Stephen Heppell Keynote transcript 2007

They saw the speed I was going and played walking across the stage music!  It’s that point in the day isn’t it really.  Listen, thanks for all, thanks for all coming.  There’s heaps to talk about and we’re going to have a little bit of time for questions at the end as well, and all goes well we should finish about quarter to.  So let’s start.

And I thought I’d start right here actually.  I got to be a granddad since I last saw you all, and I might say it’s really nice coming back to this exhibition conference event, it’s just grown and grown and grown.  It must be the best in the world now, so full of people swapping ideas, it’s not just about technologies, not just about equipment, about learning.  You know, like every conversation in every coffee bar full of people saying, yeah, I’ve tried this, why don’t you try that.  In a world that’s built from the bottom up, as the 21st Century has to be, you couldn’t imagine a better event than this one.  So thanks for being here.  And [break in recording] eleven weeks old, this was last weekend, winning her first sailing trophy.  What can I tell you?  She didn’t do very much, but she was in the boat.    

And it set me thinking really about, crumbs, you know, by the time she gets to be a mum I guess in thirty years time or so, if she chooses, go back thirty years and think what we had and what’s appeared in that time, it’s been a pretty interesting ride hasn’t it?  The computer, CD ROMs,, the web, wi-fi, cell phones.  I run a phone blog, which is good fun, you know, get out my phone, take a picture, send it, send it straight to the blog, and I found in the attic the other day my original cell phone, which I’ll maybe show you a picture of later on.  But it was … if I tell you it was five kilograms you get some sense, whopping.  And all that, you know, in the thirty years prior to her life.  Makes you think real hard about what’s going to happen in the thirty years after doesn’t it, really. 

Of course in hardware terms I don’t really know.  I was being quizzed by some children this morning about what I thought the future of learning and education was going to be like, and I didn’t know, you know.  But what I do know is what the consequences are going to be like, you know.  The consequences of the technology we’ve already got are that small is going to really matter.  And we’re seeing little tiny, massively effective companies.  We’re seeing small units that are much more part of an extended family than they were before.  You’re going to see a lot of small schools, little tiny schools at the end of the road that eight or nine children go to.  I was in a school yesterday with five, six children in it.  You’re going to see stuff that’s free.  Media’s free increasingly.  Look at the amount of stuff out there that is now freely available, like encyclopaedias that used to have vast value.  Some of you will remember people coming and selling the encyclopaedia to your front door when you were kids.  We’re heading for perfect competition, everybody knows what everybody else has got, and everybody knows what everybody else wants.  It’s the power of the internet.

And that means that includes public service broadcasting.  I’ve been helping design the media centre for the 2012 Olympics, and trying to imagine a time when everybody’s cell phone is broadcasting the whole time.  Not just the blog, you were kind of walking round … I guess it won’t be your cell phone, it’ll be your pen, you know, stick your pen behind your ear and a camera will run as you walk around.  By 2012, you know, who would you want to watch?  If you’re keen on sailing like to me, you know, you’d watch somebody who’d just turned up to the event, got their camera behind their ear that you knew, that you’d listened to them chatting on.  You won’t go to the news bulletins or you won’t go to Sky, who’ve paid a vast amount of money for the rights.  It’s just stuff and it’s all out there. 

