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What could the future of primary education look like? How we can take things from where they are now and improve them to make the situation better for the pupils, for the teachers and for everybody involved in primary education?
In each episode, Ed Finch will be talking to guests within the educational field to talk about how things are, how we want them to be and the actions we can take to get them from here to there.
[00:00:00] Ed Finch: You're listening to the Primary Futures podcast from Hamilton Brookes, a podcast about the big ideas and big questions in primary education, brought to you in partnership with Oxford Brookes University. How do we address the challenges that we're facing today in primary education? This is the big question that my guests Professor Dame Alison Peacock and Professor Sam Twiselton explore in this episode. Alison is the Chief Executive of the Chartered College of Teaching, a charitable professional body that seeks to empower a knowledgeable and respected teaching profession through membership and accreditation. Sam is the emeritus professor at Sheffield Institute of Education, Sheffield Hallam University and she's passionate about teacher and school leader development. Let's join the conversation where I asked Alison and Sam what they see in schools that makes them proud to be part of the profession.
[00:00:57] Alison Peacock: When I visit a school, what I'm really excited about is when I see classrooms where children are very keen to share their learning, where they might come rushing over to share what they've been doing, where they're happy to talk with and to each other, where the classroom is set up to really optimise learning. So for example, I was in a school in Sunderland earlier this week and the early years foundation stage was just magical. It was all, natural kind of materials, there were lots of opportunities for children to engage with natural objects, there was outdoors, indoors, kind of melded into one. Loads of opportunities for children to explore activities, but nobody directing, you must now move from this activity to that activity. So just wonderful, joyful.
[00:01:47] Ed Finch: Yeah. So that's a confident member of staff there who knows how to run an effective learning environment, isn't it?
[00:01:54] Alison Peacock: Yeah, absolutely and the more that we have those teachers, the more our children thrive.
[00:01:59] Ed Finch: Absolutely and I mean, not only did you need a confident teacher in that earlier setting, you needed a confident leadership who knew what learning really is and were giving that teacher the space to do it right.
[00:02:12] Alison Peacock: Yes, absolutely and that's one of the other things that was so encouraging because that was the first classroom I visited and from there, everything got better and better and it was an all through school in everything. So having that kind of grounding, that early experience for the children, was really paying off, you could see throughout the school, really paying off, but it was the kind of quiet confidence that the children had in that setting and it wasn't that it was a privileged environment. It wasn't at all. It was just more that the children felt safe, clearly they knew what the parameters were for them and they were enjoying what they were doing and that's so important, isn't it?
[00:02:51] Ed Finch: It is, and those children knew they belonged there. I think that means that the teacher knew that they belong. Sam, what do you look for in a school? What makes you smile?
[00:03:00] Sam Twiselton: Well, obviously as always, everything that Alison says, plus I suppose from my point of view, I really focus on the teachers as well and, you know, I think what Alison has just described, you will see echoed in those teachers in terms of quietly confident and secure and as you rightly said, they know that's partly to do with a secure, confident leadership that gives the teacher the, the sort of permission to do what's right for those kids. What we know is that most people enter the teaching profession because they want to make a difference, they know that education can really transform lives and when you actually see that's what's happening, that's what they're experiencing in their role and it sounds like that's exactly what was happening with those kids Alison was just describing, you know, that's what I look for. The reason that brought you into the profession is something that you're now experiencing on a daily basis and unfortunately it's not always the case for everybody, but that's what I just absolutely love it when you see that magic, that people really get that sense, you know, what I'm doing is making a difference to these children that will last with them through their lives and, yeah, it just gives me a tingle every time.
[00:04:07] Ed Finch: Those decisions that they're making, you know, the decisions that they know they're empowered to make, that if the right thing in the earlier setting is to step away and let the child experience, they can, they're not going to be criticised because they weren't kneeling alongside in that moment, or they might be doing it later, or they might've just done it when we see it.
[00:04:24] Sam Twiselton: Yeah, yeah, and I think, you know, you're absolutely right. That takes confidence. I think you get that confidence partly from knowledge. So I think, you know, what we have now is an incredibly well trained profession that has a range of different kinds of knowledge, including, you know, child development and what's needed, at different phases of children's development and therefore having the confidence to know when to stand back, when not to stand back as well, you know, I think when I entered the profession, it was a bit like you, always stand back for everything, which suited me because I didn't feel like I knew very much what to do if I was going to step in, whereas I don't think that's where we are now. I think we've got a much more knowledgeable and therefore sort of confident in a really underpinned way at its best.
