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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.
Where are we now? How did we get here? And what could the future look like? My guest, Professor Patrick Alexander, tackles these big questions and suggests actions that we can take in our classrooms to influence the future of primary education. Patrick's no stranger in taking on big questions, his latest research focuses on teacher professional learning and thinking creatively beyond existing models of education.
Let's join the conversation where I ask him where schools are right now.
[00:00:43] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, so as an anthropologist, I suppose what I try to bring to research in schools is sometimes described as the familiar strange in anthropological practice. So really trying to go to a situation that is unfamiliar and through a long process of research, so really it's about in depth ethnography so basically hanging around for a long time in a school to really get a sense of, you know, the rhythms and the flow of what's happening there to, you know, gain the trust of people and really find out how their lives really work and in that process to kind of understand what might at first seem strange to an outsider and I suppose the flip side of that is that by doing that you then get to reflect on your own practice, your own assumptions and realise how the things that you think are pretty normal actually from someone else's perspective might be pretty weird.
So yeah, so take something for example in the UK system like year groups, something we completely take for granted, right? We assume, yeah, of course, that's how you organise schools, why wouldn't you organise schools around year groups? And then of course you ask the question, well, how are year groups organised? And you go, Oh, well, obviously they're organised around, you know, how people fit into certain age categories around the school year and then you go, Oh, so why would you do that? What, is sensible about that? And the further you go down those rabbit holes, you get to ask some seemingly obvious questions that have really interesting, complex answers.
[00:02:02] Ed Finch: That one is an interesting one, isn't it? Because I've worked in the English education system for 20 years or so, that's the way I'm used to doing it. What are some of the alternatives? I know that you've worked overseas as well. So what might we do if we didn't do year groups?
[00:02:15] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, you know, in the UK context, you might see multiple age groups or multiple year groups collapsed in, you know, rural schools, for example. But, you know, in the UK we live in what might be described as a gerontocracy, right? This whole idea that, you know, when you think about it, so much of our society is organised around this assumption that we move through these different stages and that we gain skills, we gain knowledge, we gain rights, we gain responsibilities, all you know, linked to age. But yeah, you don't have to go very far to find out that people have been doing it differently elsewhere. So for example in the US, they would call what we do social progress. So the idea that, you know, whatever happens educationally in a year, it's better for you to go up to the next year than to stay where you are. Whereas, you know, in the UK high school system, for example, it's quite normal for people to not meet the criteria, the educational criteria and stick around. Or they move on or they stick around. So, you know, you can, at least in the, you know, the research I did recently in the Bronx in senior year of high school, it was totally normal to see a 17 year old sitting next to a 21 year old. In this case, people who might've, you know, been out in some of the classes I was in, you know, people who've been to prison, come back to school and so, you know, you get this much more diverse look of things and you know, it's fair to say that probably for a lot of human history, we've had these kinds of ways of dividing up communities according to age or according to status, but not in the very rigid sort of chronological way that we do it in the west.
[00:03:44] Ed Finch: So how we ended up doing that then? I mean, what were the choices that meant that we had all the seven year olds lined up together, possibly regardless of their ability or you know, or prior attainment, how did we get here?
[00:03:57] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, great question and it's a historical question, you know, like most of the strange things that we do in the present, you can ask yourself, okay, what is the history of why this came to be and effectively, you know, you can go back to some of the early policy moves in the 20th century. So the Haddow report would be one good place where if you dig into that, if you're a policy nerd as I am, you dig into that document and you'll find out that they were drawing heavily on developmental psychology at the time, drawing on people like Piaget and saying, okay, well, ages and stages, yeah. But you know, ultimately it becomes mainly white men sitting in a room somewhere, who on some day think, what's the evidence? And I, you know, quote unquote evidence, because you know, you think about the relevance of the evidence of relatively small scale stuff that was done in the 19th century to society today. But they took that evidence and said, yeah, okay, so we're gonna assume and you think about, things like intelligence quotient IQ testing that became popular around the same time. We're going to assume based on the existing evidence that it's better for kids to stay in these year groups than it is for us to teach across them and obviously it also is linked to things like harvest time and you know, things that almost have nothing to do with, you know, what would be the best, potentially the best way to educate kids.
[00:05:11] Ed Finch: So are there other aspects of what we do that to your anthropologist's eye, look nutty? Because you don't think about that as a teacher, do you? We have, I've got year six, of course I've got year six, these are the children, they're age ten and eleven. So are there other bits that you think just don't make sense?
