Latest / When Will They Learn? / Episode #18 Department for Despair

Transcript

Episode #18 Department for Despair · When Will They Learn?

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome to When Will They Learn?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_00: I'm Greg Ashman.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm Katie Wade.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_01: This is a podcast where we explore what's trending in the world of education.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_01: In each episode,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_01: we discuss podcasts,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_01: articles and opinion pieces that are shaping education discourse at the moment
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_01: and examine these through a science of learning lens.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_01: We discuss not just what's popular, but what's supported by the evidence.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_00: This week, we will be discussing a new pile of ACPU.
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_00: We will be discussing Lucy Powell's address to the Labour Party conference in the UK.
• 0:40
  SPEAKER_00: Bear with it, seriously.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_00: We'll be talking about some straw men.
• 0:45
  SPEAKER_00: They're pleasantly surprised to find these straw men and something that is a real shocker.
• 0:54
  SPEAKER_01: So Greg, you're back at school this week?
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: Back at school, Caiti.
• 0:59
  SPEAKER_00: So senior staff have been back since Monday.
• 1:03
  SPEAKER_00: The rest of the staff started today when we're recording, which is Wednesday.
• 1:09
  SPEAKER_00: We had Bron Ryrie-Jones give an exceptional keynote to all our teachers today
• 1:17
  SPEAKER_00: on opportunities to respond.
• 1:20
  SPEAKER_00: I'm so jealous.
• 1:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was really good.
• 1:23
  SPEAKER_00: And then we had a...
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Workshops this afternoon with selected groups of teachers,
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_00: which I understand went really well as well.
• 1:32
  SPEAKER_00: So it's been a good day.
• 1:33
  SPEAKER_00: That's really cool.
• 1:34
  SPEAKER_00: We heard the boss speak.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone likes to hear the boss speak.
• 1:38
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it's been good.
• 1:40
  SPEAKER_01: That's wonderful.
• 1:41
  SPEAKER_00: Welcome back.
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_00: You're still on your term break.
• 1:44
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, like I mean, I don't want to brag.
• 1:46
  SPEAKER_01: I do.
• 1:47
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah, we're still very much on term break until end of this week.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been,
• 1:54
  SPEAKER_01: I've actually been down in Victoria for the bulk of the last week,
• 1:57
  SPEAKER_01: just visiting people, like actually not down there working for once.
• 2:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like I was down there catching up with people and I don't know,
• 2:04
  SPEAKER_01: going to like nice wineries on the bay.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_01: Like it was lovely.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: It was gorgeous.
• 2:07
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Great.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: Well, you're breaking up a little bit for me,
• 2:11
  SPEAKER_00: but I know that using the fancy software that we are using,
• 2:14
  SPEAKER_00: that that will be fine on the actual recording.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_00: But occasionally I might have to say, excuse me, what?
• 2:22
  SPEAKER_00: But we'll see how we go.
• 2:24
  SPEAKER_00: Fingers crossed it's not just terrible internet from where I'm recording.
• 2:28
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: No.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we'll see.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: Okay.
• 2:31
  SPEAKER_00: So starting with you.
• 2:33
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely, yeah.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_01: So the one that I'm starting off with is,
• 2:36
  SPEAKER_01: it's an Education HQ article by Sarah Duggan, our friend of the show, I think.
• 2:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think we can call her a friend of the show.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: I think she's featured enough now that we can call her a friend of the show.
• 2:47
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:48
  SPEAKER_00: She'll be very pleased, I'm sure.
• 2:49
  SPEAKER_00: I've no idea.
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: We've never asked her if we can call her this.
• 2:53
  SPEAKER_00: No, no.
• 2:54
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this article is called Academics Behind New Aero Critiques Say It's No Targeted Takedown.
• 3:00
  SPEAKER_01: And, of course,
• 3:01
  SPEAKER_01: the targeted critique that we are talking about is what I would refer to as,
• 3:06
  SPEAKER_01: funnily enough,
• 3:07
  SPEAKER_01: the Aero Takedown by our pals over at ACPU or the Australian Centre for
• 3:15
  SPEAKER_01: the Public Understanding of Education.
• 3:17
  SPEAKER_01: For those of you who are not up to date with the AKPU drama, one,
• 3:22
  SPEAKER_01: we have a podcast on that, a load of AKPU that you should go back and listen to.
• 3:26
  SPEAKER_01: I will probably link that down in the show notes.
• 3:29
  SPEAKER_01: But a really quick summary here is that ACPU is this organization that sort
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: of popped up out of nowhere and started appearing on LinkedIn.
• 3:42
  SPEAKER_01: I think that was the first reference to it was a LinkedIn post.
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: But we didn't know who was behind it initially.
• 3:49
  SPEAKER_01: So there was this big investigation process that certain people online weren't too happy about.
• 3:55
  SPEAKER_01: But two people have come out and said that they're behind ACPU.
• 3:58
  SPEAKER_01: So this is Dr. David Clements and Dr. Natasha Chabati.
• 4:04
  SPEAKER_00: With a vanishingly small publication record.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_00: It's worth noting.
• 4:11
  SPEAKER_01: Absolutely.
• 4:13
  SPEAKER_01: Which I think we referenced in the last,
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember if we did it in the pod episode or whether it was just
• 4:18
  SPEAKER_01: on your Substack.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know.
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_00: There's no use asking me, Katie,
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: what I've talked about before because I can't remember and I just repeat myself all
• 4:26
  SPEAKER_00: the time and I do apologise for that.
• 4:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think we're really just covering the same thing over and over.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, this is an article they've written,
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: or they've, sorry, contributed to For Education HQ, and Greg, you were quoted in it.
• 4:42
  SPEAKER_01: But what they've basically said is they're like, well, look,
• 4:44
  SPEAKER_01: they're like,
• 4:45
  SPEAKER_01: it's not a targeted takedown of Aero, which in itself is just really interesting.
• 4:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think when I was...
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: When I was analysing this one,
• 4:55
  SPEAKER_01: I jumped straight onto that part with the fact that they claim that,
• 5:02
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm just trying to find the quote, they said that, quote,
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: So they've actually come in with a motive.
• 5:10
  SPEAKER_01: And their motive is really to say...
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: And they've picked a methodology and
• 5:44
  SPEAKER_01: I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
• 6:06
  SPEAKER_01: What ACPU have done in their analysis is they've gone through,
• 6:09
  SPEAKER_01: they've checked each one of the three separately,
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_01: and they've then said, hey,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_01: if it doesn't match one of those,
• 6:16
  SPEAKER_01: that counts as it does not match,
• 6:18
  SPEAKER_01: rather than saying, well, hey,
• 6:20
  SPEAKER_01: it might match in part to this one, it might match this other reference in part.
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_01: And to be honest, they've done this in a way that is very...
• 6:29
  SPEAKER_01: I'm going to use your word for this one, Greg.
• 6:31
  SPEAKER_01: They've done it in a way that's really pedantic, where they zoom in on some of the wording.
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: And look,
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'll be clear here and say I've started to go into a lot of depth
• 6:40
  SPEAKER_01: with their analysis and actually checking their analysis of Aero's analysis.
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: I say that right?
• 6:47
  SPEAKER_01: I think I said that right.
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, you said that right.
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_01: I've started going to detail on it.
• 6:52
  SPEAKER_01: And even there, it's like there are a lot of little issues or nitpicky things in their work.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_01: So there's problems where ACPU have used incorrect phrases.
• 7:00
  SPEAKER_01: They've at one point claimed that,
• 7:02
  SPEAKER_01: I think the claim was that Aero said something was infinite
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_01: when Aero had actually said indefinite.
