Innovating to Close the Disadvantage Gap - A Conversation with Joysy John

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

Just looking at closing the education disadvantage gap is not enough because we know that if kids are not fed, they can't focus on learning. If they have mental health or wellbeing challenges, they can't learn. So I think the coming together of health, education, and employability skills would be crucial to really make sure that we are shifting the needle when it comes to the disadvantage gap.

Hi everybody and welcome back. Today I'm speaking with Joyzi John, which was a great opportunity to find out more about the work of an amazing entrepreneur, digital consultant, advisor, and speaker. Joyzi is a global connector and collaborator committed to inspiring others, especially women and those from low-income backgrounds. Until very recently, Joyzi was the Director of Education at NESTA and led their work across innovation programs, research, and investment. She's the former Chief Industry Officer of ADA, the National College for Digital Skills, where she led the college's industry engagement and ADA Advance online learning website. Prior to this, Joisy headed up international strategic development for EF Learning Labs, led business development for Emerge Venture Lab, and advised Level 39 Technology Incubator based in Canary Wharf. Previously, Joisy helped launch 3 nonprofits focused on education: Flow, Stair Education, and the Startup Leadership Program. Joisy has over a decade of experience in technology, business management, strategy, and sales roles with JPMorgan and Morgan Stanley in Singapore, the US, and the UK. She was also the youngest person selected into the Future Leader Development Program at JPMorgan Chase. Do connect with Joisy through the social links in the show notes, and you'll also find links to Joisy's website at joisyjohn.com.

Hello. Hi, Tim.

How are you? I'm good. How are you?

Thank you for the opportunity.

Perfect. So it strikes me just from seeing your work and the amazing things that you've been doing with Nesta and elsewhere, that ensuring that all learners thrive in the future and these kinds of ideas of equity and inclusion and disadvantage gap, they really seem to be a big part of your purpose professionally and maybe personally. So I'd love you to say a bit more about that, if that's correct. But also, you know, how maybe that has been shifted or clarified for you during obviously the recent events over the last 6 months with the pandemic and lots of reflections.

You know, we all know that education hasn't evolved to meet the needs of the 21st century, and there's so much research that, you know, there's a huge disadvantage gap, and that is because of gender, race, socioeconomic disadvantage, and those gaps over the last few years, people have worked really hard to close. But then with the pandemic, the situation has just become worse. So we know that the pupils who are missing school, the ones in the poorest areas have been hit the most. And if you look at access to technology, you know, 34% of students aged between 5 to 16 do not have their own device. And if you think about even the kids who are on free school meals, that's one way of measuring disadvantage. That whole notion of disadvantage disadvantage has changed with economic uncertainty, with the parents being put on furlough or losing their jobs. So there's been a huge challenge when it comes to having access to learning during the school lockdowns. And then, you know, access to technology is just one of it. But then the other element around parental engagement, we know that those who are well off have parents who are more engaged, or they're able to pay for private tuition. So I think these gaps around the way education happens, You know, the way if you look at what's happening in state schools and compare it with independent schools, we know that, you know, with the narrowing of the curriculum, especially in England, a lot of learners in the state schools are missing out on cultural and developmental activities compared to their well-off peers who can go for arts and sports and drama and other activities. So I would say we had a clear sense of Yes, there is, you know, the education system is failing. Yes, there is disadvantage gap, but during the pandemic, it has just become worse and it's been the poorest who've been hit the most. So one of the things we've been looking at is how do we improve the use of technology and how do we improve the way it's being used in schools and colleges? But also we believe that, you know, technology alone is not going to solve the problem. We know that it's about how the technology is used in that specific context.

Absolutely.

So being able to support teachers and improving their capability as well to be able to work in an agile way and adapt to the environment. So over the lockdown, we've done quite a lot of research and looked at how we can change our own programs so that we are able to support the most disadvantaged and those with special needs.

Yeah, amazing work. I mean, it's a phenomenal statistic really, isn't it? A third of students 5 to 16 not having access really brings it home, and especially when it's so accentuated in a lockdown situation when you really suddenly are relying on that technology. And do you see—

It's not just the technology element, right? It's also the food and the emotional security. It's, you know, it's wellbeing and it's having a safe space. So when we realized that schools were not just there to transmit knowledge, it was, you know, they were providing pastoral support, psychological support, food. And those are the things that have really come to the fore during this lockdown.

That's interesting. Do you, do you actually think that people have had a bit of a shift in their attitude towards those things? Definitely, we have always had this idea that it is a transmission of knowledge, but do you think the pandemic has prompted a shift in the perception of the role of the educator to focus more on those ideas of wellbeing and things?

