Latest / When Will They Learn? / Episode #17 PISA Cope

Transcript

Episode #17 PISA Cope · When Will They Learn?

• 0:00
  SPEAKER_01: Welcome to When Will They Learn?
• 0:02
  SPEAKER_01: I'm Greg Ashman.
• 0:03
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm Caiti Wade.
• 0:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is a podcast where we explore what's trending in the world of education.
• 0:13
  SPEAKER_00: In each episode,
• 0:14
  SPEAKER_00: we discuss podcasts,
• 0:16
  SPEAKER_00: articles and opinion pieces that are shaping education discourse at the moment
• 0:20
  SPEAKER_00: and examine these through a science of learning lens.
• 0:22
  SPEAKER_00: We discuss not just what's popular, but what's supported by the evidence.
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: This week,
• 0:27
  SPEAKER_01: we will be discussing whether Australia's schools are anti-boy,
• 0:32
  SPEAKER_01: and we will be rambling at length about lots of details and aspects of the 2025 PSA.
• 0:42
  SPEAKER_01: How things are you, Caiti?
• 0:43
  SPEAKER_00: They're good.
• 0:44
  SPEAKER_00: I'm like I was saying to you, I'm recovering at the moment from an illness.
• 0:48
  SPEAKER_00: So this week I'm going to follow on from your trend in the last episode
• 0:52
  SPEAKER_00: and I'm going to sound a little bit croaky at times and my voice will cut out,
• 0:55
  SPEAKER_00: but we'll do my best.
• 0:58
  SPEAKER_00: You're in school holidays though, right?
• 1:00
  SPEAKER_01: I am, yes.
• 1:01
  SPEAKER_01: So I've been trying very hard to write my book that's due,
• 1:07
  SPEAKER_01: but I keep going down citation holes and spending ages researching things
• 1:11
  SPEAKER_01: and I'm actually writing very much, Caiti.
• 1:14
  SPEAKER_01: So it's been quite frustrating.
• 1:15
  SPEAKER_01: Although I have been to, I went to Halls Gap.
• 1:19
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I went to Halls Gap in the Grampians.
• 1:22
  SPEAKER_01: So that was nice.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_01: But yeah.
• 1:24
  SPEAKER_00: Was that just to stay?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Did you go hiking?
• 1:26
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 1:27
  SPEAKER_01: Stayed overnight, did a bit of hiking, not much.
• 1:30
  SPEAKER_01: The youngest was suffering a bit with, couldn't really do much hiking.
• 1:36
  SPEAKER_01: But we went to Splitters Falls and we went to the Grand Canyon,
• 1:42
  SPEAKER_01: which is not very similar to the one in the United States, rather different.
• 1:48
  SPEAKER_01: But yes, no, so it was nice.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_01: Stayed overnight.
• 1:50
  SPEAKER_00: Far less grand, I would imagine.
• 1:53
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, saw lots of kangaroos,
• 1:55
  SPEAKER_01: all that sort of stuff,
• 1:56
  SPEAKER_01: all kinds of things that you want to do when you go outside in Australia.
• 2:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I think it's probably better that you didn't do too much hiking.
• 2:06
  SPEAKER_00: Like I feel like, you know, if you're on holiday, like hiking's great and that's fun.
• 2:09
  SPEAKER_00: And I love that there are people who do that by choice,
• 2:12
  SPEAKER_01: but like you're on holiday, you're
• 2:15
  SPEAKER_00: not there to walk.
• 2:16
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 2:17
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yes.
• 2:18
  SPEAKER_01: I think some people like sort of running around and jumping over things
• 2:23
  SPEAKER_01: and climbing up things and, you know, cycling around and all that sort of business.
• 2:27
  SPEAKER_01: And that's great.
• 2:29
  SPEAKER_01: It really is.
• 2:30
  SPEAKER_01: And I admire those people greatly.
• 2:34
  SPEAKER_00: Well, we've got a really fun episode today.
• 2:37
  SPEAKER_00: So we'll jump into that.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:44
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 2:46
  SPEAKER_00: I'm really, I'm very passionate about this first article.
• 2:50
  SPEAKER_00: So the first article,
• 2:51
  SPEAKER_00: I actually,
• 2:52
  SPEAKER_00: I read through this the first time when I was sat at dinner and I read the heading
• 2:57
  SPEAKER_00: and went,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've got to,
• 2:58
  SPEAKER_00: I've sat with two other people and I went, I need to, I have to read this now.
• 3:02
  SPEAKER_00: And I read the heading out to them.
• 3:05
  SPEAKER_00: The heading is, is Australia's school system, Auntie Boy.
• 3:11
  SPEAKER_00: And this one is, it was published in The Conversation by Amanda Keddy.
• 3:16
  SPEAKER_00: She's a professor of education at Deakin Uni.
• 3:19
  SPEAKER_00: But I want to start off by asking you a question, Greg.
• 3:23
  SPEAKER_00: If I said to you, what are your thoughts on the feminization of Australia's curriculum?
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: What are your thoughts?
• 3:30
  SPEAKER_00: What would you say?
• 3:32
  SPEAKER_01: Well, look, it's this guy, Matt Canavan, not Caravan, Canavan.
• 3:37
  SPEAKER_01: I did misread it a few times.
• 3:40
  SPEAKER_01: Who is the leader of the Nationals,
• 3:43
  SPEAKER_01: which I suppose we would explain to people who aren't Australian,
• 3:46
  SPEAKER_01: that that is kind of the minor partner in this partnership of two parties,
• 3:52
  SPEAKER_01: the Liberals and the Nationals,
• 3:53
  SPEAKER_01: that formed something called the Coalition that represents the centre-right
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: of our politics.
• 3:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 3:59
  SPEAKER_01: And he said something,
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 4:02
  SPEAKER_01: he said he's sick and,
• 4:03
  SPEAKER_01: boys are sick and tired of the feminization of Australia's curriculum.
• 4:06
  SPEAKER_01: And he's waded in,
• 4:08
  SPEAKER_01: in a typical kind of culture wars way,
• 4:12
  SPEAKER_01: not very diplomatic,
• 4:15
  SPEAKER_01: probably not going to win many people over who are not already rusted on to
• 4:20
  SPEAKER_01: the nationals.
• 4:22
  SPEAKER_00: But does he- I read it and I just, I don't know what that means was like my first thing.
• 4:28
  SPEAKER_00: I was like, what do you mean by feminization of the Australian curriculum?
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_00: Yes.
• 4:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I mean,
• 4:35
  SPEAKER_01: and I don't know because the answer to that question,
• 4:38
  SPEAKER_01: the question you asked me, Caiti, is precise to that, is what do you mean by it?
• 4:41
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 4:43
  SPEAKER_01: And I think there are some – I think women generally face more issues at school
• 4:49
  SPEAKER_01: than men do in total.
• 4:53
  SPEAKER_01: But I do think there are some male-specific issues that young men face.
• 4:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I do think there is – A tendency in society more broadly to paint men as like on
• 5:08
  SPEAKER_01: the baddies, like on the side of the oppressors.
• 5:11
  SPEAKER_01: In modern society,
• 5:14
  SPEAKER_01: we want to reduce everything to a battle between oppressors and the oppressed.
• 5:18
  SPEAKER_01: And oppressors are bad and the oppressed are good.
• 5:20
  SPEAKER_01: And so you want to identify with the oppressed and you don't want to identify with
• 5:24
  SPEAKER_01: the oppressors.
• 5:25
  SPEAKER_01: It's kind of like almost the complete reverse of Roman culture
• 5:29
  SPEAKER_01: where Power was considered to be good and virtuous and things like that.
• 5:33
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I'm probably demonstrating my very limited understanding of Roman culture there.
• 5:38
  SPEAKER_01: And so when young men get painted as oppressors and they don't feel
• 5:42
  SPEAKER_01: that that's justified, then they do arc up a bit.
• 5:46
  SPEAKER_01: And there are instances where that would happen.
• 5:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure how much that has to do with Mr. Canavan and his comment about feminisation though.
• 5:57
  SPEAKER_00: Well, so he goes on and he explains what he means by this feminization.
• 6:04
  SPEAKER_00: And I mean,
• 6:05
  SPEAKER_00: his argument is founded in, I mean,
• 6:08
  SPEAKER_00: it's the fact that consent and respectful relationships education,
• 6:12
  SPEAKER_00: which is part of the curriculum,
• 6:14
  SPEAKER_00: he says that that promotes what he calls an anti-boy ideology.
• 6:19
  SPEAKER_00: And he makes the point that There's a concern that that's going to attract boys to
• 6:25
  SPEAKER_00: the Manosphere,
• 6:26
  SPEAKER_00: which we've spoken about before and I suspect we will speak about again today.
• 6:30
  SPEAKER_00: But it was...
• 6:34
  SPEAKER_00: The part that absolutely threw me,
• 6:36
  SPEAKER_00: and it was an interesting one,
• 6:37
  SPEAKER_00: because when I was reading this,
• 6:38
  SPEAKER_00: I actually should clarify this point too and say, Emanichetti wrote the piece.
• 6:43
  SPEAKER_00: And when I started reading this, I was like, how is this written by a woman?
• 6:46
  SPEAKER_00: How do you not think that,
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: and you know,
• 6:48
  SPEAKER_00: I went for the really emotional response of,
• 6:50
  SPEAKER_00: how do you not think it's important to have consent and respect for relationships
• 6:53
  SPEAKER_00: within the curriculum?
• 6:54
  SPEAKER_00: This is absolutely not what she's saying.
• 6:56
  SPEAKER_00: She is reporting on it.
• 6:57
  SPEAKER_00: And that becomes very clear throughout the piece.
• 6:59
  SPEAKER_00: Um, But it was like this was a big dramatic live read for me when I was sort
• 7:03
  SPEAKER_00: of reading it out to people.
• 7:06
  SPEAKER_00: And we were sat there just gasping over the fact that that would even be
• 7:10
  SPEAKER_00: a conversation that, you know, that perhaps we shouldn't be.
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: In fact,
• 7:15
  SPEAKER_00: I shouldn't say we shouldn't be teaching it because I don't think it says anywhere
• 7:19
  SPEAKER_00: and I couldn't find anything when I was searching it.
• 7:21
  SPEAKER_00: That Canavan said, don't teach about consent and respectful relationships.
• 7:26
  SPEAKER_00: It just said that his concern was that the way that that's embedded in
• 7:30
  SPEAKER_00: the curriculum teaches this anti-boy ideology.