[00:05:11] Ed Finch: I think at its best, that's exactly right. I started teaching 25, 26 years ago, around about, and I think our schools have transformed and that we need to take a breath and stand back and be really impressed with how far the profession has come. I think it's a different world to the one I took over in the very early 2000s.
[00:05:32] Sam Twiselton: Yeah, I agree and I don't think it gets talked about enough really, you know, how far we've come and how amazing that is and that, you know, that's why our skills are doing so well on the whole. I mean, obviously up against very challenging circumstances, post COVID, et cetera.
[00:05:47] Ed Finch: Yeah, let's go into that a little bit because I think the vast majority of schools you see, you smell joy when you walk through the door, I don't walk into a lot of schools where I don't feel that, but it happens sometimes. So what are the pressures on teachers do you think that mean that sometimes schools aren't those schools that we've been describing? What's standing in the way?
[00:06:10] Alison Peacock: Well, I really worry about those schools where teachers feel they've got to follow the script, where there's a right way of doing things, perceived right way of doing things, because everyone's constantly metaphorically looking over their shoulder to check that they're doing what they're supposed to be doing and I really worry about those schools. I can kind of understand that maybe sometimes if a school is brought into a multi academy trust and maybe things have been going very wrong, there's a kind of need to re establish order and so on, but those should be the very minority of schools and I'm worried that there's an increasing sort of trend to thinking that there's a right way of doing everything. It's almost like we've taken the whole lessons from school improvement and school efficacy and almost taken them too far and we've got leaders who in some cases are saying, right, well, I've worked out exactly what needs to happen to make children learn and you need to follow the script and do this and almost as soon as that happens, it feels to me as if the opposite is likely to take place. So I think this is why we've been at the Charter College, we've been talking so much about the importance of professionalism, of building teaching knowledge and agency and ethical behaviors and leadership that mean that yes, we're learning together, yes, we're learning from research, but we're also able to apply that knowledge in a repertoire of skills that is most appropriate for the children in front of us. That feels very important.
[00:07:43] Ed Finch: It is, isn't it? And it seems to make just perfect sense to me. We've chosen the people we think will make good teachers, we've trained them as best we can, it seems to me like maybe we should trust them. But there must be pressures on school leaders that stop them from making this radical choice to trust the people they've employed. I wonder, Sam, could you just talk us through a couple of the pressures you think are causing to bend things out of shape?
[00:08:06] Sam Twiselton: Yeah. I think it's probably unintended consequences. I don't think I've ever spoken to a school leader where I get the impression, you know, they come to work in the morning to not trust their teachers and not let them have professional judgment. I think we've, you know, I talked about knowledgeable teachers and I really do believe that and we've all agreed that profession has come a long way in that respect. I think there's a danger that the pendulum has swung so far in a particular direction, that the importance of criticality and the importance of professional judgment in knowing the knowledge that's relevant to the situation that you're in is sometimes lost in exactly what Alison was describing, what can become a kind of formula, you know, we've, got the answers, we've got this evidence base, this is what this tells us if we do X, Y, and Z, you know, A, B, and C will follow and we all know that education is just far more complicated than that, there are so many different variables, there never can be a formula. I think there are things that we know that, that are more likely to be effective than others. But actually knowing what's right for this particular situation that's in front of me with these particular children does involve that important professional judgment and if teachers feel like actually they haven't got the ability to make choices, to apply that judgment, that's when it can feel, in some of the teachers I talk to, I can't honestly say I see this very often in school, but I do sometimes hear about it when I talk to teachers away from school, that they feel like they've lost agency, they've lost an ability to make the choice for themselves because it can be so scripted. I don't think that's what leaders intend it to feel like.
[00:09:46] Ed Finch: No, I think very often they think that they're freeing up the load for the teachers. We're providing you the materials and they're well developed and we're pleased with them and so, you know, pay us the respect to keep into them because we've spent time and money and research on this.
[00:10:02] Sam Twiselton: Yeah, and I think, you know, I talk about pendulum, swing it back right the other way to when I started, you know, it was like a blank sheet of paper for everything. I really did feel like I was making it up as I went along. So I, you know, I think it's good that we've got people who aren't having to reinvent the wheel all the time, but yeah, it's just, at what point do you get under the skin of the thing that you've been given to support your teaching, whether it's a curriculum or a resource or whatever it is? So that you're thinking through for yourself, what's it going to, how do I make it meaningful and accessible to these children I'm responsible for? And you can't just take it off the shelf and deliver it and be sure that's going to happen, you have to have a process of professional judgment and professional ownership that you go through. I mean, that's what I love about all the work that the Chartered College has done in terms of privileging the expertise, whether we're talking about teachers, leaders, mentors, whoever, that really puts a premium on that professional knowledge, that judgment, that ability to take an evidence base, but then apply it with nuance to the situation that's in front of you.