Absolutely. I think teachers and school leaders have gone above and beyond their role as an educator. In fact, you know, some of the stories that I heard were where they were providing online bereavement support because, you know, the child had lost their relative or a parent or, or teacher as well in some cases, and they were delivering food because, you know, government's free school meal vouchers didn't really work. There were some delays and then there were technical problems. So the schools have gone above and beyond in terms of providing food delivery, providing bereavement support, really reaching out to those who are most disengaged. So for example, in some areas, schools that were set up for online learning, they were able to reach about 85% of their learners, But the last 15%, you know, those who didn't have a device or those who are from vulnerable or disadvantaged families, they realized that they had to try different things, you know, printing out things and delivering it so that they can continue with their learning or sending them messages or calling them up. So teachers have really gone above and beyond. And I think it puts a huge strain on them as well. It's not just the children and the parents who've been impacted by this pandemic. You know, the teachers have, have just worked extremely hard to make sure that they limit the learning loss.

Yeah, absolutely. I like that idea that there's almost been a, hopefully a refocusing that a school is a real hub of a community. I mean, such a, plays such an essential role in providing community services in all sorts of ways. I mean, they've always been that to a certain extent, but I think more in certain communities than others maybe. But I'm in Dubai right now and some of the schools here are, you know, they're 5,000 children. In one school. And you just think maybe we've lost that sense of the school as a hub of community when we get to that size of school. I don't know. Interesting. Obviously most of your work is UK-focused, right? But you also engage with the wider, more global developments because of the digital divide and many of these issues around disadvantage and social exclusion.

So the work was mainly focused on UK, but we would work with partners around the world to try and learn best practice and see what's happening. And, you know, there are examples of amazing stories and best practices from around the world where people have tried to help learners during this time through the use of sort of traditional technology, so to speak, as well, right? Like TV or radio or WhatsApp, because in some cases people don't have that Wi-Fi connectivity or that laptop.

It's true. I spoke with Doreen Kessie a while ago on the podcast, who works for Obongo, and they absolutely across Africa are using those, the available technologies, you know, so they're using television, they're using radio, and actually that's such an interesting kind of edtech ecosystem that actually isn't just all flashy, shiny devices. It's some of the really old analog stuff as well. That's such an interesting way to pull it all together. So just to clarify for people who may not know and may not be so UK-focused, because a lot of the listeners are all around the world. So when you say we, we're talking about Nesta, right?

I should clarify that because I'm no longer with Nesta. So, you know, in my role at Nesta, which is an innovation foundation based in the UK, we were working in improving education system within the four countries of the UK. 20 years ago, it was set up as the National Endowment for Science, Technology, and the Arts. And, you know, about 12 years ago, it became an independent charity and just as Nesta.

Perfect. Then that kind of leads on to one of my other questions I wanted to ask you. In terms of the idea of the innovation that's happening generally, I mean, pre-pandemic and now of course, even more turbocharged in post-pandemic, mid-pandemic, wherever we are right now, I'm not quite sure. What do you see actually are the role of those kinds of organizations, which are non-governmental, but kind of hubs of innovation and, you know, agents of change perhaps within that space?

I think the innovation foundations, philanthropic organizations, and, you know, non-governmental agencies have a huge role to play in making sure that education system actually evolves and adapts to the new reality, to the new world. And I would say 3 big things that, you know, foundations or innovation organizations should be looking at. First of all, it's about capacity building alongside funding. So a lot of organizations would give grants to spur innovation, but it's also about building capacity in the system and really looking at how do you make sure that this is sustainable beyond the grant fund. The second thing would be around co-creating solutions and really getting voices from the front line. So teachers or school leaders who are actually facing the problem have a better understanding of what's needed. So working with them to create the solutions that are needed. And finally, I think it's about systems thinking and not just focused on one-off interventions in a very narrow segment or sector, because typically what happens is that most of these organizations focus on either early years or primary or secondary or further education or HE, but you need to really think about it from cradle to grave. You know, it's the whole holistic nature and the systems thinking that is needed because within education itself, you need that full pipeline. But also, if you think about other elements, especially when it comes to the most disadvantaged, right, like just looking at closing the education disadvantage gap is not enough because because we know that if kids are not fed, they can't focus on learning. If kids can't see properly, you know, they can't learn. If they have mental health or wellbeing challenges, they can't learn. So I think the coming together of health, education, and employability skills will be crucial to really make sure that we are shifting the needle when it comes to the disadvantage gap.

Yeah, it is interesting. They're a kind of slightly unique node in the system because they're, as you say, I mean, they're not policymakers and they're not independent agents like schools or universities or whatever, but they have quite a unique position to be able to survey the broad landscape and then actually pull people together, but they also have an influence so they can actually leverage people within the system quite well. Do you feel that they, I mean, did you at Nesta have a lobbying capacity? Did it feel that there was actually people within government who would actually listen to the experts at Nesta?