• 7:34
  SPEAKER_00: And so I don't want to make assumptions about whether he has an issue with it being
• 7:39
  SPEAKER_00: in there or not.
• 7:41
  SPEAKER_00: But I'm also, I don't know if I fully agree with him.
• 7:46
  SPEAKER_00: And we know that I'm someone who is very passionate about Young boys and making sure
• 7:53
  SPEAKER_00: that they have avenues that,
• 7:55
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
• 7:56
  SPEAKER_00: that respect them and respect their typically masculine traits so that they,
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know,
• 8:02
  SPEAKER_00: so they do have a safe place and so they know that those things are good
• 8:06
  SPEAKER_00: and we're not just painting anything that's typically masculine
• 8:09
  SPEAKER_00: as being toxic masculinity because I do think that contributes to boys looking for,
• 8:15
  SPEAKER_00: well, I don't know, looking for, what's the word I'm thinking of, Greg?
• 8:21
  SPEAKER_01: Well, looking for affirmation somewhere else, maybe?
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, thank you.
• 8:24
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, that's right.
• 8:25
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, looking for affirmations and we like the manosphere.
• 8:29
  SPEAKER_00: But I don't know if teaching about consent is really,
• 8:33
  SPEAKER_00: I don't know if that's really the cause of this.
• 8:36
  SPEAKER_01: No, I think, I mean,
• 8:38
  SPEAKER_01: she does,
• 8:39
  SPEAKER_01: Caiti does say that,
• 8:40
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 8:41
  SPEAKER_01: they talk to young men as part of their research and many are serious
• 8:45
  SPEAKER_01: and very critical about the manosphere.
• 8:48
  SPEAKER_01: I think the manosphere appeals to a very...
• 8:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:04
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 9:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yet within them, there are bits that aren't very good.
• 9:25
  SPEAKER_01: So let's try and steal Man Canavan's point here.
• 9:28
  SPEAKER_01: Let's try and assume he was trying to say something similar
• 9:32
  SPEAKER_01: to what you've just said,
• 9:33
  SPEAKER_01: that if we keep talking about men being toxic,
• 9:38
  SPEAKER_01: that it could drive a proportion of them to look for affirmation elsewhere
• 9:44
  SPEAKER_01: in this manosphere.
• 9:46
  SPEAKER_01: Let's assume that The best of Canavan, and let's assume that that's what he's saying.
• 9:51
  SPEAKER_01: So why has he come out so clumsily talking about the respectful relationships curriculum?
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: Well,
• 9:57
  SPEAKER_01: it could be that we've called it a respectful relations curriculum and people go,
• 10:01
  SPEAKER_01: well, who could possibly be against respectful relationships?
• 10:04
  SPEAKER_01: Respectful relationships are marvellous.
• 10:07
  SPEAKER_01: But then when it's enacted, possibly some of these...
• 10:11
  SPEAKER_01: Concerns about labelling men as toxic or oppressor or oppressed stuff is going on.
• 10:18
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the bit that he is struggling with.
• 10:21
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why he has come out and said, oh, it's anti-boy, which of course it isn't.
• 10:26
  SPEAKER_01: But maybe that's like the strongest possible version of this argument.
• 10:33
  SPEAKER_00: But it is the fact that it's like when we set a curriculum,
• 10:36
  SPEAKER_00: you can set it with an intention being one thing.
• 10:38
  SPEAKER_00: But the way that it's enacted isn't necessarily that.
• 10:41
  SPEAKER_00: And we see that in lots of different things.
• 10:43
  SPEAKER_00: But this one here is very much based on the way that
• 10:47
  SPEAKER_00: an individual teacher interprets and responds to it.
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: Like for this stuff,
• 10:52
  SPEAKER_00: like I constantly go back to sense-making theory and Just that idea of everything
• 10:58
  SPEAKER_00: that you do,
• 10:59
  SPEAKER_00: you're always filtering that through your own viewpoints and understanding of
• 11:02
  SPEAKER_00: the world and what you've experienced in the past.
• 11:05
  SPEAKER_00: So if you're someone who's presenting this information to students,
• 11:08
  SPEAKER_00: but you have experienced a lot of,
• 11:12
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to say a lot of what might fall into the category of toxic masculinity,
• 11:17
  SPEAKER_00: then there's a chance that when you're presenting it,
• 11:19
  SPEAKER_00: you're presenting it filtered through that viewpoint and that's going to come out
• 11:23
  SPEAKER_00: in your
• 11:29
  SPEAKER_01: I think you've hit the nail on the head there really, Katie.
• 11:31
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's far more in individual teacher bias,
• 11:36
  SPEAKER_01: which we don't talk about, than probably sits in the curriculum.
• 11:40
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, the curriculum might take a particular slant,
• 11:42
  SPEAKER_01: but what we will have is teachers who've gone through a particular bubble.
• 11:49
  SPEAKER_01: And the problem with being in a bubble is you don't know you're in it.
• 11:52
  SPEAKER_01: So...
• 11:53
  SPEAKER_01: People will,
• 11:54
  SPEAKER_01: if you're in a bubble,
• 11:55
  SPEAKER_01: if you're in an ideological bubble,
• 11:57
  SPEAKER_01: a sealed ideological bubble, you don't realise you're there.
• 12:00
  SPEAKER_01: So you will start saying things as fact that aren't actually true.
• 12:05
  SPEAKER_01: But you don't even know that it's an opinion.
• 12:07
  SPEAKER_01: You don't even know that it's contentious because everyone in your circle shares that view.
• 12:13
  SPEAKER_01: So you don't think it's a view.
• 12:14
  SPEAKER_01: You think it's a fact.
• 12:15
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 12:16
  SPEAKER_01: That becomes a real problem when you're teaching something like history,
• 12:20
  SPEAKER_01: when you're teaching something like respectful relationships,
• 12:24
  SPEAKER_01: when you're teaching certain aspects of English,
• 12:26
  SPEAKER_01: sometimes even when you're teaching science.
• 12:29
  SPEAKER_01: And so that, I think, is the variable that's more concerning.
• 12:33
  SPEAKER_01: And I believe that I do think that young people have had the hypothesis that
• 12:43
  SPEAKER_01: I don't quite buy it, but there's something to it.
• 12:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's been this kind of march through the institutions.
• 12:49
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you look,
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: for instance,
• 12:50
  SPEAKER_01: at universities and you look at the political leanings of academics,
• 12:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think there's some evidence,
• 12:57
  SPEAKER_01: and I can't quote it off the top of my head,
• 12:59
  SPEAKER_01: so maybe I'm talking rubbish,
• 13:00
  SPEAKER_01: but there's some evidence that it's become increasingly,
• 13:02
  SPEAKER_01: academics have become increasingly more Sorry, that's not true.
• 13:07
  SPEAKER_01: They haven't become more left-wing.
• 13:10
  SPEAKER_01: The share of academics with left-wing opinions has increased and the share
• 13:15
  SPEAKER_01: of academics with right-wing opinions has decreased.
• 13:18
  SPEAKER_01: And so universities where teachers have to go either to do a bachelor's degree and
• 13:24
  SPEAKER_01: then a master's or a bachelor of education have adopted a fairly kind
• 13:30
  SPEAKER_01: of left-wing bias over time.
• 13:33
  SPEAKER_01: And so that means that young people entering
• 13:36
  SPEAKER_01: the teaching profession are possibly more likely to have a bias that goes in
• 13:41
  SPEAKER_01: that direction.
• 13:42
  SPEAKER_01: Now,
• 13:43
  SPEAKER_01: that means that when you're teaching aspects of history or respectful relationships
• 13:47
  SPEAKER_01: or things like that, that you could potentially deliver those in a biased way.
• 13:53
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the solution to this is not to somehow...
• 14:00
  SPEAKER_01: Try and remove all bias from teachers.
• 14:03
  SPEAKER_01: Teachers are human beings, human beings are biased.
• 14:05
  SPEAKER_01: Not one of us isn't.
• 14:07
  SPEAKER_01: But what I think we need in the profession is a greater awareness of this.
• 14:11
  SPEAKER_01: So if I know that I'm biased, that I bring particular biases to the table.
• 14:15
  SPEAKER_01: So I'll give one that I think that won't worry people too much, but I am pro-nuclear power.
• 14:21
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a physicist.
• 14:22
  SPEAKER_01: I'm a physicist by training.
• 14:24
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's a bit crazy that in Australia we've essentially banned nuclear power.
• 14:28
  SPEAKER_01: I think that's a bit silly.
• 14:29
  SPEAKER_01: So I have a pro-nuclear power bias.
• 14:32
  SPEAKER_01: So if I'm discussing nuclear power with students, I would be very aware of that.
• 14:38
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact,
• 14:39
  SPEAKER_01: I will be trying to hedge that as much as possible and trying to give the argument
• 14:44
  SPEAKER_01: against nuclear power as much...
• 14:49
  SPEAKER_01: I really want to present that as strongly as I can because I'm very well aware
• 14:54
  SPEAKER_01: that I have that bias.
• 14:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now, the problem is when you're not aware that you have a bias,
• 15:00
  SPEAKER_01: you don't do that and you present things as facts that aren't necessarily facts.
• 15:04
  SPEAKER_01: And so I think there is a professional standard perhaps,
• 15:06
  SPEAKER_01: professional duty, something we should pay more attention to as teachers of...
• 15:13
  SPEAKER_01: We're sort of noticing our biases,
• 15:17
  SPEAKER_01: kind of trying to discover what they are,
• 15:19
  SPEAKER_01: trying to be able to articulate what they are,
• 15:21
  SPEAKER_01: so that when we are presenting things, I think it's also, though, on top of that –
• 15:51
  SPEAKER_00: I feel very lucky that,
• 15:53
  SPEAKER_00: I'm going to say it was in my time at Clarendon delivering this content,
• 15:57
  SPEAKER_00: I was really lucky that one of the people who was sort of rolling out the delivery
• 16:02
  SPEAKER_00: of this was so good at teaching the teachers how to deliver the content.
• 16:06
  SPEAKER_00: And I feel like that's meant that when I go into any kind of lesson on this topic,
• 16:12
  SPEAKER_00: I have a really good sense of the way that I present the information,
• 16:17
  SPEAKER_00: the way that I can do that so that it's not It's not based on me trying to argue
• 16:23
  SPEAKER_00: a particular viewpoint.
• 16:24
  SPEAKER_00: It's very much, look, here are the facts.
