The Purpose of Schools in a Changing World - A Conversation with Valerie Hannon

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

It is the case that people are starting to relate to a different kind of narrative around education in a way that 5 years ago, actually, they weren't. It helps maybe to put it in light and say, is that what we care about? To craft an alternative which might, just might, start to connect with people's lived experience.

Hi everybody, welcome back. Thanks for joining me again for another episode of the podcast, and this week, the fantastic conversation I had with Valerie Hannan, who has been supporting educational change across the world in numerous systems, including the UK, Europe, US, Australia, and Africa for decades. Valerie co-founded the Innovation Unit and leads their international education work. She is also a founding member and co-chair of the Global Education Leaders Partnership. Valerie's career spans leadership of in education systems, research, teaching, and capacity building. In the UK, she was Director of Education for Derbyshire and an advisor on creativity in the Department for Education. She has led many innovation unit education programs, including Next Practice Projects, Learning Futures in the UK, and Learning Frontiers in Australia. Valerie has been consultant advisor to Finland, British Columbia in Canada, and South Africa, and she is an established thought leader in the field of education innovation. Valerie is also an expert advisor on education to the OECD the OECD and a frequent contributor to the World Summit on Innovation in Education. Valerie's new book, co-authored with Amelia Peterson, is called Thrive: The Purpose of Schools in a Changing World and was released as a second edition in February this year. You can follow Valerie on Twitter @ValerieHannon or find her on the Innovation Unit website.

Hi Valerie.

Hi.

Nice to meet you.

Nice to meet you too. Good.

Well, thank you. I really appreciate it. I think one of the pleasures of having you here is I think the way that you're articulating now the zeitgeist, if you like, of the moment socially and economically, et cetera, but also educationally, I think is some of the best that I've heard. And it's a really kind of complete picture, I think, of Yeah. Nailing where our issues are right now. So I'm really happy to be able to speak to you and I thank you for taking the time. It's brilliant. If we could perhaps start, I've heard you talk a lot about the necessary deep conversations, asking really kind of fundamental questions. So I'd just love to start there in terms of your feeling that perhaps we've been having the wrong conversation for a long time in education and which has had lots of kind of factional interests and infighting and debate over aspects and where should we be moving the conversation to, to move things properly forward, actually make some progress?

Where to start? Well, I started writing this book about almost 6 years ago and the first edition came out 5 years ago. And I think it's fair to say it got very little traction. So when one talks about zeitgeist, the geist has taken a bit of time to get here. And I'm just delighted that Cambridge have now brought out a second edition because it is the case that people are starting to relate to a different kind of narrative around education in a way that 5 years ago, actually they weren't. Yeah. And they could have shrugged and said, narrative, seriously, what's all that about? Which is something I sort of related to because my background is a very logical one. I taught maths, I studied philosophy. I have a bent towards data evidence and logical progression. And I had sort of deep in my soul, the thought that that is what matters and what moves people. Now I've learned that that is not the case. Story and narrative is what actually changes people's views and their actions. And that the really great leaders, political leaders and other kinds of leaders, grasp that intuitively and are capable of telling a different story. I mean, whether you look at Trump or Obama, both of them in their different way told a different story about what the nation was about, who they thought the American people was. And it's that that resonated and creates powerful followership.

Yeah.

Now the story around education, I try to show in my book, when you really pick at it and start to excavate, is a fundamentally economistic one, a misleading economistic one. Yeah. But one which says, you know, we invest in public education because it will make us more prosperous, aka GDP, more growth, and individuals should care about education because it will get them better jobs. And all of that is completely out of kilter with the realities that we face. You just have to revisit it, but it's just so profoundly within the psyche. And I think people who are really interested in educational change have not fully grasped, if I may hazard the proposition, the extent to which that old story has a grip on the public and the political imagination.

Yeah.