But in amongst all that, there are some things that really matter.  Identity and time really, really, really matter.  And the internet doesn’t do them very well.  The internet’s built … well, actually in truth the internet’s built wrong.  Sad to say it really, but there you go.  I’m not saying it’ll never last, but clearly there are some things that are absent, and identity is a really big one.  How many times do you go to a web page and put in your user name and yet another password?  How many times do you register with a store for a payment method?  How many times do you … how many times as a child, how many identities have you got, how many places do you exist in?  That’s a really tough question I think about who you’re going to trust with that identity.  I’m sure lots of companies would like to sell it to you.  But who would you trust, who would you trust to have the API for identity, the thing that everybody relied on.  And I’ll tell you what, the only people you’d trust really would be each other.  I don’t think I’d trust governments even, I certainly wouldn’t trust some companies.  I wouldn’t trust … I guess ten years ago I trusted the BBC and now with it’s future just a little uncertain I’m not even sure I trust them because I don’t know what they’re going to be like in fifty years time.  But I trust each of us, I trust ourselves.  And you can see that in this extraordinarily connected world, community and peer to peer support turns out to be spectacularly important.  And time is also treated really badly on the internet, the internet is just a snapshot of today all the time.  Have you ever gone to try and look at that website you build, you know, in 1997 or whatever it is?  It’s gone.  Unless you’re likely to back it up, and you backed it up on some medium you can’t now read.  And you go to a web page and it says “this page was last updated in …” And you think so does that, does that happen every year on that date or does it happen weekly but they’ve forgotten for the last fortnight?  Time is treated really badly.  And you know that those two things are going to come together and you know that that matters hugely for education and learning, how you know, for example, why Glow matters so much because there’s a pathway to identity and enough longevity to be confident about time.  Time really matters in learning.

So what we’ve got is a heap of technology and a heap of consequences.  But think on, you know, during that thirty years when we’re reaping the harvest of the consequences of the previous thirty years’ technology, new technologies will be appearing thick and fast too.  And the consequences of those are going to be far reaching. 

I haven’t seen anything - and I do horizon scanning for the Whitehall government, which is quite an interesting job.  You know, look at the future, see what’s coming that nobody’s thought of – I do horizon scanning, I haven’t seen anything that makes me think other than it gets better and better for learning every year.  You know, a world where we’ve got identity, where knowledge is a free good, where we’ve got transparency of understanding between cultures and nations, and contexts where everybody can make a contribution.  That’s pretty good, unless you happen to have fallen outside that level of inclusion that almost embraces all of us, and I’ll come back to that later on.

So you’d think it was a fab time, except that … let me go sailing with you for a moment.  Here’s a boat, it’s my boat.  And you think it’s just a boat, and indeed it is.  But it’s pretty sophisticated.  When we go racing it we get text messages.  This is to tell us what the course is going to be, and if you can see that – I think you can – we’ve been getting text messages since 2002 telling us what the courses are going to be.  And it’s massively, massively about teamwork. Twelve people to sail it.  If one of them makes a mistake it goes badly for all us.  It’s hugely about teamwork.  It’s massively about research.  We have an online forum for the crew, all chatting away, you know.  A whole section of it is just about the science of sailing, you know, and we’re reaching out around the world, looking at all the free stuff that’s out there about wind tunnel testing and tank testing, the physics of sailing, the meteorology, the material science, the … you know, there’s a whole mass of detail about it.  And I’ll tell you what, we know more about how to make a boat go faster now than we did ten years ago and it’s exponential, because of that sharing.  It’s also, it’s also about data.  We’ve got a mass of data, the boat is awash with data.  I’ve got a cupboard full of microprocessors, got more computers in the boat than I’ve got in the business.  A huge amount of data, and it’s real time data all the time helping us to make judgements about what we should do and what we shouldn’t do.  And there are sensors all over the boat, picking up obviously how fast we’re going and how fast the wind is, but picking up on stuff like the water temperature, because the boat goes differently through warm water to cold water, it’s more dense so the water temperature really matters.  Everything matters, every last little detail matters.  And of course we’ve got a mass of predictive data from which we learn how well we can do, and if the boat does a little better we can persuade the boat to go a little bit quicker than the computer thought it should go.  The computer goes ah-ha-ha-ha, I’ll remember that next time and keeps pushing our targets up in a really interesting kind of way.  And we get faster and faster, hence the trophy last weekend with the baby. 

And also we’re downloading predictive stuff about future weather patterns, pulling them off the internet, putting them over the chart, so as we’re racing the boat round we know what tomorrow afternoon’s weather’s going to be like right now.  And of course it’s still, it’s actually still pretty hard to sail, you know, it’s a physical thing and when you get it wrong it hurts a lot, people in hospital last year.  So, you know, just the simple, simple, simple things; just a boat, but look at the complexity.