• 16:26
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, even just around,
• 16:27
  SPEAKER_00: I know this is one that was touched on in this particular paper on this topic,
• 16:31
  SPEAKER_00: just the fact that,
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 16:33
  SPEAKER_00: statistically,
• 16:34
  SPEAKER_00: the reason that we do speak about The reason we do speak about men or boys
• 16:39
  SPEAKER_00: in this sense is because most gender-based violence,
• 16:42
  SPEAKER_00: men are the perpetrators,
• 16:44
  SPEAKER_00: just statistically,
• 16:45
  SPEAKER_00: and that's the reason and that's a fact,
• 16:47
  SPEAKER_00: but it doesn't mean that men are always the perpetrators and it doesn't mean
• 16:50
  SPEAKER_00: that men aren't the victims and that we can have all of that and all
• 16:53
  SPEAKER_00: of those things can be true and we can present that when we're delivering it.
• 16:58
  SPEAKER_00: I don't necessarily think though that all teachers get that training.
• 17:03
  SPEAKER_00: Like I'm a maths teacher.
• 17:05
  SPEAKER_00: I wasn't trained in,
• 17:07
  SPEAKER_00: I think typically this stuff would sit in, you know, I mean health PE teaching.
• 17:11
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 17:13
  SPEAKER_00: So formally,
• 17:14
  SPEAKER_00: and I mean not that I'm necessarily saying that a uni degree for teaching is going
• 17:18
  SPEAKER_00: to teach you how to teach anyway,
• 17:20
  SPEAKER_00: but this wasn't even touched on for me on how do you cover this stuff,
• 17:24
  SPEAKER_00: how do you become aware of any biases you might have in that,
• 17:28
  SPEAKER_00: which I think then means that teachers don't have that training or the avenue
• 17:33
  SPEAKER_00: to actually get support.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: I agree.
• 17:36
  SPEAKER_01: I think you've probably had a fairly good experience teaching students Well,
• 17:40
  SPEAKER_01: at Clarendon,
• 17:41
  SPEAKER_01: we don't teach the exact respectful relationships curriculum that
• 17:45
  SPEAKER_01: the Victorian government have created.
• 17:48
  SPEAKER_01: We teach a version of it.
• 17:49
  SPEAKER_01: And I suppose that tells you something as well.
• 17:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I would say that although everyone always is a little bit of a fish out of water
• 18:00
  SPEAKER_01: when you've got a Yeah.
• 18:16
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know.
• 18:17
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe we do.
• 18:18
  SPEAKER_01: Maybe that's what your experience speaks to than elsewhere.
• 18:23
  SPEAKER_01: So for instance, saying that men are the overwhelming perpetrators of domestic violence is true.
• 18:32
  SPEAKER_01: And it's a perfectly reasonable thing to present students with because it's
• 18:36
  SPEAKER_01: the truth about the world and something that they can grapple with.
• 18:39
  SPEAKER_01: But when you start tipping that over into discussing things like toxic masculinity,
• 18:44
  SPEAKER_01: that's taking it in a slightly different direction.
• 18:46
  SPEAKER_01: And then boys will.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: They will.
• 18:48
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, I've seen them do it.
• 18:50
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them will object to that.
• 18:53
  SPEAKER_01: And then walls come up.
• 18:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then it's not productive.
• 18:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, it's not productive.
• 18:59
  SPEAKER_01: So there are ways of doing this and entering these things,
• 19:02
  SPEAKER_01: these discussions, where you are aware of your own bias.
• 19:07
  SPEAKER_01: And again,
• 19:08
  SPEAKER_01: I think that it should be something that we spend more time thinking about
• 19:12
  SPEAKER_01: as teachers and put into our standards and things like that.
• 19:15
  SPEAKER_01: And there are ways of approaching these topics that Will not put people on
• 19:21
  SPEAKER_01: the defensive one way or the other.
• 19:24
  SPEAKER_01: And I think we should be thinking more about that as well.
• 19:27
  SPEAKER_00: I actually think that's really, that's your goal.
• 19:30
  SPEAKER_00: It's thinking about how to present the information in a way that,
• 19:34
  SPEAKER_00: yeah, that doesn't immediately put any student on the defensive.
• 19:39
  SPEAKER_00: I say any, I mean,
• 19:40
  SPEAKER_00: you're probably going to get a couple,
• 19:41
  SPEAKER_00: but for the majority,
• 19:42
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's what you're trying to avoid because it moves it into a thing
• 19:46
  SPEAKER_00: where you've got students who are I think that's where we do begin to push
• 19:51
  SPEAKER_00: a little bit into some of those, okay, well,
• 19:54
  SPEAKER_00: if I'm being told that X,
• 19:56
  SPEAKER_00: Y, Z is bad, I'm going to go completely out on the opposite.
• 20:00
  SPEAKER_00: And I think we all do this in elements in our lives.
• 20:04
  SPEAKER_00: I was actually very lucky.
• 20:05
  SPEAKER_00: I have to share this one.
• 20:07
  SPEAKER_00: Just today I got to visit,
• 20:09
  SPEAKER_00: it was a primary class, and this is a great example of how this stuff was taught.
• 20:14
  SPEAKER_00: So I visited a primary class who were doing,
• 20:17
  SPEAKER_00: it was a display of work that they've done across the entire term.
• 20:21
  SPEAKER_00: And to be clear, this was all boys and it was a group of grade sixes.
• 20:26
  SPEAKER_00: And they'd picked a chosen, it was called like a chosen intolerance.
• 20:31
  SPEAKER_00: And it was something in the world that they wanted.
• 20:35
  SPEAKER_00: Well, yeah, that they really don't like.
• 20:37
  SPEAKER_00: And they presented on that in a couple of ways.
• 20:39
  SPEAKER_00: So they had a written piece,
• 20:40
  SPEAKER_00: but they also then,
• 20:41
  SPEAKER_00: as part of that,
• 20:42
  SPEAKER_00: had created some kind of, I'm going to say like figurative representation of it.
• 20:48
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the boys had chosen, so a combination of that.
• 20:51
  SPEAKER_00: There were things,
• 20:52
  SPEAKER_00: so there was a lot of stuff on homelessness,
• 20:54
  SPEAKER_00: on racism, but there was also a lot of gender-based stuff.
• 20:56
  SPEAKER_00: So it hit on both domestic violence.
• 21:00
  SPEAKER_00: There were some on violence.
• 21:02
  SPEAKER_00: I genuinely teared up multiple times.
• 21:03
  SPEAKER_00: This is one of the best experiences ever.
• 21:27
  SPEAKER_00: And a lot of the different models that they created showed different voices.
• 21:29
  SPEAKER_00: Um,
• 21:51
  SPEAKER_00: And it was just, I mean,
• 21:54
  SPEAKER_00: I wanted to bring it up partly because I knew we were talking about this,
• 21:57
  SPEAKER_00: but also just because this is a really clear example of a group of all boys who,
• 22:02
  SPEAKER_00: when given something on this,
• 22:04
  SPEAKER_00: took it and,
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: you know,
• 22:05
  SPEAKER_00: so many of them chose gender-based stuff too,
• 22:08
  SPEAKER_00: but it wasn't just that,
• 22:09
  SPEAKER_00: and actually produced something that they were passionate about and
• 22:14
  SPEAKER_00: that they were able to speak to to a level where I wasn't the only adult in the room
• 22:21
  SPEAKER_00: who was tearing up as they were talking.
• 22:23
  SPEAKER_00: It was really incredible.
• 22:25
  SPEAKER_01: Well, what an absolute credit to their teachers.
• 22:27
  SPEAKER_00: It was phenomenally done.
• 22:34
  SPEAKER_00: This is what everyone wants to hear about.
• 22:37
  SPEAKER_01: So this will probably be a bit of a rambling discussion that won't necessarily stick
• 22:42
  SPEAKER_01: to one article.
• 22:43
  SPEAKER_01: But for what it's worth, the article that we're talking about is a piece of 2025.
• 22:47
  SPEAKER_01: I was telling tale about what really constitutes a good education system.
• 22:51
  SPEAKER_01: And it's by me.
• 22:53
  SPEAKER_01: And it's in Education HQ.
• 22:55
  SPEAKER_01: And in our show notes.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 22:57
  SPEAKER_01: But then the first thing I have to say is that I have to make a correction.
• 23:02
  SPEAKER_01: I wrote something in there that is wrong.
• 23:04
  SPEAKER_01: And I can't find it now.
• 23:05
  SPEAKER_01: I should have highlighted it in advance.
• 23:07
  SPEAKER_01: But I think I say in the article that I'm talking about Finland and Finland in Pisa
• 23:15
  SPEAKER_01: since about 2005 has been on a fairly relentless decline in its Pisa results.
• 23:22
  SPEAKER_01: And
• 23:25
  SPEAKER_01: that means that in 2025, Finland actually posted lower scores in Pisa than Australia did.
• 23:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in this article,
• 23:34
  SPEAKER_01: I think I say,
• 23:36
  SPEAKER_01: and I can't find it,
• 23:37
  SPEAKER_01: but I basically say they're lower but not statistically significantly lower
• 23:41
  SPEAKER_01: than Australia's results.
• 23:42
  SPEAKER_00: You say Finland now posts lower scores than Australia,
• 23:46
  SPEAKER_00: albeit with the saving grace that the deference is not a significant one.
• 23:50
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, that's not right.
• 23:52
  SPEAKER_01: I've subsequently learned that in two of the three,
• 23:55
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's reading and maths, Finland is significantly lower than Australia now.
• 24:01
  SPEAKER_00: So this is far worse.
• 24:02
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, I don't know why I thought that at the time that I did this.
• 24:06
  SPEAKER_01: When PISA results come out, there's a lot of activity and a lot of flurry.
• 24:10
  SPEAKER_01: But I went back and I checked the Australia reports.
• 24:12
  SPEAKER_01: And unless I've made a mistake,
• 24:15
  SPEAKER_01: I actually think that Finland is lower in two areas now than Australia.
• 24:18
  SPEAKER_01: So I wanted to correct that for a start.
• 24:21
  SPEAKER_01: But really...
• 24:24
  SPEAKER_01: The story for Australia is one of decline.
• 24:28
  SPEAKER_01: So what I do when the PISA results come out is I put together a little Excel sheet,
• 24:35
  SPEAKER_01: which I'm going to put on my screen as I talk about it.
• 24:40
  SPEAKER_01: And I add, it's really good, AI helped me do it.
• 24:43
  SPEAKER_01: It used to take me hours to do this,
• 24:45
  SPEAKER_01: but AI helped me this time add all the I'm so curious about this spreadsheet.
