The minor inconvenience of an entirely predictable high tide was put into sharp perspective, on our return to Leeds Airport, when we learned of the apocalyptic horror that was unfolding in the Indian Ocean. My JFK moment came in the back of the taxi taking us home when I heard on the news that the tourist resort of Khao Lak, in Thailand had been badly hit by the tsunami. I’ll always remember that moment because my friend and colleague, Jane Attenborough, was there on holiday.

Jane was arts officer at the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and I’d been working closely with her in setting up an experimental music project called Musical Futures. it was a difficult initiative for me, as project leader, to set up, and there were a number of times that Jane had to convince me not to give up on it. Jane’s unflinching commitment to making that project work shone through every conversation held with her – her intense desire to make high quality music participation available to all young people meant that naysayers and waverers never stood a chance. Writing an obituary, Lord Moser – the project chair and now  Musical Futures co-chair with Sting – described her intensity and wisdom: Jane had a phenomenal breadth of understanding of the arts in Britain.

She also had the most uninhibited, infectious and endearing laugh I have ever heard. You heard that laugh well before Jane appeared in a room.

It’s been ten years since she, her mother-in-law and her daughter were swept away – an unimaginable burden for her husband Michael Holland to bear. Her father, Richard Attenborough, wrote  of the devastating effect their loss had on the family. For my part, I still miss Jane and deeply regret the fact that she never got to see Musical Futures become a globally successful initiative, enabling over a million young people, to follow their passion for music. She would have also loved to have seen the project (supposedly a fixed term 3-year project) enter its 12th year, about to become an independent not-for-profit social enterprise. None of this would have been possible without Jane’s vision and enthusiasm.

It’s often said of the tsunami – probably the most devastating natural disaster humankind has experienced – that an undue amount of attention was given to the loss experienced by families in the developed world, and not enough to places like Banda Aceh (a city which lost 167,000 residents). That’s probably true but you can only remember, and pay tribute to, those you’ve known. I’m privileged to have known Jane, and whatever the Musical Futures project goes on to achieve is due in large part to her initial vision and commitment.

Meanwhile, in England, the government’s schools inspections agency (OFSTED) sought to re-assert its independence last week, when its Chief Inspector – accused by government advisers as trapped in 1960’s ‘progressive’ teaching methods – argued that insisting that ‘children be lectured for six hours a day in serried ranks’ wasn’t the way to produce 21st century citizens.

This kind of political polarisation is nothing new – John Dewey received as much criticism as praise when he sought to make learning more social, in the 1930s. But what has changed, according to Fullan, is the emergence of social networks that connect teachers, enabling them to be collaborative designers and researchers. Anyone who has attend TeachMeet sessions, or taken part in innumerable twitter chat sessions, can see how things have changed, perhaps irrevocably.

It’s also clear that, just as our teachers seek self-determination, so do our students. As Fullan points out, ‘the ultimate goal of new pedagogies is for students to become independent learners who are able to design and manage the learning process effectively for themselves.’

There are technological and social reasons why we all – teachers and students alike – want to be more in control of our lives. in my new book, OPEN: How We’ll Work, Live and Learn In The Future, I argue that the shift we’re seeing is from pedagogy to heutagogy. – from tutor-led to self-determined learning.  The implications, for teacher-student relations, are profound:

What is equally profound, however, is that teachers are modelling these new, open, paradigms. Like their students, they’re no longer being told what to think. Communities of practice are springing up everywhere. They’re not interested in traditional vs progressive, knowledge vs skills polarities, or political point-scoring. They’re being informed, but not dominated, by academic theory. They are interested in what works in their classrooms and what engages their students.

They have opened their classrooms, as well as their minds. Video is becoming an indispensable teaching tool, padlet the vehicle for sharing. Musical Futures, for example,has a sharing wall created by music teachers from around the world – you’ll see practice (good and struggling) being critiqued, refined and re-shaped collaboratively. In comparison, school’s internal professional development  sessions seem pallid and lifeless.

And perhaps the most thrilling part of this revolution? These new action research models fully involve the end-users: students are researchers, too. They are sharing their experiences, and their views, about learning that works for them.

Somewhere, receding into the background, are the fading voices of policy makers, advocating opposing pedagogies, based on ideology as much as evidential claims. Increasingly, however, they are becoming ‘noises off’ – because teachers are too busy working it out for themselves to listen.

 OPEN: How We’ll Work Live and Learn In The Future is available on Amazon.

Before getting to the Vegemite question, let me just say that I would applaud anything that gets teachers closer to research – especially if they are given the time and support to do so (but not on top of everything else they have to do). We undoubtedly need more evidence to assess educational interventions. But a political drive for certainty often leads to gross over-simplifications, and I feel we should be wary of that happening as a result of Goldacre’s influence.