• 7:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so they've actually made some errors in their piece when you start to get into it.
• 7:13
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it is uncharitable, Caiti.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'll just add one to that because the other thing,
• 7:20
  SPEAKER_00: and I don't know whether we made enough about this last time,
• 7:23
  SPEAKER_00: they've been really uncharitable.
• 7:25
  SPEAKER_00: So they're trying to claim that they've been really fair.
• 7:28
  SPEAKER_00: But so in one case that I looked at in my blog,
• 7:33
  SPEAKER_00: they basically said that Aero had been talking about inquiry learning,
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: but the source didn't mention inquiry learning.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: The reference that they linked to didn't mention inquiry learning.
• 7:44
  SPEAKER_00: No, it didn't use the word inquiry learning,
• 7:47
  SPEAKER_00: but it described something that could reasonably be That's exactly it.
• 7:52
  SPEAKER_00: And the thing is,
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: as you get into it, it becomes very clear that it's a lot of very fiddly little...
• 8:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, pedantic issues that are being brought up by them.
• 8:16
  SPEAKER_01: But they claim that this isn't, this is not meant to be a targeted takedown.
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: And again, I don't agree.
• 8:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't agree in part just because if you then move into,
• 8:27
  SPEAKER_01: and I mean,
• 8:28
  SPEAKER_01: you say this as well,
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_01: if you then move into looking at their other projects,
• 8:32
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, the other projects show- Well, shall I list them?
• 8:34
  SPEAKER_00: Shall I list them, Caiti?
• 8:35
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, can you please, in fact?
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the first one that they've done is the Aero Evidence Report.
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_00: The second one they're going to do is the TEAP report,
• 8:42
  SPEAKER_00: which is the report about teacher education that all the anti-science of learning
• 8:49
  SPEAKER_00: and academic people hate
• 8:51
  SPEAKER_00: because it's basically saying we should have some more cognitive science
• 8:54
  SPEAKER_00: and things like that in teacher education.
• 8:56
  SPEAKER_00: They've got the Victorian teaching and learning model.
• 9:07
  SPEAKER_00: They're 2.0 resources,
• 9:08
  SPEAKER_00: which all the academics who don't like the science of learning hate
• 9:11
  SPEAKER_00: because it's promoting explicit teaching.
• 9:14
  SPEAKER_00: They've got cognitive load theory studies that they're going to critique,
• 9:18
  SPEAKER_00: which all the academics who hate the science of learning don't like
• 9:21
  SPEAKER_00: because they don't like cognitive load It's no point.
• 9:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, they don't like it.
• 9:42
  SPEAKER_00: They don't like randomized controlled trials for some reason because learning is
• 9:48
  SPEAKER_00: about humans and humans are complicated and so special they can't be reduced
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_00: to random, all that sort of crap.
• 9:53
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, something about a lab, yeah.
• 9:56
  SPEAKER_00: Meta-analyses in I can sort of get behind that one a bit more.
• 9:59
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a little bit critical,
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_00: but I suspect they're going after meta-analyses in education because they're going
• 10:05
  SPEAKER_00: after John Hattie's work, which I would criticise.
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_00: I personally would criticise it.
• 10:12
  SPEAKER_01: We've spoken about that before on the pod as well.
• 10:15
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 10:17
  SPEAKER_00: But John Hannity's work and people like the Education Endowment Foundation in
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_00: the UK,
• 10:23
  SPEAKER_00: those meta-analyses again seem to support explicit teaching, that sort of thing.
• 10:27
  SPEAKER_00: So, Caiti,
• 10:28
  SPEAKER_00: it's just ludicrous for them to pose as if they're these impartial people
• 10:35
  SPEAKER_00: with no agenda.
• 10:37
  SPEAKER_00: They just want to help the poor old public Understand Education.
• 10:42
  SPEAKER_00: That's all they're trying to do here.
• 10:44
  SPEAKER_00: They've got no agenda.
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: And it's ludicrous.
• 10:48
  SPEAKER_00: And it's a tactical error.
• 10:50
  SPEAKER_00: Because people like you and me, Katie, who disagree with them, can just keep pointing out.
• 10:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 11:10
  SPEAKER_00: It's decent.
• 11:37
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's actually, I mean,
• 11:38
  SPEAKER_01: it's disingenuous,
• 11:39
  SPEAKER_01: but it's disrespectful to people following them when they say,
• 11:43
  SPEAKER_01: in this article,
• 11:44
  SPEAKER_01: they say,
• 11:45
  SPEAKER_01: the same method will be applied to other influential texts,
• 11:47
  SPEAKER_01: including documents that are not part of the current science of learning approach,
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: end quote.
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: Which ones then?
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: Present them.
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: Put them on your upcoming project list.
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: People aren't silly.
• 11:58
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, put them on the projects list, yes.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: Like we can see that there's a clear trend in what you're doing.
• 12:04
  SPEAKER_01: So own up and just admit that there's a clear trend.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:08
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it's ludicrous and they just make themselves look silly.
• 12:12
  SPEAKER_00: And when you look at their methodology,
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_00: which you and I,
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_00: by the sounds of it together, have collectively spent far too much time doing.
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I might post a thing.
• 12:21
  SPEAKER_00: I might.
• 12:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_00: You can look at one claim and you can immediately kind of see what's going on.
• 12:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's just this really uncharitable reading.
• 12:30
  SPEAKER_00: And when I first blogged about this, Caiti, I said, oh,
• 12:37
  SPEAKER_00: I would love to know who's behind this because I will subject their own work to
• 12:40
  SPEAKER_00: the same scrutiny.
• 12:42
  SPEAKER_00: But when you look at the work of people,
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_00: these guys,
• 12:47
  SPEAKER_00: Clements and whoever the other one is,
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_00: And when I thought it was Robert Hatton,
• 12:51
  SPEAKER_00: because if you remember very early on when I didn't know who these people were,
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_00: I got AI on the case and it found a LinkedIn post where someone claimed
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_00: that Robert Hatton,
• 13:01
  SPEAKER_00: this Professor Emeritus from South Australia,
• 13:04
  SPEAKER_00: was I suspect that he's keeping a low profile.
• 13:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 13:35
  SPEAKER_00: It's just circular.
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_00: When I wrote my first blog...
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_00: Back in 2012, I started blogging about education.
• 14:08
  SPEAKER_00: And I decided that I would do it pseudonymously because I just wanted a sandbox
• 14:12
  SPEAKER_00: where I could play around with ideas without worrying about how they would land
• 14:16
  SPEAKER_00: with people at work.
• 14:17
  SPEAKER_00: Turns out I was over worrying, really, because people at work were quite open to those ideas.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I just wanted to blog pseudonymously.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_00: And so I gave the blog this ludicrous title,
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_00: Webs of Substance,
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_00: which people proceeded to mock because it's made me sound really self-important.
• 14:34
  SPEAKER_00: And it did,
• 14:35
  SPEAKER_00: and it was a silly name,
• 14:36
  SPEAKER_00: but where it came from was this- I bet it sounded
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: really cool when you came up
• 14:40
  SPEAKER_01: with it though.
• 14:41
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
• 14:42
  SPEAKER_00: I just thought that's a
• 14:43
  SPEAKER_01: cool name.
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_00: Well, thank you.
• 14:45
  SPEAKER_00: Well, where it comes from is Francis Bacon.
• 14:50
  SPEAKER_00: Knowledge is power.
• 14:51
  SPEAKER_00: Have you ever seen that one?
• 14:52
  SPEAKER_00: Knowledge is power.
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_00: So Francis Bacon said knowledge is power.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_00: But there's this meme of a guy on the internet and he'd only ever heard it.
