Transcript - Episode 102 — SEND Parenting

EP 102: Disengaged In School with Dr. Chris Bagley
Speaker Names

Dr Olivia KesselHost

00:06

Welcome to the Send Parenting Podcast. I'm your neurodiverse host, dr Olivia Kessel, and, more importantly, I'm mother to my wonderfully neurodivergent daughter, alexandra, who really inspired this podcast. As a veteran in navigating the world of neurodiversity in a UK education system, I've uncovered a wealth of misinformation, alongside many answers and solutions that were never taught to me in medical school or in any of the parenting handbooks. Each week on this podcast, I will be bringing the experts to your ears to empower you on your parenting crusade. This week we'll be joined by Dr Chris Bagley, a clinical psychologist, teacher and writer who's passionate about reforming education. Join us today as he explores alternative ways to educate children, utilizing their strengths and through collaboration.

01:03

I know a shocker not what most of us think of when we think of our current education system. This one, if you've ever struggled with your child in school, is definitely worth listening to. So welcome, dr Bagley. It is a pleasure to have you come back and join us on the Send Parenting podcast to celebrate our 100th birthday episode, where we're going to have a full week of lovely speakers coming back to share where they've been and what they're getting up to and how they are supporting neurodiversity in their roles and I know you joined us last year for two podcasts episode 34, which was Rethinking Education, and episode 49, which looked at school detention and exclusion, both of which I think are definitely part and parcel of the life of a lot of my listeners. But because some people might not have listened to those episodes, I'd love to start out with just a refresh on who are you and what is a bit of your background.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

01:58

Well, first of all, a massive shout out to you for 100 podcasts. That's big numbers, the Centurion. So congrats on that. Yeah, thanks my name's for 100 podcast. That's big numbers, the centurion. So congrats on that. And yeah, my name is chris.

02:10

Hi everybody, I am a psychologist and writer and campaigner I guess is a good way to describe myself. I'm also a musician and like to explore ideas in all sorts of different ways, which links with a lot of my work, I guess, and most of the work I do at the moment is in the social enterprise world. So I worked with the social enterprise for four or five years called States of Mind, where I'm director of research, and maybe we'll touch on some of that work today. And I also am co-director at Square Peg, which is expanding, hopefully over the next few years and run by predominantly Ali Costello. Predominantly Ali Costello has made quite a splash, I think, in terms of helping people to think about policy and giving families in particular, a voice in what is a very messy and politically fraught context.

02:52

And also I'm an academic at UCL, so I supervise doctorate students who are doing research generally, try to aim to supervise students who are doing work around rethinking education, and there's a brilliant researcher recently called Sat Vasando who did some work in a learning community in the UK which is going to be getting out there soon. So maybe interesting thing for families to know about, you know, if they've got young people who are struggling to get into school, for example. There's some really good evidence there of what can work in a sort of learning community context. So pretty diverse different sort of things I try and do, but of learning community context, so pretty diverse different sort of things I try and do. But I guess in terms of the direction of it it's very much recognizing that schooling is a very problematic paradigm and trying to consider other ways of doing education.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

03:33

Really, yeah, and I think that's a. You know that that will strike a chord with a lot of my listeners, as it does with me, because one of the struggles is finding finding, within the constraints of the way education is done right now, the right setting for your child is extremely difficult. So you know, learning more about things like learning communities. I'd love you to unpick that a little bit more, because sometimes you just can't find the right school for your child, and I know also I have a Zen Parenting community as well, and we know we support each other and quite a few members that talk about things, and one of the things that parents express is well, I can't homeschool my child right now. I don't have that ability, and so it really becomes a huge issue of my child doesn't want to go to school, they're refusing to go to school and it's fraught really. So it's really interesting to learn different ways to do things, but also to learn how learning at home can work as well.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

04:28

Well, and the learning communities that exist in the UK. I know they are expanding all the time, slowly of course, but everybody knows, and it's become mainstream news, that home education is expanding exponentially and persistent absence inverted commas is rising very rapidly as well, as is home education, sometimes non-elective, sometimes elective. So one of the things that's been really interesting for me most of my practitioner work I forgot to mention that actually I am still a practitioner psychologist, so primarily I've been working in prisons and people with early units units and it's really noticeable in the school system how many young people have gradually started to be off-rolled in ways whereby they're told to sort of go into home education because it's going to meet their needs, when actually the school system itself isn't responding to them. So what it's doing is it's meeting the school's needs and that resonate with a lot of parents. You know schools have a very narrow uh, I call it the four tenets sort of things that they're valued. So standardization, competition is highly valued excellence measured by progress, eight, which secondary parents will know about and accountability.