• 24:49
  SPEAKER_01: I'll send it to you, Katie.
• 24:51
  SPEAKER_01: I love a spreadsheet.
• 24:52
  SPEAKER_01: We've actually improved a little bit in science.
• 25:12
  SPEAKER_01: On 2022, but our maths and our reading, continuing to slide.
• 25:19
  SPEAKER_01: Maths in particular has gone through this dramatic slide from above 5.30 in 2012.
• 25:29
  SPEAKER_01: So that gives you a sense that if you've gone from 530 down to 480,
• 25:32
  SPEAKER_01: that's almost half standard deviation.
• 25:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, it's more than half standard deviation.
• 25:56
  SPEAKER_01: It's less than – I'm confusing myself now.
• 25:59
  SPEAKER_01: But it gives you a sense of what's been happening there.
• 26:03
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the story for Australia.
• 26:05
  SPEAKER_01: So where should we look?
• 26:07
  SPEAKER_01: And there's been lots of interesting debate about this.
• 26:10
  SPEAKER_01: There's a guy – are you familiar with Adam Voight?
• 26:13
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, we've talked about him before.
• 26:14
  SPEAKER_01: He's the – he runs – Yeah, he runs – Real Schools Australia.
• 26:20
  SPEAKER_01: And they're like, they, well, it mentions restorative practices.
• 26:23
  SPEAKER_01: And I think, so something to do with that.
• 26:26
  SPEAKER_01: Obviously, I've not had training for them.
• 26:28
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't know exactly what's involved.
• 26:30
  SPEAKER_01: But that's what he does.
• 26:31
  SPEAKER_01: Former principal, and he's written two pieces now on LinkedIn.
• 26:37
  SPEAKER_01: This is an aside, but he writes these articles on LinkedIn, right?
• 26:42
  SPEAKER_01: And they're really long.
• 26:45
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't think I know of anyone else that does this,
• 26:47
  SPEAKER_01: but there's like a feature you can write like this.
• 26:50
  SPEAKER_01: So most LinkedIn posts are limited in length,
• 26:52
  SPEAKER_01: but he writes these really long articles on LinkedIn.
• 26:54
  SPEAKER_01: And then if you want to quote any of it because you want to respond to it,
• 26:58
  SPEAKER_01: you can't highlight the text.
• 27:00
  SPEAKER_01: You can't copy and paste the text from these articles.
• 27:02
  SPEAKER_01: So you have to do like...
• 27:04
  SPEAKER_01: I can't.
• 27:05
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know whether you can.
• 27:06
  SPEAKER_01: So what I have to do is sort of,
• 27:07
  SPEAKER_01: it's a real faff,
• 27:08
  SPEAKER_01: do like a screen grab and then whack it in ALA and say,
• 27:11
  SPEAKER_01: turn that into text if I want to quote bits from the article.
• 27:14
  SPEAKER_01: But he wrote... Do you love how he does that?
• 27:16
  SPEAKER_01: He wrote this...
• 27:17
  SPEAKER_01: He's written a couple now on Pisa, which I've been critical of because, you know, he's...
• 27:24
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember exactly what the arguments were,
• 27:26
  SPEAKER_01: but he essentially was saying we shouldn't necessarily look to England.
• 27:32
  SPEAKER_01: And he was talking about Ireland as being a good example.
• 27:36
  SPEAKER_01: That is a popular view at
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: the moment.
• 27:37
  SPEAKER_00: So just before you do that, Greg,
• 27:40
  SPEAKER_00: just context for why,
• 27:42
  SPEAKER_00: because I mean,
• 27:43
  SPEAKER_00: if people have kind of been following along,
• 27:45
  SPEAKER_00: they'll have seen England come up a few times.
• 27:48
  SPEAKER_00: Why is it that England's come up?
• 27:51
  SPEAKER_01: Okay, yeah.
• 27:52
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, I've rambled off then.
• 27:53
  SPEAKER_01: I do apologise.
• 27:54
  SPEAKER_01: I went off rambling and started talking about an article that we weren't meant to talk about.
• 27:58
  SPEAKER_01: No, that's all right.
• 28:00
  SPEAKER_01: I've read it anyway.
• 28:02
  SPEAKER_01: There's two, isn't there?
• 28:03
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, so England.
• 28:05
  SPEAKER_01: Okay.
• 28:06
  SPEAKER_01: What so is it good about England?
• 28:08
  SPEAKER_01: Not a lot is one answer.
• 28:10
  SPEAKER_01: So if you look at England's results, they
• 28:17
  SPEAKER_01: are up slightly.
• 28:21
  SPEAKER_01: Is that right?
• 28:22
  SPEAKER_01: Well, they're up quite a bit in maths since 2022.
• 28:27
  SPEAKER_01: Sorry, not maths, science since 2022.
• 28:31
  SPEAKER_01: They're stable in maths and they're stable in reading.
• 28:37
  SPEAKER_01: So no meaningful difference in reading maths and up a bit in science.
• 28:40
  SPEAKER_01: You might say, well, what do you do?
• 28:42
  SPEAKER_01: What does that mean?
• 28:43
  SPEAKER_01: The thing is that the whole of the OECD has gone down this mountainside And slid.
• 28:52
  SPEAKER_01: And so the fact that England have held firm and improved a little bit
• 28:56
  SPEAKER_01: in science books that trend significantly.
• 29:00
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so it's not
• 29:01
  SPEAKER_00: that England have done something
• 29:02
  SPEAKER_00: where it's like their results have just climbed and we're like,
• 29:05
  SPEAKER_00: wow, that's amazing, which is not what anyone's arguing.
• 29:08
  SPEAKER_01: No, England's results declined in 2022, between 2018 and 2022, as did many.
• 29:13
  SPEAKER_01: And people at the time put that down to the pandemic.
• 29:16
  SPEAKER_01: What has happened in most places since then is that they have further declined
• 29:20
  SPEAKER_01: from 2022 to 2025.
• 29:21
  SPEAKER_01: People are very worried about this.
• 29:23
  SPEAKER_01: This is what happened in Australia apart from the science.
• 29:27
  SPEAKER_00: Because I think like the 2018,
• 29:30
  SPEAKER_00: 2022, we're of course like we're all thinking the same thing in that time period.
• 29:33
  SPEAKER_00: There was a pretty major world event that took place.
• 29:36
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:37
  SPEAKER_01: And people are now saying,
• 29:38
  SPEAKER_01: oh, well, it's because of screens and AI and all this sort of business.
• 29:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 29:43
  SPEAKER_00: I mean, it's easy to explain anything away.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 29:45
  SPEAKER_01: But England have held.
• 29:48
  SPEAKER_01: And so this is quite remarkable.
• 29:50
  SPEAKER_01: And now they're the top in the top 10.
• 29:52
  SPEAKER_01: If you look at rankings,
• 29:53
  SPEAKER_01: we shouldn't really look at rankings,
• 29:55
  SPEAKER_01: Caiti, because the numbers of countries that take part in peace vary.
• 29:59
  SPEAKER_01: And also countries are different to each other on lots of ways other
• 30:04
  SPEAKER_01: than just their education system.
• 30:06
  SPEAKER_01: So the fact that,
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 30:07
  SPEAKER_01: a country might be lower ranked,
• 30:09
  SPEAKER_01: it might actually be reflecting really good practice in that country.
• 30:13
  SPEAKER_01: So, for instance, Turkey.
• 30:17
  SPEAKER_01: On this astonishing journey, so Turkey, I'm just going to pull it up on my screen.
• 30:22
  SPEAKER_01: I only started doing pizza in 2018 and it's results of, well, it dipped in 2022 in reading and
• 30:38
  SPEAKER_01: It did in maths, but I doubt whether it was significant, went up in science.
• 30:43
  SPEAKER_01: And then this 2025, it's increased all of them.
• 30:47
  SPEAKER_01: So Turkey are doing something right.
• 30:48
  SPEAKER_01: Now, their scores are still low, but Turkey is not a rich Western country.
• 30:55
  SPEAKER_01: And so that will affect things because we know
• 30:58
  SPEAKER_01: that socioeconomic status affects school performance.
• 31:03
  SPEAKER_01: But we can still look to learn things from Turkey because...
• 31:05
  SPEAKER_01: We could assume that they've done something between sort of 2018 and 2025
• 31:11
  SPEAKER_01: that has caused this huge increase.
• 31:16
  SPEAKER_01: So although Turkey would be low in the rankings,
• 31:19
  SPEAKER_01: its direction of travel – That tells us that it should be something
• 31:22
  SPEAKER_01: that we should look at.
• 31:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the fact that England,
• 31:24
  SPEAKER_01: when I'm talking about the rankings with England,
• 31:26
  SPEAKER_01: bear all of that in mind,
• 31:27
  SPEAKER_01: but people are quite excited because England is now in the top 10 countries
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: and it wasn't before.
• 31:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that again tells you something about direction of travel and is
• 31:37
  SPEAKER_01: the second highest country in Europe.
• 31:40
  SPEAKER_01: Now the United Kingdom, which England is a part of, is a different country.
• 31:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think England counts as something like 85% of the United Kingdom score.
• 31:48
  SPEAKER_01: But in the UK, they break it down further by the countries of the UK.
• 31:53
  SPEAKER_01: So you've got Scotland,
• 31:54
  SPEAKER_01: Wales, you've got England, a bit like we could break our PISA scores down by state.
• 31:59
  SPEAKER_01: And if you go to the Australian report, you can do that.
• 32:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, why is this important?
• 32:04
  SPEAKER_01: Because...
• 32:05
  SPEAKER_01: In exactly 2010,
• 32:11
  SPEAKER_01: in fact,
• 32:12
  SPEAKER_01: the UK had an election,
• 32:14
  SPEAKER_01: and
• 32:17
  SPEAKER_01: the Labour Party lost power, and there was a coalition government.
• 32:22
  SPEAKER_01: Now, coalitions are very, very unusual in the UK, don't happen very often at all.
• 32:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's not like we have a coalition in Australia that is always trying to compete
• 32:31
  SPEAKER_01: for power, but...
• 32:33
  SPEAKER_01: This coalition was unusual.
• 32:34
  SPEAKER_01: It was a coalition between the Conservative Party and the Liberal Democrats and
• 32:38
  SPEAKER_01: the minister who became the minister for education,
• 32:41
  SPEAKER_01: the Education Secretary, Michael Gove.
• 32:44
  SPEAKER_01: I think he knew he was on borrowed time and he just went hell for leather.