[00:11:07] Ed Finch: It's a different way of looking at what evidence means, isn't it? I think a lot of teachers come to research with a mistaken understanding of that it's like research in pure sciences and that it's going to give them answers and tell them how to do something, whereas probably what educational research is good at doing is asking better questions.
[00:11:28] Alison Peacock: I think it's also about encouraging teachers to ask questions of their own practice and questions of their own circumstance, so that they feel confident in engaging in that inquiry because that way, particularly when you've got schools working together across the piece, you know, you could be looking at a particular area of the curriculum, developing it, trialing a way of working, evaluating how well it's going, visiting each other's classrooms, you know, it's a very rich approach to pedagogy, when you're not on your own with the door shut and I think increasingly multi academy trusts are enabling that kind of inquiry, which is nevertheless underpinned by rigorous methodology, but it's a way of giving a sense of discovery to the teachers and I think it's just wonderful when teachers are able to engage in curriculum innovation, curriculum development, to evaluate their practice, to see what other colleagues are doing, it's so fascinating, isn't it? When, you know, when you watch other colleagues teaching, because everybody comes at things from a different perspective or a different starting point in terms of who they are as a teacher, regardless of, you know, the same materials in front of you, but you're going to approach it in the way that is representative of who you are and long may that continue because otherwise we might as well have a robot at the front of the classroom and we need charismatic, lovely teachers, don't we?
[00:12:51] Ed Finch: We have.
So I wanted to think a little bit, if I can use your brains for it, about the recruitment and retention issue. At the moment, friends who are heads are telling me they're really struggling to recruit people into jobs and I know of schools which have dropped subjects. This is secondary schools, but I think the primary schools have some of the same problems and I know of a lot of people who are leaving the profession, which it really worries me and it makes me sad. What do you think some of the main reasons that people are leaving the profession at the moment are?
[00:13:23] Alison Peacock: I think it's a very complex issue. We see that this is an issue across the world, so it's not just something that's happening in the UK. I do think there's something really important about culture within a school when we're thinking about retention of staff. We all know, hopefully, what it's like to work for an inspiring leader, someone who recognises us, notices us, gives us credit for ideas, engages us. We all know what that's like, but we've all perhaps heard, if we haven't experienced it ourselves, what it's like to work for somebody who perhaps is less interested in building the culture and more interested in their outputs. So I think sometimes the culture of the school is a problem and we certainly hear from the work of people like Johnny Apley that when you get culture right, everything follows in terms of children's behaviour, relationships with parents, wellbeing of teachers and so on. I think there are pressures in a post pandemic society. People are a little bit more selfish. I think sometimes the fact is that we were, whether we like to think about it or not, we were faced with a pandemic, which felt very life or death and in those circumstances, I think people think, well, what do I really value? What really matters about my life? And if you feel that you're being worked within an inch of your, within an inch of your life, if you've got workload that is unbearable and frankly, you've never finished that work, it could be tempting to try and look from away from the classroom and find something where you feel you'd be able to finish your work at five o'clock or six o'clock or whatever time it may be and go and do something different. So flexible working is something that some schools are starting to look at and we're hearing of multi academy trusts like Dixon's Academies who are planning a nine day fortnight from September, let's see how that all works. I think it is tempting maybe to look at other people and think they're only going into the office two or three times a week, why do I have to go in five days? So there's all of that, there's the workload, there's the kind of lack of flexibility, and so on. But I also think that, it's very pleasing to see that we now have a new HMCI of Ofsted who is actively listening to the profession because the accountability of schools and that pressure from Ofsted, quite frankly, had become so toxic at the end of the last HMCI's tenure that it was becoming a huge problem. So I hope and I conducted an interview just last week with Sir Martin Oliver, where I hope that he comes through on some of his things he was suggesting in that interview, which was much more about working with the profession, listening to colleagues, building the expertise of inspectors, trying to make sure that people who visit schools to judge them have experience themselves of working in schools in that phase, that sector, in that kind of context. Those kinds of things are really important because as soon as you start to get that accountability pressure kind of pervading the system, even schools that are nowhere near an inspection, that maybe I've only just had one, start preparing for the next one in a kind of uber sort of ridiculous way. So I do think that's a massive part of the story, but there's not a magic wand. I mean, obviously money would help, so paying people appropriately would be a good thing and maintaining the buildings would be helpful and then having some support services around the school so that when you come up against the challenge that you're... you feel the school's resources don't have the knowledge to know how to deal with, you know, that you can refer to support services and people will come and help. That seems to have eroded dramatically over the last 14 years, so there's a lot that could improve.