• 15:01
  SPEAKER_00: And he'd heard it as knowledge is power.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_00: France, as in the country, is bacon.
• 15:07
  SPEAKER_00: And he was very confused by this.
• 15:09
  SPEAKER_00: And he wondered why people kept saying it in a profound way.
• 15:11
  SPEAKER_00: He would ask them, And he'd go, well, Francis Bacon?
• 15:15
  SPEAKER_00: And they'd go, yes, Francis Bacon.
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, sorry, I'm digressing too much.
• 15:20
  SPEAKER_00: Francis Bacon, another thing he said.
• 15:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Francis Bacon.
• 15:25
  SPEAKER_00: Philosophers are like spiders weaving cobwebs out of their own substance.
• 15:30
  SPEAKER_00: So in other words,
• 15:31
  SPEAKER_00: a spider,
• 15:32
  SPEAKER_00: the silt for a web comes out of the spider itself and then he weaves it into
• 15:36
  SPEAKER_00: the web.
• 15:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 15:38
  SPEAKER_00: And he was making the analogy that philosophers are like that.
• 15:41
  SPEAKER_00: They make stuff up.
• 15:44
  SPEAKER_00: And then they construct it into these really complicated structures.
• 15:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it's not grounded in reality.
• 15:50
  SPEAKER_00: They haven't tested it in reality.
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: And Francis Bacon,
• 15:54
  SPEAKER_00: of course, was this great early proponent of science, of checking your workings.
• 15:59
  SPEAKER_00: Well, that's what a lot of educators do.
• 16:14
  SPEAKER_00: That's what it was called, yeah.
• 16:41
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, Webs of Substance, yeah.
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: Doesn't exist anymore.
• 16:43
  SPEAKER_00: Well, it does.
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: I've got an archive of it somewhere.
• 16:46
  SPEAKER_00: But I sometimes post old posts from it.
• 16:48
  SPEAKER_00: It was fun times.
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: But you know what happened?
• 16:51
  SPEAKER_00: I went to the first ever Australian research ed in Sydney.
• 16:56
  SPEAKER_00: And I went there and I spoke.
• 17:00
  SPEAKER_00: And there was a guy there who was probably,
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: I suppose you'd call him a bit anti-science of learning.
• 17:06
  SPEAKER_00: And he connected my talk that I gave
• 17:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, it was at ResearchEd 2015.
• 17:12
  SPEAKER_00: You're breaking up a little bit for me, Caiti.
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: I sort of got that.
• 17:15
  SPEAKER_01: I know, it was such a good question.
• 17:17
  SPEAKER_01: I said, why was he at ResearchEd?
• 17:19
  SPEAKER_00: Why was he at research yet?
• 17:21
  SPEAKER_00: There were a few people that came, like, it was a curiosity back then.
• 17:25
  SPEAKER_00: It was 2015.
• 17:26
  SPEAKER_00: It was a shore school in Sydney.
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: And I think a few of them thought it might be an interesting movement or
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: that they might be able to ask a difficult question or I don't know.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway,
• 17:37
  SPEAKER_00: he was there and he connected,
• 17:39
  SPEAKER_00: he basically joined the dots and he figured out I was this guy blogging
• 17:43
  SPEAKER_00: because my pen name,
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_00: my pseudonym was Because it was called Webs of Substance,
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_00: I called myself Harry Webb,
• 17:50
  SPEAKER_00: which I thought was really funny because there's this singer,
• 17:54
  SPEAKER_00: an old singer from the UK called Cliff Richard, whose original name was Harry Webb.
• 18:01
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, again, I'm digressing into things that nobody needs to know.
• 18:05
  SPEAKER_00: And he figured out Greg Ashman is Harry Webb.
• 18:08
  SPEAKER_00: And he started kind of trolling me.
• 18:10
  SPEAKER_00: And he got this Canadian guy involved who used to be on Twitter, who used to argue.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_00: And they both started trundling me.
• 18:19
  SPEAKER_00: And this Canadian guy,
• 18:20
  SPEAKER_00: by the way,
• 18:21
  SPEAKER_00: he ended up having to leave teaching because he,
• 18:25
  SPEAKER_00: I think this is what, I think I remember this right.
• 18:27
  SPEAKER_00: I read a news article later.
• 18:29
  SPEAKER_00: He had shown his class a video.
• 18:33
  SPEAKER_00: And this video is, have you seen Brooklyn Nine-Nine?
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, a lot.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 18:37
  SPEAKER_00: So the lead character in Brooklyn Nine-Nine used to do these skits on a comedy show, I think.
• 18:43
  SPEAKER_00: And they were probably age inappropriate, I suspect.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_00: And he showed this video to the kids in his class and he's no longer teaching anymore.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: I can't remember his name.
• 18:56
  SPEAKER_00: He looked a bit like a...
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_00: His avatar on Twitter, he looks a bit like a sort of goblin.
• 19:04
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, the two of them went for me on Twitter and sort of tried to dox me,
• 19:10
  SPEAKER_00: expose me, whatever, thought that it would be like the end of me.
• 19:13
  SPEAKER_00: But as I said, it wasn't really because...
• 19:16
  SPEAKER_00: No one at my school found what I was writing particularly controversial.
• 19:19
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just started writing it in my own name.
• 19:22
  SPEAKER_00: So from 2015 onwards, I wrote as Greg Ashman.
• 19:25
  SPEAKER_00: But it has been a periodic source of trouble for me because ever
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: so occasionally people will complain to the school about something I've written.
• 19:36
  SPEAKER_00: They want to report me to the The feds,
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 19:38
  SPEAKER_00: they think that I'll lose my job or something for disagreeing with them
• 19:43
  SPEAKER_00: about education.
• 19:45
  SPEAKER_00: And so they think that that's a good thing to do.
• 19:47
  SPEAKER_00: Of course, it just casts them in a very poor light.
• 19:50
  SPEAKER_00: And that's the only thing it achieves.
• 19:52
  SPEAKER_00: But I realise I'm very lucky.
• 19:53
  SPEAKER_00: If I was in another school,
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: I can imagine a principal saying,
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: oh, could you just tone it down a bit or that sort of thing?
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: But I've never had that.
• 20:01
  SPEAKER_00: I've always been supported.
• 20:02
  SPEAKER_00: That was a bit of a digression there, Caiti.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_01: There is something in that, though,
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_01: that for a lot of teachers who are posting anonymously online
• 20:10
  SPEAKER_01: or do have anonymous accounts,
• 20:12
  SPEAKER_01: there's actually a reason that you might choose to do that.
• 20:15
  SPEAKER_01: And for teachers working in different school systems,
• 20:18
  SPEAKER_01: some of them don't have a choice if they want to be able
• 20:20
  SPEAKER_01: to express themselves online.
• 20:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't remember if we got to this point the last time we discussed ACPU,
• 20:27
  SPEAKER_01: but there is a big difference between you being
• 20:29
  SPEAKER_01: an anonymous casual blogger who's posting about...
• 20:34
  SPEAKER_01: It's an anonymous blog and if you don't like
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_01: the fact someone's doing it anonymously, you don't have to follow them.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_01: But an organization,
• 21:01
  SPEAKER_01: on the other hand,
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_01: who are claiming that they exist to enhance or advance the public's understanding
• 21:09
  SPEAKER_01: of education research, well,
• 21:11
  SPEAKER_01: if you're actually doing research,
• 21:12
  SPEAKER_01: which is what they're doing,
• 21:13
  SPEAKER_01: or you're analyzing research,
• 21:15
  SPEAKER_01: which is research itself,
• 21:18
  SPEAKER_01: that's when then the anonymity part,
• 21:22
  SPEAKER_01: I hate that word,
• 21:23
  SPEAKER_01: that's when that actually does become important and you can't be anonymous.