Yes, absolutely. Because, you know, as an innovation foundation, we would work very closely in convening people, bringing key stakeholders together, but also influencing government. And we worked closely with the Department for Education in shaping the EdTech strategy and working with the government in running innovation programs around addressing the key challenges in education using technology.

And one of the projects I was really interested in was the skills taxonomy. That looked like a phenomenal piece of work.

Yeah. So one of the problems is that there's a huge skills shortage and that costs the UK about £2 billion a year in higher salaries, you know, recruitment costs and temporary staffing bills, but it also impacts UK's ability to grow. So if we can fix the skills gap, there's a huge opportunity to improve productivity. And Skills Taxonomy is basically a way of understanding what skills are needed and what are the subcategories within each roles or each category. And usually the way skills taxonomy works is that it's created by experts. And by the time the consultations are done and people have agreed to the terminology and the hierarchy of skills and roles, it's already outdated. So what we did is that we at Nesta looked at 41 million UK job adverts that were collected between 2012 and 2017. And that data was provided by Burning Glass. And by creating an automated skills taxonomy, it basically gave a better picture of demand and supply. And, you know, what are the skills that employers are looking for? What's the value of those skills? And by having this skills taxonomy that's real-time, it not only saves cost and time, but it also helps policymakers, educational service providers really understand how the need for skills is changing and how they can adapt their training provision in order to make sure that the skills gap can be closed.

Yeah. Wow. To create that kind of responsiveness in the system. Amazing. And did you see any trends over time in the shifting proportions of different skills that were lacking?

Yeah. So some of the things that we already knew in terms of like admin skills, and those are the kind of skills that were seeing a huge decline and things that were seeing an increase in demand from employers were things around creativity, systems thinking, and, you know, communication skills. And we saw that there's been an increase in demand for digital skills as well. And the fact that not all digital skills are equal. So payroll, you know, just maintaining records, those require digital skills, but they are not in as much demand or valued the same as maybe digital skills that require animation or creating some new piece of technology. So there's a whole range of digital skills, and it's important to understand which of those are more in demand versus which of those are seeing a decline in demand.

Yeah, it's a big category. I guess if you just talk about digital skills, that doesn't necessarily give you the information you need. Interesting. One of my interests personally is, is the idea of bringing Agile into education, because I can see a lot of, as a kind of learning management system, there's a lot of interesting connections there. And I was really interested in the project you did with Mark Brundy. Looking at kind of using an agile approach, you know, the idea of a minimum viable product to then provide very quickly in the, in the context of the pandemic to then provide an additional service that hadn't necessarily been provided before. Could you say a bit more about that one?

So earlier this year during the lockdown, Nesta funded a pilot that was spearheaded by Shireland Collegiate Academy and Glu to bring together various different partners and to help address the need of not just academic learning but also well-being and employability skills. And it was just a pilot to reach about 500 disadvantaged Year 10 students in Birmingham. And basically what we realized is that, A, even though the government had promised the laptops, there were huge delays in getting those laptops to these young people. And B, these local authorities that were trying to support these young people, they had resources that they weren't really using. So for example, they already had Microsoft licenses that they weren't using. So Mark and his team basically trained up teachers as well as worked with local authorities to use the existing resources but provide new content as well as training to teachers to support these learners. So it was all around a shared goal partnership where it was about supporting learners, you know, not just the academic side but also their well-being. So there was a partnership with Trauma Response Network as well. And the pilot really exceeded all expectations because there was so much demand. There were 4,000 people who wanted to get on the pilot. So I think the pilot reached about 2,000 learners, and now that pilot is being rolled out nationally in partnership with Hodder Education.

Fantastic. Amazing. And I just, I wrote a piece not long ago about the necessity of the situation being the mother of invention, you know, that old old saying, but I think it really seems that there's been a huge amount of creative energy has gone into just urgent problem solving for people, particularly really excluded young people all over the world. Just how do we reach them? And as I mean, you've talked about quite a few examples already, but I think it's just an amazing testament to teachers and educators and, you know, how they have this innovation capacity within them that sometimes isn't always released by the structures that they normally work within.

There's such huge accountability pressure, so, you know, teachers just don't have the bandwidth. So, you know, if we can reduce the teacher workload, if we can make sure we give them the respect that they deserve as people shaping the future generation, and if we provide them with the support and funding, then they could be doing a lot more to support learners.