[00:05:26] Patrick Alexander: Well Ed, I would say almost everything that we do in school, you could cast your eye on and go, hang on a second, why is it we do that? So, and you know, when we were in COVID times, when we were deep in the pandemic, that was hopefully, I think for a lot of people, a kind of reflection point to look at that and think, you know, you only have to think about those examples of things like students being asked to put their school uniform on at home before they went on a zoom call together. What are we doing? This is weird!
[00:05:55] Ed Finch: Discipline is a big story. On the day we're recording this, here in Oxford, we've had the news have been thick with stories about children's behaviour in schools and a lot of it has been about the knock on to teacher well being as well and I think the two probably can't quite be pulled apart.
[00:06:14] Patrick Alexander: Absolutely.
[00:06:15] Ed Finch: What do you hear about teacher wellbeing? Because you're based in schools, taking this eye on it. Where xare we with the profession?
[00:06:23] Patrick Alexander: When I think about teacher wellbeing and obviously, like you say, behaviour student wellbeing wellbeing in the round in schools is so kind of interlinked, you can't really think about one without thinking about the other. I'm always encouraged when I think about teacher wellbeing to ask the question, What do I remember about school? And I remember, like most people who've ended up doing something to do with education, one particular teacher who really influenced my life, shout out to Mr. Taylor, my A level history teacher. But in thinking about those people, you think about those people who, in spite of the systems they work in, had a positive impact on students and so I think to a large extent, you know, if you ask most teachers, they could tell you what they think is not working in their schools, but they feel to an extent that they're constrained by those systems and they can't find a way out of them. So for me as an anthropologist, one important thing to do when you go into a school is to look at the systems and look at the structures and say if you were given a blank canvas, if you were to think about the future of education, what would you do differently that would improve your wellbeing? And often teachers, obviously, are the people who have the experience and the kind of professional wisdom to be able to answer that question.
[00:07:31] Ed Finch: So let's just take a little moment to do that then. So we're talking about teachers who are feeling in some way disempowered as professionals because their systems that are making choices for them could be around curriculum. It could be about the, you know, the behavior policy, or it could just be about when they're expected to turn up and sign out. I mean, how can, how do we imagine a different world? Because we've got a thousand children in some large primaries, or 12 in smaller primaries. We've got these children, they're going to turn up at a certain time, they're going to go home at a certain time, we've got to keep them safe in between. How do we reimagine a world where the teachers have that sort of agency and still have it safe for everyone?
[00:08:09] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, yeah. It feels like we're in a really important moment for thinking about the future of education in a really profound way, not thinking about, Oh, what could we tweak? Because, you know, the model as a whole I think, is looking pretty rickety at the moment. So I think, yeah, those profound questions are absolutely, you know, foundational.
One concept that I've been toying with at the moment, is the concept of intellectual wellbeing and really that came out of doing professional learning activities with teachers in different settings and with international schools in Hong Kong, where I'm right in the depths of the pandemic I was trying to offer something as a kind of academic, as an outsider, that was going to you know, raise those big questions about what education is for and how it should be done. But at the time I thought, well there's not going to be much interest or appetite for this because you know these teachers are working day to day, sometimes hour to hour, minute to minute to just hold the whole thing together, figuring out how to put everything online, all of the complexities that we had to deal with in the pandemic and the surprising outcome of doing these kind of much more philosophical, anthropologically themed sessions was that teachers really felt like they got, they described it as brain space or head space or a kind of clearing where, you know, so it felt like self care, it felt like a sort of a space where it was almost not therapeutic, but it was a space where they could re-engage with the real kind of foundational reasons why they got involved in teaching to begin with, rather than reacting to this, to the onslaught as it was at the time. So I think that's one way to start answering that question is to say, in order to be able to push against those constraints, those structural problems that sometimes make people feel like they haven't got any power, there has to be some kind of intellectual re engagement and by that I mean a kind of critical, authentic engagement with the big philosophical questions of education, so not, it's not about us saying, well what works and presenting you with a nice bit of evidence that says, here's how you extend short term memory. It's about saying, no, how are we implicated in the good and the bad? of what education reproduces for the rest of the world and really kind of taking a deep dive into those questions and saying right, what are the problems? How are we implicated? And you know, most importantly, what can we do about it? What are the things that we can start doing? How can we kind of act in the present to make those changes real?