• 21:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, you've got a touch of the R2-D2s about you at my end at the moment,
• 21:35
  SPEAKER_00: Caiti, but I think I got that.
• 21:39
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, I agree.
• 21:41
  SPEAKER_00: Look, if you are setting yourself up as a centre, I mean, it's this whole idea, isn't it?
• 21:47
  SPEAKER_00: We're the researchers,
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: the public,
• 21:49
  SPEAKER_00: they're silly,
• 21:50
  SPEAKER_00: they don't really understand,
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: they're prone to believing in misinformation and disinformation and they read all
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: the wrong newspapers and they're And what we're going to do magnanimously,
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: because we are,
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 22:06
  SPEAKER_00: good people,
• 22:07
  SPEAKER_00: is we are going to write this website to basically just improve
• 22:12
  SPEAKER_00: the public's understanding of this really complicated field that we know lots about.
• 22:17
  SPEAKER_00: And of course, the public aren't going to read that at all.
• 22:19
  SPEAKER_00: You and I are going to read it and realise how partisan it is.
• 22:24
  SPEAKER_01: Suppose that it's useful
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: if it justifies what you already thought
• 22:28
  SPEAKER_00: I think you said justifies there.
• 22:30
  SPEAKER_01: I did.
• 22:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, I don't know what's going on here.
• 22:35
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe it's my internet, maybe it's yours.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_00: And you'll be perfectly,
• 22:38
  SPEAKER_00: because of the wonderful gadgets that we use,
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_00: you'll be perfectly legible to people listening to this podcast.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_00: Just right now I'm struggling a little bit.
• 22:49
  SPEAKER_00: Shall I maybe talk about Lucy Powell and let's hope the internet sorts itself out?
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I might try to fix it.
• 22:54
  SPEAKER_01: If I disappear, I'll be back.
• 22:59
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, so Lucy Powell is the deputy leader of the UK Labour Party,
• 23:08
  SPEAKER_00: which is the party in power in the UK.
• 23:11
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think that makes a deputy prime minister.
• 23:14
  SPEAKER_00: I've confused myself now.
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure.
• 23:16
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, she's the deputy leader of the Labour Party.
• 23:21
  SPEAKER_00: She is also the education minister,
• 23:23
  SPEAKER_00: which for arcane reasons to do with devolution in the United Kingdom means
• 23:30
  SPEAKER_00: that she's not actually the education minister for the whole of the United Kingdom.
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a federal system like Yeah.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_00: And has no say whatsoever over education in Scotland,
• 23:56
  SPEAKER_00: Wales and Northern Ireland, despite being the UK education minister.
• 23:59
  SPEAKER_00: So that's out of the way.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: So she's the deputy leader of the Labour Party.
• 24:04
  SPEAKER_00: And so the Labour Party have had a conference.
• 24:07
  SPEAKER_00: They have that every year in the Northern Hemisphere autumn.
• 24:11
  SPEAKER_00: All the parties have a conference.
• 24:13
  SPEAKER_00: And she gave a speech and said,
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, talking about ludicrous figures, I mean, she is a bit of a ludicrous figure.
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: She talks about,
• 24:23
  SPEAKER_00: she starts, she says, I'm still raving after my DJ set at the LGBT disco last night.
• 24:30
  SPEAKER_00: I thought that was a nice touch.
• 24:31
  SPEAKER_00: But then she goes on a lot.
• 24:32
  SPEAKER_01: I liked that.
• 24:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 24:34
  SPEAKER_00: Then she goes on lots of boring stuff about politics generally and,
• 24:37
  SPEAKER_00: you know, that our listeners wouldn't be interested in.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: It was very persuasive, to be fair to her.
• 24:42
  SPEAKER_01: I did listen to the whole thing, so it was quite persuasive.
• 24:46
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah, I had it.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, no,
• 24:50
  SPEAKER_01: I decided to listen because I was like,
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: oh, that's a convenient way to get this information in.
• 24:54
  SPEAKER_01: I just wasn't expecting all the pre-UK politics that I've now learned about.
• 25:00
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, well, there you go.
• 25:02
  SPEAKER_00: Well, very persuasive apparently.
• 25:04
  SPEAKER_00: I just read it, so I haven't actually heard her deliver it, so I've just got the cold words.
• 25:10
  SPEAKER_00: And the most ludicrous bit,
• 25:15
  SPEAKER_00: as far as I was concerned,
• 25:16
  SPEAKER_00: was that she kept calling her Department of Education the Department of Hope,
• 25:21
  SPEAKER_00: the Department of Hope, Caiti.
• 25:23
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 25:24
  SPEAKER_01: It is convincing.
• 25:25
  SPEAKER_01: Like, how can you be against a Department
• 25:27
  SPEAKER_00: of Hope?
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_00: Well, quite.
• 25:30
  SPEAKER_00: But have you read 1984, Caiti?
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: No, and I should.
• 25:36
  SPEAKER_01: It's actually on my list right now.
• 25:38
  SPEAKER_00: So in 1984,
• 25:40
  SPEAKER_00: the Ministry of Truth,
• 25:42
  SPEAKER_00: their job is to go back and change all the newspapers so that whoever they're at war
• 25:48
  SPEAKER_00: with now, the old copies reflect that.
• 25:50
  SPEAKER_00: So essentially the Ministry of Truth is about lying.
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_00: And rewriting
• 25:54
  SPEAKER_01: history, yeah, got it.
• 25:55
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, the Ministry of Peace conducts war.
• 26:00
  SPEAKER_00: And the Ministry of Love is where poor old Winston Smith ends up with his head in
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_00: a cage of rats.
• 26:08
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, sorry, I've given away the plot, Caiti, and you haven't read it.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: Scrub that.
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_00: I can delete that from my Kindle as we speak.
• 26:15
  SPEAKER_00: It's fine.
• 26:16
  SPEAKER_00: And...
• 26:19
  SPEAKER_00: And that's, what was it called?
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, and so it's in charge of torturing people.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_00: So an Orwellian reading of the Ministry of Hope is that it's going to be in charge of despair.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I do worry a little that it might be,
• 26:34
  SPEAKER_00: Katie, from some of the things that Lucy Powell is saying.
• 26:39
  SPEAKER_00: So the context for this is that...
• 26:44
  SPEAKER_00: The Pisa, and we talked about Pisa.
• 26:46
  SPEAKER_00: Was it the last one we did Pisa, Caiti?
• 26:48
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 26:49
  SPEAKER_00: So go back to our last podcast if you want to hear us prattle fruitlessly about Pisa.
• 26:56
  SPEAKER_00: But essentially, the TLDR, Caiti, see, I'm with it.
• 27:01
  SPEAKER_00: I like that, yeah.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_00: The TLDR is that England held while a lot of countries fell in Pisa and And so
• 27:10
  SPEAKER_00: that pushed England up the ranking and it's now like
• 27:12
  SPEAKER_00: the second highest ranking country in Europe.
• 27:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's probably a bit of measurement monkey business going on there, Caiti.
• 27:18
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not totally convinced that everyone has got worse.
• 27:22
  SPEAKER_00: And I suspect there's a bit of things that are supposed to be the same not being
• 27:28
  SPEAKER_00: the same that's kind of affected those overall results.
• 27:31
  SPEAKER_00: But anyway, England has done relatively well.
• 27:35
  SPEAKER_00: And so lots of people popped up to make excuses for why that would be,
• 27:39
  SPEAKER_00: because they don't want England to do well,
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: because England uses explicit teaching, it's committed to knowledge-rich curriculum.