• 32:47
  SPEAKER_01: He built on the reforms of the previous Labour government and they made quite
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: a few reforms,
• 32:51
  SPEAKER_01: which people often forget now,
• 32:54
  SPEAKER_01: and about school autonomy and schools and Free schools and all this sort
• 33:00
  SPEAKER_01: of structural stuff.
• 33:02
  SPEAKER_01: He went hard on the curriculum, making it more knowledge rich.
• 33:06
  SPEAKER_01: There was a lot of reform around the inspectorate, the inspector schools in the UK.
• 33:11
  SPEAKER_01: There was reforms around teacher training,
• 33:13
  SPEAKER_01: all this sort of stuff,
• 33:14
  SPEAKER_01: which we've looked to in Australia,
• 33:19
  SPEAKER_01: an emphasis on explicit teaching and things like that.
• 33:21
  SPEAKER_01: And you had all these people, this groundswell of people who stepped in and did their bit.
• 33:26
  SPEAKER_01: So at Research Ed Melbourne, I heard from Matt Hood and Matt Hood set up the Ambition Institute.
• 33:32
  SPEAKER_01: Matt Hood is involved in one of these sets of trusts and he was the one
• 33:36
  SPEAKER_01: that said we must do everything we can to protect Aero
• 33:40
  SPEAKER_01: because Aero is doing such good work in the education space in Australia.
• 33:46
  SPEAKER_00: I agree, yeah.
• 33:50
  SPEAKER_01: And so what's happened is that Wales and Scotland, they didn't do that.
• 33:57
  SPEAKER_01: So Wales and Scotland,
• 33:59
  SPEAKER_01: even before 2010, they'd started going their own way, Scotland particularly.
• 34:04
  SPEAKER_01: So in Scotland,
• 34:05
  SPEAKER_01: the Scottish National Party,
• 34:07
  SPEAKER_01: which wants to be independent from the UK, has been in power since 2007.
• 34:10
  SPEAKER_01: They introduced this It's a curriculum for excellence thing that I was mentioning earlier.
• 34:15
  SPEAKER_01: And it's,
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 34:16
  SPEAKER_01: focused on 21st century skills,
• 34:18
  SPEAKER_01: quite complicated,
• 34:19
  SPEAKER_01: not really focused on being knowledge rich or anything like that,
• 34:24
  SPEAKER_01: but about these different kind of competencies and skills.
• 34:27
  SPEAKER_01: And their results have gone down and are really quite poor now compared to England's.
• 34:33
  SPEAKER_01: Wales is even worse.
• 34:35
  SPEAKER_01: So what we have in the United Kingdom is you've got these countries
• 34:38
  SPEAKER_01: that are very similar to each other.
• 34:40
  SPEAKER_01: Their neighbours, similar levels of wealth.
• 34:44
  SPEAKER_01: There is a bit more deprivation, say, in Wales than there would be in England on average, maybe.
• 34:48
  SPEAKER_01: But the countries are comparable.
• 34:51
  SPEAKER_01: And what we've seen is over time,
• 34:53
  SPEAKER_01: England,
• 34:54
  SPEAKER_01: its trajectory, well, it's sort of held – And Wales and Scotland have declined.
• 35:00
  SPEAKER_01: And so people say, well,
• 35:02
  SPEAKER_01: this must be something to do with English education policy because the other factors
• 35:08
  SPEAKER_01: that might affect education attainment,
• 35:10
  SPEAKER_01: like socioeconomic status and stuff like that, will have remained relatively stable.
• 35:15
  SPEAKER_01: So that's the story about England.
• 35:16
  SPEAKER_01: And that's why Jason Clare,
• 35:18
  SPEAKER_01: our federal education minister,
• 35:20
  SPEAKER_01: released a press release saying we should look to England.
• 35:22
  SPEAKER_01: But this has upset a lot of people.
• 35:25
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 35:26
  SPEAKER_00: So this brings us back to our LinkedIn articles.
• 35:29
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 35:30
  SPEAKER_01: So it's upset a lot of people.
• 35:31
  SPEAKER_01: There's a lot of Pisa cope, Caiti, with people not very happy.
• 35:38
  SPEAKER_01: Because you see,
• 35:40
  SPEAKER_01: England might be doing relatively well,
• 35:42
  SPEAKER_01: but they're doing relatively well having done the wrong things, Caiti.
• 35:46
  SPEAKER_01: So we shouldn't look to England because all those things that Michael Gove did are wrong things.
• 35:53
  SPEAKER_01: And so like a priori, just bad.
• 35:57
  SPEAKER_01: And so we can't possibly look to England and try and adopt some of those reforms.
• 36:01
  SPEAKER_01: We need to look elsewhere.
• 36:02
  SPEAKER_01: So this is why you've got Adam Voigt sort of saying we should look at Ireland.
• 36:09
  SPEAKER_01: Ireland does well.
• 36:14
  SPEAKER_01: Relatively speaking, but it has declined since 2022.
• 36:19
  SPEAKER_01: He also mentioned Japan.
• 36:20
  SPEAKER_01: And in his first article, actually, this is quite interesting.
• 36:24
  SPEAKER_01: In his first article, he mentioned, this is coming back to me now.
• 36:30
  SPEAKER_01: He mentioned Japan and he said that in 2021, Japan introduced these kind of reforms.
• 36:37
  SPEAKER_01: I forget exactly what they were, but they were sort of progressive education-inspired reforms.
• 36:42
  SPEAKER_00: And learning curriculum.
• 36:44
  SPEAKER_01: There you go.
• 36:45
  SPEAKER_01: And...
• 36:47
  SPEAKER_01: So implausibly he suggested,
• 36:49
  SPEAKER_01: and this was a few weeks ago before PISA results came out,
• 36:52
  SPEAKER_01: implausibly he suggested that this might have had an impact
• 36:54
  SPEAKER_01: on their 2022 PISA results, which were very good.
• 36:59
  SPEAKER_01: So Japan, their PISA results actually bucked the trend and went up in 2022.
• 37:06
  SPEAKER_01: If a reform introduced in 2021 affected the results of 15-year-olds a year later,
• 37:12
  SPEAKER_01: then that would be extraordinary.
• 37:14
  SPEAKER_00: That would be an impressive reform.
• 37:15
  SPEAKER_00: We need to get onto it.
• 37:16
  SPEAKER_01: That would be an impressive reform.
• 37:19
  SPEAKER_01: I don't think that that's what happened.
• 37:22
  SPEAKER_01: And actually, once the PISA results came out...
• 37:29
  SPEAKER_01: So, if anything,
• 37:30
  SPEAKER_01: if that 2021 active learning reform is associated with anything,
• 37:34
  SPEAKER_01: it's probably more associated with that decline.
• 37:36
  SPEAKER_01: And to be fair to Adam Voigt, he recognised that fact.
• 37:39
  SPEAKER_01: And then in his second piece, he started talking about Ireland.
• 37:43
  SPEAKER_01: But there's a lot of this...
• 37:45
  SPEAKER_01: So there's someone in the UK on Twitter called Barbara Bleeman,
• 37:49
  SPEAKER_01: who is an English as in the subject English specialist.
• 37:55
  SPEAKER_01: And if you look at her timeline,
• 37:57
  SPEAKER_01: it is almost entirely Pisa Cope trying to explain away England's success.
• 38:04
  SPEAKER_01: It's an interesting thing that there are so many people in England invested
• 38:09
  SPEAKER_01: in England not doing as well as it was.
• 38:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: Well, I mean,
• 38:31
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like Edu,
• 38:33
  SPEAKER_00: LinkedIn,
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: Twitter,
• 38:34
  SPEAKER_00: the whole thing,
• 38:35
  SPEAKER_00: I feel like I want to say that Australians wouldn't do that,
• 38:39
  SPEAKER_00: but I feel like we would based on what I see online.
• 38:42
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, if the reforms were wrong, if they were bad, then no one would want them to.
• 38:47
  SPEAKER_01: So the thing that's been happening...
• 38:51
  SPEAKER_01: The main issue that people have raised with the England PISA results is
• 38:59
  SPEAKER_01: that this is very technical, but I suppose I have to try and explain.
• 39:05
  SPEAKER_01: England did this thing called a non-response analysis.
• 39:09
  SPEAKER_01: So PISA, what they do is they go to a country, they select these schools to take part in PISA.
• 39:15
  SPEAKER_01: Some of them won't respond.
• 39:17
  SPEAKER_01: And so they have these backup schools to sort of replace them with.
• 39:20
  SPEAKER_01: And they're trying to produce a representative sample.
• 39:23
  SPEAKER_01: So the students they want to take PISA,
• 39:26
  SPEAKER_01: they want those students to be as similar as possible to the wider population
• 39:30
  SPEAKER_01: of students in the country.
• 39:32
  SPEAKER_00: So they're just trying to find a representative sample.
• 39:34
  SPEAKER_01: So they select schools to try and do that.
• 39:36
  SPEAKER_01: Then when they go to these schools, they select, I don't know, 40 kids to do it.
• 39:42
  SPEAKER_01: But then on the day, some of those kids won't take part.
• 39:45
  SPEAKER_01: And it might be because they're not at school.
• 39:48
  SPEAKER_01: It might be that they don't want to,
• 39:50
  SPEAKER_01: possibly,
• 39:51
  SPEAKER_01: because no one can force them to take part in a non-compulsory,
• 39:56
  SPEAKER_01: low-stakes assessment for some overseas, multi-country organisation.
• 40:04
  SPEAKER_01: It might be that,
• 40:05
  SPEAKER_01: and this is critical,
• 40:06
  SPEAKER_01: there are certain special educational needs that mean that you can't interact with
• 40:10
  SPEAKER_01: the piece of materials.
• 40:11
  SPEAKER_01: And so if you have them, you don't take part.
• 40:14
  SPEAKER_01: And that's the same all over the world.
• 40:16
  SPEAKER_01: The same rules apply.
• 40:19
  SPEAKER_01: So what England opted into was this voluntary analysis of is there
• 40:24
  SPEAKER_01: a systematic difference between the schools that don't take part and the schools
• 40:29
  SPEAKER_01: that do or between the students that don't take part and the students that do?
• 40:33
  SPEAKER_01: And in terms of schools, they found no difference.
• 40:35
  SPEAKER_01: So the schools that didn't respond were replaced with other schools.
• 40:39
  SPEAKER_01: There was no real difference between the schools that didn't respond and the schools that did.
• 40:42
  SPEAKER_01: When it came to the students,
• 40:45
  SPEAKER_01: so the difference between the students who were there on the day and did it and all
• 40:49
  SPEAKER_01: that, and those that weren't, then there is a difference.