[00:10:30] Ed Finch: Yeah, so something you've raised there is, I think, a real hot potato for the English system at the moment. You're talking a little bit about the limitations of educational research, aren't you? A lot of schools of all sorts like to think that they're research based or research informed and what research looks like in education, it's pretty tricky. You can't really ethically do a control where some of the children don't get anything. So what research should we be looking at? What have we not been noticing?
[00:10:59] Patrick Alexander: Yeah and you know, it won't be a surprise to anyone listening to this, I don't think to recognise that, you know, the research... what's seen as educational research at the moment, broadly speaking, is research in the kind of tradition of developmental psychology, in the vein of cognitive psychology and what a lot of people will be getting is information about how the state of the art in cognitive science can be applied to classroom settings in a way that makes teaching more effective and on one level, that's absolutely fair enough to say, okay, If you want kids in your class to remember what you're talking about, let's think about how memory works, let's think about, you know, removing distractions, you know, all of that stuff that is kind of tried and tested in that whole kind of what works evidence based agenda. But that's not the whole picture, you know, there is a lot of education research out there, which isn't simply trying to make teaching as we know it now more effective and of course, again, we have to think about the history of what teaching is and at the moment there is an argument that if you're only thinking about making the technical delivery of teaching more effective, you're not necessarily attending to the big question, which is what is being taught? You know, what is the nature of the education that we're delivering? And you know, someone like, you know, Gerbiester, the educational philosopher would make the case that, you know, so much of the learning that happens in school can in some ways elide, it can kind of go around education because it's designed to have a specific outcome that is predetermined and that is reached at the end of the lesson and as a result removes the kind of essence of what education could be, which is the kind of unpredictable, exciting adventure that you go on where you don't know where you're going to end up and you know, that, that involves, as he would say, you know, by necessity and not by coincidence, involves trust and risk and joy and a lot of that can be kind of designed out of a hyper effective approach to education.
[00:12:55] Ed Finch: How does that look on the, so this is very much where we are in the UK. I think it's like some imposed models of control coming down and like an imposed understanding that learning is about remembering more stuff, you know, does that track internationally? I mean, does the UNESCO report talk about that sort of problem or was there different problems overseas?
[00:13:15] Patrick Alexander: You raise the point about how approaches to learning map differently across different phases, and I think, you know, something that I often hear from primary teachers is that they see the kind of joy of education sort of battered out of kids through the secondary, through secondary schooling, not to put it too crudely, but you know, and of course, to look at that, we only need to ask the question, well what is it that effectively structures the nature of learning that happens in secondary schools? The reality is, it's high stakes assessment, right? That's the bottom line and what drives high stakes assessment? We have to point the finger a little bit at universities or the university, you know, the system of higher education to say there is an assumption that schools are driving children towards having the kinds of qualifications that will allow them access to higher education on the assumption that higher education leads to social mobility and better jobs and you know, a quality of life and all of those things and an American thinker, Lauren Berlant, describes the cruel optimism that's built into that system, because it is a system that assumes meritocracy, but will demonstrate evidence that an exceptional few will benefit at the expense of everyone. That's how competition works, right? So I think there is a big challenge written into the system in that sense. Yeah, we can make that process more effective, but should we be making that process?
[00:14:33] Ed Finch: What do we wanna do?
[00:14:33] Patrick Alexander: Exactly and so you know, back to your point about the UNESCO, the report that they brought out in 2021, yeah, about what the future of education should look like and it's a huge report, so there's lots of stuff in there that you can dig into. But effectively, you know, they're talking about a new kind of social contract for education, which is to say, what kinds of people are we cultivating through the education systems that we have at the moment? And what kind of future do we want to exist in? And ultimately that has to come back to sustainability. So it has to on some level come back to the climate crisis and to ask the question what kind of a world are we living in? Do we want to encourage to materialise through the process of education? The number one concern we have to have is about climate, but, you know, combined with that, if you look at any of the, you know, World Economic Forum and other large sort of international institutions, you'll see, you know, those risks about AI, about you know, pandemics, about climate change, about all of those connected concerns and risks and thinking about how education can attend to those.