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: And some of the things that people have said we addressed last time,
• 27:49
  SPEAKER_00: but one of the things that keeps coming up is, but at what cost, Caiti?
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_00: So England might be doing well academically, and Lucy Powell acknowledges this.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_00: She says...
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_00: Where does she say this?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_00: I can't find my bit where she says something nice about the English results,
• 28:09
  SPEAKER_00: but she did somewhere.
• 28:12
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, she acknowledges that.
• 28:13
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, she acknowledges that.
• 28:15
  SPEAKER_00: But the question that people are raising is, at what cost?
• 28:20
  SPEAKER_00: So in many countries, there are kids who are disengaged from education.
• 28:24
  SPEAKER_00: In many countries, there are kids who can't find employment after school.
• 28:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so she points to things like,
• 28:33
  SPEAKER_00: at the last general election, so this is when her party took power.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_00: So before it was the Conservative Party,
• 28:41
  SPEAKER_00: who she would call the Tories and doesn't have a very high opinion of.
• 28:44
  SPEAKER_00: Michael Gove was a minister who...
• 28:47
  SPEAKER_00: He was mentioned a few times.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:09
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: It's come at a cost.
• 29:28
  SPEAKER_00: There's persistence absence from school.
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: There are kids not in education training or employment.
• 29:35
  SPEAKER_00: And some guy from the OECD has told her,
• 29:39
  SPEAKER_00: the head of PISA has told her that too many young people think schools waste time
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_00: and don't feel they belong.
• 29:44
  SPEAKER_00: Okay, now.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: If we unpack that,
• 29:46
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what the guy from Pisa said exactly or what that looks like,
• 29:51
  SPEAKER_00: but the other two claims we can compare with Scotland.
• 29:54
  SPEAKER_00: So Scotland has been on this relentless downward trajectory.
• 29:58
  SPEAKER_00: They introduced Curriculum for Excellence and That's a bit like the Department
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_00: of Hope or the Ministry of Truth,
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_00: the curriculum for excellence that they introduced in 2011 that has correlated with
• 30:11
  SPEAKER_00: a relentless decline in excellence.
• 30:15
  SPEAKER_00: Wow.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: So they've been going down.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_00: But if you look at their figures,
• 30:19
  SPEAKER_00: because you can do this,
• 30:20
  SPEAKER_00: you can do this in the UK,
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_00: you can compare levels of kids not in education,
• 30:25
  SPEAKER_00: employment or training, similar in Scotland to England.
• 30:29
  SPEAKER_00: Also, I think similar,
• 30:31
  SPEAKER_00: maybe a bit worse in I might not be remembering that quite correctly,
• 30:34
  SPEAKER_00: but they're very similar.
• 30:35
  SPEAKER_00: So given that Scotland has followed this very different curriculum
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_00: where they haven't got really good literacy numeracy results,
• 30:41
  SPEAKER_00: and it suggests that England's curriculum is not responsible for this number
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_00: of kids, not in education, employment and training, that something else is.
• 30:51
  SPEAKER_00: And then if you look at persistent absence,
• 30:54
  SPEAKER_00: persistent absence in Scotland is actually quite a bit higher than in England.
• 30:59
  SPEAKER_00: So again,
• 31:00
  SPEAKER_00: it doesn't suggest that Michael Gove's reforms to the curriculum are responsible
• 31:06
  SPEAKER_00: for persistent absence in England.
• 31:09
  SPEAKER_00: So this narrative that it's come at this cost, I think it's a bit flawed.
• 31:13
  SPEAKER_00: I think there are big problems in England and she rightly identifies,
• 31:15
  SPEAKER_00: let's give her her due, Yeah.
• 31:32
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_00: Daisy Christodoulou.
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_00: Has written brilliantly about this.
• 32:08
  SPEAKER_00: And she's written about the third of kids in England who don't get a decent score
• 32:16
  SPEAKER_00: at GCSE in English and Math.
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_00: So GCSE, for those who don't know, I mean, that sounds great, actually.
• 32:20
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, but we don't, and no one's going to do it, but
• 32:48
  SPEAKER_00: Anyway, so they have that.
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_00: And there's about a third of kids who don't get a grade four or five and above.
• 32:57
  SPEAKER_00: And what people say is, oh, what we need is more vocational options.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_00: So the theory is that the kids who are struggling to do well in English
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_00: and maths are struggling because,
• 33:09
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm going to use a phrase that I hate, that is like,
• 33:15
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, yeah.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_00: And so what Lucy Powell's going to do is she's going to put in place GCSEs
• 33:38
  SPEAKER_00: that are technical, vocational GCSEs, and they're going to have parity of esteem.
• 33:43
  SPEAKER_00: So no one's going to be snobbish about this.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: Everyone's going to think that they're just as good.
• 33:48
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, but you know, the difference is, though, she's coming from the Department of Hope, so...
• 34:09
  SPEAKER_00: But the problem is, well, two problems.
• 34:12
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I'm extemporising at length again.
• 34:14
  SPEAKER_00: I do apologise.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_00: I do have a tendency to do that.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: Two problems.
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_00: First of all, these are not the same kids.
• 34:20
  SPEAKER_00: So Daisy Christodoulou,
• 34:21
  SPEAKER_00: in a blog post that she wrote,
• 34:23
  SPEAKER_00: makes it very clear that actually to do well in society,
• 34:29
  SPEAKER_00: Proper vocational subjects,
• 34:32
  SPEAKER_00: the ones that are recognized by industry in Britain,
• 34:36
  SPEAKER_00: they're called City and Guilds courses.
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_00: You actually have to learn quite a lot of knowledge and
• 34:42
  SPEAKER_00: the skills you need are quite high level.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact,
• 34:46
  SPEAKER_00: if you're going to struggle to get a decent mark in GCSE English and Maths,
• 34:50
  SPEAKER_00: you're going to struggle with these rigorous skills.
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_00: Vocational subjects.
• 34:56
  SPEAKER_00: So the 10% to 15% of kids who really do need these subjects,
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_00: really do need these pathways because they're passionate about going
• 35:05
  SPEAKER_00: into engineering or whatever, they're not.
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_00: We can't simply just identify them with this group of kids who struggle at GCSE.
• 35:12
  SPEAKER_00: And in fact,
• 35:13
  SPEAKER_00: the group of kids who struggle at English
• 35:14
  SPEAKER_00: and Maths GCSE will probably be much better served
• 35:17
  SPEAKER_00: by some excellent targeted teaching,
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_00: helping them get better at English and Maths,
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_00: Some schools in England are able to do that.
• 35:24
  SPEAKER_00: If you look at their data,
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: there's far less than a third of kids getting below a four in English and maths.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_00: They've somehow managed to pull some of those kids through.
• 35:34
  SPEAKER_00: And actually, that is what we need to do.
• 35:36
  SPEAKER_00: We need to target those kids with appropriate courses,
• 35:39
  SPEAKER_00: appropriate ways to teach them,
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_00: maybe using explicit teaching and those sorts of things.
• 35:47
  SPEAKER_00: So in other words,
• 35:48
  SPEAKER_00: the kids that really want and are desperate
• 35:51
  SPEAKER_00: for these vocational qualifications are not the same kids.
• 35:54
  SPEAKER_00: And so what this leads to is, in my blog, I called it crapademic subjects.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_00: So they call them vocational GCSEs.
• 36:04
  SPEAKER_00: But what's going to happen?
• 36:06
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about 14, 15 and 16 year olds here.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_00: We're talking about schools with limited budgets.