One of the things I saw that you wrote is very interesting, that idea, because I'm quite interested in, of course, the innovation within education, but also the developing research base around that as well in terms of what works. Because, you know, in recent decades we've been quite enamored by evidence-based education, which is clearly not a bad thing, but often that tends to be associated with slightly more traditional methods and school effectiveness research, whereas you were talking about innovation in education is about finding the right balance between implementing well-evidenced solutions effectively and experimenting to find out what works in different contexts. And in a way, that project with Sir Mark Grundy seems to have been some kind of a live experiment to see what works in a specific context. And we've touched on it already a little bit, but how do you think we could develop that more R&D mindset or capacity in schools to then actually just be able to unleash some of that capacity within the system to build it up?

I think in order to really build that R&D capacity within schools, we need to make sure that as much as possible, the data collection is automated. So especially when you're testing out technology solutions, it's really easy to pull that data from the system itself rather than asking teachers to do something separately outside of the system. So the more it can be automated, the more it can reduce the workload that teachers have. The more likely that this R&D could be supported. The second thing is really providing training to the teachers and helping solve some of the problems that they are facing, whether it's in planning, marking, timetabling, giving feedback, or engaging parents. The more we meet the real needs that teachers have, the more likely that there will be greater emphasis on trying to figure out, like, is it working? Is it helping solve their real need and how is it benefiting them? And I think the third thing is really getting teachers and schools more actively involved in R&D, and everyone is at a different level of capacity as well as capability. So if we could have more peer-to-peer learning as well as getting schools involved in the program where they are benefiting and they are getting some teacher CPD out of it and teachers are being supported through the training, but also the edtech companies are getting valuable insights and feedback from the teachers. So I think it's, it's a win-win if we really solve for the problems that exist and then provide teacher training and support and capacity to make sure that we're really focusing on building that evidence to improve the product, but also build additional capacity in the education system.

Brilliant. And again, it comes back in a way to that collaboration, as you're saying, like agents like Nesta maybe, and then also the edtech companies. With schools and local authorities and curriculum organizations and just trying to have that sense of a joined-up approach. But actually, as you say, we've got to focus on real needs because otherwise if we're creating the problems that we want to solve because we've got a great idea, that's not going to go anywhere.

I think that happens a lot though. You know, people are so focused on the solution and, you know, sometimes they forget to stop and think about like, what's the problem we're trying to solve? You know, let's— I've seen it a number of times where people jump to a solution Okay, this is what we want to do. You know, we want to create a challenge prize, or we want to create an online solution without really thinking, you know, what's the problem we're trying to solve? Who is it for? You know, how does this help them in their journey before then deciding, you know, what's the solution really needed to solve that problem?

So just lastly, looking forward to that, obviously, you know, we're, we're hopeful now that perhaps there's a bit of light at the end of this pandemic tunnel in terms of a vaccine and Where do you see the bright spots in terms of some of the positives that will come out of this and that will last and stick with us? Because I think that's a big question for everybody is there's a lot, lot has changed. There's lots been thrown up in the air, but how do you think things will land in terms of this tech collaboration innovation kind of within education?

I think one of the bright spots is that more and more people are talking about reimagining education and really rebooting it so that things don't go back to how they were before the lockdown or before the pandemic. So there's generally a higher level of awareness about the issues that education needs to evolve and change, that we've been only focused on academic learning at the expense of well-being and other vocational skills that are, as well as social and emotional skills that are needed. So there's a greater emphasis on redefining what it means to learn and what it means to teach. Secondly, I think the role of technology is going to be a central part of how learning and teaching happens in the future. I think over the last few months everyone has been forced to use technology, and even when, you know, we're fully open and schools and the world has recovered from this pandemic, I think people will realize the benefits of using technology and how it can support learners on a personalized journey, how it can be used to help them with formative assessment so that they are really improving their understanding and learning things in a different way. And I think the, the final thing is around looking at how we can really focus on collaboration within the education sector across learners, teachers, parents, government and enterprises and corporates, because there's a huge need to understand what are the skills needed, how are we enabling learners, how are we not just improving efficiency, because a lot of the work that's being done is on improving efficiency. What's— whatever has been happening, you know, let's just teach it in a faster, more efficient way, let's just put everything online, but that doesn't solve the fundamental problem around student agency, motivation, and really supporting them to realize their full potential. And that will happen when we make learning much more engaging, much more meaningful and relevant, and really thinking about how we can make it much more multidisciplinary. And those sort of things will come out when learners are really engaged in what they're learning and how they're learning, and they are solving real-world problems that exist in our society.

Good. Yeah, brilliant. Well, it's good news. It's a hopeful thought. And I see so much energy around this topic at the moment. Amazing people connecting and having really interesting conversations, you and so many others who are really raising the profile of this issue. And so it will be fascinating to see what emerges from it. So thank you very much for your time. I really appreciate talking to you. It's really—

Thanks a lot, Tim.

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