And so when you are arguing for different approaches, it's all very peripheral because it doesn't fit with this background narrative in which, you know, those are the things that count and therefore garnering credentials, being knowledge-based, a system which is fundamentally elitist and that it's all about getting into university and university is what counts and the rest is fundamentally second class. All of those propositions are, even if you sort of bring them out and put them to people, they say, well, no, I don't quite, but they really do believe that actually. So you've got to shake shake that up somehow. Now, I don't pretend to know how to shake it up, but I'm gonna have a go. You know, it helps maybe to put it in lights and say, is that what we care about? And to craft an alternative which might, just might, start to connect with people's lived experience. Now, yeah, it seems to me to be the way forward. I've been really, really influenced actually after I wrote the book, because it came out later, by Michael Sandel's book Tyranny of Merit. And I think every educator should read that because what it shows is our profound— and I hold this in spades— profound prejudice towards the cognitive, and the degree to which we elevate cognitive intellectual endeavor and achievement above and beyond anything else. And, you know, it's understandable. Hey, as Joni Mitchell puts it, we got to the moon, you know, you be polite. So, so this anti-science, I mean, I seriously am, but there are other dimensions of human life, of course, which is so profoundly important and which the education system disregards at its peril. But the outcome of it all is of course that 50% of people that go through education systems are written off in Italy.

Yeah.

Yeah.

I mean, that's where I am in France. That's an extreme picture. Absolutely. But I see it of course, all over the world as well. Yeah. Interesting. And there's a, there's kind of an irony perhaps, or certainly a tension between that, as you're saying, that idea that stories connect with us on an emotional level and we buy into them, but it's a cognitivist bias and a rational bias in the content of the story, right? Precisely.

You nailed it there. Exactly. That's what goes on.

The idea of narrative, I completely agree with. I think we need more of a unifying narrative. And there was a lot of hope about the pandemic being that kind of unifying narrative that would give people that kind of kick to pull together and say, really question what are our priorities, what's important, and therefore how do we construct our systems to support that? But it hasn't seemed to, I mean, we're still not out of the woods, of course, but it hasn't seemed to. And I wondered whether I put out something yesterday about the climate emergency being that unifying story. I don't know whether I know, obviously that's part of the picture and some of your four levels, but I wonder whether perhaps you could speak to that. It would, might that provide that kind of urgent unifying story to look beyond this kind of transactional and individualistic mindset towards education?

Well, I don't think it provides the story. My sense was that it might just might be the disruptive event which caused people to stand back a bit, as you said, regard their values with a different perspective and ask indeed that, just that question, what, what do we care about? What matters?

Yeah.

You know, care became priceless, oil valueless, but I don't think it provides the story. Naturally, if you are really analytical about it, it provides an element of the story. The pandemic in itself was zoogenic and it derives from predations into the natural world. Our disregard of the appropriate relationships between our species and the underlying sort of dominance that we have of other species, which is profoundly damaging and ought, if people are thoughtful, throw up the real risk, clear and present danger of other zoonotic pandemics beginning again because of continuing with those practices, moving into wild habitats, getting rid of rainforests and so on and so forth. So it ought to invoke in people thoughtfulness about our relationship with the natural world. But for many people, it hasn't done that at all. And governments have not particularly encouraged that. So the most we can kind of harvest, if I can put it as crudely as this, from the disruptive event is just that potential to invite people to reflect on their value system and the impact that, you know, being cut off from other kids has had on them. On their kids. Well, a whole range of things, the nature of work, our lives, and so on and so forth. Now, as you say, people are so desperate to get back to what counted as life before. That's not an easy trick to pull off, but we've got to keep doing that in all the avenues that we can. Does it provide the new story? No, it does not. My proposal is that we need to think about thriving very holistically, that we have to think about thriving as interrelated in how we thrive as a planet and on the planet. How we thrive as communities, how we thrive in our interpersonal relationships, and how we thrive as individuals. And the pandemic itself really only touches on the first of those. Again, if you're really thoughtful, you can see how it flows through.

Yeah.

But actually we need to unpick what it means to thrive at those other levels. I suppose the one where it really does touch directly is the thriving at the intra-personal level, is it? Because of the impact on people's mental health.. And it's throwing into sharp relief how fragile that is. And I think many parents were quite shocked, you know, to see the sort of state that their kids got into, but for others it revealed what was underlying anyway. And we're starting to think, well, what kind of education system will really enable my kid to thrive as a human in this new world? What do they need to feel secure, to have a sense of purpose, to have a sense of quiet, to have a sense of calm, all of those things. So my rather long answer to your question is, but I think it could help. I'm not necessarily confident it will, but only as a kind of the future kick breaking the door down.