For example, it’s realtively easy to judge the success of a medical intervention – the patient gets better. But, if we simply judge the effectiveness of educational interventions by crude metrics (an improvement in test scores, for example) we may miss some vital perspectives. It’s possible to envisage a scenario where a shift in pedagogy had no discernible effect on test scores, but made students more self-aware of their learning strengths and weaknesses. Would that intervention be deemed a failure? And what about the impact upon teachers? It could be argued that in medical interventions the most important factor is the drug, or operational procedure being tested. Learning is, as we know, as uniquely relational experience. Therefore, the impact of the intervention on the teacher’s sense of professionalism, curiosity, motivation, or self-esteem, is crucial. An inspired teacher is likely to make almost any pedagogical shift effective (and thereby skew the objectivity of the results!). No matter how inspired a doctor is, they are unlikely to make much of a difference to the way a new round of chemotherapy works.

I was reminded of this when reading a piece by the Guardian’s Oliver Burkeman on ‘phenomenal knowledge’. Burkeman refers to a paper by the philosopher L.A.Paul which argues that, in many choices in life, rationality will only get you so far. Transformative experiences (like having a baby) cannot be really assessed, until after the experience has taken place. You don’t know whether having a baby is the right thing to do, only that it will change your life, and until you’ve experienced that new life, how can you know if it will be right for you? Burkeman gives a rather more prosaic example of Vegemite – you can read everything you need to know about vegemite: it’s taste, texture, acidity. You can only really know if you like it, however, by trying it.

Mrs Schmidt’s Blog

Ron Canuel, CEO of the CEA (Canadian Education Association) recently asked ‘why do we need innovation in education?’ I’m on the board of the CEA,’s professional magazine, so I have to declare an interest in blogging about this. But it’s a perfectly valid, if surprising, question to ask. Surprising, because it’s hard to imagine captains of industry asking themselves ‘do we need more innovaion in (say) manufacturing? Or medicine, or technology?  But it’s valid to ask, because so few education innovations seem to stick, and scale-up. The ‘game changers’ rarely seem to change the game.

Ron, himself, gives one good reason for the comparative lack of innovation: that accountability frameworks don’t recognise innovation as a yardstick to be measured. So, education systems tend to value compliance , conformity, even complacency, above experimentation.

He’s right, of course, though just because we’re not being rewarded for innovation, is insufficient reason not to do it. Educators have a moral purpose – to strive to find the best learning for each individual in their care – and that should always trump keeping governments off our backs. That takes courage, of course, and school leaders, especially the less experienced ones, need time to build their courage. A Head Teacher of a highly innovative school in England, was taking a bunch of visitors around the school this week. He was asked ‘what progress have you made this year against the targets from the last OFSTED (our national inspections agency) visit?’ ‘None’, came the reply to a confused silence. ‘We haven’t tried to – it’s not important’. If only we had more school leaders who showed such determination not to be blown off-course by the constantly shifting winds of government. School leaders have a lot more autonomy than they often claim to have. But because it’s  such a tough job, it’s sometimes frankly easier to work to the targets and priorities someone else has set for you, and blame them when it doesn’t work.

There are, however, another couple of explanations for the lack of innovation.

First, there’s the dreaded ‘guinea-pig’ syndrome, where any attempt to try something new is met with ‘so you’re going to use these children as guinea-pigs in your experiment, are you?’  I’m baffled by this reaction (and parents and politicians are equally guilty here) for two reasons: First, how many medical breakthroughs would we have missed if people had refused to take part in clinical trials? More accurately, it’s not the patients who are refusing the clinical trial. Kids generally enjoy being part of a new initiative. It’s the guardians of their interests who resist.

Second,  there’s the ‘not-invented here-syndrome’ . Most of the truly exciting innovations in education are trialled on the ‘terminally ill’: the students for whom nothing seems to be working.  But the treatment would work just as well on other students. The CEA have recently rewarded one such initiative: The Oasis Skateboard Factory. This is an alternative school in Toronto for kids for whom mainstream schooling just doesn’t work. I urge you to take a little time to watch it. Listen to Craig, the founder of the school, and listen to the students. And then tell me, what is it about this innovation that wouldn’t work in mainstream schooling?

It’s such a compelling argument for offering some kids (if not most) a more authentic, project and enterprise-based approach to learning. My experience of showing new models of learning to educators, or policy makers, usually gets the same reaction Ron Canuel refers to: ‘that’s interesting, but it wouldn’t work in our school’. When the Musical Futures model I helped develop was drawing attention from schools in other countries, I did the politically correct thing by saying that cultural contexts would need different approaches, and that student outcomes would probably be different. But, inside I was thinking, ‘kids are not that different all over the world, so this should work just the same, wherever you are’. The reality has been just that. In seven countries the impact on kids is pretty much the same, wherever you go, for the reasons stated so elequently in the Oasis video.

I’ve been researching business models of innovation for the book I’m writing, and it’s fascinating to observe the ‘innovation gap’ which blocks change. Sometimes it’s structural/cultural – disciplinary silos, circling the waggons with’professional standards’ (most innovations come from outside), specialists viewing attempts to change their established ways as implied criticism). Sometimes it’s managerial – CEOs of innovative companies (think Steve Jobs) spend twice as much time personally involved in innovation, than their counterparts in less innovative companies. You have to model the change you wish to see.