• 36:11
  SPEAKER_00: They're not going to go out and buy a whole load of bricks to teach kids how to do bricklaying.
• 36:16
  SPEAKER_00: They're not going to necessarily have fully equipped classrooms.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_00: Catering kitchens and things like that.
• 36:21
  SPEAKER_00: If at scale you wheel out so-called vocational subjects for these kids
• 36:26
  SPEAKER_00: at this level,
• 36:28
  SPEAKER_00: they will involve reading and writing about construction,
• 36:32
  SPEAKER_00: reading and writing about nutritional standards for children.
• 36:41
  SPEAKER_00: They will be doing what teachers in regular classrooms can do with what they have
• 36:48
  SPEAKER_00: to hand,
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_00: which is write on whiteboards,
• 36:51
  SPEAKER_00: get the kids writing in booklets or maybe doing things on computers.
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_00: Now, why do I predict this?
• 36:56
  SPEAKER_00: Why?
• 37:10
  SPEAKER_00: Have I got sort of mystical powers?
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_00: Am I looking into my crystal ball?
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: No, I remember, Caiti, because I worked in England in the early 2000s when we did this.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_00: We've done this all before when we tried to do this.
• 37:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 37:26
  SPEAKER_00: And it didn't work.
• 37:27
  SPEAKER_00: It ended up with silly qualifications.
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_00: So what you end up with as well,
• 37:31
  SPEAKER_00: you target it, because you're not quite, you're between two stones.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_00: It's not really vocational because actually it's meant It's meant
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_00: to serve these kids who struggle with so-called academic subjects.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not really about teaching vocation.
• 37:46
  SPEAKER_00: It's about providing an alternative to these subjects.
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_00: But what they become is they become easy ways of getting grades.
• 37:53
  SPEAKER_00: So then you get these kids who are outside this 30% who you're not targeting,
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_00: but schools are then incentivized to pop them in there to do these subjects,
• 38:01
  SPEAKER_00: to get these easy grades.
• 38:03
  SPEAKER_00: And you end up with a ridiculous situation we had in the early 2000s
• 38:06
  SPEAKER_00: of something called the European Union.
• 38:08
  SPEAKER_00: We just need like a ministry of truth to go back and rewrite that and then problem solved.
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely, absolutely.
• 38:37
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I'm just going to check something.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, okay.
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, we do.
• 38:43
  SPEAKER_00: But you can see this coming a mile off.
• 38:46
  SPEAKER_00: And so they're going to knock the corners off the piano.
• 38:48
  SPEAKER_00: The piano is going to go out of tune.
• 38:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's going to start playing chopsticks badly.
• 38:52
  SPEAKER_00: That's where we're going.
• 38:54
  SPEAKER_01: But I think like because when I listened to it without having that context,
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: I had a like I had a different concern as well,
• 39:01
  SPEAKER_01: which is that I think that as soon as you start,
• 39:03
  SPEAKER_01: because I think it's great to have different pathway options available and I need
• 39:07
  SPEAKER_01: to say that.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: But I think that as soon as you have that as a really clear defined students can go
• 39:14
  SPEAKER_01: in and do X pathway at school,
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: I actually think that it can give schools a bit of an excuse to not be accountable
• 39:19
  SPEAKER_01: for their student's Learning of your basic reading and writing and numeracy
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: or whatever.
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's,
• 39:28
  SPEAKER_01: like I know in her speech,
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: Lucy Powell references the fact that we want to have this bridge between sort
• 39:35
  SPEAKER_01: of high school and careers, but Yeah.
• 39:57
  SPEAKER_01: It's a nice thing to do.
• 39:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I just think that if we push this idea of there being a very clear set pathway
• 40:03
  SPEAKER_01: for some students,
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: we also immediately start to pigeonhole and go,
• 40:07
  SPEAKER_01: well, we're going to put X student in this because it's too difficult to teach them.
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: Put that in the too hard basket.
• 40:12
  SPEAKER_01: And that just becomes an excuse for you to not teach them from a younger age the basics.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 40:17
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I was in charge at the time in the late 2000s.
• 40:22
  SPEAKER_00: There was this program called Diplomas that they tried to set up in England.
• 40:26
  SPEAKER_00: And I had to try and set up an ISTT one.
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_00: I had to try and coordinate these schools.
• 40:31
  SPEAKER_00: It was really hard.
• 40:32
  SPEAKER_00: We couldn't get it off the ground in the end.
• 40:34
  SPEAKER_00: And schools tried to create like health and beauty diplomas.
• 40:38
  SPEAKER_00: And they were like trying to find the resources to build a diploma center
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_00: where kids could go and learn.
• 40:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_00: Putting them constantly through subjects where they have to read and write
• 41:05
  SPEAKER_00: when we haven't taught them how to read and write will make them very disaffected.
• 41:09
  SPEAKER_00: And to be honest,
• 41:10
  SPEAKER_00: if we've done that and we've failed them in that way,
• 41:12
  SPEAKER_00: it might be better for them to go into the workforce than to sit through some kind
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_00: of degraded form of supposed...
• 41:22
  SPEAKER_00: It's a problem that we could potentially avoid.
• 41:25
  SPEAKER_00: So after the Second World War, Caiti, the British government tried this system.
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_00: They called it the tripartite system.
• 41:43
  SPEAKER_00: So the idea was that there would be different kinds of schools.
• 41:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's similar to some European countries now.
• 41:48
  SPEAKER_00: I think Netherlands has something similar.
• 41:50
  SPEAKER_00: I think Germany has or had something similar.
• 41:53
  SPEAKER_00: So at 11,
• 41:54
  SPEAKER_00: you do an exam,
• 41:56
  SPEAKER_00: which is supposedly just a test of general intelligence, but then it's coachable.
• 42:01
  SPEAKER_00: So middle class parents coach their kids called the 11 plus.
• 42:05
  SPEAKER_00: If you passed,
• 42:07
  SPEAKER_00: and it wasn't supposed to be a pass fail thing,
• 42:09
  SPEAKER_00: but if you pass the 11 plus, you went to a grammar school.
• 42:12
  SPEAKER_00: If you failed, you went to a secondary modern, which had fewer resources.
• 42:17
  SPEAKER_00: But there was also supposed to be this other kind of school called a technical school.
• 42:22
  SPEAKER_00: That's why it was called the tripartite system.
• 42:25
  SPEAKER_00: But when my dad went to school in the fifties, he managed to get into a grammar school.
• 42:33
  SPEAKER_00: But you never hear about these technical schools.
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_00: So the argument throughout the 1950s and into the 1960s in Britain was
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_00: whether you should maintain the system or abolish it.
• 42:43
  SPEAKER_00: And in the end,
• 42:44
  SPEAKER_00: the argument for abolishing it won and all schools became the same
• 42:47
  SPEAKER_00: and they were not selective anymore.
• 42:48
  SPEAKER_00: Apart from in some boroughs in England,
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_00: which somehow managed to retain them again, just very complicated.
• 42:54
  SPEAKER_00: But these mysterious technical schools...
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_00: A few of them were built, but they by and large never really appeared.
• 43:00
  SPEAKER_00: And they were supposed to deliver this technical vocational education.
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: And the reason was,
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: of course,
• 43:05
  SPEAKER_00: that they were very expensive because lathes and hairdressing salons
• 43:13
  SPEAKER_00: and mechanics workshops and all those sorts of things that you need
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: to deliver technical education, they're very expensive.
• 43:22
  SPEAKER_00: We do have them in further education, what we call technical education.
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: They do exist, but they are expensive.
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: And often that sort of training is better provided through subsidies from employers
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_00: because employers buy lathes because they can make money out of the lathes,
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_00: these very expensive pieces of equipment.