[00:17:12] Ed Finch: I guess if I was to give you a magic wand, I'll ask Sam, if I was to give you a magic wand and say, you can sort out extended services, or you can say, sort out curriculum, or you can sort out accountability, which one would you wave your wand at first? Which one do you think would be the biggest agent to keep people in the
[00:17:27] Sam Twiselton: That's really hard, I think accountability is a major thing, a major force there. One of the advisory groups that I sit on, actually Alison sits on as well, is the Recruitment and Retention Strategy Group for the DfE and when that was set up a long time ago now, they did a major piece of research into who's leaving the profession, who's thinking about leaving the profession, those who have left, why? Those who are thinking about it, but change their mind and actually it's that latter group that was the most interesting. They showed us quite a few of the interviews that they'd conducted with those people and the thing that they all had in common was they'd changed schools.
[00:18:07] Ed Finch: Yeah.
[00:18:08] Sam Twiselton: And sometimes it would have only been on the back of incidentally, they'd happened to visit a school for a different purpose. So this is quite often people fairly early on in their career who, it was only going to a different school and seeing how different it could be, compared to what they thought, well, it's all, it's like this for everybody where they currently were and just absolutely transformed the whole view of the profession. Now it's, I guess it's the same accountability system, in both schools. But it's what Alison was saying about the culture managed to not be poisoned by what can be the toxicity of accountability and I know Ofsted don't intend it to be like this. They've so often said this, you know, but all the things that, that schools do because they're getting ready for Ofsted and therefore they need to have X, Y, and Z, certain kinds of evidence, certain kinds of data and I think actually that, as well as creating a bad, fearful culture, it also adds to the workload. I've been looking at a fair bit of research recently suggesting that English teachers do work harder than teachers around the rest of the world in the main, but actually it's not the amount of work that they do that's causing the biggest problems in terms of retention. It's the work they have to do that they don't feel is serving the purpose that we've talked about earlier on, you know, why they came into the profession, they don't feel like it's making a difference to these children, all the data entry, whatever it is. In fact, sometimes they feel like it's getting in the way because it might be that they feel like they're gaming the system in some way and that is driven by accountability. So I think we do need to look at, it's not just Ofsted, is it? It's league tables and there's something overarching that as well about how the profession is viewed, the status of the profession compared to other professions and I think that's a real problem. I don't know what the answer is, but I do know that in Ontario, which is considered to be, you know, one of the higher performing education systems around the world, it's been on a big improvement journey. It was struggling a couple of decades ago and it came up with a 10 year plan, a number one priority of three overarching priorities was the status of the profession. So they really, actively worked on that.
[00:20:24] Ed Finch: Yeah, I think that a lot of teachers and a lot of school leaders talk quite bleakly about the social contract seeming to be broken.
[00:20:34] Sam Twiselton: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:20:36] Ed Finch: They talk about a lack of respect, whether they're talking...
[00:20:38] Sam Twiselton: Social media, parents, behaviour, there's a lot going on, isn't there?
[00:20:43] Ed Finch: So what you would do to cut into that and say, no, we need our communities and our society to understand that the work that teachers do is important and beautiful and based on knowledge and based on skills, you know, I don't know how you cut into that.
[00:20:59] Alison Peacock: I think it links to what you were saying though, Ed, about the wider support services for schools and for children and for families and I think if you've got a young family and you feel as if the school isn't on your side, then school is such a figure of authority within society that you're probably going to choose that as the place to kick back. Whether actually it's because your electricity bill is higher than you wanted it to be, which has got nothing to do with school, but it's stressful and schools are places where you feel you can go and complain and somebody who perhaps is a bit more experienced than you will be able to listen and even though they can't sort it out, someone that you can kick back against. So I think schools are victims of that because, you know, you can't even go and see your doctor anymore, can you really, there's, where can you go in society to talk to someone? There's almost nowhere.
[00:21:50] Ed Finch: I think school leaders know that difficult parent is probably at school because that is the one place they can find someone who really will listen to them because they don't have a lot of choice.
