Values in Education - A Conversation with Jonathan James

Welcome to the Future Learning Design Podcast.

One of the things about values is sometimes there's a conflict between the values that parents and the local community might have and the values that the state wants to portray. And I think in the middle of that, you've got what teachers' values are. The idea that we are moving towards a kind of globalised order and that's a single direction of travel, but that doesn't always turn out to be the case.

Hi everybody, welcome back to the podcast with me, Tim Logan, brought to you in partnership with Intrepid Ed News. This week my guest is Jonathan James, who is a teacher, education consultant, and doctoral candidate at the University College London Institute of Education. In his own research, Jonathan looks at values in education and investigates how policies developed in response to the threat of terrorism are being implemented in schools in England and France. Jonathan has written extensively on the role of schools in anti-terrorism policies policy and is an expert on values education and countering radicalization. His book, co-authored with Dr. Jan-Görmend Janmaat, Civil Disorder, Domestic Terrorism and Education Policy: The Context in England and France, was published in 2019. At the UCL Institute of Education, Jonathan has taught on the master's courses Minorities, Migrants and Refugees in National Education Systems, as well as Comparative Education: Theories and Methods. Since 2020, Jonathan has been providing consulting services to the OECD's Education The Conversation. You can connect with Jonathan on LinkedIn or on Twitter @JonathanJames30. We dive straight into the conversation with Jonathan telling me what he's been recently working on.

And in terms of, I think, things that I'm thinking about now, like I said, I've written a couple of blogs, um, that one for The Conversation and one for the Yale Europe blog. And I was like, okay, so what are the things for a lay audience? I suppose it is like teachers in both countries. The challenges are around dealing with difficult conversations in the classroom. And these, there was a kind of flashpoint issues, I suppose, that come up with the values education. So like, um, so in France, a good example would be the issue with the Charlie Hebdo cartoons. That's just the kind of thing that's not gone away. Yeah. Um, that kind of became a thing with the Charlie Hebdo attacks in 2015, flared up again after Samuel Paty was murdered.

Yeah.

And that's kind of like a long-standing bugbear for Muslim students, I suppose. I mean, you've got some elements of the government trying to go quite hard on it, whereas practitioners on the ground are obviously a lot more, um, they want to try and preserve harmony within the school community, so they're a lot less interested in disciplinary measures that create resentment, you know.

Yeah, there's all sorts of sensitivities in there as well, isn't there?

Yeah, I think so. But I think what's interesting, and it may be again related to the theory, is that teachers, they show a lot of pragmatism in the way they approach these things. So with the values education unit, with the government, a lot of research on how problems are framed at the local level and how they're framed at the national level, particularly in regard to immigration politics as well. So at the national level, there is the will to be seen to be tough on immigration there's the, you know, there's the Macron government sort of gesturing to the far-right vote and that kind of stuff, and of course that does affect teachers and there are teachers that have those views, but in the main teachers, whatever their views are really, are more interested in being able to talk to the kids about what happened to Samuel Paty without having a confrontation. Yeah, they're coming at it from a completely different angle. They've got no interest in playing politics.

Yeah.

Uh, so they're coming at it from a completely different angle. Yeah.

But there's also a pedagogical or philo— like educational philosophical problem about just being able to have difficult conversations and dialogues in a classroom about controversial issues, right?

Yeah.

Education becomes rather bland if we're not able to do that.

Exactly. I think there's a, there's a thing about how you approach it. So I think there's underlying like pedagogical professional development issues around their actual substantive knowledge of the issues themselves, so they need to know what it is they're talking about. You sometimes got non-specialists dealing with these issues, particularly in the English case. I think you get a lot of non-specialists or anyone that's a form tutor is expected to teach PSHE, for example, and deal with these tricky conversations. They also equipped to do that. But then there's the emotional, I suppose, the kind of anxiety that is generated by maybe not knowing the subject matter, or being given a PowerPoint an hour before you've got to teach it and having to look at that and just being a bit like, oh my God. Yeah, of course these conversations generate emotional responses in the students. And I think in the case of France, with Samuel Paty, I mean, I've just been writing up a chapter of a case study that I did, and the first time I went to the school was just after Samuel Paty was murdered. But the whole of the data is kind of like, kind of influenced by that. Yeah. And one of the things that struck me is that, and it's the same with January 2015, teachers have their own emotions about the fact that a teacher just got killed.