So on one hand, sustainability and I mean sustainability in the broadest sense, so political systems that are more sustainable, economic systems that are more sustainable, and also about, I think, encouraging an education system that interacts differently with the future and this is the slightly more kind of conceptual bit, it's a little bit tricky to understand, but it's about futures literacy. So it's about trying to educate young people to think about the future differently and if you go back, you know, rewind two minutes to when we were talking about the way that our education system is organised now, it's education that is organised around anticipation. So one thing, you know, as an anthropologist going into schools back in 2014, 15, I went into this big public high school in the Bronx and I've spent a lot of time in schools, we all have, right? But what I suddenly realised going into this school was that almost every activity was future oriented. So all you have to do is say, how's your day been? Oh, I'm learning about this. Oh, why are you learning about that? Well, I'm learning about that so that I can get to the next step and the next and the next Even mindfulness, right, which is purported to be about being in the present, normally is talked about as being a means to an end, right? If you do mindfulness, you will become a better person. So everything is about anticipation towards the future. But the problem with that is that it's about anticipating a future that is kind of already there, right? So we think, go to school, get good grades, go to university, get a job and exist in the kind of, you know, picket fence, you know, ideal life, whatever that may look like. But you know, that's a future that only existed for a few people, if it ever existed, in the middle of the last century. So we're, you know, in that way, socialising people to expect and to act as if the future of the 1950s is going to happen for them in the 2030s and obviously it isn't. So futures literacy is a different way of engaging with the concept of the future to say, the future isn't just this thing that we're moving towards, the future is a thing that we inhabit now in the present and people like Riel Miller from UNESCO use, you know, different metaphorical language to try and explain this and one thing that I find useful as a metaphor is the idea that you're not walking towards the future, but you turn your back and kind of drag the present along with you. So, you know, what you're doing now is the future, but you have to enact it and so, you know, if we can think about an education system that is much more future focused in that way, then we might get closer to a better world, to a more sustainable world, to a world that deals with the pressing questions of social justice and conflict and everything else that we see around us.
[00:18:21] Ed Finch: Well, moving towards a better world is exactly what we do on Primary Futures. So we'll talk about that a little bit more after this break.
Right, well we're back, thank you. You know, we are in a situation we talked about a little bit where there's a lot of pressure on young people and you're describing that as the pressure of the future, the idea that this whole enterprise of education is about what might happen post 18, which for a child who's age seven in my year three class is quite a long way off. So what I'd really like to do is just try to imagine, I don't know, you might have to take some of your academic hats off here, because let's just try and imagine together some solutions for some of these problems and here at Primary Futures, we know that the money tree is not there, you know, we know that there's not a huge amount of money to spend and we know people have limited capacity, but we believe in a better world and we believe that if we argue well, we might get some points across.
So let's talk about some hopeful trends. What are some things that are giving you hope as you look at the landscape of education?
[00:19:24] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, so I think the kind of really positive thing that came out of the pandemic is the kind of huge opening, potential opening up of education horizons you know, unfortunately, we have kind of moved back to a lot of the systems as they were pre pandemic and we saw the really sort of significant role of schools as a kind of custodial service, you know, we heard a lot of politicians saying, we've got to get these kids back to school, the lost learning. But I think, you know, really a lot of that was oriented around work, you know, as a fact of saying, we've got to get these kids back to school so people can get back to work. But I think there is a lot of positive to take away from the potentials that were presented to us during the pandemic. So thinking about different modalities of learning that, the traditional spaces of school don't have to be what we think they are. You know, school can be anywhere and there are a lot of people who've been, you know, thinking and theorising how we could imagine, you know, whole towns and whole cities that are a kind of education commons, that when you think about it, you know, with that kind of familiar, strange approach you think, well, why is it? Can you imagine in a hundred years time or 200 years time, they think, so let me get this straight, you all got up at exactly the same time and put pressure on the grid at exactly the same time. So we'll make a cup of tea to all get on the road at the same time to commute into, you know, there are so many aspects of that as a kind of social practice that are bonkers. You know, the idea that we all have to be in the same spot at the same time, that's a throwback to the early 20th century, if anything. So I think that's one positive thing is that we can think about the time of schooling differently. We can think about the space of schooling differently. You know, we can think about how technology interacts with physical, you know, face to face teaching and learning to try and sort of expand those horizons as well. I think we can think about the relationships in education as well. You know, I think one of the interesting things about the pandemic was that kind of softening that happened where teachers had to sort of say, Okay, you can see that I'm making this up as I go along because I'm reacting to what happened yesterday and so we could step a little bit away from that sort of gerontocracy thing that I was talking about before that, you know, because I'm an adult, you should respect me on that basis. It's more about sort of us going into this educational experience together. So all of those I think are positive and I think actually, you know, as much as there is a lot of doom and gloom about generative AI, one of the really interesting things that I think AI suggests to us is that we might have reached a really valuable, important and positive turning point in how we think about what it is that do because if I can do a lesson plan in 15 seconds, that is more or less as good as a lesson plan, I'm not talking about the teaching, but the plan itself that you know, a teacher could write in 35 minutes or an hour without generative AI. That suggests that the technical task is not the main event of teaching. So you know, we've seen, what, 10, 20 years of teacher education policy that has been very much focused on the technical skills of teaching. Let's get all of these teachers to be able to do these things in this specific way. You know, the London challenge, a lot of that stuff was about kind of standardising teaching practice, you know, it was about the technique of teaching, whereas, so I think the sort of really exciting thing about generative AI is, that it says, great, so actually teaching doesn't have to be about technical skill anymore, it can be about an ethical position, it can be about what you bring as a fellow human to the practice of teaching that isn't about your technical ability, not to say that's not important.