[00:22:00] Alison Peacock: And schools will give them time nine times out of ten as well. The more that we can work with communities, the more that we can provide those services for families and for young people as they're growing up, the more that we can, school can be at the centre of that, but it doesn't have to be the solver of all problems and I think where we've got to recently is that school seems to be the answer to everything. Teachers have to be the answer to everything because there's no other resource left. We're kind of like the sort of, you know, an emergency service that is just there in the community five days a week, sometimes more, just being there for our children and the more that we can broaden out the support across our communities, the better it strikes me and the more we can work together to make learning and just life and management of leisure time and management of time and resources, we can make it easier for people if we're not on our own.
[00:22:55] Ed Finch: Yes, but there's a lot that's very unusual about the English system and we have to say English because Scotland and Wales have different systems, so it's not British. So it's my perception that most teachers and leaders in England don't know how, frankly, odd parts of our system are. If there was something that you could steal from another education system that might change ours, where would you take it from? What would you take?
[00:23:22] Alison Peacock: We need to be sure that we're always putting children first, and I'm not sure that is necessarily the main priority. We kind of say it is, but in reality, that whole suite of conferences that we were all involved in, the Learning First Conferences, were all about putting children first and not tracking data first and I think, for example, in New Zealand, you know, there's a real sense of early childhood experiences being really important and building on those and also first generation heritage families being included in a way that is very good to see. So there are parts of the world where they have other priorities, which are more obviously part of their policy. I feel if you had to sort of encapsulate what's the English policy about? It feels like it's all about outcomes, tests, it's a bit deficit, really.
[00:24:16] Ed Finch: Yeah and I'm sure that the people who are in charge of this would say, but yes, there are only proxies, they're because we want to see every child making progress and reaching a potential. But the fact is the outcomes end up defining the curriculum and the curriculum defines the child's experience. Sam, what would you steal from around the world to tweak our system?
[00:24:35] Sam Twiselton: Something sort of fairly basic just sprang to my mind when you posed the question, which is Sheffield Hallam was involved in evaluating the Shanghai Maths Project, you know, when, lots of primary teachers were sent over to Shanghai to learn how to teach maths the Shanghai way. Loads of interesting things came out of the evaluation that the DfE wasn't that interested in, but, or didn't necessarily want to make a big song and dance about. But one of them was how much less time teaching, actual face to face teaching, the teachers in Shanghai do and the rest of their days is taken up with I don't know whether we would call it professional development, action research, action learning, a combination of those things where they are collaborating to really, in a very focused way, assess the progress of the pupils that they've been teaching that day. So, you know, half of the day they'll be teaching, the second half they'll be thinking in a very detailed, focused way about how do we progress these pupils learning? And in order to do that, they'll be looking at research and things as well, you know, it's not just a sort of off the top of the head kind of activity, but they could only do that because they didn't have a teaching timetable that crammed their day. So it's a sort of fairly basic thing, but just more time. Time to do the things that make you be the better professional that you need to be to develop that professional judgment that we were talking about at the beginning. If you can't see the wood for the trees because your head is so full of all the things that cram your day up, it's really hard to be able to stand back and think about how we progress pupils learning in the way that those Shanghai teachers were.
[00:26:08] Ed Finch: Ah, listen, that's fascinating. We're going to come back in just a couple of minutes and I'm going to invite us to try and think about a golden world we could have just a few years down the line if everybody gets together. But let's just take a quick break and we'll be back in two minutes.
Welcome back from the break.
It's been lovely talking to Dame Alison Peacock and Professor Sam Twisselton and I feel like there's a little elephant in the room that we've actually known each other for a while now. It's just so lovely to be in this virtual room with you, we don't spend enough time. There was a little time in our lives when we saw a little bit more of each other as we were all part of the Beyond Levels experience, which I think of as Alison's baby, although maybe it was more Julie Lily's really. Alison, can you remind us all what that was about?
[00:26:54] Alison Peacock: Yeah, so this was when national curriculum levels were removed and Nikki Morgan was the secretary of state at the time and she did a sort of broadcast, which looked like was from her cupboard, basically telling schools that national curriculum levels had gone and we just got to get on with it and nobody really knew what to do and I put out a tweet saying, wouldn't it be a great idea if we all collaborated and shared stories of how we're engaging with assessment after levels? And tweets started to flood in and then my colleague and friend, Julie Lilly, messaged me and said, how are you going to deal with all this? Shall I start kind of keeping a record of who's messaging about offers of support and so on and very early on within hours of that tweet, probably less than an hour, sam sent a tweet saying, Oh, well, we've got a brand new facility at Sheffield Hallam. Why don't you think about coming and having your first conference, which was rapidly emerging as what was going to happen, come to us, come to Sheffield Hallam and so that was how it was born and we worked with Sean Cavan, who was at Sheffield Hallam at the time to plan the first Learning First conference, beyond Levels Conference, which was like an assessment party. So we had 500 people who came from all over the country, down from Newcastle, up from Cornwall, across from Wales, everybody gathering together, each to share tiny snippets of their practice and we had a very kind of 10 minutes maximum for each speaker to get up onto the stage. We had cards, red, amber, and green cards. Which we, you know, if you've got a red card, that was it, you're off. Very good humoured, very can do, very collaborative event, consultants gave their time for free. Everybody gave their time for free, Sheffield Hallam shared their building for free. We got sponsorship that meant that everybody could have a packed lunch. Yeah and it was the start of something amazing and we had 13 of those conferences across the country in the space of the next 16 months and they were all free for teachers to attend and they were great kind of energising opportunities to share, exactly as Sam's been saying, collaboration at its best.