• 43:42
  SPEAKER_00: And then they might send young people on release to further education colleges
• 43:47
  SPEAKER_00: where they can learn a bit more about them.
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_00: That seems to be the better way around.
• 43:51
  SPEAKER_00: Insisting that teachers who are often predominantly middle class often
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_00: And predominantly from an academic background themselves,
• 43:59
  SPEAKER_00: are going to rock up and teach 14-year-olds something meaningful about construction
• 44:05
  SPEAKER_00: in a classroom with a pen and paper.
• 44:09
  SPEAKER_00: It's just not going to happen.
• 44:12
  SPEAKER_00: It's not a good use of anyone's time.
• 44:14
  SPEAKER_00: We already know this because we've tried it before.
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_00: And so it just makes me really depressed that this is what they're proposing
• 44:21
  SPEAKER_00: as their new big idea.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: All right.
• 44:28
  SPEAKER_01: So article number three.
• 44:30
  SPEAKER_01: Article number three is the 10 straw men of the science of learning.
• 44:35
  SPEAKER_01: And this particular article was published on,
• 44:37
  SPEAKER_01: wait for this, the AARE blog, who we have featured before, but never like this.
• 44:45
  SPEAKER_01: So this one was by, and I have- Penny Van Bergen.
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you.
• 44:51
  SPEAKER_01: I was going to say I've got part of her name, but not all of it.
• 44:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, Penny.
• 44:54
  SPEAKER_00: The very sound, the very sound Penny Van Bergen, Caiti.
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: I was so...
• 45:01
  SPEAKER_01: Greg, you sent me this article and I saw where it was posted and I had this immediate reaction.
• 45:07
  SPEAKER_01: I went, oh no, this isn't good.
• 45:10
  SPEAKER_01: I don't want to deal with this.
• 45:12
  SPEAKER_01: And then I started reading it and it hit me by surprise because the 10 strawmen of
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: the science of learning were in fact actually strawmen of the science of learning.
• 45:23
  SPEAKER_01: And Penny does a great job of I mean,
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: really defending the science of learning in a place where- Setting fire to
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_00: the straw men.
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: Setting fire to the straw men, absolutely.
• 45:36
  SPEAKER_01: Which I thought in itself was interesting.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: I think I just, I kept reading it, expecting as I went through each part.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know if you had this when you were reading it.
• 45:46
  SPEAKER_01: I was reading through and I kept expecting something to drop and it to just be like,
• 45:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, and here's all these beautiful defenses for science of learning.
• 45:55
  SPEAKER_01: And bam, it's the worst.
• 45:56
  SPEAKER_01: But actually, the article finishes brilliantly.
• 45:59
  SPEAKER_01: It says, straw man 10, science of learning is an oppressive regime.
• 46:04
  SPEAKER_01: And Penny responds, it's not, it's just science.
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: And that's how it ends.
• 46:09
  SPEAKER_01: There was no big penny drop, so to speak, in the article for me.
• 46:13
  SPEAKER_01: It was brilliant.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: It was great.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_00: And it's very, I mean, I'll just read the bit about Sweller and Error.
• 46:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's just very well measured.
• 46:20
  SPEAKER_01: I love that part.
• 46:21
  SPEAKER_00: Science of Learning.
• 46:22
  SPEAKER_00: So the straw man.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_00: So I think we talked about straw men before, haven't we?
• 46:26
  SPEAKER_00: So a straw man is a position someone doesn't hold.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_00: So it's not true.
• 46:31
  SPEAKER_00: So the straw man is that science of learning is John Sweller and Error.
• 46:34
  SPEAKER_00: That's not true.
• 46:36
  SPEAKER_00: And Penny explains,
• 46:37
  SPEAKER_00: Penny Van Bergen, sorry,
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not on first name terms with her, so I don't think I should call her that.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: I should call her Penny Van Bergen.
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: Science of learning is not commensurate with a single researcher or organisation.
• 46:47
  SPEAKER_00: Science has never been about the individual.
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_00: By design, it is about producing a body of empirical evidence to explain how the world works.
• 46:53
  SPEAKER_00: It is self-correcting and falsifiable.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: Absolutely.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_00: Good on you.
• 46:56
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, retrieval practice...
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: Schema theory.
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_00: There's loads of stuff that isn't just Sweller
• 47:18
  SPEAKER_00: and isn't just what's currently available through Arrow.
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, science of learning isn't just like three John Swellers in a trench coat or something.
• 47:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 47:28
  SPEAKER_00: And so I just thought it was great.
• 47:29
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, I also thought the comments were interesting.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_00: So I looked for comments.
• 47:35
  SPEAKER_00: I thought, I wonder how this will land.
• 47:37
  SPEAKER_00: So I kept going back to the thing.
• 47:39
  SPEAKER_00: For quite a while, there weren't any comments.
• 47:40
  SPEAKER_00: I think people were a bit stunned.
• 47:43
  SPEAKER_00: And the first few comments are quite encouraging.
• 47:48
  SPEAKER_00: But then where do we get to?
• 47:52
  SPEAKER_00: Scott Webster, right?
• 47:54
  SPEAKER_00: He says,
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: one obvious limitation of a science of learning is
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: that its findings concerning how learning occurs can be utilized both for educative
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_00: and for indoctrinatory purposes.
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_00: What is needed is a normative aspect.
• 48:06
  SPEAKER_00: What is needed?
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know what that means, Katie.
• 48:10
  SPEAKER_00: I'm a bit slow sometimes.
• 48:11
  SPEAKER_00: Which is able to distinguish between the sorts of learning
• 48:14
  SPEAKER_00: that can be considered educative from the sorts of learning
• 48:17
  SPEAKER_00: which are indoctrinatory.
• 48:18
  SPEAKER_00: Interestingly,
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_00: in 1929,
• 48:20
  SPEAKER_00: John Dewey published his The Source Well, I think I'm agreeing with Dewey there.
• 48:24
  SPEAKER_00: I don't see what the problem is.
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: Indeed,
• 48:37
  SPEAKER_00: he claimed that nothing has brought pedagogical theory into greater dispute than
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_00: the belief that it is identified with handing out to teachers recipes
• 48:53
  SPEAKER_00: I think I'm diverging a little bit with Dewey there.
• 48:55
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not quite sure.
• 48:57
  SPEAKER_00: Like, yeah, sort of, maybe.
• 48:59
  SPEAKER_00: Not sure.
• 49:00
  SPEAKER_00: Therefore,
• 49:01
  SPEAKER_00: rather than claim that a science of learning provides teachers with a body
• 49:04
  SPEAKER_00: of knowledge to inform their practice,
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_00: research findings provide resources for inquiry, not prescriptions for practice.
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: Accordingly,
• 49:10
  SPEAKER_00: the professional disposition of teachers is that to be an inquirer being scientific
• 49:15
  SPEAKER_00: while simultaneously being philosophical to ensure that the experiences of
• 49:20
  SPEAKER_00: The experiences she is offering can be as educative as possible,
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_00: especially for a democratic context.
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_00: So the Wafflers came out in response to the Van Bergen piece.
• 49:32
  SPEAKER_00: I'm not sure what quote.
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know quite what that is,
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_00: but there's a bit of an exchange there and he gets a little bit passive aggressive.
• 49:41
  SPEAKER_00: But it was interesting to see that.
• 49:43
  SPEAKER_00: But I thought good on Penny Van Bergen for going into the lion's den and publishing
• 49:50
  SPEAKER_00: an article quite at odds with a lot of the stuff that the ARE blog has been carrying
• 49:55
  SPEAKER_00: in recent times.