[00:23:03] Ed Finch: But it does raise that question, doesn't it? So a lot of, you know, a lot of colleagues who are proud to be teachers are proud of skills, which, you know, some of them are a little bit outmoded, you know, and you know, it seems really harsh to say to a colleague who's really proud of a display that, you know, that wasn't maybe the best use of their professional time. But so if we've got technologies, we've got a screen on the wall that could show anything rather than me cutting letters out of crepe paper and sticking them on, what would the new professionalism look like? What would I be proud of as a teacher if I wasn't proud of cutting out letters or as you say, planning a lesson, which is a fairly standard template.
[00:23:42] Patrick Alexander: Yeah. Well, I mean, I'm all for displays, you know, I think it, give me a good diorama any day of the week. So I think actually, I mean, that's a great example, Ed, you know, to say the kind of human error built into a good display is actually the beauty of it, right? Think about a display that has those cutout letters and that has some magic in it compared to something that's just been printed out.
[00:24:03] Ed Finch: Which says my teacher values my work, because look, they've mounted it on coloured paper and stuck it up.
[00:24:08] Patrick Alexander: Yeah and also that, you know, even in the cut of the paper and in the choices that are made, that is a representation of the kind of human investment and you know, if you think about something like, you know, going back to the kind of looming shadow of high stakes assessment that obviously comes into primary education as well. If we recognise that things like generative AI will create a massively efficient means of that kind of assessment. On one hand, that means teachers don't have to spend so much time doing that. So they can re engage in the kind of deep philosophical questions of what it means to be a teacher, with children in your classroom. But it also raises the question of the value of that kind of assessment. It's not going away and let's not be naive, but at the same time, the rate of technological change will not have been missed by the big exam houses who will also be thinking, okay, so how could assessment be imagined differently for the future? And what would the big impact of that be? And that to me is a really exciting, positive question.
[00:25:07] Ed Finch: Yeah, I mean, there's a great PhD or a history study there, isn't there? It's like, what assessment we value is what we can do. So I think, you know, when I first started, I had a paper tick sheet and I put ticks to show that kids had met competencies and then I think about online platforms for teaching times tables where they've got some machine learning built in and they over test children on the facts they're finding difficult because it can do that now and now, you know, me maybe look at, you know, a situation where the children are putting in their work electronically and I've got a friend who can market for me. So where is the human in it? I think a lot of what you've said has sounded like the opportunity is to re humanise schools and re humanise children's experience and teachers' lives.
[00:25:52] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, that's a great way of putting it is it's it is about a kind of humanistic approach to education, which is also, you know, that's not a radical idea, you know, prior to the arrival of, you know, high stakes assessment as we know it. That's kind of what schools were like, right? I mean, prior to the 40s, you know, the 11 plus really kind of was the, you know, the big nail in that particular coffin. You would have had a much more fluid approach to education and I can hear the retractors in my mind saying, yeah, but what about quality assurance, right? How do we know that teachers are doing a good job? And of course, again, we only have to look to other systems, places, you know, of course, like Finland, where the social status, the pay, the training, the investment in teachers means that they get more respect as professionals and with that respect comes an expectation that what they're doing is of quality however you, might define that.