Yeah. I mean, I've heard you speak elsewhere about the fact that education is often low down on the list of priorities. People don't actually tell much of a story about education. Do you think that it's come up more presently in people's minds to begin at least to talk about what might be the next story related to education because people have felt, as you said, right up in their faces, you know, parents, et cetera, when schools have been closed, you know, young people missing their friends, all of those lack of connection, et cetera. Has that brought it more to a political and a social priority?

I think it has socially. I think in civil society, there are many more debates about this now, which when we first put the first edition of the book out, you know, you couldn't get hearing really. I think it is much more now a matter of debate and thoughtful debate, many more people talking in these terms, which is fantastic. Politically, I don't see it. I don't see it in what Biden has to say about renewal. I'm listening very carefully to what Keir Starmer in this country, in the UK, has said about, you know, the Labour Party needs huge new ideas in order to regenerate itself as was done after the Second World War. And they're grasping to find that. So I listen very carefully about what he said about education. What do they say? They say equipping people for new jobs in the green economy.

Yeah.

It's that same transactional individualistic economistic narrative again.

Well, coming back to your point about being individualistic, I mean, I think it's fair enough. For education to have, you know, desirable outcomes for individuals, but we have to factor in the common good as well. And we have to factor in the planet as well.

Yeah.

Just in parenthesis, Tim, I'd say people have said to me, oh, I get what you've put in this book. And actually it's a kind of reversion to a really humanist approach to it. It's post-humanist. Because if you look at the work of people like Jacques Delors, who, who, which I admire, and I think in its time was fantastic, but actually itself got very little traction. That was a humanist approach. We need to be thinking about individuals. We need to be thinking about the common good in society. Here's what we need to do. What I'm trying to argue here is that we have to go beyond that and think about the planet itself and other species as themselves having rights that we have no moral justification trampling. And that dominance paradigm in which human beings are an utterly dominant species and everything else flows to our need. Well, for a start, as I say, the future just kicked the door down and proved to us that actually, you know, we have to respect other species. It's in our own interest to do so.

Exactly. Yeah.

But does the planet itself have rights? I mean, I'm really, really intrigued by the fact that there's this group in the UK, there must be others around the world, legal practice called Client Earth.

Okay.

And their client is the Earth.

Wow.

So they take cases on behalf of the Earth, whether that's a river that is getting completely distorted because of human activity.

Yeah.

Or where, you know, natural habitats or forests are being threatened and, and obviously pollution, air quality. And they take cases on behalf of the Earth. In my book, I give the example of some localities in the US where people have assigned rights to a lake. And now, if that sounds fanciful, remember not that long ago that we didn't assign rights to people with mental health problems or children. We do now.

Yeah.

And so my point being, we have to look at the Earth and other species as having rights, and which, you know, we are a part of nature, but we do not dominate nature. Our brilliant success has been achieved at the expense of other species and it is leading to our demise. Yeah.

But I would say that idea of individualism is, it's the way that we've separated ourselves individualistically from those other dimensions.

Right.

And I think that's where it causes problems. 'Cause as you say, there is a self-interest in taking care of the stewardship of the planet, of children, of all these other, you know, socially that comes back to us. It's that regenerative idea. And I think, again, I've heard you reference Kate Raworth's work. On Doughnut Economics, which I think is just such an important idea to then pull people into. Again, it's kind of a narrative, right? I mean, she's used a visual narrative of a doughnut, which is a really kind of prosaic image in a way, but actually to bring people into this idea that everybody benefits from this virtuous cycle of supporting others socially and economically, but also then the stewardship of the planet. Because we have to work within these limits. And if we get to that donut space, then that's when things will flow. But I mean, maybe it's utopian, I don't know, but it does. That's when things will flow back to everybody in terms of benefits.

I entirely agree with that. But there's also a part for me in which the planetary and other species thriving links so directly to the intra-personal, the— yeah, in that what we have seen, again, coming back to your point about the impact of the pandemic, the recognition that people being in nature, relating to nature, learning to love it, yeah, actually is incredibly powerful in terms of their own mental health. You know, there are just numerous bodies of evidence now which show that as a therapy, if you like, yeah, engagement in nature is immensely powerful. Well, that's therapeutic at the end when things have got wrong, but upstream, in terms of growing young people who are comfortable with themselves, who know who they are, who work from a center of a centre of gravity for their own personal lives, if you like. Engagement with nature and understanding both the beauty of it and their place within it is fundamentally connected. So it's not just, you know, so again, your point, the transactional relationship, it is reverting to our understanding of ourselves as species. It sounds a bit hippie and—

This is the problem, isn't it? This is the problem of an inclusive narrative.