• 40:54
  SPEAKER_01: So, for instance,
• 40:56
  SPEAKER_01: of those who did not take part,
• 40:59
  SPEAKER_01: there was a greater prevalence of special educational needs.
• 41:02
  SPEAKER_01: Now, in a sense,
• 41:03
  SPEAKER_01: that's not surprising,
• 41:04
  SPEAKER_01: given that special educational needs is one of
• 41:06
  SPEAKER_01: the reasons why you might not take part everywhere.
• 41:08
  SPEAKER_01: OK, so but there is a greater prevalence and that might not just have been those
• 41:14
  SPEAKER_01: who didn't take part for technical reasons.
• 41:16
  SPEAKER_01: There is also in England, if you have a certain level of what's the word?
• 41:24
  SPEAKER_01: If you if you if you earn less than a certain amount of money or if you're
• 41:28
  SPEAKER_01: on benefits or something like that,
• 41:29
  SPEAKER_01: you You can qualify for something called free school meals.
• 41:33
  SPEAKER_01: So that means when you go to school, you get your lunch for free.
• 41:36
  SPEAKER_01: We don't have that in Australia, not on a national level, but they do have that in England.
• 41:40
  SPEAKER_01: And they found a disparity between the students who did not take part,
• 41:45
  SPEAKER_01: that more of those qualified for free school meals than those that did take part.
• 41:49
  SPEAKER_01: Now, I don't find any of this surprising because for a start,
• 41:52
  SPEAKER_01: special educational needs are a reason not to take part.
• 41:55
  SPEAKER_01: So we would expect to be a greater prevalence of that in the group that didn't take part.
• 42:00
  SPEAKER_01: But also indications of...
• 42:10
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yeah,
• 42:11
  SPEAKER_01: I would expect those kids maybe to be a bit less likely to be at school that day or
• 42:16
  SPEAKER_01: to be a bit less inclined to take part or...
• 42:20
  SPEAKER_01: There's probably a lot of comorbidity between special educational needs
• 42:23
  SPEAKER_01: and socioeconomic deprivation and so on.
• 42:26
  SPEAKER_01: So do I find it surprising?
• 42:28
  SPEAKER_01: Not really.
• 42:29
  SPEAKER_01: But what people did,
• 42:30
  SPEAKER_01: and particularly Scottish nationalists,
• 42:32
  SPEAKER_01: this is amusing because obviously Scottish nationalists don't want to be saying
• 42:36
  SPEAKER_01: that England has done well in Pisa when Scotland has not,
• 42:40
  SPEAKER_01: especially since their government's been in power since...
• 42:42
  SPEAKER_01: 2007 is responsible for the curriculum for excellence.
• 42:46
  SPEAKER_01: What they've said is, oh, England's fiddled the figures.
• 42:50
  SPEAKER_01: Basically,
• 42:51
  SPEAKER_01: they've sorted things so that the sample that took PISA is a more advantaged group
• 42:56
  SPEAKER_01: than English students generally.
• 42:58
  SPEAKER_01: And so that's fiddled the figures and inflated England's scores.
• 43:03
  SPEAKER_00: But Greg,
• 43:04
  SPEAKER_00: surely if If that was the case and all of those factors that England didn't get
• 43:10
  SPEAKER_00: to decide, like, I mean,
• 43:11
  SPEAKER_00: you said that schools are selected,
• 43:14
  SPEAKER_00: there's a group of backup schools,
• 43:16
  SPEAKER_00: surely if that's the case for England,
• 43:18
  SPEAKER_00: and if we're talking about students who perhaps aren't at school
• 43:21
  SPEAKER_00: because they do come from a background where, yeah,
• 43:25
  SPEAKER_00: where there might be other factors that are impacting their attendance,
• 43:28
  SPEAKER_00: surely if that's the case for England,
• 43:30
  SPEAKER_00: that would be the case for other countries participating in PISA.
• 43:34
  SPEAKER_01: Well, yes.
• 43:36
  SPEAKER_01: So, and if anyone's fiddled the figures, it's not England.
• 43:39
  SPEAKER_01: The government in England are the people that volunteered
• 43:41
  SPEAKER_01: for this non-response analysis that has shown this data.
• 43:45
  SPEAKER_01: The people who actually did the sampling are PISA,
• 43:48
  SPEAKER_01: a branch of the OECD based in Paris,
• 43:52
  SPEAKER_01: this multinational organisation that administered PISA.
• 43:56
  SPEAKER_01: And yes, and you absolutely bang on, Katie, because...
• 44:02
  SPEAKER_01: Presumably, the same sort of thing is happening everywhere.
• 44:06
  SPEAKER_01: We just don't necessarily have the analysis.
• 44:08
  SPEAKER_01: Where we do have the analysis, though, is for Scotland.
• 44:11
  SPEAKER_01: So there was this...
• 44:13
  SPEAKER_01: Someone wrote an article saying this is disgraceful,
• 44:16
  SPEAKER_01: England are fiddling the figures, and in Scotland we don't do that.
• 44:20
  SPEAKER_01: And a guy whose name has blanked...
• 44:24
  SPEAKER_01: I've blanked the name.
• 44:25
  SPEAKER_01: I'll pull it up, though.
• 44:26
  SPEAKER_01: A guy called...
• 44:33
  SPEAKER_01: Jackie something is the person who wrote the article.
• 44:36
  SPEAKER_01: Sam Taylor.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 44:38
  SPEAKER_01: Jackie Kemp wrote the article.
• 44:40
  SPEAKER_01: And Sam Taylor pointed out that she made a bit of a statistical error.
• 44:44
  SPEAKER_01: And in fact, a similar analysis had been done in Scotland.
• 44:46
  SPEAKER_01: And Scotland does have free school meals,
• 44:50
  SPEAKER_01: unlike Australia, but it has a different system of free school meals to England.
• 44:55
  SPEAKER_01: So fewer people qualify for them.
• 44:58
  SPEAKER_01: But if anything,
• 44:59
  SPEAKER_01: in the Scottish data,
• 45:00
  SPEAKER_01: there was a bigger disparity between non-responders and responders
• 45:05
  SPEAKER_01: on free school meals than there was in England.
• 45:08
  SPEAKER_01: So on my blog from yesterday, today.
• 45:13
  SPEAKER_01: Today, this morning.
• 45:14
  SPEAKER_00: I listened to it while I was getting ready.
• 45:18
  SPEAKER_01: On that, I post all this.
• 45:22
  SPEAKER_01: And she's got this really, really funny.
• 45:24
  SPEAKER_01: She corrects her article, but it's really funny how she does it.
• 45:27
  SPEAKER_01: She says,
• 45:28
  SPEAKER_01: Sam Taylor of These Islands,
• 45:30
  SPEAKER_01: an aggressive,
• 45:31
  SPEAKER_01: dark money-funded,
• 45:33
  SPEAKER_01: pro-unionist think tank,
• 45:34
  SPEAKER_01: a hydra head of the populist right, disputed my suggestion that there was...
• 45:38
  SPEAKER_01: It's very funny.
• 45:39
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, she corrects it.
• 45:40
  SPEAKER_01: And then we've got Christian Bocco.
• 45:43
  SPEAKER_01: Are you familiar with Christian Bocco, Caiti?
• 45:47
  SPEAKER_00: I don't think I am, no.
• 45:49
  SPEAKER_01: So Christian Bokov is this guy who's been on Twitter forever.
• 45:53
  SPEAKER_01: He's a professor of maths education at Southampton University or something.
• 46:00
  SPEAKER_01: He's Dutch originally.
• 46:01
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 46:02
  SPEAKER_01: And he is – if you are an educational progressive,
• 46:07
  SPEAKER_01: then he's a good person to do a bit of cognitive offload to.
• 46:15
  SPEAKER_01: He'll do your thinking for you.
• 46:17
  SPEAKER_01: He will – but he always – presents himself as really balanced and quite cerebral.
• 46:23
  SPEAKER_01: And he knows the details of the research that other people don't know.
• 46:27
  SPEAKER_01: And he's neither progressive or traditionist.
• 46:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's a silly divide.
• 46:30
  SPEAKER_01: And he's above all of that.
• 46:32
  SPEAKER_01: He's above all the fray.
• 46:33
  SPEAKER_01: And he's got a line in vague.
• 46:35
  SPEAKER_01: Do you know what vague posting is, Caiti?
• 46:38
  SPEAKER_00: I actually do.
• 46:39
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 46:40
  SPEAKER_01: So go on.
• 46:41
  SPEAKER_00: Oh, I was going to say, well,
• 46:43
  SPEAKER_00: vague posting is where you do something that's a little bit cryptic
• 46:46
  SPEAKER_00: and it doesn't really say anything and everyone's kind of guessing and Yeah,
• 46:49
  SPEAKER_01: so he's always criticising unnamed people on Twitter, but he doesn't name them.
• 46:55
  SPEAKER_01: So you can't actually go back to what these people actually said to see
• 46:57
  SPEAKER_01: whether he's characterising them correctly.
• 47:01
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, he wrote this article for the Times Educational Supplement.
• 47:04
  SPEAKER_01: I shouldn't call it that anymore.
• 47:06
  SPEAKER_01: Test Magazine.
• 47:08
  SPEAKER_01: And he said,
• 47:09
  SPEAKER_01: there are also some signs that England's sample of students was upwardly biased with
• 47:13
  SPEAKER_01: a much lower percentage of students on free school models or
• 47:15
  SPEAKER_01: with special educational needs and disabilities than some other countries.
• 47:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, that doesn't make any sense.
• 47:21
  SPEAKER_01: Because for a start,
• 47:22
  SPEAKER_01: you can't really compare countries,
• 47:24
  SPEAKER_01: because each country will have its own way of defining special educational needs.
• 47:30
  SPEAKER_01: And some countries won't even have free school meals.
• 47:33
  SPEAKER_01: And the country's And then the other...
• 47:50
  SPEAKER_01: Guy who has been demonstrating this Pisa
• 47:55
  SPEAKER_00: cope.
• 47:57
  SPEAKER_00: I hope this is what I'm wanting.
• 48:01
  SPEAKER_01: So this is Andy Hargreaves, okay?
• 48:04
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 48:05
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, so Andy Hargreaves and I had an exchange on Twitter.
• 48:09
  SPEAKER_00: This is the great debate, Greg.
• 48:12
  SPEAKER_01: Well, he's not going to exchange with me on Twitter anymore, unfortunately.
• 48:16
  SPEAKER_01: I did see that.