[00:26:45] Ed Finch: So a perception of the teacher and the work they do is being profoundly human leads to respect for the humanity of the teacher and of the kids and of course, you know, so many people listening from primary schools will say, but we would, we completely do that. You know, you don't have to go to Montessori or Steiner to see schools where the humanity of the children's right there, but how refreshing to think that'll actually be the focus. So what's some small things that we can do then, because I've got colleagues listening and they say, come on, Patrick, you know what? I want to do something about this, I want to re humanise my classroom, I want to get the kids back to the middle and I want to feel like a proper person. So what do you, think we can do and what could we hope for say in five years from now as those shifts without a huge investment of money? Cause we know it's not there or vastly more stuff. What could we be doing and what could we hope for?
[00:27:35] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, back to your point that you just made, there is no doubt in my mind that teachers and who I will always defer to with the greatest respect as the experts when it comes to practice are already doing a lot of these things. So it's not like we need to radically change what we're doing, but we need to look at what's happening and see where we see the best examples of that innovation in practice, to put it one way. So yeah, absolutely. It's important to think about how you get these big abstract concepts or big ideas into the classroom. I think that question of asking what the future could look like is a great place to start, but it's a challenging place to start because we're so used to imagining the future that we've been presented with for years and years and years, which effectively is the future of capitalism, let's call it what it is. That it's very, sometimes really hard to get beyond that and so I think one thing that you can build into practice in a very, you know, sort of pragmatic way is these ideas about futures literacy. So really just encouraging kids to think about the future in different ways. So one way to do that is, you know, that idea of backcasting as an example, right? So you say, okay, in five years time, get five teachers around a table, stick a couple of bottles of wine in the middle and say, what would you ideally like to see the system to, you know, to look like in five years time? What would you like it to look like? Describe that and then, you know, and again, this isn't rocket science, it's about saying, okay, so how would we get there? And recognising what are the structural and policy constraints along the way and you know, keep asking those why's to say, well, you know, why is that a block? And of course that backcasting takes you in different directions. So you say, okay, well, you know, so really the future of education is about the future of work, of course it is, because the reason why kids go to school, partly, is so that adults can go to work. So let's think about work differently and of course, yeah, the outcome of that discussion, that's the hard work. But the discussion itself is something that you can do quite straightforwardly in any school and of course, I'm sure there will be teachers listening going, yeah, of course, we do that already, you know, we do that work and maybe it's just about recognising it to be what it is, which is also an opportunity for kind of radical thinking, but in a positive way to say look, we know that we're, as a kind of global society, we're not in a particularly good spot at the moment. There are lots of things to worry about and the only way we can make change is to make it happen now, you know, you think about something like the school strike for climate change movement, there is a reason why It's a school strike movement because those kids looked at their school environments and thought the conversations we need to be having are not happening in school. So let's make those conversations happen in school and make education the place where kids are presented with space, with clearings, where they can really think about transformation and it's not just about transformational global citizenship or you know, the kind of the language of it. But to say, yeah, let's look at what the future can be and talk about how we can make that happen now. Another thing would be something like a, what is possible in the future? What is probable in the future and what is preferable in the future? And that's another, you know, sort of straightforward, practical exercise you can do.
[00:30:44] Ed Finch: So that brilliant talk for kids, which can happen through philosophy for education, or it could be happening through assemblies, or it could be happening through collective worship if they were using that time, about what could our future be and not what are you going to be when you grow up, but who are you going to be when you grow up, or what do you want your values to be, that's beautiful and that's easy to do. For my colleagues then, so for all these primary school teachers who are feeling constrained at the situation, how can we, in the next five years, you know, get those conversations about professionalism and who am I as a teacher. Would you like to see this? I mean, I don't, none of us have got staff meeting time left because we've got to do a, you know, who's going to put out the chairs for the Christmas show and we've got to do the statutory safeguarding. I don't suppose I can ask my colleagues to give up their weekends, although those who'd like to come to Bruet are very welcome, but those who don't aren't getting those conversations. Where do we get those in and how do we make sure those happen? Because sure you're right, I'm sure that would be transformative.