Of course.

For showing the cartoon. They're gonna be feeling all sorts of things about that. They know that the cartoons are a sensitive subject for the Muslim students in their class. Yeah. And then they've got to go and lead a 3-hour session or 2-hour session on that topic, right? Yeah. And there's so, there's so much going on there emotionally. They've got their own emotions, they've got to respond to the student emotions. And again, like, not, not to avoid the subject, I mean, the way that they did it was quite clever in this particular school. You know, they planned it collaboratively, which helped the non-specialists feel a lot more comfortable. They taught it in pairs. They deliberately didn't include any references to Charlie Hebdo until quite late on in the conversation. So that was a lot of, that was a lot of work for them.

Yeah.

Um, over the school holidays and—

Huge. And, and, and there's so much of it as well, I suppose, is about creating a safe space in the classroom in like, in more than just words, but where people genuinely feel that they're free to offer an opinion about things, but in a thoughtful way.

And yes, well, yeah, you're right. You think it's about, it's about them being in safe and then The interpersonal dynamics, again, I say more in France, but I think in England as well. So I think the England, the key touchstone issue, there are loads of issues, but the one that's causing this conflict between family values, student values, teacher values, state values, is what was the issue around LGBT inclusive sex and relationships education. So I went to one school, which is one of those key schools, well, one of the schools where there were the protests. In the summer after I went with a protest. I mean, it's really complex, but there, unfortunately, there was a sense of antagonism with the local community.

Yeah.

And I suppose the kids themselves, because it's a primary school, are not old enough to feel that antagonism towards them, you know. And in France, that's much more common, that kind of, yeah, these are our values, we are going to teach you our values.

Yeah.

You know, that question of who gets to decide. Of course, like, yeah, we live in society, right? But I think that if it's framed that these are our values, these are our national values that go back years and years and years, you got— and then you lot came along and you have to adapt to them. Yeah, that actually is going to antagonize people. And just from a social justice point of view, that's not right, is it? Because everyone who lives in this country, all these kids, you know, mostly who are born in this country, everyone gets to decide what our values are.

Yeah, but there is, isn't there, a very different approach between the UK and France, right? You know, just reading your research and just in general from my own previous reading, like the multiculturalist kind of agenda in the UK is quite different to the, what, the integrationist approach.

Yeah, I would say yes. I think that the UK is more traditional, two things: values pluralism, kind of like this idea of values pluralism, to talk more about where values are talked about in the curriculum, which is traditionally very little. It's more about procedural values, so how do you have a debate, like the procedures rather than the substantive values themselves, where I think France tends a little bit more towards— if you were on a continuum, you'd have like UK on the kind of procedural value side, the East Asian countries on the more— Singapore on the very moral Yeah, incentive values. These is what you should think and feel.

Yeah.

And France somewhere in the middle, right?

Yeah.

Um, but already there's quite a big gap with England.

But that's— how does that fit? Because you've done some work with the OECD. How does that fit with that kind of human value side? Because I was quite interested in that, in the attitudes and values stuff that's coming out with the Learning Compass.

Work.

You've got the, the attitudes and value, the values particularly there going, going from personal through to human values. And it, it feels to me that there is a stronger emphasis now on, on this idea of universally human values like justice, equity, respect, that you, that kind of connect with what you're saying about the East Asian countries, about more moral substantive values. So if the OECD are propounding that kind of more universal human values approach, what, like, how much room is there left for countries themselves to take a different approach? You, you know what I mean? Is there a kind of bigger universal agenda around education globally that's pushing in a more substantive direction?

There's a couple of things I'd like to say. So I was looking at the Education 2030s, like, report. Yeah. 'What Students Learn Matters,' you know, which is like one of their first publications beyond the learning compass that came out last year. And there's a whole section on student profiles, really, kind of like things like the learner profile. It's amazing how many countries have taken— well, but something like the learner profile. What kind of person do we want our students to be? Exactly. And as part of the overall goals for the curriculum. And it's really interesting to see how much convergence there is to things like, you know, agency and co-agency.

