the view that this shouldn't be a program, it's a holistic kind of an approach that the school adopts to underpin the way it works. And why is because if you've got that language for teaching and learning going on in the maths department but they're using some other language in the history department, from the, from the point of view of the student, that's much less compelling and it's confusing. So if you get the same language across the entire institution, It seems very obvious and straightforward for students. And so, well, I think there's two problems with sort of traditional programs in schools from my experience. One is that they tend to be inflexible and therefore they work in some contexts but not in others. And the other is that they're located in a very specific part of the school rather than pervading the school. And this kind of, you know, way of thinking about teaching and learning needs to pervade the entire school. Sometimes I talk about it as becoming the DNA of the school. This is just how we think about things, how we do things here. And if you ask me, you know, kind of how do I see that developing, you know, I started to do this because I want to see a rethinking of the way schooling works, and you have to break in somewhere. And decided to do it starting from the bottom up with schools as opposed to systems because it needs that ownership and advocacy within the institution to make it work. But I kind of hope that once that's sort of established at sufficient scale, that actually practice creates policy rather than the other way around. So in other words, policy reflects successful practice rather than being made in a vacuum. Because my experience of doing this sort of gifted and talented stuff for government is that once government gets hold of something and creates a policy, the way in which it does its measurement metrics reduces everything to something really mechanistic. So suddenly, you know, everything I was interested in about teaching and learning and how all that works is all sidelined in favor of everybody has to create a sort of a register of the people who— and we don't care how you create it, just create a register. And then those people get special things and we don't really care what's in the special things so long as we can say they've got some special things. And all of that makes it too crude to have any kind of effectiveness at all. So I really think we need self-improving schools and we need schools who take ownership for it. And we've got enough out there, and especially in the international school sector, we've got some fantastic fantastic school leaders and really kind of courageous and innovative and not into the space of doing ridiculous things, but not afraid to sort of say what's been done in the past isn't necessarily going to be right for the future. And they're ideally placed because often they're in the school that hasn't necessarily got that much longevity, and there isn't that kind of idea that we've been doing this like this for 50 years.

Yeah, and there's a very particular context again that they're working in internationally, nationally, locally, in that particular country wherever they are. I just, I would love to come back to it. So you've said a couple of things that I'd love to pick up on. The, the idea of, because obviously you're quite a broad church of schools, you've got some very elite private schools within the group, and then you've also got a lot of UK-based maybe academy schools, or, you know, so different socioeconomic backgrounds, some quite deprived areas, schools there. So you've got a really interesting mix of cohorts and situations. So there's that I'd love to pick up on in terms of how you see the role of those two players, if you like, the private and the public, but also the idea of school-level autonomy within the framework, if you like, because as you said, it's— you've talked about it as a scaffold or a framework rather than a framework.

Yeah.

Yeah, to give schools the flexibility to implement in a way that works for their context. Maybe we could start with that, if you just talk a little bit about how does that work. So how much can you see that it's a high-performance learning school, and how different might you see different schools? And then if we could then go on to perhaps the difference where you see the roles of the private and the public sector in, you know, making change.