Yeah, but so coming back to the pandemic, how many more people said, oh wow, you know, when the traffic stopped, I heard the birds.

Yeah, it's true.

Or I started to walk out in my local environment. And I think educators do get that.

Yeah.

And a lot more people are interested in really thinking through how they get their kids, you know, being green school is not just about greening the bloody playground or lowering your carbon footprint. Yeah. It's about saying how in the educational offering to ensure that our kids actually get into the wild regularly, experience being outside of the concrete jungle, and also engage with other species in a really curious and respectful way. And these are profoundly educational objectives.

Yeah, absolutely.

Um, I know you wanted to ask a quick question about, you know, how would we know if a school or a community was thriving? And in our book, we come up with some suggestions about that. Because you asked the question, I was looking back, and just let me read out a few because—

Yeah, please.

Yeah. So supposing we put as indicators of a A really great school outputs like the global competence of learners when they graduate, um, the school's collective contribution to local sustainability, academic achievement for sure, always counts, but also side by side with how that knowledge and those skills are applied in real-world contexts. How about learner performance in internships or work-based learning? How about entrepreneurial skill and achievement evidenced in, again, in real-world contexts?

Yeah.

How about some effective engagement in community programs in your locality? Um, how about evidence of a learning relationship built up over time with somebody from, from the older generation?

Yeah.

How about contributions of the school as a thriving micro-community with positive caring relationships as the norm within the school? And related to that, what about mental health indicators?

Yeah.

I would, if I were a parent now, as opposed to grandparent, sending my kids to school, I'd be wanting to know What are the mental health indicators? How many kids are up with stress and anxiety? Yeah. How often do you have to have therapists working downstream when symptoms are manifest rather than upstream? So good mental health for me is a really critical one.

Absolutely.

Physical fitness habits. Yeah. Does the school really put learning how to care for your body up there as an entitlement for every kid?

No, it's brilliant. And in a way it's kind of perhaps bringing some of the, what was in the hidden curriculum, up into the explicit, the impacts or outcomes that we're having as a school. But previously, I think all of that stuff, some of it was there, but it was all just in the hidden curriculum.

Exactly. Well, hidden, I would call it on the periphery, Tim. The way I conceived this is these things are on the periphery and now you're going to bring them to the core, absolutely to the core and the centre and turn it on its head.

Yeah, nice. And just related to that, I guess, and, and what you were saying, that idea of the way that educators use the school, you know, in interacting with nature, et cetera. But I'm also really interested in this idea of the school, cuz I think it's become a little bit unfashionable, let's say. And I, Gert Biester talks about the learnification of education, you know, this very kind of fashionable idea about everything's about learning. Nothing's about teaching in school anymore. You know, it like that's associated with then old industrial paradigm. And sure, I can understand where that those conversations are coming from, but I also really like what you've been talking about, the idea of the school as a community hub, because I think many of those places that used to be, uh, used in terms of interactions in the community, religious places, or, you know, the well, for example, you know, back public space. Exactly. The danger of challenging that. Yeah. So sorry, I don't wanna answer my own question, but just in terms of what you see the role of the school playing And you've talked now about the Future School for sure, but also just that physical place in a community and what that can provide.

Well, I, I just think that we eliminate institutions at our peril.

Yeah.

And you talked about individualization. I mean, my, my nightmare, my horror is every kid, you know, communing with his or her screen on its own. And you know, there you are, you've got all the programs, you've got terrific feedback, you've got AI giving expert guidance through an academic discipline. And for all we know, I mean, this is where disruption comes at you from sideways, isn't it? For all we know, Jack Ma, or more likely Elon Musk, are putting together such an incredibly powerful disruptive option, such as Amazon was for shopping. Yeah, but you know, the thing is just whacked. And we talked about the pandemic, so I was really interested in the phenomenon of pandemic pods in the US. Yeah, parents got together and the sisters were doing it for themselves, you could say. What were they doing? They were removing their kids from the public space. They were removing their kids from interaction and engagement with kids from very different kinds of backgrounds, even with the stratification of schools, of course, you know, on a neighbourhood basis. Nonetheless, you come across kids with very different viewpoints, more likely from different races as well. So I just think that the institution of the school, brackets, must be redesigned, but close brackets, the institution of the school is something we need to think very carefully about before we write it off. And as you say, just move to the idea that it's all about learning and nothing to do with teaching. Now I happen to think that teaching has got a role in the future and that the expertise or the role of teaching will involve and entail a different kind of expertise. I like to call it sort of choreography, but the notion that a teacher is in the place where they can choreograph the immensity of the resources that are now available for learning. And a kid doesn't know what she doesn't know, and nor do her parents, and no single teacher does either. But as a community of learners who are focused on learning and on values, then you can be into a completely different ball game. So I want to argue wherever I get the opportunity, really, that we should not write schools off as physical spaces where the face-to-face is really important. And again, yeah, learning from the pandemic, My God, don't we crave being face to face?