Yeah.

It's a big thing. You've got cognitive and metacognitive skills. Are there things like sustainability, things that align with the OECD's global competencies, so kind of like accepting difference, all of those kinds of human attributes which you could say were quite universal? What I would also say is that if you look at the countries who participate most in something like the Education 2030 project, Mexico, Japan, South Korea, uh, Singapore, Hong Kong are there as well. Like, I just think that there are some countries that participate a lot, and then there are other countries that maybe aren't going in the same direction. So there is convergence, but I don't know if it's reaching everywhere.

Perhaps set by a global discussion that isn't necessarily representative of the full spectrum of views on it, maybe.

Exactly. I mean, one of the things I noted earlier was, it's a very OECD message, but it is true that it tends to be the high performers or the countries that are really improving rapidly in PISA are the ones that, that tend to participate most in these kinds of global exercises. My personal view is that it's the usual suspects that are doing that listening and learning and moving in the same direction.

Yeah. So, so then for the national kind of agenda, like in France and the UK, is it, is it being influenced by the global conversation? Around values, or is it— does it just feel like it's more— it's going in, in, in the direction that they are taking it themselves?

Well, I suppose my research is about how the context of Islamist terrorism in particular, or the age of extremisms more broadly— so you've got right-wing extremism as well— how that's influencing values education. So I tend to see that as being I mean, it's not the only factor influencing it, but it is a very important factor, right?

And I think that—

I mean, I think I would go as far to say in the two cases that I'm looking at, I would say terrorist incidents and broader concerns about minority ethnic populations have more of an influence, particularly in the English case, and a kind of values-based perspective, right?

Yeah. Yeah. But then, but then what about at the school level? Because obviously there's a lot of conversations that I have in schools with school leaders around the values that, you know, the values that define your organization and that therefore influence your culture, influence your decision-making in an organization. Do people have a, a distinct flavor of those in different places that you see, or is that set again quite I suppose it differs in different systems, but is that influenced by the, the national context?

So I think that the governance structures of the two countries that I'm looking at are really important because what you're talking about is a bit more, um, it's a bit more prevalent. If I take the four schools I've been to in England, two of them are values— well, they have official values for the school, right? One of those is a bit— they're a bit more implicit. One of them, they're quite explicit. So one of them was a newly established free school, and so they set up the school. There was a group of teachers that set up the school. They were very clear about what they wanted their values to be. The values are all around the school, and they appear on the kids' report cards. I saw an assembly where they got rewarded for the values and that kind of stuff. And I think that is enabled, so that kind of diversity is enabled by the fact that the education policy landscape, or the school landscape in England, is quite decentralized. People often say neoliberal, but it's very kind of like school leaders have a lot of room to establish their organization, or like this is just this idea that as well the government gives a group of teachers money to set up a school. That's something that doesn't really happen in France, for instance. And so France is much more of a national education system, uh, in that respect. I think there were differences between the values maybe being portrayed implicitly in the four schools that I've been into in France, but like none of them are explicitly values-led organizations. School leaders will talk about their values, right, and then they'll talk about them in terms of being our values as a school. Yeah, but they won't have a set of values that define the organization in the same way.

Yeah, because those are set at the national level.

Yeah, I think more than that. So I think, you know, one of the things about values is sometimes there's a conflict between— we've talked a little bit about the conflict between the values that the parents or the local community might have and the values that the state wants to portray. And I think in the middle of that you've got what teachers' values are, and what teachers think they should be promoting. And sometimes what teachers, the values that teachers think they're promoting, might conflict with what the state wants to promote, and they might also conflict with what the parents might want to promote as well.

Which makes it a phenomenally complex position to be in, especially when you have, as we were discussing, these controversial issues like extremism or Samuel Paty, or, you know, really sensitive emotive issues that come up, you have to navigate.