So, there are some long-standing reasons why innovation gets blocked, or fails to transfer. But these aren’t as insurmountable as we often proclaim, and we can’t let them get in the way. As to the orginal question being posed, here are my five top reasons why we need innovation in education:

1. Because student outcomes are flatlining in countries where the ‘do more, work harder’ dictat,  combined with market-driven approaches from governments, drove innovation out of the sector and replaced it with fear. We need some new ideas.

2. Because, as educators, we’re in direct competition with the learning young people access socially, informally – and, right now, we’re coming off second best.

3. Because we need to constantly engage in respectful, challenging, professional discourse about our practice (and we need to spend rather less time providing pointless information to satisfy demands for accountability)

4. Because children, far from considering themselves ‘guinea pigs’ actually enjoy being part of something new. They well understand that being part of an innovation that doesn’t ultimately work isn’t going to have a critical effect on their education – not least because of (2) above. But the critical point is ‘being part of’, being active co-designers of learning innovations.

5. Because the one-size model of schooling never did fit all students, and it certainly won’t now. The school of the future needs to be an amalgamation of many different learning models, which students and teachers can try out to find what works best for them.

But what are yours? Please let me know your reasons for demanding more innovation in eudcation, and let CEA know here.

I see that the UK Secretary of State for Education has been having another pop at what he terms ‘progressive’ education this week. Responding to claims that children born in the late 50s achieved better social mobility as a result of grammar schools, Michael Gove (correctly, in my view) said that selective education wasn’t a magic bullet to achieving social equality. So far, so good. But then he cited the influence of ‘progressive education’ and the move away from traditional subjects, rigorously taught, as a more relevant factor.

So, in one breathtaking false causation, he manages to put himself on the side of the angels, by urging a return to a fondly imagined past, all in the name of correcting the ‘moral indefensability’ of social inequality. With respect, minister, I think you’ll find it’s a bit more complicated than that. For one thing, as evidence has repeatedly shown, education plays a relatively minor part in creating social equality – social and economic policies, environment, health all combine to prevent young people from poorer backgrounds from having what my Aussie friends would term ‘a fair go’. For another, as Melissa Benn reminded us this week, Britain’s schooling system has never been equal.

I’m not sure if I qualify as a ‘progressive’, but I’m getting pretty fed up with the term being used in a constantly perjorative way, and ‘tradition’ always being associated with ‘rigour’. So, it’s time we progressives fought fire with fire. When it comes to pedagogy, Mr Gove, in my book, is a ‘regressive’, and we should label him thus at every opportunity. Perhaps then he might see how isolated he is. Can you imagine a health minister urging a return to 19th century surgical procedures?

One of the few current MPs who has actually taught in a school, Nick Dakin, made some telling points in a letter to today’s Observer:

 “I have been struck by how out of touch policy-makers are with the challenges facing our young people and those who work with them. Too often, solutions are found for problems that exist in politicians’ minds rather than the real world.

The key things that determine performance are the quality of teaching and the quality of leadership. And the biggest challenges come from the changing nature of young people and the demands of new technology. These are real and genuine. But too often, school leaders are distracted by managing confused ideas and fads and the obsession with structural change.

More than anything else, school and college leaders crave stability. But we now have a government embarked on replacing success with failure, excited by curriculum models for the 1950s rather than the 21st century”

His final point is critical. Even if traditional subjects, rigorously taught, ever did work then (and, as a working-class lad from Jarrow, I was ‘rigorously’ taught Latin in a grammar school till my hands bled), the world has changed so dramatically in the past 50 years, that to imagine they would still work in a digitally connected, unpredictable present, is both naive and patronising.

Mr Gove is constantly citing those countries doing well in PISA tests as the models we should aspire to. Let’s not dwell too long on the Finnish success story – high achievement through abolishing private schooling and introducing ‘progressive’, student-centred pedagogies which blur traditional subject boundaries. Instead, let’s look at Singapore.

Because that’s what I was able to do this week as a guest of the Singapore Ministry of Education. Whilst some have suggested that Singapore’s astonishing rise up the PISA tables is due to traditional teaching methods, including rote memorisation, many people I spoke to argued that it had more to do with almost every child receiving daily injections of ‘cramming’, after school, from private tutors.

Whatever. My point really is that, even if we followed Mr Gove’s advice to copy Singapore, by the time we’d done that, they’d have already moved on. In a two-day intensive workshop, I was asked to share the pedagogies I advocated through the Musical Futures and Learning Futures projects to teachers, researchers and education officials. The result was that a Musical Futures pilot will be starting soon in Singapore. How ’bout that, Mr Gove? The country you most admire is trying out ‘progressive’ approaches developed in the UK!

And why are they doing this? Because the Singaporean education minister, Heng Swee Keat, has made a policy shift towards cultivating creativity and a more holistic education which is ‘less about content knowledge’ and more about getting students to “discern truths from untruths, connect seemingly disparate dots, and create knowledge even as the context changes”. It’s a bold, innovative, future-focused, change of direction, and I’m personally excited to be playing a small part in it. 

Come on, Michael, get with the programme – being a regressive is so 19th century!