[00:29:10] Ed Finch: I met people at those conferences who became very close friends, people who are I learned to respect who I'd not come across. I came across ideas, I know, I mean, for me, it was amazing. It wired me into my professionalism and into my professional learning like nothing before and gave me some of my closest friends, so I will always be grateful to you and to Julie for making those happen.
[00:29:38] Sam Twiselton: I mean, it was just a very delightful experience to be involved in, but I think what it showed me was it's where we started this conversation, you know, that teachers just want to make a difference and they're willing to give up their Saturdays to travel, you know, goodness knows how far, give their time for free and I don't know, there's just a feeling of real sort of momentum around it. Having gone from a situation, as Alison said, where people think, Oh my God, I don't know what to do to actually, Oh, we're empowered, you know, we're taking in the control and I think eventually, Alison, it sort of led into how you've taken on the charter college and seen that as being a vehicle for that sort of sense of professional agency and, yeah, it's just brilliant.
[00:30:18] Alison Peacock: Yeah, it did, it did. That first conference when we had so many colleagues all coming together and I remember just standing at the door of Sheffield Hallam, people were flooding in and I was saying, welcome to our assessment party and it was a Saturday morning, you know, you could have expected people to be feeling a bit tired and groggy and there was just, there was such an energy and at the end of that conference, I remember Shirley Clark kind of gathered everybody together and was like, this has been a great day and I just remember thinking, wow, if we could bottle this energy, this enthusiasm, this sharing, this collaboration, this wisdom, actually, if we could bottle that and share it across the country, wouldn't that be amazing? And it was at the time when the founding CEO role at the Chartered College was being advertised and I never thought I would leave headship because I absolutely love teaching and being a head teacher, but when I saw that job advertised, I kind of thought this could be the thing and I, you know, I haven't looked back because I've loved it and continue to love it because there's so much potential there because the profession's great.
[00:31:22] Ed Finch: Profession's great.
I was, you know, I'd love to see five years from now, if we all make the right choices and do the right things, that we've got a profession that want to spend time together, that want to work on shared understandings, not on taking you know, truths from authorities, I'd like to see everybody feel that they belong in the way that they did at those events.
[00:31:44] Sam Twiselton: Yeah, I honestly think the chartered college is part of the answer to that. That's how it works in other professions often is your professional body is the vehicle for you to come together, collaboratively create knowledge, create that sense of agency so that the profession doesn't feel like it's being done to. It's professional body is gathering it's profession around it to do things together and I think, you know, for me in five years time, if that's where we are, if we've got a government that's working really closely with the charter college and recognising that's where the expertise for this stuff is not in sanctuary buildings, really.
[00:32:23] Ed Finch: Does someone have to get out of the way to let that happen?
[00:32:26] Alison Peacock: I think the college is gathering momentum all the time and I think the fact that we're independent now of government, we don't have any funding from government, is a very liberating factor. So we can rise above politics, which means that, you know, hopefully in the future, politicians will look to us, they will ask us for advice. It was already beginning to happen, it's already beginning to happen with opportunities for fellows of the college to engage in conversations with colleagues from DfE and so on, really helping to form policy, that should be the way we go. But I think having our independence is so crucial, it means we don't have to toadie to anybody, especially when there's about to be a change of government. We don't have to kind of say to them, well, we've always been your friends, haven't we? You know, actually, we can rise above it and I think the fact that we are trying to provide a voice for the profession, it doesn't mean that we all need to agree on everything because we won't. But we, I think the fundamentals we do agree on, we, agree on the fact that we want education to be as amazing opportunity for all our children, find me a teacher that doesn't want that to happen.
[00:33:30] Ed Finch: So where we're recording this, a few days after Ofsted announced that they were dismantling their curriculum arm. Do you feel that there's a place for the college to step into some of that work? And not in a way that I think sometimes Ofsted may have got it slightly wrong and been very highly prescriptive, but in that descriptive space. This is what we think good learning can look like in these particular circumstances.