Oh yeah, big time. And so even one of those schools that I said was values-led, it's quite interesting that they have these 5 values. And then they, they said, well, the 2, I spoke to 2 people from the leadership group, interviewed 2 people from the leadership group, and they were like, yeah, our values come first. And they would, they didn't like the Fundamental British Values policy. One of them, the deputy head, was like, it's a bit Brexit. It's a bit isolationist, we don't like it. They have, they say our values come first. But then when you speak to the teachers, I suppose they imbue the school values and fundamental values, British values, with the values they think are important. But there's a lot of unity in terms of basically the teachers tend to talk about tolerance, kindness, accepting difference.

Yeah.

Partly because they're working in a multicultural context. They really value those things. I think universally, I mean, out of the 4 schools, like all of the, you know, maybe 15 teacher interviews, I think maybe 10 of them mentioned tolerance, kindness. And actually, when you look at the fundamental British values the government has set out, yeah, one of them is about tolerance, but that tends to be the one that features most. Activities in terms of the visual artifacts and displays around the school, that tends to be the one that rises to the top.

Interesting. Yeah, I suppose there's more— by definition, there's more inclusivity in that. So what's the one— what are the ones that— because I'm not actually familiar being British, but I should be— but what, what are the fundamental British values that are being kind of pushed? And then which ones are the ones which are less popular, let's say, or, you know, that conflict more frequently with the teachers?

So I think there's democracy, the rule of law, individual liberty, and mutual respect and tolerance for those of different faiths. And I would say that the tolerance one is by far the one the schools that give most time to, or my four schools give most time to. Democracy, people often say, oh, we have a student council and that's democracy, or we do this unit in history.

Yeah.

And then the other two don't get mentioned as much, really. I think where the conflict with the government framing and the teachers' framing comes in is that teachers tend not to like— and this is why I'm not the only person that's found this out, like, any kind of study that you look at fundamental language values will prevent is, um, teachers don't like the framing of them as fundamental British values. They're not exclusively British. People will say that framing is not inclusive of students in my school who don't have British nationality. So people really react against that.

Interesting. But would you say there's— because, I mean, obviously it's that there's a nationalist agenda going on in there that some people are comfortable with and other people in the UK are less comfortable with. But if you compare the UK and France, would you say that the national— the nationalist, it has more of a controversial aspect in the UK compared to in France?

So what I'd say about that is that in France, French Republican values are supposed to be universal, right? So a lot of people respond to those. The national is not front and center, I don't think, in the way that they are presented. At the same time, when people start talking about those values, and Laïcité in particular, yeah, they'll often talk about French history as well. So there's a bit of a paradox there. So I suppose my answer to that would be I don't know if people see them as being nationalist values, but of course the way that they're understood is very much grounded in, in the national Yeah, interesting.

And there's two, I mean, there's two different directions I'd love to ask you, but one is where do international schools fit into this? Because you and I have both had, you know, lots of experience in, in the international context. Where do they sit if you're talking about quite distinct experiences and, and stories within a national context? And then you have these kind of strange transnational education entities floating around, you know, in most large cities. Of course, there are a number of them. Where do they sit in your— you're not explicitly focusing on them in your research, I understand, but having your personal experience, professional experience, where would you see them?

It's fitting in. Well, it's— I mean, two things. I think it's interesting, we've mentioned this before, but the learner profile the amount of countries that are going in that direction, yeah, it's quite interesting to me.

Um, so that's the IB learner profile, right?

Yeah, the IB learner profile. I think that is, you know, one of the things from the IB that has pollinated, you know, into international education systems, even though maybe it's not always explicit within international schools. Yeah, right. Um, I suppose, yeah, that clear set of values or attributes that the learner profile sets out aren't always understood that well within international schools, but I do think that's had a lot of influence. So I think it's really interesting.

But then also the IB have been quite explicitly, I remember the phrase values laden in their curriculum, right? They've always, you know, ever since the you know, the inception of the IB, it feels like they've— the values have been an explicit part of what they do. And yet, of course, I would agree with you that it doesn't always necessarily manifest in practice, but just as a framework, they, they seem to have always been quite overt about the fact that it is substantively values-driven.