Well, makes you start thinking about learning doesn’t it, you know, all that.  You know, where are we with all that, where are we with the phones and the data and the real time analysis and the … you know, we’ve ignored phones pretty spectacularly really.  At the policy level, it’s not to say schools are doing fab things with them, every coffee bar here full of people showing what, “Let me show you what I’m doing on me phone.”  We’ve got a pupil-centric view of the world rather than a pupils-centric, you know, that moment when their exam papers all get opened, the media turn up and interview one person at a time as they open their one envelope and take out their results, rather than a collaborative view.  We’ve got very, very poor real time data.

Working with Edexcel, one of the exam boards, at the moment, they’ve got extraordinary new technology just coming round the corner that’s going to let children watch their exam paper being marked in real time.  They’ll sit there and see this, “Come on, come on, one more, one more mark.”  Now that’s real time stuff, you know, we’ve … to be honest, Tesco’s currently probably know more about where their bottles of brandy are than we know about where our students are, because they’ve got little RFID tags on them.  We’ve got very, very little predictive information at all.  Look how difficult the job of predicting university success through exam passes is, it’s a hopelessly poor relationship between grades and future grades. 

Doing the job of teaching is spectacularly complex and getting harder, intellectually harder.  The research comes from where?  I was asked the other day by a magazine to pick the best ten schools in the world.  It’s the kind of thing you get asked, you know, oh right, okay, um … and I picked my best ten.  And then I thought afterwards I wonder how many of them are in the literature, I wonder how many of them are in journals or chapters in research books.  And two of them, only two of them, were written up in any shape or form.  So, you know, where does the research come from?  And our international comparisons are pretty useless aren’t they?  You know, if you take a DMs test or whatever, you know, German schools quite rightly refuse to sit their children down in front of bits of mathematics that they haven’t covered in the curriculum so they always get a fairly distorted score in terms of international comparisons.  And anyway, look at how good Chinese schools are with maths.  So is it fair to compare?

And what metrics are we collecting?  I was working with a group of head teachers in China, and I said to them, “Look, if this all goes really well what do you think schools are going to be like in ten years time?”  There was a long pause, and one of them said, “You know, I think there might be a little more joy.”  Which I thought was a good response really.  I hope there’ll be a lot more joy personally.  But how are you going to measure it?  Joy is not exam passes is it?  You know, how many highers have you got?  How much joy have you got?  No, there’s no correlation.

So, you know, we’re a long way off really in terms of what we need, or are we?  And, you know, I’ve fretted about this heaps really and thought hard about how can we move all this forward, and that’s really the theme of what we’re exploring today.  So, you know, what sort of world are we in?  Well, we’re in a rather nice bottom-up world, and it’s a different world to the one we used to be in.  You know, in the cautious old 20th Century, look there’s that first mobile phone I had, you can see it’s quite big.  Do you know, it never dropped its signal either, which is quite alarming now I think looking back.  I think if I had put a chicken on there it would have probably roasted.  But in that cautious old century, if we’d invented mobile phones as we did, we’d be looking for come back.  We’d be looking for [I’ve got sticky fingers] … we’d be looking for this kind of reassurance, we’d be looking for a policy paper from the government wouldn’t we, or inspection guidelines, or a ministerial speech embracing phones, recommended standards.  I remember fondly there was a recommended standard published in England for computers which said all computers should have a hundred and twenty-one keys on their keyboard, and I remember thinking, blimey, a hundred and twenty-one.  Mine had a hundred and thirteen, I missed by miles.  But, you know, people would publish these sort of standards, you know, and policy guidance.  I don’t believe that happens in this century. 

I think in this century we really do just get on with it, and people are doing the most extraordinary stuff.  I was in the Isle of Man the other day, children are modelling building in 3D architecture – this is SketchUp, I’m sure lots of you use it too, it’s free – and these are primary children.  I was in a school in Scotland and they were doing extraordinary clay stop-frame animations.  You can see here the little … see the sockets for the eyes?  The girl who made this had a whole box of eyes.  I was in … I got this email just this morning funnily enough from somebody at the show, from Mark Pendleton, who, you know … well, you can read it for … can you read that from the back, can you see that?  Yeah, of course you can.  And extraordinary, you know, just something he wanted to do, develop a little in his own time, and now his coffee break Spanish is downloaded more than nine million times.  It’s number one in the US and UK iTunes education charts.  Just something he wanted to start on his own.