Of course.

Exactly. The serendipity of the interactions. You don't know who you'll bump into. You don't know where the session will go. It is not the same as what we are doing now, or indeed using highly expert AI education program.

Yeah, absolutely.

The key is then how do you use that face to face, acknowledging its preciousness, and don't use it for the kind of thing that you could easily do just with your screen at home. That's a waste.

That's a shame. Absolutely. But it's not, not only for the children as well, right? I mean, you know, that idea of the community center hub for the parents. I mean, you know, the serendipity of meeting new people, of connecting, of networking, all those things happen, which kind of brings the fabric of a community somehow closer together, or, you know, links are made, et cetera.

Yeah. I agree. And I think it's, it's potentially more the case now that we have a shift towards working from home, at least in a hybrid context. And not for everybody, obviously, you know, no one can forget this. We talk blithely about working from home. Percent of the population cannot, because they are making things or caring for others or working outside. However, the office as the centre of, for work is obviously now less central. Point being, parents, many of them will have a bit more flexibility in terms of actually engaging with the school. Now that I think is really, really important in terms of the kind of conversations school is able to engineer or scaffold about what they're trying to do. So Again, during the pandemic, many schools were fundamental to supporting communities with food, with, you know, loneliness, all kinds of things. I don't want to turn them into social services. And this is the critique, the progressive traditionalist binary split kind of, you know, that culture war represented this as the lefties turning schools into social services. That's not what I'm talking about. I'm talking about spaces where real public debate can go on. About some important issues and where people act as communities in terms of supporting each other. I don't think it's idealistic. I see it in primary schools that happens more. And of course then secondaries get drawn into the old narrative and focused on, you know, the, the competitive scramble for academic qualifications. And so it's pushed to the periphery.

And then we're in the, we're fully in the brambles of all of that. Absolutely. When maybe I could, one of the things then we'll link into the idea of ecosystems, but you mentioned choreographing and you mentioned engineering in 2 of the things you've said, and I've, I've heard you talk about choreographing on a number of occasions. I think that's a really interesting idea because one of the things I'm particularly interested in, the idea of complex networks and how we work with complex networks and complex human ecologies, clearly schools, education, learning systems, that's what they are, and leadership in that context, but also the role of an educator, teacher, et cetera. And I think that idea of a choreographer is a really powerful idea versus the idea of an engineer. Because I think often we've, we've imagined that education can be engineered and it's a complicated problem. And therefore we just need the right experts to solve the right problems and then everything will be fine. But actually, hopefully we're learning that it's a thicket of brambles. It's a complex network. And therefore we need people to choreograph a dance, right? You know, and they've got certain principles or, but actually there's a control element or a future state that they're not trying to recreate, or I don't know. What, what do you think?

No, no, I entirely understand what you're saying. I agree with it and I take it back. I shouldn't have used the term engineer. I don't know how it slipped out.

It wasn't a criticism at all.

No, no, no. You're right. Right. Because the connotations are inappropriate. And as you've implied in your question, it's about complex systems, not just complicated ones. So some people are working around ecosystems worldwide and trying to foster and enable them, have called themselves weavers. Uh, you may have come across the Weaving Lab. I kind of, you know, react a little bit to that metaphor, but I know what they're trying to say. So there's something more fluid, less determined about the whole thing. Yeah. I think a gardening metaphor is probably a pretty good one. So you recognize, first of all, the specificity of locality and its context, cuz there's no one template for these things.

Yeah.