05:37

And some children can't fit into that, they can't cope in that system and schools end up sometimes behaving in ways that they would probably find morally unconscionable when they started. It's sort of mass massaging children out of the system and using problematic language traps to convince themselves of the reason. And it's difficult to watch, sometimes as an ed psych, when you're in schools. Lovely, warm-hearted, conscientious teachers behaving in ways that you can see underneath are triggered by some very rigid and inflexible ideologies that they sometimes have forgotten their subject to. So it's super complex and that's where the sort of learning communities and the home ed world comes in and that's where a lot of my work's now directed at that, because what you notice, for example, in learning communities is they'll call themselves things like consent-based or rights respecting or self-directed, and that's really interesting because that very deeply and closely aligns with what we know from psychological literature about what human beings need to fundamentally thrive, which is what got me interested in it in the first place.

06:42

You know seeing an enormous amount of distress. You know young people and families literally at breaking point, sometimes schools at breaking point, teachers living with really difficult cognitive dissonance. You know having to convince themselves that everything's fine when they know many of them that it's not and what they're doing is potentially harmful at the school system and hurts people. So that led me into that. So there's some really great stuff going on and, um, one of the things that's really intriguing is how a few psychological theories maybe I can talk about those olivia really link with this very closely.

07:15

So there's two in particular I'm really fond of and there are many others you could use, but the two theories that I think are most interesting and most well evidenced and most supportive of things like learning communities and home education groups where people get together and co-construct stuff. First one is self-determination theory, and that theory makes an assumption that all human beings are innately curious. Anyone who's had a two-year-old or a three-year-old, whatever, even a younger kid. You can't stop them being curious. Right, you know you've got to have eyes in the back of your head because they're so curious.

07:52

Now, one of the you have to actually, you know childproof your house because they're so curious and you know I would make the argument as would dc and ryan, who devised the theory, and it's been very well evidenced over many decades now. They would argue that that doesn't disappear as you get older. What happens is something that's I'm going to talk about now, in terms of sort of constructing human beings in a certain way so that they might begin to perceive themselves as incurious, or systems that are created to control, which reduces the capacity of people to be curious. So there's three sort of tenets of that, or phenomenon. One is competence, so this idea that for a human being to thrive you have to have an internalized sense that you're good at stuff, you're competent Implicitly we all know that right, if you think you're absolutely shit at everything and you don't have the capacity to be good at tough stuff, you're not going to feel a high sense of self-worth. So that's the first factor. The other one is relatedness, and I'm going to link that with another theory which is called belongingness, because they're very similar constructs and it's this idea that if you don't feel that you're connected to other human beings in a reciprocal fashion, in a way that you feel seen, in a way that you feel heard and understood, again you can't thrive. But the belongingness literature again, is very strong. That might only mean having two close people. You know, for a lot of young people who, for example, have a diagnosis of autism, sometimes they only need or want or can cope with one or two people, but they still need to belong. We all need that. You know there are very few people who can live as hermits and even people who are hermits we know about them being hermits because of the people speak to them. So you know, even when you go to the extreme, you can see that this, this makes sense.

09:35

And the other one, which is maybe the most crucial one and the most well evidence, is autonomy. So if you're not able to exert your will, if you're not able to proceed from a position whereby you've chosen to do something and you're not coerced into doing it, if you're not able to do that, you can't thrive. And the theory itself essentially says that if you don't have those three things over an extended period of time, what you're going to get is psychopathology. You're going to get people who are presenting with behaviors that are distressed or, as schools would say, oppositional, that are distressed or, as schools would say, oppositional, challenging, naughty. So that's my thinking on it as a psychologist and more from what I've seen now.