This is a school in Japan, it’s a pre-school in Japan, where … you’ve seen that research about young children and spatial awareness and depth, and they thought it would be quite good fun if they built a net over the atrium because they thought the children would develop, you know, cognitively faster as a result.  Quite alarmed at what that … well, it’s [laughs] … am I right, is that trap door?  Some kind of natural selection process going on there as well.  I was in … I’m building some schools in Liverpool and I was running a day for teachers on future schools, and these students arrived from a school in Dudley, and they said “We saw you were advertising this event, read about it in the Times and we thought we’d come along.”  And I said, “Oh, that’s interesting.”  They said, “We get half a day a week off timetable because when we were thirteen we did a GCSE a week … a GCSE a month, and if we got an A and an A* that buys us off half a day a week from 14 to 16.  And so we saved up a couple of half days and came here.”  Everywhere, everywhere there are people just getting on with it doing extraordinary stuff and pushing the boundaries of what … and there’s a real sense of an embracing of change.  I mean, ten years ago there were people wandering around wishing that their schools had been like they were when they were a kid, there’s not a soul in a school now that would want their school to be like it was when they were a child.  Everybody’s got that sense of it’s moving forward, and whether it’s moving in the right direction, where it’s going, whole another story.  It’s a real sense of change, and that’s global, that’s absolutely around the world.  And it’s a hugely exciting time.

That raises the question of help, you know, what if they’re all doing different stuff?  Well that’s not so bad if they are really, because … this is from some OECD data, and I’ve shown it up here before, you know, if we were trying, for example, to build a model of a school that had good maths and was fair … you know, Fiona earlier kept talk, quite rightly, it was terrific I thought, about egalitarianism and equality – so if we’re trying to build an education system that’s fair for all and also, you know, builds on high performance, I guess we’re all sort of shooting for that space.

What was interesting is in the last century we used to tell people what to do, and as a result the chances of them hitting that space were pretty slim, to be honest, because every school … I mean, you know, every school is different, every context is different, every day is different, you know.  It’s sunny outside today, it’s going to be raining tomorrow.  If you were teaching it would be a different day today to tomorrow, and Friday is different to Monday whatever the weather, you know, it just changes.  And the north is different to the south, and east is different to the west, and so on.  And what went wrong with that old quality control model was that a few schools would blunder on to the target just about, and around the world people gave them … well, they’d talk about beacon schools or lighthouse schools or schools or excellence, or whatever, and ask the others to try and copy the.  Because the others were copying them, they were all doing the same thing, it’s just that it didn’t work for most of them.  Well that model of one size fits all is gone.  It’s failed, it doesn’t work.  And what’s exciting is to be able to say to schools, look, what we want you to do is just take these ingredients of things that we think work and apply them to your school where you think they’re appropriate, and we just want you to be rigorous about how you check what works and what doesn’t work.  But we don’t want to tell you what to do, we’re going to ask you what works.  And at that point all over the world, all over the OECD world anyway, schools are hitting their target with that model of quality assurance.  And it’s hugely effective, and it’s pretty encouraging.

So we’re in a world where every school is going to explore what to do and what not to do, where every student, every parent, every community, is part of all that.  And that would be tough enough if it wasn’t for the fact that the things that we used to value are now pretty confused.  Let’s have a look at some.  Here’s … well, we’re having a mortgage crisis at the moment so this would be a good place to start.  This is a [let me just get the old network working] … this is ‘Wage Slips 4 U.’ Interesting website.  Well, you can see how it works I’m sure from there.  You pop along to the website and if you’ve lost your proof of income you tell them who your employer is and tell them what your income was, and they reproduce your wage slip for you, which you then take along to the bank as your proof of income and they give you a whacking great mortgage, which is all rather jolly.  Bits of paper count for nothing.