It's about history and culture and what's going on in the, in the, and the economy, by the way. But yeah, it's wrong to talk about people having a very clear, fixed idea about what the outcome will be like a bridge. It's not engineering, it's something more fluid than that. But again, it's coming back to mindset. Educators starting to conceive of themselves as people who are in a position to use their expertise, and by the way I'm not deriding subject expertise, it's really important, to see where there are great resources for learning, where they could be brought into the piece, and not thinking that they have to be the fount of all knowledge and skills and that they are transmitting those to the kids. Hugely exhausting and fundamentally self-defeating way to think about teaching. But to come back to your earlier point, that's why I want to elevate teaching, not set teaching to one side, but to say again, it should be an incredibly noble profession. Yeah. More sophisticated than ever. And I think potentially far more rewarding than ever. You know, how many times do you hear people in teaching, by the way, the, the destruction rate or the loss in terms of young teachers leaving the profession?

Absolutely.

Oh, any other industry would be saying, What? And the often quoted remark is, I didn't come into teaching because of this. This isn't what I thought I'd be doing. Not because they're fluffy head kind of idealists. And so if we are moving, as I hope we just might, in this kind of direction, I think teaching would have been more sophisticated, more demanding, but ultimately far more satisfying and actually become a vocation.

Yeah, good. Absolutely. But perhaps also that role, as you said, in a way is also about the connecting, cuz you're bringing the school. Then again, it comes back to that kind of local idea of a school as a node in a network, a broader network of businesses or partnerships with other agencies or different public, private, whatever, but into that ecosystem idea. And then, you know, the professionals in that school are acting as connectors to bring people in to say, right, we have this learning need or this passion here with this child. And how can we provide an ecosystem around that? That has somehow learning as the, it's kind of the fuel in the ecosystem.

Yeah. It's the connective tissue in a sense.

Yeah.

I also think there's a connection here to a really profound societal shift coming back to the level of thriving, which is around thriving communities and the possibility that in particular working-class communities will have a regained sense of both dignity and possibility in regeneration. I'm from a very working-class background and, you know, there wasn't a book in the house.

Yeah.

I mean, when I say that to people, it's like, of course they must. No, there really wasn't a book in the house. The message to me was get yourself an education and get the hell out of here. Right. Get out of this community and go to real places, you know, big cities. And of course that's been the model. People strive to get to university and then they get the hell out of their community and they become possibly citizens of the world. I've got no problem with that at all, but a kind of content or pleased to leave behind the old because it's— I mean, this is deathly.

This is deathly.

Yeah.

Well, it rips the heart out of the communities, right? And all the skill, the brain drain. And yeah.

And so then you get these concentrations in the cities, which, you know, cities have always been terrifically vibrant centers of creativity and no doubt will continue to be so, but can we not combine that with other kinds of localities in different areas?

Yeah.

Because people are increasingly feeling this is where we We will make where we live a good place to live. For example, in the UK, we're working, we, that is the Global Education Leaders Partnership of which I'm co-chair, working with Doncaster at the moment, who's intentionally with the support of its MP, Ed Miliband, setting up a talent and innovation ecosystem.

Brilliant.

Bring together, I mean, Doncaster, post-industrial kind of west, you know, you can't, you don't get more extreme example of it really. And also one, which is, you know, you say Doncaster and there's a kind of sneer on the part of other people, like, ugh, seriously? So their intention now is to, to create a talent and innovation ecosystem, which say, this is gonna be a great place to live in 10 years' time. And we're gonna do it looking at all the resources that we could perhaps choreograph, but bring together in, in a way that can have outcomes we can't even anticipate yet. And, and link young people to routes of employment in particular around health services and engineering, where we've got strength. And give them a sense of purpose and living here and contributing to the wealth and a richer, in the fullest sense of that term, culturally richer, creatively richer community might be the outcome, which is far more desirable than getting off to London where most people wanted to do.

Amazing.

Yeah.

And it has to be asset-based, doesn't it? It has to be strengths-based because we look and we nurture the things that we have already that we can then build on and improve. And that, I mean, that's what the standardized education system just fundamentally doesn't do.

Right.

Yeah, amazing. Thank you. My time's up. But really, thank you so much, Valerie.

No, my pleasure.

Really an interesting conversation. And I just wish you all the best with the hugely important work you're doing.

I apologize to your listeners for sputtering and coughing through it.

But no, not at all. Not at all. Thank you, Valerie.

Okay, bye, Tim.

Bye-bye.

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