• 48:19
  SPEAKER_01: What did he say after I wrote this article?
• 48:22
  SPEAKER_01: I can't remember.
• 48:23
  SPEAKER_01: But he's fallen out with me.
• 48:25
  SPEAKER_01: He thinks it's very unfair what I've written.
• 48:27
  SPEAKER_01: He also thinks it's in plain wrong.
• 48:29
  SPEAKER_01: Much of it is plain wrong.
• 48:31
  SPEAKER_01: But I've asked him what's wrong because I'd like to correct it.
• 48:35
  SPEAKER_01: But he's not going to interact with me anymore because he thinks the article is very unfair.
• 48:41
  SPEAKER_01: So it seems like I'm not going to find out what is plain wrong about the article.
• 48:46
  SPEAKER_00: And his stance is about Finland, right?
• 48:49
  SPEAKER_01: Well, no.
• 48:54
  SPEAKER_01: That's what I wanted to talk about.
• 48:56
  SPEAKER_01: The reason I got into a debate with him on Twitter was because he was posting about England.
• 49:03
  SPEAKER_01: So he was suffering from a bit of Pisa cope,
• 49:05
  SPEAKER_01: another one of these people that didn't really want England to have done well
• 49:12
  SPEAKER_01: at Pisa.
• 49:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, I don't know.
• 49:14
  SPEAKER_01: I don't know what he wants, but that's That's how it comes across to me.
• 49:17
  SPEAKER_01: And a guy called Tom Sherrington, who you might have heard of, he had written.
• 49:24
  SPEAKER_01: So basically,
• 49:26
  SPEAKER_01: the English education minister,
• 49:28
  SPEAKER_01: Lucy Powell,
• 49:29
  SPEAKER_01: has found it really hard to celebrate England's success in Pisa because it was
• 49:34
  SPEAKER_01: the previous government that put all these things in place.
• 49:36
  SPEAKER_01: And the current government has got these proposals to So she put out a statement that was
• 49:54
  SPEAKER_01: Tom Sherrington's point is this isn't about politics.
• 49:57
  SPEAKER_01: You can be on the left,
• 49:59
  SPEAKER_01: as Tom Sherrington very much is,
• 50:01
  SPEAKER_01: as I understand it,
• 50:02
  SPEAKER_01: and still say that these reforms that Michael Gove of the right introduced were
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: a good thing.
• 50:08
  SPEAKER_01: So let's get over that and let's just say let's keep going with this agenda.
• 50:13
  SPEAKER_01: Well, Andy Hargreaves then responded to that and came up with his own statement
• 50:17
  SPEAKER_01: that he thought Lucy Powell should put out.
• 50:20
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 50:21
  SPEAKER_01: And some of this is extraordinary.
• 50:23
  SPEAKER_01: The data,
• 50:24
  SPEAKER_01: this is on England,
• 50:25
  SPEAKER_01: certainly do not justify a policy of more direct instruction
• 50:29
  SPEAKER_01: and super strict behaviour management in what is becoming a global policy business
• 50:33
  SPEAKER_01: for former ministers Michael Gove, Nick Gibb and advisor Tom Bennett.
• 50:37
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, the PISA results for England are out.
• 50:40
  SPEAKER_01: And he says, given their outlier nature, they should be treated with interest and care.
• 50:44
  SPEAKER_01: And he says,
• 50:47
  SPEAKER_01: remember now, he's speaking on behalf of the UK government's education minister.
• 50:53
  SPEAKER_01: This is not him speaking.
• 50:55
  SPEAKER_01: This is what he would like the UK government's minister to say.
• 50:57
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, yeah.
• 51:12
  SPEAKER_01: So basically, in principle, you can't do well on PISA.
• 51:27
  SPEAKER_01: It's a great place.
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: Where is it?
• 51:28
  SPEAKER_01: I can't find it now.
• 51:58
  SPEAKER_01: It's a very long statement.
• 51:59
  SPEAKER_01: I've got it in my post on it.
• 52:01
  SPEAKER_01: What's he got?
• 52:03
  SPEAKER_01: Quick political fixes.
• 52:05
  SPEAKER_01: This is it.
• 52:07
  SPEAKER_01: I can't actually find it on the original scene now, but it was there.
• 52:10
  SPEAKER_01: Quick political fixes and lucrative global careers for those
• 52:13
  SPEAKER_01: who advance them are not what our young people need and deserve now.
• 52:17
  SPEAKER_01: And I just thought that was astonishing because my image
• 52:20
  SPEAKER_01: of Andy Hargreaves is someone getting on a plane,
• 52:23
  SPEAKER_01: flying to Finland and then telling us all what's great about Finland
• 52:27
  SPEAKER_01: because that's what he was...
• 52:29
  SPEAKER_01: That's the Finland thing.
• 52:31
  SPEAKER_01: He went and did an OACD tour of Finland, wrote about Finland.
• 52:36
  SPEAKER_01: And so my article on that was all about how he'd written the introduction
• 52:40
  SPEAKER_01: to Pasi Saalberg's book called Finish Lessons.
• 52:45
  SPEAKER_01: What was it called?
• 52:46
  SPEAKER_01: Finish Lessons, What the World Can Learn from Educational Change in Finland.
• 52:50
  SPEAKER_01: And he wrote the forewords and I wrote about that.
• 52:53
  SPEAKER_01: So this is a guy who was – He wouldn't accept this characterization,
• 52:58
  SPEAKER_01: but I would say promoting Finland.
• 53:01
  SPEAKER_01: Finland have gone down the gurgler ever since.
• 53:05
  SPEAKER_01: Well, ever since of about 2005, actually.
• 53:08
  SPEAKER_01: And so Pazisalberg was wrong about Finland.
• 53:09
  SPEAKER_00: Which is an interesting one because that's the one that you hear
• 53:12
  SPEAKER_00: about online constantly and in conversations about education.
• 53:16
  SPEAKER_00: It's, oh, but Finland are doing these things and their results.
• 53:19
  SPEAKER_00: And it's like, have you looked recently?
• 53:21
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah.
• 53:22
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, and I mean,
• 53:24
  SPEAKER_01: we're Australia,
• 53:25
  SPEAKER_01: we're going down the gurgler,
• 53:26
  SPEAKER_01: but we're not going down the gurgler as fast as Finland,
• 53:29
  SPEAKER_01: and so we're now outperforming them.
• 53:32
  SPEAKER_01: So there's,
• 53:33
  SPEAKER_01: and Sandro Helger writes this forward,
• 53:35
  SPEAKER_01: and I picked out some choice bits from that,
• 53:37
  SPEAKER_01: and he talks about Yong Zhao,
• 53:41
  SPEAKER_01: who's also wrong,
• 53:42
  SPEAKER_01: all these people are just wrong, or have turned out to be wrong with hindsight.
• 53:46
  SPEAKER_01: There's a guy called Gabriel Heller-Salgren, which I'll be impressed if you've heard of him.
• 53:52
  SPEAKER_01: So you'll have heard of Pasi Sahlberg, who has been wrong.
• 53:57
  SPEAKER_01: You only have heard about Gabriel Heller Sahlgren, who has been right about Finland.
• 54:02
  SPEAKER_01: And that shows you an interesting thing about incentives in education,
• 54:09
  SPEAKER_01: that you can be right and you won't necessarily become well-known.
• 54:15
  SPEAKER_01: And you can be wrong and actually become extremely well-known.
• 54:19
  SPEAKER_01: So Gabriel Heller Sahlgren...
• 54:23
  SPEAKER_01: Basically wrote a piece many years ago now actually saying everyone's wrong
• 54:28
  SPEAKER_01: about Finland and Sagan himself is Finnish.
• 54:33
  SPEAKER_01: The curriculum is very tightly controlled with prescribed textbooks.
• 54:37
  SPEAKER_01: Teachers had very little autonomy.
• 54:40
  SPEAKER_01: Everything was taught very, very traditionally up until the 1990s.
• 54:44
  SPEAKER_01: Then Finland started to catch up with all the rest of us and started
• 54:48
  SPEAKER_01: to change what they were doing.
• 54:51
  SPEAKER_01: Now, Finland...
• 54:52
  SPEAKER_01: Got its amazing PISA results at the start of the 2000s.
• 54:56
  SPEAKER_01: Now, those 15-year-olds who sat PISA at the start of the 2000s will have had most
• 55:00
  SPEAKER_01: of their education during the 1990s and under that traditional,
• 55:06
  SPEAKER_01: highly controlled system.
• 55:08
  SPEAKER_01: Since then, Finland has been catching up with the rest of us.
• 55:12
  SPEAKER_01: In 2016, it introduced phenomenon-based learning.
• 55:14
  SPEAKER_01: It's done all this sort of stuff.
• 55:16
  SPEAKER_01: And its results have significantly improved.
• 55:21
  SPEAKER_01: So Solgren says it's not what people,
• 55:23
  SPEAKER_01: when people went to Finland in 2007 and said, oh,
• 55:26
  SPEAKER_01: Finnish teachers have all this autonomy and they have master's degrees and they,
• 55:31
  SPEAKER_01: all this, whatever they said at the time.
• 55:34
  SPEAKER_01: It wasn't that that was responsible for the stellar results they had at the start of 2000s.
• 55:38
  SPEAKER_01: It was something else entirely.
• 55:40
  SPEAKER_01: So I'm with Solgren on that.
• 55:43
  SPEAKER_01: And yeah, so I wrote a post about that.
• 55:47
  SPEAKER_01: But see if I can find what Hargreaves said about the post.
• 55:55
  SPEAKER_01: Let's give him a right of reply to that post.
• 55:58
  SPEAKER_01: Let's have a look.
• 55:59
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, no, I've pressed the wrong button.
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_01: Where are we?
• 56:01
  SPEAKER_00: Yeah, well, there was a lot going on in the...
• 56:04
  SPEAKER_00: Sorry, I'm making sure I've got all of these noted down too for the show notes.
• 56:08
  SPEAKER_01: This is what Andy Hargreaves said about my post.
• 56:10
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 56:11
  SPEAKER_01: There is so much about this piece by Greg Ashman that is plain wrong,
• 56:14
  SPEAKER_01: of poor standard, and far wide of the mark, and in a style that is schneid.
• 56:20
  SPEAKER_01: Schneid?
• 56:21
  SPEAKER_01: Schneid.
• 56:22
  SPEAKER_01: Why did I say schneid?
• 56:24
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, I'm thinking of Schnauzer the dog.