[00:31:42] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, no and I think that you're absolutely right to pinpoint the problem that every single school will encounter in having these kinds of conversations, which is time and that is because time in school is time capital, right? So that's another part of the problem is that through schooling. Teachers and students alike are encouraged to think about time as capital investment in the future, right, back to this whole question about cognitive science and effective teaching. How can we maximise the return on our investment in this time? Three, two, one, give me the answer. So kind of pushing against that way of thinking about time, is a first and important lesson and of course, it isn't your average teacher that's going to be able to make those decisions. It's about senior leaders, putting their money where their mouth is and saying, okay, so we're going to create an hour of in school time that is less structured or that is unstructured and the fear of course, is that this is wasted time and time wasted in school is not only considered to be, yeah, it's a waste, but it's also considered almost deviant or immoral to have an hour where you, you know, no one knows what you're going to do. I mean, that seems like a, why would you do that? You need to, we need to be getting more and more but just doing that kind of a thing is a way of creating a clearing, creating a space where teachers can have these kinds of conversations and feel empowered again, you know, to feel, you know, nobody got into teaching for the money, right? I mean, who knows these days, maybe, but I would be surprised. So most people got into teaching because they had an ethical stance towards what they think the world should look like and what they can do about it and so I think if we can create those kinds of spaces in school, which is always about time, then we start to encourage these kinds of conversations and I think a really powerful outcome of these conversations is that teachers then, through something like intellectual well being, this sense of kind of critical investment in their practice, they feel more empowered to take a stand as well. So it's not about the end of the summer and you know, someone's read a book about cognitive load and you know, we've all got to change our practice to attend to this new theory that's being thrown at us, but to be able to say, okay, but I've read some stuff too, because I had the time to do it and what about these ideas? You know, to have that kind of you know, critical stance and to be a public intellectual and I mean that in the sense that in the community of a school or in the community of a school and its parents, teachers should be respected as public intellectuals who've got something of value to say, you know, it's not just about going to a parent's evening and saying, compared to all the other kids in the class, how well is my kid doing? It should be, going back to that UNESCO angle, a different kind of social contract to say, what are we all doing in this process to make for a better world and to value the you know, what teachers have to say about it because they're informed, critical, you know, ethical professionals.
[00:34:37] Ed Finch: Great. So we are going to create spaces in our school where kids can talk about the future in a different way and see the job of education, whether it's being at school or being out, is not about this result 10 years down the line. It's about, I don't know, living with some authenticity in that time and we're going to create times when our staff can have these conversations and say, do you actually know what I think counts? I don't just get programmed, I am a professional with some agency, that sounds pretty good and it doesn't sound too time heavy. It sounds reasonably possible.
[00:35:10] Patrick Alexander: Yeah and I think, you know, the other thing about that is that we shouldn't also expect that as a result of that, we're all going to get on or we're all gonna, you know, we're all going to agree. I mean in fact, you know, what, we should be looking for is spaces where that lack of consensus can be sustained. To quote the famous 20th century philosopher Brad Pitt, happiness is overrated, you know, we shouldn't all, if you're happy in the current world, you know, something's wrong and I think having that disagreement is absolutely fine. That should be where we were able to get to, to kind of constructively disagree. But also, you know, in the process feel sort of empowered and enlivened to be able to do the work that we think needs to get done.
[00:35:50] Ed Finch: So what's the way out of the maze in our way where we can imagine the future? We know we haven't got tons of money, but we've got tons of opportunity. What's the way out of the maze to break down this school as the factory of difference?
[00:36:07] Patrick Alexander: Yeah and I think that's another way into this thinking about futures literacy is to present provocations, right? Education should be provoking for everybody, you know, irrespective of political leaning that we should be presented with questions that are challenging and be able to kind of chew through them as you've just said, to figure out what happens. So let's start with the provocation, that there isn't a problem with schooling, schooling is the problem. We need to think about a different way of doing education that doesn't hark back to the darkest parts of our history, as in the case of the UK as a nation, you know, schooling emerges alongside a lot of other bad stuff, right? It emerges alongside the inequities of industrialisation and post industrialisation. It emerges alongside the inequities of the colonial project, the New Zealand Maori researcher, Linda Tehiwai Smith, I think rightly argues that for indigenous communities, schooling is only second to genocide in terms of its deleterious impact on culture, right? That people have been for decades, for centuries, encouraged to give up certain parts of cultural identity in favor of what is presented as valuable knowledge or valuable ways of being in schools. So if we just take that provocation, which I absolutely appreciate is a really hard provocation to entertain if you've dedicated your life to teaching in schools, but I think it's an exciting one to say, okay, let's just run with this as an idea and think about what education could look like if we let go of some of those things and again it comes back to assessment and it comes back to how we think about what the outcomes of education should be and so let's imagine it. What would the outcome of education be if it wasn't assessment?