I mean, here’s another one, look, here’s … this one’s rather good, let’s go and get a PhD.  What else have we got to do?  Seems like time well spent.  “What did you do?”  “Well, I went to a keynote, but good news, I got a PhD for the dog while I was there.”  So here’s ‘Instant Degree Online,’ and you get an instant degree for your life experience, and you can see we’ve got a few choices to make before they send it.  I’ve got to pick a subject.  What do we want to be good at?  Let’s have divinity.  No, perhaps not.  Civil engineering.  Well, why not?  Civil engineering, yeah, it looks … computer engineering, clinical psychology.  I tell you what, I know what I’m going to do, let’s go for … let’s go for pharmacy, because I get an awful lot of emails about pharmacy so I’m becoming a world expert.  And if your major isn’t there you can list it, you write your resumé in here, look, not much space, doesn’t need to be.  And then you just agree, you know, when would you like to graduate?  How well did you want to do?  I think I did pretty well actually, so here we go.  And name and date of birth and email are required fields.  That’s about it, and off we go and graduate.  Now you can see that …

Here’s another one, let’s go and get some essays.  Let’s be a student, let’s go to CheatHouse.com, which I like the sound of.  These are free essays online, and here’s CheatHouse with their library of essays and term papers and books and case studies, and essays that work for you, and assures they’re better than the ones you could have written it says here.

You can see what’s happening in the world is that the gateways we’ve built to represent processes are pretty much, pretty much worthless really.  And that gives us a really nice challenge.  The challenge is … because, you know, it’s what you want to do, the challenge is how are you going to represent the process.  You know, if my certificate is meaningless, how do I demonstrate that I’ve learnt it.  If I’m this person, for example, how do I prove to anybody that I’m any good?  Let’s hear from here.

[Video clip]

I was a midwife in China.  I have finished two years training, some of the time in hospital, and then I worked for four years in my village delivering many babies.  And now I work here in a hospital in England, but instead I work in the kitchen reheating frozen meals.  My experience in China doesn’t count.  People think Chinese medicines is just herbs and potions, but midwifery is much the same world over.  Maybe I’ll re-qualify one day, but it seems a waste of time because I have so much practice already.

Now if you’ve spoken to almost anybody in the service industry in Scotland you’ll have heard a similar story, and sixty per cent I think of under thirty graduates into the United Kingdom at the moment are graduates, and most of them are doing wretched jobs because their qualifications just don’t work, they just don’t transfer very well.  So we’re in a really interesting situation where really everything is in up in the air, and I think we’ll reflect on that as being actually a fab opportunity.  It doesn’t, it’s not just that that’s up in the air.  If you go for that old model of let’s try and certificate everything and think that that was proof of learning, then we get things like this as well.  These are from … well, you can see this is from Living Scotsman, students at St Andrew’s, you know, popping ritalin pills left, right and centre to improve their concentration – ritalin really works.  One of the things I’m doing with my horizon scanning is to look at the Alzheimer’s research, and it’s quite interesting.  The current, one of the current pathways forward for Alzheimer’s is to [that’s my phone ringing] … one of the current pathways forward for Alzheimer’s is to chemically re-establish some of the neural pathways in the brain that hadn’t really got properly connected when people were young.  You under-use your brain massively and if your brain’s ebbing away a bit, using all of it is a good way forward.  But it turns out that that same therapy for people that haven’t got Alzheimer’s just plain and simply makes them brainier by a significant amount.  So we’re in all sorts of interesting challenges.  If just jumping over the hurdle, and the hurdle is the piece of paper is the only bit of evidence that we’ve got of learning, you can see that any which way that old model is in proper trouble

So for me that’s a fabulous opportunity, it’s a time that puts real power, real power in the hands of schools, in the hands of teachers, in a way it never has done before.  And we can sort of summarise that in this simple way really.  We’ve moved from a model where we used to know what we knew and that got published typically by universities, who were doing external work looking at learning in the schools.  We’ve moved from that to the detective work of searching in unexpected places.  And those unexpected places are revealed by our reflecting our own practice, and where do we do that?  In our schools.  So what we’ve gone from, if you like, is educational research to learning research, and that’s an interesting movement because it’s taken us from research institutions towards learning communities, and learning communities when you look around turn out to be families and villages and schools and all the places that most of you are embedded in.