So in terms of what would you see, And I think it's also, what would you hear? Yeah, because when you hear the students speaking, they speak in this language of confidence about themselves and about their position and their situation. And you'll see the signaling of everybody can, everyone can, is evident in the school in terms of both using the HPL kind of language. And some schools, and especially schools I'd say here in the Middle East, who spend quite a lot of money on what their physical infrastructure looks like, they'll have these built into things like the staircases or other ways in which they make it very much visible all the time. But if you're in a different kind of school, you might have it in reception, but it's there, it's present. But you also see it in just being referred to all the time in lessons, but in a very natural kind of way. So you see it from the way in which teachers deliver their But interestingly, you hear it from the students in their responses. So they'll use the phrases, you know, they'll say something in response to something that says, you know, 'Well, actually, it's not obvious. I think we need to think more flexibly about this.' And that flexible thinking is, you know, kind of one of the things that you're looking for. So they're just using it quite naturally in the way that they talk about what they do. And even very young children do it. Something like self-regulation, you teach them the technical terms, term. And you might say, well, they— that's much too difficult for them. Well, I don't believe that. You know, I believe that if you can learn all the names of dinosaurs, you can learn the word self-regulation. And basically, but what you need to understand is that, you know, I do it, I think about it, I think about how I could do it better. But how do you make that happen in a school? Well, you know, your teacher just asks you sometimes to stop and says, all right, we've got to the end of the lesson now, we're all going to take 5 minutes to think about how did we do that ask and whether we could have done it differently. And, you know, they could make that a bigger feature. They could say, well, okay, they could call on different students to talk about, you know, well, how did you approach it? And then, you know, ask people, now think about, do you think the approach you used was as good as so-and-so's? Do you think it was better, worse? You know, it's not hard. It's just that it has to become part of the kind of routine. So you'd see it, you'd hear it, and particularly you hear the kind of the not yet type of language. Around the school in different forms, in different ways, as well as a celebration of both progress and success. Because what you're saying is, is it's about progress, but it's also about progress in the context of knowing what really good would look like. So the two things together, rather than just— progress is always retrospective, you know, you're doing better than you did last time. But, you know, people like Dylan Willems are really clear about this, that, you know, you need to identify what's the next step. So how do you get next step? And I would also say you also need to know what— if you were doing it optimally, this is what I'd expect, because otherwise you haven't got the big picture. You're sort of working in the dark. And in terms of, you know, you— what you asked about working with different kinds of schools, I think this is something that any school can adopt, but it's more difficult for some schools in some circumstances. So in other words, when you introduce it into a school, one of the reasons why it needs to be flexible. It's because your clientele are different in different schools. So, you know, we could be having a talk with an international school where, for example, 70% of the students are Thai, in which case the conversation we would be having around this would be how does this map and hinge onto parents' expectations who come from a particular cultural background where we're saying some things that they might find quite strange and counterintuitive. With, because the question of high performance was not going to be a problem with those families. They expect that, that, that's what they think school is for. And so that's not going to be an issue. The issue is that what they mean by high performance is kind of passing the test on subject knowledge. So broadening the idea about what it means to be educated, to be able to deal with the current, um, complexities in the workplace and in is part of the education piece that you'd have to do. Whereas if I contrast that with a school in— we have a group of schools that are really inspirational group in Leeds in England, very difficult and challenging circumstances. And actually last week we were having a discussion about in their adoption phase next term, we're coming up to how they're going to talk about this with parents. And they've got parents who by and large had a very unsatisfactory experience at school themselves, and they don't like school or feel positively about school. The parents who don't particularly have high aspirations for what's possible, they expect that their children are going to work within a short distance of where their family lives. They don't think they're going to go across the other side of the world and do something. But on the other hand, they do want the best for their child. So the whole conversation is a different kind of conversation, which is around— it isn't the case that the next generation has to replicate the previous generation, you know. Things are moving fast and there's all kinds of possibilities here, and we're working as a school to open those doors for your students in, in a different way in the future. It doesn't mean they're dismissing you or the past. It means that they're looking at possibilities for the future. And in terms of why, for us, having that kind of range of schools is part of what I believe is really important is that, as these lead schools said, is one of the attractions for us is that you work with some really top schools internationally because we want to have a look under the bonnet at what they do.

Yeah.

Because that's obviously what we need to replicate in our school, but normally we don't get much of a chance to see it. So I think the fact that you're all on that kind of joint mission to work in this particular kind of way, I think, means that you've got something in common. So if you visit another school or you have a Teams call with another school, it's not like it's sometimes been in the past where it's a bit of a kind of what I might refer to as a National Trust tour. You know, you go and you ooh and you aah and you say, oh, they've got a jolly nice swimming pool and oh, that's very interesting, but it's all a bit unsophisticated. Whereas here you're talking about we're trying to achieve the same things and we're using these particular kinds of mechanisms and we've got this, we've run into this kind of problem, we've got this kind of barrier and have you got any kind of ideas? And basically the ideas broadly transfer from one context to another fairly easily. It might be that the receiving school is thinking, yes, well, we couldn't do it in quite that way, but I could see how it could work in context. It's just that they might have to adapt and adjust a bit, but broadly the idea is still a good idea. And so for us, you know, for us in terms of the high performance learning kind of movement, I think we started with some of the schools where the soil is most fertile, and we still want to work with them, and because they come up with some amazing stuff and they're pushing the boundaries of the art of the possible. But we've also begun to work more fully with schools for whom this is more difficult because they're starting in a more difficult context and figuring out what's the journey look like for them. And in short, they need more support and help to make it, and it's a slightly slower journey, but, but that doesn't mean that they can't get there. You know, that's what we believe of them too, is we believe everybody's got it. Everybody can. So even these schools, if they've got the appetite, the thing that schools that work with us tend to have in common is they have leadership teams, some of whom are very mature and some less mature, but they're all really focused on trying to do something great. So they're kind of ambitious about it all. And even the schools that are, you know, the absolute top schools, they are relentlessly dissatisfied. It's like, 'Yes, we're doing that right at the moment, but we still want to go further.' And so for, for them, our kind of idea that everybody— or the theory that everybody could be a high performer— means we don't have a school in the world where everybody comes out of that school as a high performer. So there's still a job of work to do, even for the very, very best schools, and quite a big job of work.