[00:33:58] Alison Peacock: So, the college will never say, this is the way that things ought to be done, because it's up to the professionals to listen to the argument and decide what's best for them. What we can do and what we are beginning to do more and more of, is present a range of opportunities. So for example, we're doing work on Rethinking Curriculum at Key Stage 2. We're hoping to get funding to do Rethinking Curriculum at Key Stage 3. We're looking at assessment and through our journal and through our courses and through the chartered route, we're encouraging people to look at a range of evidence, explore ideas in the context of their own classrooms and their own schools, and then work in the way that's most efficacious for them. So it's not about saying everybody needs to do it this way or that way, because that's for the profession to decide, but it is about opening arrows, I think, to what's available and what's working well for some colleagues in some schools and helping people to find out more about that and that's really fascinating.
[00:34:56] Ed Finch: It's really exciting work. Sam, you have a lot of involvement in initial teacher training and in the ECT framework. Do you think in five years from now, we could have a system which a real focus was inducting our new colleagues into this body of the profession?
[00:35:14] Sam Twiselton: Yeah, to be fair, I think to some extent that's what the early, both the ITT framework and the early career framework are trying to do, but in five years time, I would like to see it being done, being overseen by the charter college, alison might not like me saying this, rather than the DfE. DfE would have an arm's length relationship with it because it needs to be funded and that will be taxpayers, et cetera. But I think, you know, back to what we were saying, the expertise for knowing what good looks like in terms of an induction and an initial teacher training experience lies with the college, not with DFE civil servants, you know, much as I admire DFE civil servants, I have to say, you know, they're not experts in education and pedagogy. So what I would hope will have happened in five years time is that we still have this really important idea of a legal entitlement in terms of induction, in terms of once you've got your QTS for at least two years, I might even like to see it extended. For it to be really funded in the way it needs to be so that the most important sort of active ingredient in it all is often the mentor who's supporting the teacher in the school, and they're not doing that out of goodwill there, they have time funded for it to happen, but also that the way it's being delivered, the whole experience, both for early career teachers and for their mentors is that their professional judgment is being trusted more than it is at the moment. So less prescribed, there is more sense of agency, more sense of an ability to meet each individual teacher at their point of need rather than having to sort of slog their way through something in a particular way, but that there is still consistency and coherence around what that offer is. So if I get a job in Devon, I'm going to get the same quality of experience as I would do if I got it in Cumbria. So there has to be some consistency, but I don't think that needs to amount to the level of prescription and sort of command and control from the centre that we've currently got. I feel like if there was a role for the Chartered College, I mean, they may not take the whole thing over. Alison would probably... but you know, having some, kind of relationship with it so that it's not, you know, bless them, civil servants trying to pretend that they know about something that they can't know about because it's not their background, that's how I would say it. Same for initial teacher training as well.
[00:37:34] Ed Finch: And I think that's really well observed that civil servants work incredibly hard, they're incredibly agile professionally, they're astonishing people to by and large, but they're definitely not teachers. Is there an argument that we should try and get, whether it was the Chartered College or an Independent Curriculum Commission or what? Is there some way of wresting control of education out of the immediacy of our political system so that it stops being a football and stops swinging? Is there a role for the college in that, Alison?
[00:38:04] Alison Peacock: So there is a role for the college in that, but there may well be alongside the college, a role for a curriculum and assessment authority that reviews curriculum and you know, FED has been doing a lot of work, haven't they, thinking about having a long term plan for education. It does seem that we need another layer beyond the minister having a whim about something and that because of potentially education ministers, secretaries of state can be persuaded, we're all subject to being persuaded by certain ideas and then can run with it and sometimes to the detriment of the rest of the profession. So I think if we had a layer of expertise, really focusing on things, something like curriculum development, that would be really helpful. I mean, the Chartered College is also working with the PTI really closely because what they do is offer subject specialist training for teachers and they do that by putting them in a situation with someone who's a real subject expert. So having somebody like Brian Cox talking about science, if you're in the room with an expert, you're reminded what is it like to be taught by a great teacher? What it's like, what is it like to be in a situation where you are, you know, frankly in awe of what you're hearing because it's so amazing and it's that kind of inspiration that PTI offer. We work very closely to try and offer those kinds of experiences to teachers, because we think it's really important that they broaden their horizons around what might be possible in the classroom and we've always got time for the very best, haven't we? So we can write about it, we can encourage teachers, and we do, to study to become chartered teachers. But we also want them to be really inspired people, people who have access to the latest thinking and who can't wait to get back to the classroom and try things out with children.