And you're right, actually, if you think about the content, I mean, I mean, I taught English B to diploma, and the themes that you'd look at, you know, in the languages diploma, or I know that in geography is a lot about sustainability, right? And economics, they'll learn about equality, and yeah, the arts and humanities subjects, it's really— and the hard sciences, I would say it's very oriented in terms of, um, what would we say, one way to say global issues, humanistic values, in terms of the curriculum content. Yeah, I do think if we look at— so I suppose if you've got values education as a kind of separate subject or in civics or whatever, yeah, but then I suppose you've got that kind of cross-curricular aspect, yeah, right, where, um, yeah, so how much— again, back to your other question, I suppose the question you asked earlier about how much are these kind of, like, things like sustainability, humanistic values, global insights influencing different areas of the curriculum. I think you can see that influence quite a lot.

Yeah, I mean, there's always been quite an overt political agenda in the IB, right? If you look at their mission statement to create a more peaceful world, I don't think many people would argue that that's not a good thing to aim for, but it is a political ambition. I don't know.

In a way it is, in a way it isn't, right? So I suppose we're not, I guess we're not going to be, but like the IB is not going to challenge capitalism, for example. It's not going to be party political. And it's probably not going to take sides. Macroeconomics, it's not really gonna rock the boat, right? Sustainability. But I suppose it's interesting, I mean, we're both British, but if you look at the— since 2010, the way the curriculum's gone and the way the public debate has gone in British— I mean, that's been a step away from internationalism, right?

Yeah.

So something that maybe we wouldn't have thought of as being— the idea of, you know, looking at world literature or having that global perspective would not have been very political. Like, we would have said that there was a consensus around that in, in the UK 20 years ago, right? Whereas now, with the recent— you've got the Fundamental British Values, it's one thing, but that's been accompanied by a re-centering of British, English history in the history curriculum, of English British authors in the English literature curriculum, you know, narrowing down at those, those two subject areas in particular.

Yeah.

So that internationalism, I suppose, is not something that can be taken for granted so much more.

Yeah. More politicized. No, that's interesting. But I mean, it is just, I think sometimes that we do forget how political in a values sense, or, you know, or in a, in a party political sense, in some ways the content of the curriculum is that we We make choices, right? As educators, we make choices about what students learn and clearly that those choices have an influence, but they also come from somewhere. So it's, it can never be a values-free endeavor, right?

Absolutely.

Yeah.

'Cause there were always choices to be made.

Yeah.

And, and then as you were speaking, I was thinking about the fact that as well, again, going back to that idea of globalization and the, and the global conversation, I suppose One thing that we've learned, again coming back from a British perspective, is that the idea that we are moving towards a kind of globalized order, yeah, and that's a single direction of travel, but that doesn't always turn out to be the case, right?

Yeah, yeah.

Curriculum or politics, like we can move towards a more internationalist perspective, but that's not always a linear one-way move.

No, being a personal victim of Brexit, it certainly isn't linear, right?

Yeah.

But then the other direction I wanted to go earlier was just to ask you then about explicitly values education and civics, which you mentioned, but because I think that's really interesting. And I, you know, that was my introduction personally into education was through the citizenship PGCE, you know, in the early 2000s when they brought it in. And that felt like education was being put to work politically in some ways to address some of these topics that we've been talking about, some of these controversial topics where they wanted a space for debate around, connected also with personal and social health education. You know, where do you see, I mean, in the UK and in France, where do you see that being positioned? Like from a policy level, is civics education being used strategically in some ways to respond to some of these things? And then just, and then maybe perhaps at the school level, you know, what, what role does it end up actually playing?

So I think that France has got a longer standing tradition of having a civic education curriculum. And that's been re— since the January 2015 attacks, that's been revitalized. Well, actually, the timing's a bit funny because they planned a moral and civic education curriculum for— and that was going to start in 2016, but then after the Charlie Hebdo attacks, they brought forward the rollout of the curriculum to 2015, and the other subjects were renewed in 2016. Okay. So I think I would say that it would— it's there, it's part of a tradition.

Yeah.