Now what do we do about becomes really quite exciting?  What I’m trying to do about it is this, and I’m really excited that this has started in Scotland as one of six countries in the world where we’re kicking this off.  Scotland and Wales in this part of Europe, and Sweden, Australia, China, and I’ve forgotten somewhere.  So the idea is a very simple one.  The idea is that we ought to be able to recognise schools as places that move research forward, and taking about a third of a school staff at a time, the hypothesis is very simple.  The hypothesis is our school could be better, and what we mean by better could be pretty complex. You know, could be more joy, more learning, more attendance, more employment after they leave, more whatever.  And the schools will choose, I don’t want to impose that choice on somebody, you’re in different places, different context, different cultures. 

The scholarship is to look around the world and see what ingredients other schools have developed and tested.  What are the good ideas?  You’re swapping great ideas with each other over the coffee bar here.  I wonder what they’re doing in New Zealand and Australia, people here from Singapore, fabulous stuff going on Singapore at the moment.  I had a project out there, EduQuest, where we were arming children with video cameras to write up science experiments during primary school that normally they were doing in secondary school.  And it turned out they were writing up the science experiment with a video camera, you know, and they were quite capable of understanding the science and the scientific method and scientific error and the progression and so on in a way that the formality of the written scientific method had precluded.  So now in Singapore they’re building science labs in primary schools all over the country.  So what the other guys doing that we might borrow from.

And then having borrowed those good ideas, what our action research is very simply to take those recipes, to take those ingredients, and build our own local recipe, and try and improve the school. And when it’s improved, and only when, then build an exhibition.  Face to face with the parents, the children, the policy makers for everybody, and online so that we’ve got a place where our success can be hared.  Now there’s a lot of schools around the world, 1.17 million schools in China. So, you know, we only need a few tens of thousand each year reporting their successes and you can see this is going to be pretty good.

Where do you go from there?  Well it gets really quite interesting.  Where we go from there is that having made that improvement, having evidence that the metrics, having built successful exhibition, a third of the aff get a doctorate, together.  There’s no individual examination, they all get one.  And then the next third start.  It works out roughly right with a third because you wouldn’t want to turn up in a school and start a job and the entire es of the school have all just got a doctorate, and it’s “Oh god, it wasn’t me.”  So a third works out about ht.

That’s not easy to do that.  One of the things we’ve had to do is look around the world at what are the big trends in learning, what are the things that people are doing, and typically the world on this diagram is going from left to right.  We’re moving from subject based learning to project based learning.  Why?  Because it’s more seductive, the children learn more, results are higher, even results when you test on a subject basis.  And then what we’re trying to do is to arm people with a very simple website which allows them to say, okay, imagine that I’m on that continuum for one size fits all towards personalisation.  And the red spot is where we are right now as a school, the yellow spot is where we’re intending to be.  That’s going to … our improvement is going to come from moving towards personalisation.  I’m not saying that personalisation is the improvement, but we’re going to do that and then we’re going to see if that’s made an improvement to our learning.

How will we know we’re here?  Well the school will say we know we’re here when these conditions are met.  The school will post their own conditions, will know we’re halfway towards personalisation when blahdy-blahdy-blah, they’ll put their own up.  And they might think of their own axis as well, they might say, “Okay, I’m just interested in moving from low self-esteem to high learner self-esteem,” that’s where I want to go.  But then what rather cleverly happens I hope is that the website then pairs you up with other schools around the world who are showing equal ambitions on those things, so, you know, one size fits all … I mean, personalisation’s only just really just appeared in the US, big new sudden thing.  So lots of people think they’re being ambitious personalisation, you’d regard them as being significantly under-ambitious.  So that dialogue about what are we all doing, you know, continues in a really exciting way.  You can see that what’s happening here is that the analysis of change is passed right down into schools – and this isn’t a burden, I’m not saying to teachers give up the day job.  This is what teachers do with their lives, they reflect on their practice, they think about how can we make the school better, they look around for good ideas.  I’m just trying to make it easier for them to do that and to properly acknowledge and properly reward the quality of that reflection.  And I’m hugely excited about where it’s all going.  It launched this September, Scotland’s one of the countries, so watch this space for it to properly grow.