10:11

What the school system does, of course, is it legislates based on a sort of materialist ideology, right, so the only thing that really exists are things that are objectively measurable, which is standards, and the way that you design the success criteria is based around excellence. So young people rising up sort of ladder of academic success, and the way that's policed and I use that word deliberately is through behavior policies. Now, those things are fine to a certain extent if you're a young person who feels competent in that system and what you might call that is some young people might have might internalize the values of the system or integrate them into their sense of self. They might not love it, they might not enjoy it, but if you think you're going to do well out of the exams and you're going to get some good credentials, you might identify with it, feel a sense of competence, feel some sense of belongingness within that system because you perceive that you can connect with other people who have similar strengths and needs and you know you can build something from that. And then you also might perceive that you have some sense of choice because you're able to have an element of control over what happens. When you finish. You might get a good set of grades, for example, you might do some activities that are great for your cv ucas, that sort of thing but those aren't the young people whose parents probably listen to your podcast.

11:26

What you're going to get is the young people where they go to school every day. They can't access stuff, and this is thousands and thousands and thousands of children. You know, if you look at research by Sivers and Pula, if you look at the OECD and World Health Organization data about how young people are feeling in english schools, it ain't good. You know. The edge foundation released a paper where 50 of young people just under 50 said that school is something to get through and they thought that the pedagogy was alienating and stressful. That's half and sievers and co two really cool eps. They did a study which basically said the same thing, said what are the things in your life that creates the most negative emotion or stress? School was by far the highest, and this is always the case. Social media was significantly lower, as it always is. Social media is harmful for some people. It's the new cosmopolitan for other people. If you become a YouTuber, you can make a career. So I've put that in because I think that's important.

12:25

And going back to those young people if you can't cope with it, what happens then is, rather than feeling intrinsically motivated to take part, everything becomes extrinsically motivated. So you've got things impinging upon you so you might get put on report. I'm sure some of your families I've talked to you about report. They're usually traffic lighted, so you know a. You're marginalized by being on report. You can look weird in front of your peers, you're othered, you might go to isolation, you might be suspended, the schools. And what happens is when kids are ambivalent or not coping because there's no space to consider any of the underlying psychological reasons for that, you get the blame card being played Again I don't think deliberately or in an evil fashion by school teachers, but this is what happens. And then you might get a kid isolated, sometimes permanently excluded.

13:17

And if you think about that, going back to the self-determination theory model, if you're only extrinsically motivated and you never feel intrinsically motivated, if you don't feel a sense of competence, if your school isn't a place where you belong and you have no choice or autonomy, you're going to suffer. It's completely inevitable that you're going to suffer. And those are the young people I've been working with the last 10, 12 years. They're the only young people I've seen and they're not unique. Like I said, I would suggest in some parts of the country and in some schools, I would suggest the majority of children feel like that and that is extremely heartbreaking.

13:51

The data is there, can't get away from it. But we're in a phase at the moment where the government policy, because of the nature of how humans evolve, changes very, very, very, very slowly. Everyone's schooled, very, very, very, very slowly. Everyone's schooled. So even when families see this going on, often it takes a really brave, risk-taking parent to remove their child from school, doesn't it? Because the schooling ontology, or what I call the schooling paradigm, is very entrenched in our minds. Our whole sense of being is related to it. So even if you know that psychological background and you know that the fundamental human needs of your child are being completely roughshod ridden over, it's still really difficult as a parent, isn't it to go?

14:29

I'm going to take my child out, because then what? Then you need a completely different ontology. You need a different worldview about what education is, and that's like asking people to change their fundamental ontology about education, about God. It's that big a thing.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

14:47

Yeah, no, it's like the sky isn't blue, the sky is red. I mean it really is. You have to almost. I mean it's mind blowing.

14:54

You know, I never thought I would be someone who now views education the way I view education, if that makes any sense. You know what I mean. You almost can't understand that you're going to. You know it's a big journey to get there and your child is the one that leads you there and unfortunately, I know, for myself and a lot of my listeners it took too long. You know what I mean. I let too much damage happen to a degree. You know what I mean. You feel guilt about it, I think as a parent, because and some parents who are still trapped within the system, even you know, even my daughter's in a specialist independent school where she's really well taken care of, but there have been points where she's not wanted to go to school and the school's trying to force you still to go to school and you, as your parent, realize like no, this isn't the right thing. You know it, really it it makes you question your belief system and you have to change it and that's very very, very hard.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