• 49:56
  SPEAKER_01: Which I actually didn't know was a thing that...
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know how it works.
• 50:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, I've realised.
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: John Sweller has published on there.
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: Has he?
• 50:14
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, he had an article on there quite a few years ago now.
• 50:18
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, certainly no one's ever approached me to write anything for the AARE blog.
• 50:22
  SPEAKER_00: But I think from time to time,
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_00: maybe it's showing,
• 50:26
  SPEAKER_00: maybe it's necessary to show a kind of multiple perspectives and all that sort
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: of stuff.
• 50:31
  SPEAKER_00: But I mean, like,
• 50:32
  SPEAKER_00: if you were to tally up the number of articles on the AARE blog,
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_00: A-A-R-E blog about science of learning or about aero,
• 50:41
  SPEAKER_00: I think the vast majority would be quite negative.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_00: But it was good to see this.
• 50:46
  SPEAKER_00: And there's some really good turns of phrases in the piece as well.
• 50:49
  SPEAKER_00: It's almost the sort of thing you might print out and put up in the staff room.
• 50:54
  SPEAKER_00: What was the other one that I quite liked?
• 50:58
  SPEAKER_00: Ah, yeah, she goes...
• 51:01
  SPEAKER_00: So Penny Van Bergen does a lot of...
• 51:04
  SPEAKER_00: So there's lots of myths about science of learning.
• 51:06
  SPEAKER_00: So some people,
• 51:07
  SPEAKER_00: I remember a few years ago,
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: many years ago now,
• 51:09
  SPEAKER_00: actually,
• 51:10
  SPEAKER_00: someone in the TES,
• 51:11
  SPEAKER_00: it was actually the head of the UK,
• 51:14
  SPEAKER_00: England's Chartered College of Teachers,
• 51:16
  SPEAKER_00: said that cognitive load theory all came from adults in...
• 51:20
  SPEAKER_00: That's what the bulk of it is.
• 51:35
  SPEAKER_00: Yes, some has been done in universities, but most of it has not.
• 51:40
  SPEAKER_00: It's a bit artificial.
• 51:41
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, that's the beauty of those little randomized control trials is
• 51:45
  SPEAKER_00: that you can control all the variables,
• 51:47
  SPEAKER_00: but it means that what the kids end up doing isn't quite the same.
• 51:49
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 51:50
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 52:18
  SPEAKER_01: Well, see,
• 52:19
  SPEAKER_01: I quite like the straw man five,
• 52:21
  SPEAKER_01: which is science of learning is un slash settled, unsettled slash settled.
• 52:26
  SPEAKER_01: And I like that one because I see both ends of this exact argument made where it's,
• 52:32
  SPEAKER_01: well, science of learning is just Yeah.
• 52:48
  SPEAKER_01: That might change.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: Or, of course, you hit it from that other angle of, well, no, because it's not settled.
• 52:54
  SPEAKER_01: We don't know how students learn.
• 52:56
  SPEAKER_01: And again, you're completely neglecting the fact.
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: And I think she handles it perfectly.
• 53:00
  SPEAKER_01: She starts off by saying, no science is ever fully settled.
• 53:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's about taking theories.
• 53:06
  SPEAKER_01: You're testing them.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: You're looking for different boundary cases.
• 53:10
  SPEAKER_01: You're just constantly doing more work to evolve that area so
• 53:14
  SPEAKER_01: that you can apply your knowledge in different contexts across different classrooms.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: But I mean,
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: that's part of why we typically use evidence-informed rather than evidence-based
• 53:28
  SPEAKER_01: when we're talking about it.
• 53:30
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, absolutely.
• 53:31
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm pretty sure there's an article in the AARE corpus where someone argues
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_00: against the science of learning by saying the science is not settled.
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_00: But we know that no one thinks it is.
• 53:45
  SPEAKER_00: And that's why it's a classic straw man.
• 53:50
  SPEAKER_00: Last little thing.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_00: It's just a shocker.
• 53:54
  SPEAKER_00: I was shocked, Caiti.
• 53:56
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, well, this one was sent in by a listener who was equally as shocked.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_00: I was shocked.
• 54:03
  SPEAKER_01: I wish I could show you guys the gesture Greg's pulling right now.
• 54:07
  SPEAKER_01: Get our AI to recreate it later.
• 54:10
  SPEAKER_00: So it's Open Universities Australia and it's in
• 54:16
  SPEAKER_00: the Home Advice Insight blogs revealed that What Kind of Learner Are You?
• 54:24
  SPEAKER_00: By Open Universities Australia, published on August the 20th, 2026.
• 54:30
  SPEAKER_00: That's the part that hurts.
• 54:34
  SPEAKER_00: It's an article promoting learning styles.
• 54:39
  SPEAKER_00: They should be ashamed of themselves, Caiti.
• 54:43
  SPEAKER_00: This is a university.
• 54:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's a good job that there is no named author.
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_00: But it's pretty stark that the author is Open Universities Australia.
• 54:54
  SPEAKER_00: They should be ashamed of themselves, Caiti.
• 54:57
  SPEAKER_01: Just, I love this.
• 55:01
  SPEAKER_01: If you're a kinesthetic learner,
• 55:03
  SPEAKER_01: health and medical science, sports, this is a thing that's mentioned on this.
• 55:09
  SPEAKER_01: The logical mathematical thinker.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_00: But also, even like, it conflates and like, Multiple intelligences don't exist, right?
• 55:22
  SPEAKER_00: Learning styles don't exist, right?
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 55:24
  SPEAKER_00: But multiple intelligences are not learning styles.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_01: No.
• 55:28
  SPEAKER_00: They're different ideas.
• 55:30
  SPEAKER_00: And yet we've also managed to conflate those two things.
• 55:36
  SPEAKER_00: Honestly, how is it?
• 55:41
  SPEAKER_00: I am lost for words.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_00: It's probably a good thing since talk too much.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: It's okay because Open Unis will have you know that no matter what kind
• 55:52
  SPEAKER_01: of learner you are, studying online can cater to your needs.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you're actually fine, Greg.
• 55:57
  SPEAKER_01: You can just go study online and you're set.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: We're just all online learners now, Caiti.
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_00: We've got an online learning style.
• 56:06
  SPEAKER_01: I feel like I have an offline learning style.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, I do when I get sent articles like that, yes.
• 56:13
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, yeah, I just, we're normally here to critique articles and to discuss ideas.
• 56:19
  SPEAKER_00: There's just nowhere to go with that.
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_00: Like, there just isn't.
• 56:23
  SPEAKER_00: Maybe we should post a link to Pashla et al.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_00: Learning styles,
• 56:27
  SPEAKER_00: concepts and evidence,
• 56:29
  SPEAKER_00: just in case anyone out there listening to this podcast has not heard that the idea
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_00: of catering to different learning styles is a myth.
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 56:41
  SPEAKER_00: The one thing I would say,
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_00: it is useful to use a variety of different modes,
• 56:45
  SPEAKER_00: but that's not because kids have different learning styles.
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_00: It's because variety is good.
• 56:49
  SPEAKER_00: Different modes are good.
• 56:54
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you, everyone, for listening to this week's episode of When Will They Learn podcast.
• 56:59
  SPEAKER_01: Any of the articles that we've referenced can be found down in the show notes.
• 57:03
  SPEAKER_01: And if there is an article,
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: podcast,
• 57:05
  SPEAKER_01: or opinion piece that you would like Greg and I to discuss in a future episode,
• 57:09
  SPEAKER_01: please drop it to us on any of our socials that you can also find down in
• 57:12
  SPEAKER_01: the show notes.