• 56:26
  SPEAKER_01: Anyway, that is snide and insulting by insinuation and more.
• 56:33
  SPEAKER_01: After I endeavoured to engage differences with respect,
• 56:35
  SPEAKER_01: civility and open sharing of resources,
• 56:38
  SPEAKER_01: that this and other interactions with the author are now terminated for good.
• 56:42
  SPEAKER_01: Thank you and goodbye.
• 56:44
  SPEAKER_01: If you would like to read our original OECD review of Finland,
• 56:47
  SPEAKER_01: please go judge for yourself and read from page 76 onwards of and then he posts
• 56:51
  SPEAKER_01: the link.
• 56:52
  SPEAKER_01: So I don't think I'll be hearing from Andy Hargreaves again,
• 56:55
  SPEAKER_01: which is a shame,
• 56:56
  SPEAKER_01: because as I say, I would like to know what I wrote that was plain wrong.
• 57:00
  SPEAKER_01: And that's kind of,
• 57:02
  SPEAKER_01: I know you wanted me to sort of talk about Pisa and I have rambled a bit,
• 57:08
  SPEAKER_01: but was there anything else that I haven't talked about?
• 57:11
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there's the discipline stuff as well.
• 57:13
  SPEAKER_01: Yes.
• 57:14
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:15
  SPEAKER_00: Because that was the other thing that's been popular on edgy.
• 57:19
  SPEAKER_00: It's been a really full on couple of weeks online in this space,
• 57:24
  SPEAKER_00: which I think you know more than most.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: Oh, yeah.
• 57:27
  SPEAKER_01: So, Blaise Joseph released his report that we talked about.
• 57:31
  SPEAKER_01: No, we haven't talked about that.
• 57:32
  SPEAKER_00: No, we alluded to it and we couldn't speak about it because it was all hush-hush last time.
• 57:37
  SPEAKER_00: So, he's for Centre for Independent Studies.
• 57:40
  SPEAKER_01: So he released this report showing that we got basically a problem of discipline
• 57:45
  SPEAKER_01: in Australian classrooms,
• 57:46
  SPEAKER_01: which, I mean, we kind of knew, but I'm not diminishing what Blaze did.
• 57:51
  SPEAKER_01: I think it's really important work to actually get that survey.
• 57:52
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah, but I think we need the data to back it up.
• 57:54
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 57:55
  SPEAKER_01: And then that got criticised on the AARE blog.
• 57:57
  SPEAKER_01: And then when the PISA results came out,
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: of course,
• 57:59
  SPEAKER_01: they confirmed Blaze's view that compared to other countries,
• 58:02
  SPEAKER_01: we do have Certainly low level disruption,
• 58:05
  SPEAKER_01: we do have quite a lot compared to other countries and that came out from PISA data
• 58:09
  SPEAKER_01: as well.
• 58:10
  SPEAKER_01: So yeah, that was probably the other story.
• 58:15
  SPEAKER_01: But it was,
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: you know,
• 58:16
  SPEAKER_01: there's a lot, I mean, maths,
• 58:17
  SPEAKER_01: I'm I'm glad that our maths is in a real state,
• 58:21
  SPEAKER_01: Caiti, and as two maths teachers, this is a worry.
• 58:25
  SPEAKER_01: They're reforming the K-2 curriculum, I believe, Australian curriculum.
• 58:34
  SPEAKER_01: Hopefully,
• 58:36
  SPEAKER_01: it's considerably better than what we have now,
• 58:38
  SPEAKER_01: which is pretty awful,
• 58:40
  SPEAKER_01: and hopefully they reform the whole of it and we get much more ambitious
• 58:43
  SPEAKER_01: about how we teach maths.
• 58:45
  SPEAKER_00: It's ambition, but I think it's also just the I actually think it comes back to earlier.
• 58:50
  SPEAKER_00: It's the translation of the curriculum into the classroom.
• 58:53
  SPEAKER_00: And I'm not just speaking about the way that you deliver it
• 58:56
  SPEAKER_00: and what techniques you use,
• 58:57
  SPEAKER_00: but it's even just the sequencing of the curriculum and how does
• 59:03
  SPEAKER_00: an Australian curriculum descriptor,
• 59:05
  SPEAKER_00: how does that actually translate into an actual thing that you need students to do?
• 59:12
  SPEAKER_00: Because I don't think there's necessarily...
• 59:15
  SPEAKER_00: Clarity nor consistency in the way that that's interpreted.
• 59:20
  SPEAKER_01: No, and that's just one problem with it.
• 59:24
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, it's terrible.
• 59:25
  SPEAKER_01: And I don't know whether structurally we can have anything better.
• 59:29
  SPEAKER_01: I worry whether it always has to be a compromise designed by committee.
• 59:33
  SPEAKER_01: I mean, there was a famous story,
• 59:35
  SPEAKER_01: which I'm not sure is quite true,
• 59:37
  SPEAKER_01: but that Michael Gove simply just wrote the English national curriculum
• 59:41
  SPEAKER_01: with his advisors and just got the job done because he was in so much of a hurry.
• 59:46
  SPEAKER_01: I'm not sure that's true.
• 59:47
  SPEAKER_01: It was a bit of a rumour.
• 59:49
  SPEAKER_00: Here is looking to do,
• 59:50
  SPEAKER_00: I would be so happy to just like take some time,
• 59:53
  SPEAKER_00: write the entire Australian curriculum.
• 59:55
  SPEAKER_00: But that's what they should do.
• 59:56
  SPEAKER_01: They should give it to one person to just write it rather
• 59:58
  SPEAKER_01: than all this horse trading between the states and territories and all that sort
• 1:00:03
  SPEAKER_01: of business that they seem to have to go through,
• 1:00:05
  SPEAKER_01: which ultimately diminishes the product.
• 1:00:09
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:00:10
  SPEAKER_01: So anything else on Peter?
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: No, look,
• 1:00:12
  SPEAKER_00: I think you've actually given us a pretty good summary
• 1:00:15
  SPEAKER_00: of absolutely everything moving between the results,
• 1:00:19
  SPEAKER_00: the Twitter wars, which I said, that's popular.
• 1:00:22
  SPEAKER_00: We've got to touch on that.
• 1:00:24
  SPEAKER_00: And yeah, and then obviously the behavior piece in there, I think we've got it.
• 1:00:28
  SPEAKER_01: Well, can I mention one more thing then, please?
• 1:00:30
  SPEAKER_01: Please.
• 1:00:32
  SPEAKER_01: We know that there's a lot going on on LinkedIn.
• 1:00:35
  SPEAKER_01: I've been a bit slow to LinkedIn.
• 1:00:36
  SPEAKER_01: I'm still more on Twitter than I'm on LinkedIn.
• 1:00:38
  SPEAKER_01: I find it really hard to follow things on LinkedIn.
• 1:00:42
  SPEAKER_01: The notifications I get don't seem to keep up with what's going on.
• 1:00:45
  SPEAKER_01: But anyway, I've been on LinkedIn, not least to read these long articles by Adam Voight.
• 1:00:51
  SPEAKER_01: But I've seen a few other things as well.
• 1:00:53
  SPEAKER_01: And I've realised that a lot of the education debate is taking place on LinkedIn.
• 1:00:57
  SPEAKER_01: It is.
• 1:00:59
  SPEAKER_01: And I'm also aware that the last couple of research heads,
• 1:01:03
  SPEAKER_01: there are a few complaints from people on social media that they didn't hear
• 1:01:06
  SPEAKER_01: about them in time and they'd sold out and they didn't get to go because
• 1:01:08
  SPEAKER_01: a research head in Australia sells out now.
• 1:01:11
  SPEAKER_01: Yeah.
• 1:01:12
  SPEAKER_01: There is now a ResearchEd Australia LinkedIn account.
• 1:01:17
  SPEAKER_01: So
• 1:01:19
  SPEAKER_01: news about ResearchEd Australia is now available via LinkedIn.
• 1:01:24
  SPEAKER_01: So if you are not a Twitter person and you therefore do not follow
• 1:01:28
  SPEAKER_01: the ResearchEd Australia Twitter account,
• 1:01:31
  SPEAKER_01: you can now follow the ResearchEd Australia LinkedIn account.
• 1:01:35
  SPEAKER_01: And basically what is posted on one should be posted on the other.
• 1:01:39
  SPEAKER_01: And you should find out about ResearchEd events and speakers
• 1:01:41
  SPEAKER_01: and things like
• 1:01:43
  SPEAKER_00: I think that's absolutely awesome because I have been wanting one
• 1:01:46
  SPEAKER_00: of those for such a long time.
• 1:01:48
  SPEAKER_00: As someone who's not,
• 1:01:50
  SPEAKER_00: like I've got a Twitter,
• 1:01:51
  SPEAKER_00: but I'm not super active on it because I find Twitter confusing
• 1:01:54
  SPEAKER_00: and I don't understand the retweeting and then I end up in this weird nested thing
• 1:01:58
  SPEAKER_00: and I don't know how to follow it.
• 1:02:01
  SPEAKER_00: And I know that that's, I know it's user error, but I find it really overwhelming.
• 1:02:05
  SPEAKER_00: So I like on LinkedIn that I can just go,
• 1:02:07
  SPEAKER_00: here's a post and I can read all the comments and the arguments that way.
• 1:02:11
  SPEAKER_01: Hmm.
• 1:02:12
  SPEAKER_01: Yes, well, there are merits to both.
• 1:02:17
  SPEAKER_01: And we are now on both.
• 1:02:19
  SPEAKER_01: Well, we, Research Ed Australia is now on both.
• 1:02:22
  SPEAKER_01: Research Ed Australia, though, will not be taking part in debates.
• 1:02:24
  SPEAKER_01: It will just be posting news about events and speakers and things like that.
• 1:02:31
  SPEAKER_01: It's not going to be a source of controversy.
• 1:02:34
  SPEAKER_01: For that, people will need to follow me and you, Caiti.
• 1:02:42
  SPEAKER_00: Thank you for listening to this episode of When Will They Learn podcast.
• 1:02:45
  SPEAKER_00: Any of the articles that we've mentioned today will be down in the show notes
• 1:02:49
  SPEAKER_00: and there is a lot in today's episode and I'll make sure to include the link to
• 1:02:53
  SPEAKER_00: the Research at Australia LinkedIn page.
• 1:02:56
  SPEAKER_00: If there is something that you want us to talk about in a future episode,
• 1:02:59
  SPEAKER_00: please drop it to either Greg or I on any of our socials that you can also find down
• 1:03:04
  SPEAKER_00: in the show notes.