But I think concerns about terrorism specifically, and I guess again, national unity, integration more broadly, have meant that civic education plays a really important role. And I think every time, every time there's been a terrorist attack since then, there's a government announcement saying we're going to reinforce civic education. So that's, that's France. That's kind of policy in one way. England, what we've seen, I think, is a decline in the institutionalization of citizenship education. You know, that was— and again, the timing is quite similar because that was Tony Blair's baby. He commissioned the Cricke Report. He showed a real interest in— I would say the New Labour government showed a real interest in citizenship education before even 9/11, for example, before terrorism was on the agenda. On the political agenda, really. And then you had 9/11 and it started to get— one of the many purposes that civic education served was to respond to this particular challenge that got thrown into the mix, I suppose, a little bit the way that it did in France. But then again, I think the conservative— well, the coalition government that came in in 2010, like, citizenship education is no longer compulsory as a standalone subject. You've got less and less people being trained as specialists.

Yeah.

And you've got the EBAC now, which means that certain subjects like history and geography are counted in the EBAC, whereas citizenship isn't. That disincentivizes schools to invest in it. So it's become less— and then you've got fundamental British values that comes in as a way of responding to concerns about terrorism. But it's not like— unlike in France, where in theory at least the values, all the lessons I've observed, it's been like, okay, here's a value of equality, this is how it works out in discrimination, anti-discrimination law, for example. There's always a connection to the law or the constitution, okay, like that. So it's a values education grounded in a civic education program. I think that's a really useful way of approaching it, actually, um, because the students get a sense of, okay, so this is— I mean, as a teacher training I observed as well, the guy leading it explained, you know, that we have principles and these principles enter into law, right?

Yeah.

And it's— I think it's really useful for students to be able to say, okay, this is what we believe in and this is how our constitution and our legal framework support that. I think that's a real advantage in the French system. Over the English one.

Yeah.

Unfortunately in France, and I wouldn't say this was universal, but I've had some teachers say that they struggle. So in a lot— 3 of the 4 schools I've been to, civic and moral education is taught by history and geography teachers, but they have like 3 and a half hours a week with the kids and they've got to cover history, geography, and okay, moral education. And sometimes civic and moral education gets squeezed out by history and geography because of the assessment components in the BAC and in the brevet, because of the kind of institutionalization of history and geography in the French education system. So I think it does sometimes get squeezed out.

Interesting. And similarly in England as well?

Yeah, I think the squeezing out is probably a bit more dramatic in England. Having said that, like, I saw some great citizenship and PSHE days at one of the schools that I went to, and they had like, all the kids were off timetable for a day, and they had this one on, it was about Bastille Day, and it was about democracy, and they had that also led by the French department, so it's kind of cross-curricular, and that was brilliant. I saw another one on race, Black Lives Matter and racial equality and that kind of thing. And so those schools are doing great stuff, I think.

Yeah.

But I do think in another school, a sixth form college, there was a school leader that was really committed to citizenship education personally, but in practice she didn't, didn't feel like she always had the chance to do as much as she, or to make as much happen as she wanted to.

Yeah. And in terms of, because obviously in the UK they were training, specifically training teachers with the, the necessary understanding and competencies to be able to be an effective citizenship teacher in terms of all the things that that means, facilitating dialogues around sensitive issues and Do you see, or have you seen in the research, a lack of not just the kind of commitment and interest in this topic, but actually a lack of competencies? And, you know, this is no criticism of teachers, of course, but, you know, just in terms of it does take us, as we've discussed, a certain sense of the subject, etc., to be able to do it effectively. Is that an issue in terms of lack of training, capacity development?

I would say yes. I mean, I think that the Sixth Form College I was just speaking about, the school leader spoke at length about how teachers struggled with these issues and the training needs and the difficulties that she experienced with that. So yeah, I think I would say it's a problem in some places. I would contrast that with the secondary school that I went to where the deputy head in charge of of citizenship, well, of those citizenship days, which was a citizenship-trained teacher. And so they did, they dealt with that kind of through collaborative planning.

Yeah.

Or she would basically plan the sessions and then to the teachers, and I suppose that would help. They did a lot of kind of collaborative, again, it was two people in the room, things like that to help.