15:43

And I think as a society it's not a laddered thing, it doesn't just go up somewhere. I think it's much messier than that. It's a whole like visceral, mysterious combination of factors that are existing all around us all the time. So it's not just schooling. Is it because the job market, for example, compels credentials and just the sense of who we are as human beings and concepts like social mobility and meritocracy and all these other things you're sort of marinated in throughout your school life as a, but you become an adult. It's very difficult to break free of it. So I think that's when good time to link, link back to sort of learning communities and the sort of right respecting consent-based, self-directed learning approaches, and they're all slightly different, but the, from what I can understand it anyway and I haven't visited all of them I've spoke to a lot of people who work in them and when doing some research, ioe at the moment UCL, really trying to establish what's going on in those places, and there's a really good piece of research done last academic year by one of my students, like I said, and she found that in this particular learning community they had a very strong sense of autonomy, they had very good levels of relatedness. They felt real belonging there, and these are young people often who are neurodivergent, so young people who really couldn't cope with school, and often they end they go to learning communities. Because of that and the difficulty though and this is the interesting part, and we're working with the community now like freedom to learn, for example, we want to bring them in and other people to try and help other people to understand this or run in learning communities. The young people find it difficult to feel competent because they've been also conditioned that competence relates to test scores and schooled conceptualizations of success. So that's the challenge.

17:22

So our society. We know that the materialist schooling paradigm doesn't work. I think most people now are starting to realize that, slowly as it is, there are obviously a lot of teachers out there the ones in positions of power who are maintaining the status quo, who are unwilling to look at the amount of distress and harm caused by keeping things the same. But I think there are a lot of teachers out there who know this, you know, and there are a lot of teachers out there who know this, you know, and there are a lot of families out there, of course, you know this better than many who know this, but shifting to a worldview where you start to do something really different is hard.

17:58

So what the learning communities are trying to do often is really foster autonomy, really foster belongingness and do things like and this is also what I've been doing at states of mind which we've talked about before right is, rather than starting with a rigid curricula, standardization, rigid objectives and excellence, you start with questions or you start with provocations, whereby the young people work with supportive adult mentors or, you know, educators to co-construct what they're doing and to co-construct what success looks like. Now that's super, super radical for a schooled mind, because that's the complete opposite of what schooling is. But what that does do, is it?

18:39

aligns very neatly with what we know about human social psychology, though. So that's the exciting thing for me, which is why I'm really leaning into this work and trying to add some gravitas to the work so that the learning communities feel strong and so that people can see it's not a stupid thing or dangerous thing for their young people to go to these places, because they are doing things in a way that allows human beings to flourish. So that's very exciting to me human beings to flourish so that's very exciting to me. And, um, at states of mind, we've managed to do this over five years in a normal inverted commas crap word, but you know what I mean secondary mainstream schools with teenagers, or we'll sit down with them and go. We'll start with how are you, and you go from there. You know, and now, if you give them that space, they're schooled, of course. So it takes them a while to go. What, what the hell is this? We don't normally have any autonomy, we don't normally have a chance to ask questions, we don't normally have a chance to co-construct what we're doing. So it takes as slow as delicate, it takes like a whole academic year to do this with groups of students about what is school evaluation, what elements of education should be evaluated? And then go. Well, how do we explore that further? So they've interviewed teachers, they've done focus groups with students, they spoke to ex-office instructors, they've read lots of academic papers, pulled it all together and then they co-constructed an education evaluation framework called the Review for Progress and Development. There's nothing special about us, there's nothing special about these young people. It's an ontology, it's a way of being when thinking about what education is. And on the back of that, these young people, they presented at international conferences. They presented to the Education Select Committee. They were part of the Beyond Ofsted project.

20:20

We went to parliament with three of the young people. They've written articles and that started from just going. How are you? You? What would you like to talk about?

20:30

And, of course, if you're a young person in school, it doesn't take them long to figure out, when they start talking to one another, actually the way our education is evaluated through the accountability structures we have now. That's the root cause of the way that the teachers are forced to behave, it's the way that we the root cause of the reasons that you know, that we're coerced into being educated in this way, etc. So there's a real childism within our structures that just assumes young people can't do that. And if you don't use what is commonly referred to sort of explicit instruction, nothing will happen at all. Or that if you don't have predefined rigid success criteria defined at the beginning, nothing will happen and it or that if you don't have predefined rigid success criteria defined at the beginning, nothing will happen, and it's absolute nonsense.