It's interesting that what you were saying about the learning being built into the kind of network, I think that's really interesting with a diverse network. Like, you've got to be able to build learning learning, mutual learning into that, but in a way that, as you said, sometimes the schools who have, I would say, just more constraints, maybe they're in the public sector with government constraints and they're in an area where just the families have more constraints, everybody has more constraints. That's just a different starting point to someone in a very elite private school with lots of money, lots of high aspiration, high, just a higher starting point and trying to encouraged that one is not better than the other. One just has a different starting point from the other and different constraints from the other, but actually both can learn from each other just as much without getting into this kind of paternalistic or colonial kind of idea that, well, this is a top school which has got an amazing 50-meter swimming pool and therefore they must be doing things better than us.

No, I totally agree with you, and, and, you know, I think that's— it's much more the kind of professional dialogue that we should have is that because even the, even these really top schools have got their own constraints. It's just exactly, they're just a bit more subtle in terms of what they are. But I think the top and bottom of this for me is I just don't think that education should be satisfied with the quality that it's had in the past. I think the long and short is that human capital tells us that people, and we know it's because of neuroplasticity and it really helps us to understand why this is possible. But all the psychology evidence shows us it's definitely possible that we could be educating far more people to a much higher level. And therefore, you know, it's a bit like, when are we going to act? You know, act now. And so my contribution to that is simply to say I kind of codified the known knowledge and tried to put it into a form to enable schools to act. And I just want more schools to act because I think for all of us, well, it's a bit of a no-brainer really that this is a better way to work. And it's not that it's sort of unique to me. I mean, I hope that sometime in the future you won't even have that kind of title because it'll just be the way we do things. But we have to get from A to B, and that's kind of—

Yeah, it's great stuff. There's loads more I'd love to ask you, but we're rapidly running out of time. But I just wanted to introduce one little idea which I just thought I thought was really nice when I read one of your papers about structured tinkering. I don't know whether that's a term you use anymore. I just thought that was a really nice description of what we're trying to do. Like we're tinkering, but we're not doing it in an ad hoc, you know, chaotic way. We're doing it in a, as much as a structured context and way as we can.

Yeah, because so it's, I borrowed, well, I reworked something from Karl Popper, really the philosopher where he says that, you know, tinkering is the best way to create change in the social sciences, that the big structural change never really occurs. It's just small-level tinkering over time all adds up to something significant. But I think that, you know, it's not random tinkering, it's this structured tinkering. In the same way as Anders Ericsson would say, you know, you need to practice, but it needs to be deliberate practice. So from a teaching point of view, I think you're doing this structured tinkering and you're just sort of playing with your practice in a structured way to make adjustments over time. And as you do that, you know, it just gets stronger and stronger, but it's not like you have to do— make this change within 3 weeks or whatever. And yeah, I think people continue to tinker. And the other reason that I really feel that's an important way to think about it is because all the and says that most people decide how they teach within the first 3 years of their teaching and they don't change it much. So the most you're going to get is some tinkering. Even if people say they've changed completely, they probably haven't when you dig a bit deeper. So it's just human nature that we find something that works. And if you want us to change it, we're not going to change a lot and we have to feel it's beneficial change.

Yeah. The tinkering has to come. I think that the drive for the tinkering has to come from the individual themselves, right? You know, the idea of it's not really tinkering if you're being told to tinker and told how to tinker. It's, that's not tinkering. And so I think there's something about intrinsic, the drive there that's built into that concept, which is nice.

Yeah. I know. I'm really pleased that you picked up on that. Cause I haven't, I haven't talked about it very much recently, but I did notice that Alan Harrelson had referenced it in one of his papers, which was really nice. And I think I might bring it a bit more to the fore. Because I genuinely do believe that's the methodology.

Yeah, and I think, as a slight aside, I think the increasing awareness of how to work within complexity and complex adaptive systems, that idea of structured tinkering is a really resonant one there because linear cause and effect doesn't exist, let's face it, not really, not in complex systems, so therefore we need to do something else and sometimes tinkering or parallel tinkering to see what works and what doesn't, but not in an ad hoc way, you know, looking around you, understanding the context, being as structured as possible, but trying a couple of things. That's just good practice in a complex system. And so I think it's becoming more resonant again, that idea. So yeah, let's rejuvenate that concept.

Yeah, that's really good. That's really interesting for me. That's good.

Oh, thank you, Deborah. No, really, really interesting. And you know, I'd love to continue the conversation, but I hope, as you say, this kind of call to act, just to actually do something, is just, is really important. So yeah, amazing. Thank you so much for the conversation.

My pleasure. My pleasure. I'm really delighted to have been asked.

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