Yeah, because it, I mean, it feels like there's more need rather than less need. For people with those competencies, right? I don't know where France and where the UK are investing in that capacity development, but it doesn't feel like there's less need for it. In fact, the opposite. For me, it feels like there's more need for people, educators, to be able to grapple with really difficult thorny issues, whether it is Black Lives Matter or equity and equality or whatever, justice, whatever it is. And, and as you said, with Sami Khatib, specific instances, it, it feels like they just keep coming. And if we don't engage with them, if we don't engage young people with those, the things that are happening and to be able to be informed and find genuine sources that are valid and, and, you know, useful to think critically around these issues, then we're not doing our jobs, right? As educators, for me. That's my belief, but do people recognize at the policy level that that's necessary?

It's a good question, actually. I think where, I think the question is where it's coming from. So in France, one of the, uh, the academies, the, which are these kind of 30 territorial delocalized representatives of the Ministry of Education regions, I guess you would say it. So academy level in one of the academies I've got, they've spent a lot of money and they've got a 100-strong group of teachers for training around laïcité and republican values. And one of the kind of transversal themes is discussion and debate. There's a real awareness on the part of, of the two kind of academies that I've worked with at that level that there's a need to train teachers in how to lead discussion and debate. And they both said to me that, that is not something that comes naturally to teachers in France, and it's not part of the tradition, I guess. And there's a real awareness of that, and I've seen some great work happening there.

Brilliant.

And we were talking before about different arenas of policymaking, right? And I think that people at the local level, kind of school leaders and those kind of mid-level policy actors, you might call it, who are a bit closer to the ground, I think they have different concerns than national policymakers. So I don't know, I've never heard Macron or the education minister, Blanquer, speak about the needs to train teachers in discussion and debate. They'll maybe talk more about the content, or they might say things like, we need to absolutely defend the value of laïcité, we need to defend our republican values. But I hear less about the more practical pedagogical nitty-gritty, you know.

Yeah.

And I think there's a tendency— I wouldn't say this globally, but I think that in England and in France, in both countries, I think there's a tendency to forget about the pedagogy that goes along with these issues. Because often we're talking about the politics, right? And politicians talk about politics, that's their job. But I think sometimes what's missing from these discussions is, well, we know we need to be talking about these issues, but how do we actually do it? Or how do I do it when I've got a group of, of 16-year-olds in front of me on a Monday morning? How do I, how do we build that capacity?

Yeah. That, that's the crucial piece for me because it's not, not only from a values perspective and a controversial issues perspective, but also just from a general pedagogical perspective across the board. I mean, If we have teachers who are really pedagogically competent in those kinds of dialogic methods, then for me that would be a good thing in all subjects, not just to address some of these issues. But I mean, maybe that's just my own educational bias coming out.

And I think if they've got time to reflect, they've got time to talk to their colleagues about these things, time to be— another one of the things in the south of France, they're really working on— there's one group, an online training group that works specifically on teachers' reflexivity.

Yeah.

So kind of their teachers' ethics and their reflectivity on their own views, basically.

Interesting.

And they do training specifically on that theme. So I think that's a really interesting way to go as well, but I think you're right that it's a cross-curricular thing.

Yeah. No, that, that's really interesting because as you said, you're, as a teacher, sometimes, or many times, you have to leave your own values or political beliefs at the door, right? But, but it's very difficult as, you know, to be fully human in the room. You know, you can't do that entirely, right?

Exactly. And I think that makes one of the things that Carol Vincent's great book on fundamental British values, one of the things she talks about is that one of the reasons the teachers end up treading on eggshells is because they don't want to be seen to be indoctrinating children. And that makes— that adds to the kind of emotional clutter that you bring to these subjects, right?

Yeah. No, it's a highly complex kind of dance that you have to do as an educator. It's not just, here's a PowerPoint presentation on fundamentalism, now go teach it.

Right.

Done.

I mean, it's there's a huge amount going on. Clutter is a good word. It's like, it's— there's a lot to think about as an educator. And, you know, I just, as I said, I just, I think we have, we have some kind of moral responsibility to support teachers to do more of that rather than less of that. Because if we, if we avoid it and it becomes all vanilla and, and just, you know, you know, we just stay with the safe subjects and we stay with, with our disciplines and, and anything that's politically inert, then we are not doing our jobs effectively.

Absolutely.

Cool. Thank you, man. Really lovely. See you later.

Thank you. Bye. Bye.

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