So the research bit is absolutely fab, I think the new basis of that research is hugely exciting.  And just to give you a sense, you know, I’ve been trialling this in the Caribbean, I took a large school, twelve hundred children, I chopped it up into four new schools, built new gateways for them, new entrances.  Typically about three hundred and fifty in each, they got their own names, they got their own uniforms, got their own colours.  They’ve all got their own targets and metrics that they’ve chosen, and the old campus has become a learning development park.  One lot’s interested in maths performance and truancy, another’s interested in ICT ingenuity and so on.  They swap what they’ve learned with each other in a really exciting way, and they’ve created a fabulous habit of shared research and a sense of 21st Century-ness.  And when you talk to the teachers and the pupils and the parents, they talk about “our, our, our,” where before they talked about “we, me and my.”  Really interesting.

And the schools we’re now building as a result of all that are hugely exciting out there.  Here’s Beulah Smith High School, and you can see not very much from this but you get a sense that look, you know, discrete buildings.  This is a school, but this is a self-contained group here, and here’s another entirely self-contained group here.  They share some facilities, they share sports and science facilities over here, and over here, but most of the day they’re learning in these much smaller units, much more intimate, lots more targets.  Each one by the say run by a Dean and a Vice-Dean.  The park itself, what would have been the school, now run by a committee of Deans and Vice-Deans.  I’m not even sure where the head is in that, where we’re even going to have heads.  So, you know, a real sense of change, but only possible because it’s built on that reflection of what the future might look like.

Now we’re going to be out of time for questions if I don’t hurry along, so two things I want to show you.  One is what do those science bases, what can they look like, those specialist science spaces when you dedicate bits of space to those communities of children?  And this is one we’re building in Knowsley, the science, the dedicated science space at the heart of that building.  The children spend most of their day in those dedicated spaces of about a hundred and twenty-five, but the big shared science space in the middle of it is a pretty spectacular place.  And if we’re trying to make learning seductive and engaging and delightful and effective and all the other things, it needs to be in the 21st Century.  These are the sort of spaces I believe that are going to seduce children in when they’ve got the comfort of the personal, the small, the intimate location of most of their day.  And think in the evenings, you know, parents pouring into these spaces to engage in public debates about science and so on.  This is fab, fab, fab stuff. 

And I’m just going to play you some girls talking about what it’s like to be in a radical space and what it does to their relationship with learning and to their relationship with their teachers.  These girls are in Ingenium in Grey Court School in west of London, and both girls incidentally came to the country as recent migrants.  Both arrived within I think four or five years of this piece being filmed so they both learned to speak English here, and they’re reflecting on what it’s like to be taught in a radical new space.  And here’s what they’ve got to say for themselves.

[Video clip]

Girl 1:      Well this is the Ingenium and this is what our project is about, and it’s basically a classroom, it’s called the Classroom of the Future, and it’s in our school.  It’s like an ordinary classroom but it’s much bigger and it’s much more spacious and it’s a lot different in some ways, but … even though we still have ordinary, everyday lessons inside it.

Girl 2:      Basically students were asked what kind of learning environment they would like to work in and that’s what they came up with.  So you’ve got the wide open doors, you’ve got the colour, you’ve got all the space, and you don’t get the teacher/student barrier any more.  It’s kind of broken down and they work together, whereas in classrooms the teacher’s telling you what to do and you’re reading from a textbook.  This is more you discover your ideas and you’re learning in your own way and like students can adapt to it so well.

Girl 1:      It’s a better environment to learn in, and you’re more open and confident and you’re learning from each other as well, as well as the internet or books. 

And so on.  I mean, you can just hear this is about inclusion, these are children who, you know, it’s bad enough to be uprooted and dragged halfway around the world, but to suddenly yourself in a place where your voice matters is enormously, enormously important.