[00:39:54] Ed Finch: Another good reason why we need to get rid of the meaningless workload tasks, so that we can actually get that passion back for what it...
[00:40:02] Alison Peacock: We can focus on the learning, yeah, absolutely.
[00:40:05] Ed Finch: I mean, this is five years down and five years down the line, we're going to have a profession who are connected with collegiality, who want to be there because they're passionate about what they're doing, they're really reconnected with their why and they're sharing professional knowledge and making their own understandings. It sounds a pretty exciting place to be and maybe that'll tempt me back into the classroom, but I think it probably would. But what could we be doing in our schools, in our colleges, in our classes next week or after half term or come September, which will get us a step or two down the road? What do you think we should be doing to get that sense of collegiality and that sense of our professional identity back into what we're doing? I'll start with you, Alison.
[00:40:47] Alison Peacock: Well, the first thing I would say, wouldn't I, is join the Chartered College. So more and more groups of schools are signing up all their staff to become members of the college and that gives a kind of framework for staff meetings, opportunity to share knowledge and for teachers to become chartered and to really explore practice. I think that would be a really important thing to do, but I also think it is also about the accountability system and if we are able to work more collaboratively with Ofsted, Ofsted is made up primarily of serving head teachers and senior leaders. We need those people to really be knowledgeable and to be engaged in studying and really thinking about their practice rather than just taking the kind of current ideology and pursuing it. So we do need a thinking profession and I think within five years, we could have a real see change. We've got amazing colleagues all over the country who are just waiting, I think, to have the opportunity to behave in a more collegiate manner.
[00:41:47] Ed Finch: Yeah, be connected up, to be empowered and to know that being professional means making your own understandings. Yeah, and Sam, what would you do to make this happen? And particularly how can we support early career teachers to get involved in this?
[00:42:02] Sam Twiselton: Well, first of all, building on what Alison just said, I don't think any of us are saying that accountability needs to be taken away, it's how you frame that accountability. So this will be partly Ofsted, but it might also be things like the public, you know, publication of outcomes and so on, and the creation of league tables. You know, if you've got something that's always going to have a stick element to it, something like Ofsted, make sure that it's looking at the things that we know are going to make the biggest difference from this conversation, which is how well are schools supporting their staff? How are they empowering their staff? How are they making sure that the early career teachers and the trainee teachers that are in the school are getting the support and the sense of belonging to something important that they need to make them sort of feel that reason that they came into the profession in the first place is being fed, rather than sort of disappointed, which I think is what can happen. So in terms of the early career teachers themselves, you know, go back to what I was saying earlier, they are really important, their mentors are really important. So again, the accountability system should be recognising that and should be looking for that and should be celebrating that, that's what school leaders should be being measured on as, as much as the things that do make them do well in sort of performance tables and so on and I do think that is achievable. Within five years, I think with a new government who, you know, already made sort of very positive noises about what they need to do in this space, I think we could have made a lot of progress within that timeframe.
[00:43:28] Ed Finch: Yeah, well let's hold them to account on that one. I'll tell you what, at the start of this recording, you talked about a beautiful, empowering learning environment for young people for early years, Alison. I just say, we need that beautiful, empowering learning environment for our colleagues as well and we can fly like we've never flown before.
[00:43:47] Alison Peacock: Exactly.
[00:43:48] Sam Twiselton: Exactly. That's what Alison mentioned Johnny Apley earlier and one of the ways that he's created a brilliant culture for the schools that he's responsible for is actually putting staff first so that they can put children first. You can't put children first unless you've got, you know, staff who, also feel supported and valued and you know, I think the importance of that relationship between staff wellbeing and pupil wellbeing is really important.
[00:44:15] Ed Finch: Well on that one, I'm afraid our time is run to a close. Thank you so much for your time. Thank you for coming on the Primary Futures podcast and I hope we get to speak again soon.
[00:44:26] Alison Peacock: Thank you.
[00:44:27] Sam Twiselton: Thanks, Ed.
[00:44:32] Ed Finch: So which ideas would you like to take away from this conversation? Download the Primary Pledge Card in the show notes to continue the conversation and note actions that you'd like to take. Share your Primary Pledge Card with us and fellow educators by tagging Hamilton Brooks on social media at Primary Futures, we're on a mission to build a better future for primary education, and you can help us to spread the word by leaving a rating and review wherever you listen to this podcast to help more educators discover us and the inspiring conversations we have with our guests.