[00:37:53] Ed Finch: Well, I mean, it's a lived experience, isn't it? Which we are living, you know, as children every moment we're in school and as teachers. I was back in a school this morning, a school I worked in for 13 years and I walked around that building and I remembered something in every room, you know? Every room, I was, this is where I had my interview when I came here, back in 2002, this is the first class I ever taught and children remembered me, very pleasingly, from three years ago and wanted to tell me. One child said, On my first day at school, I was sitting in the cafeteria and you came and spoke to me. I'm like, well, I don't remember that, but it's beautiful that you do. You know, these are places that are freighted with meaning, aren't they? I guess we've got to do some sort of assessment, but when that starts being what we're doing or the reason we're doing it, then definitely the tail is wagging the dog, and that's places where we're no longer having authentic experience, day by day.
[00:38:49] Patrick Alexander: I mean, I think it's really interesting that you bring up memory because, you know, we could think about schooling or education as memory making and schooling as sort of recall and you know, to make that distinction that so often the memories that come out of education are not the things people were taught, but the experiences they had. I mean, I remember coming across an essay that I wrote for A Level History while, you know, doing the, you know, the annual sort of spring cleaning and having no memory whatsoever of writing this quite seemingly, quite well informed essay about, you know, the 1832 Reform Act or something. So if we think, okay, education is about the memories that make us who we are and the connections that we have with the people around us, So let's continue that thought experiment, right? To say, okay, do we need assessments? I mean, we don't have assessment. We haven't had assessment for a long time at the end of the primary phase, obviously we have in the last few decades. Do we need it? I mean, what would happen if we had no assessment at the end of the whole process of education to 18?
[00:39:48] Ed Finch: I don't know, but I'm pretty sure the sky wouldn't fall in. There we go.
[00:39:52] Patrick Alexander: And so then the question becomes, for who do those assessments exist? And one answer would be, well for employers and for universities. But surely employers and universities could...
[00:40:03] Ed Finch: They're going to find a way to recruit. So I think it's probably so that we can be checked up on.
[00:40:08] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, quality assurance would be a way of describing right? But yeah, those kinds of questions to me are the exciting place to go, to just, to provide us with provocations that hopefully take education in a brighter direction.
[00:40:22] Ed Finch: Yeah, so I mean, I think we've got somewhere, we've identified some problems, we've thought a little bit about what we'd like to see and how to get there. So, overall would you say that you're an optimist when you're thinking about primary education? Are you filled with hope?
[00:40:36] Patrick Alexander: Absolutely and I think that the great thing about primary education is that, well, in every classroom that I've ever been in, there is a lot of joy and I think that we have to accept that secondary education is constrained in more ways by that shadow of high stakes assessment and that creates so many more problems than maybe we see in primary classrooms, where obviously that's still a factor and it's still a heavy influence, but there is a little bit more scope to do the kind of project based learning or play based learning or, you know, all of the different kinds of approaches we might take, that allow for this kind of, you know, sort of human flourishing to take place and I think one thing that I haven't mentioned yet that I think is also a really important part of this process is that we should, as educators and as communities, you know, involve children in discussions about education. One of the craziest things about schooling is that people rarely have conversations like this where they go, what are we doing? We all spend tens of thousands of hours of our lives. in these institutions doing these things and rarely, you know, if you look at the International Baccalaureate, for example, they might talk about theory of knowledge, some kind of you know, sort of bigger philosophical questions about education. But as a general rule, discussions about education don't necessarily happen in educational institutions and to my mind, that is another place to start and to say, well, what is the point of all this we're doing? You know, what are we doing here?
[00:42:02] Ed Finch: I don't know of a single teacher, I don't know of a single teacher who thinks the point of all this is limited to a good clutch of GCSEs. Well, I think I know kids who think that's what teachers think. So we open up these conversations, we find these places to find some meaning and some humanity, you know, we might even connect them up and that might make school a bit of a easier place for some kids to be and that would be an achievement, if nothing else.
[00:42:26] Patrick Alexander: Yeah, absolutely.
[00:42:27] Ed Finch: Thank you so much, been brilliant talking to you and I know that what I want to do now is have a little think about the change I want to see and I want to have a little think about, you know, the little actions that I can take to shift us along there. So I'm sure the listeners will be having the same thing and maybe having a think along with us about how we can make primary education better for the young people, for their parents, for the people who work in it, and that's got to be for the whole country too. Thank you, Patrick Alexander, what a lovely hour I've spent.
[00:42:55] Patrick Alexander: Absolute pleasure. Thank you, Ed.
[00:43:00] 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.
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