Now, as we come to questions, I just want to leave you with this last thought really.  Why on earth, why Scotland?  Why shouldn’t you just sit back and look for all these exciting ideas around the world to take root and then say, okay, that one looks pretty good, let’s do what they’re doing.  Why should we bother?  Why should it be here?  And I think the answers are complex, but they’re the reason I’m here.  The front runners in all this worldwide are few, less than a dozen, maybe less than  half a dozen, and they all meet these characteristics: they’re agile, they’re stable, culturally they’re happy being who they are.  They’ve got a track record, I mean, Scotland’s track record of effective education, you can’t venture around the world without finding the footprint of Scottish education.  And it’s an honourable track record.  They’ve all embraced the sense of change properly.  They’re outward facing, not withdrawing into themselves and wishing the rest of the world would go away.  And some large countries, never mind small countries, are doing that.  They’re stable politically, they’re stable administratively.  Haven’t got tanks on the lawns outside and they passionately believe in egalitarianism.  And those schools in those places are showing quite extraordinary progress.  The policy is simple, the gains are massive. 

What should the national policy be?  Well, you know, the national policy should be as simple as this, it should just be this could so be us.  And that’s sort of enough really.  And the school policy is we honestly don’t know how good our kids could be, I don’t know, and I’ve spent an age going round visiting Scottish country dancing in wheelchairs, I’ve seen kids doing the most fabulous stuff, I’ve not been into a school in Scotland other than I’ve found people talking about their excitement of their changes and their ideas and where they’re moving forward.  They’re all different and they’re all pursuing different ideas, and that’s the richness of it all.  But they’re all saying flip, you know, our kids are doing better than we thought.  Whether they’re playing with little Nintendo DSs before school in the morning or whether they’re embracing art as part of their science curriculum, they’re all progressing spectacularly.  And on this you don’t know and you honestly don’t know how good your kids could be, but what we do know is they could be flipping brilliant.  And I was really excited this morning, this afternoon to hear Fiona simply this, you know, we want Scotland’s people to be all that they might be.  Now I don’t know very many countries around the world, who by the way have got a diffidence as well because they’re confident countries, they’re countries that are putting themselves forward, saying, “Yeah, we’re best at this.”  They’re not, they’re absolutely not.  You need that diffidence, that nervousness, that self-criticalness that’s absolutely in the heart of Scottish culture.  And I, goodness knows, I know it, courted my wife all round the [?Ilden] hills, my brother lives up here, and my father-in-law was Chairman of the Royal Scots.  I passionately believe that this country above all else in Europe can lead this forward. 

But why would it matter?  Why does learning matter?  Learning matters for this reason and others.  I got this email this morning from one of the children in my Inclusion Trust charity, and this is proper full on poverty, folks.  This is a kid who’s excited by getting two crisp packets for a birthday treat and is looking forward to Christmas when they might get another two.  We’re in a stage in Western Europe where we’ve still got the most appalling poverty, and my absolute belief is that learning can inoculate children against poverty.  What our parents and our grandparents did with vaccines and with medicines to break the most dreadful cycles of deprivation through ill health, we can do as a generation, this is our task we can do with learning.  We can make that stamp on the world, and I’ll tell you what, if it can’t start here in Scotland, and it has, I don’t know where there’s a more fertile place to start, I honestly don’t know.  This could so be you, it is you.

And then as I look around the world, I also find everywhere children – I’m working with these children in South-East Asia – children trying to research their own future, and they believe with a passion too that if they can just learn with other kids around the world, the world they build might just be a slightly better place.  So, you know, it’s all a bit heavy this isn’t it for late in the day, but, I tell you what, it is heavy.  Learning and the new opportunities that learning has been given by new technology is a very, very, very time for us.  And when I think back to little Amelie there, thirty years away from being a mum and thirty years hopefully away from me being a great granddad – it’s scary enough being a granddad – you think about what the opportunities are in those thirty years, it’s a pretty special time.

So I’m going to pause right there, and we’ve got time for I think a few questions haven’t we?  We have.  And I have excellent DVDs here to reward anybody who asks a question – which I will throw at you.  Or somebody will bring to you, I think perhaps somebody will bring to you.  So let’s have a first question.  Ask anything you like, I promise short answers, you will get to the bar!

Questions and Answers