21:13

So the success criteria of that particular project was we want to make a documentary, which they did. We want to write papers. They've been in the Guardian, interviewed by Fiona Miller. You know that's a different allocation of success criteria. But it wasn't forced. And when you don't't force people, let's go back to self-determination theory. If people have autonomy, if they feel a sense of belonging within the group and they feel competent, they'll feel intrinsically motivated.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

21:36

So a lot of the young people within that group.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

21:39

They were doing work outside the sessions. So it's an hour half a week. We'd work with them and a lot of them would say, can we do work outside the sessions? Some of them have joined, like the fair education alliance, different organizations as part of the youth body. So it's actually mind-blowing what happens if you say to people and we know this in our own lives when we feel really intrinsically motivated to do something, how good it feels when you do it. There's literally no reason other than ideology that education can't look like that more often. And that's the argument waking.

22:07

Really, there's nothing special about me or states of mind or the young people. These are young people from new and borough in london, which is again inverted commas one of the most deprived boroughs in the in the country. Those are supposed to be hard to reach children absolute nonsense. If you, if they consent, they opt in, if you help them to co-construct something together in a nest of faith in like their humanity and their intelligence, it's quite amazing what they can do and every again.

22:33

I think everyone implicitly knows that as well. Everyone knows that when you choose something, when you have autonomy, that's when you do your best stuff. When you feel coerced or compelled or extrinsically motivated by sort of external factors. That's when you don't feel happy and when you do your worst stuff. That makes sense. So I feel quite hopeful.

22:54

You know, and one of the things I said to before we came on is that there's a curriculum review out at the moment from the government and for the first time I think ever, there's a government who's asking for people to write onto the consultation, right um into it, sorry if they're not using the national curriculum, if they're not using the national curriculum, if they're not following a traditional curriculum. So if anyone's interested in that, please do add to it, because I actually think home educate, home education groups or people who are interacting in that way I personally perceive that that is, of course, as legitimate a form of education as any, and you have a voice and you should use it, because you know it might not change anything overnight, but it's part of a conversation that is definitely shifting absolutely and good to be included in that conversation, or at least you know, called out to be included in that conversation.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

23:38

Because, as you said, like uh, and you know, there's one step further too. We, we use these standardized tests and and the way we are you making our youth accountable in education. You know through GCSEs and what kind of job you're going to get, but actually the skills that they need are exactly the kind of skills that they're getting from these kind of programs that you've been running in schools, where you know you're intrinsically motivated, you're. You know you're going the extra mile. I mean that is what we need in our workforce. You know you're going the extra mile.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

24:12

I mean that is what we need in our workforce, not someone who is kowtowing, basically Sure, and there's a sort of silly retort to the sort of work as well that we're doing, which makes no sense at all, which is, oh, it's kind of easy. There's nothing easier than just having a rigid curriculum and making people learn it. That's the easiest way you can conceptualize learning really easy to do that. It's much more difficult to start much in an open dialogue form and co-construct with people. It's much more difficult and it creates much more shift in people's internal sense of themselves and their sense of self-awareness. If you're just following a curriculum and writing an essay on world war ii or you're doing something that's in the curriculum about, you know the wind and weathering on the british coastlines in geography, or you're you know doing um algebra in maths, that's very prescriptive. I'm not saying you don't learn anything like that of course you do, but the difficulty in terms of you as a human being showing up and working in a way that allows you to develop things like self-awareness, capacity to listen to and authentically collaborate with others, understand your power in the world, what you can do, how you can influence different elements of our society, whether it be a political level or a local level. You can do this stuff through that sort of co-construction work. That stuff happens and you see the young people grow. If you do it for an academic year, an hour and a half a week, you actually see them grow, and when you ask them at the end, it's really quite astonishing the sort of things that they'll say in terms of what they perceive has happened to them as a human being by going through a process where they interact with the projects based on their own strengths and aspirations. So some young people, for example, will be really adept at talking about the work and they'll be the ones who do the conferences. Some young people prefer to write the sort of position statements or documentation. Some young people just want to take part in the discussions, and that's fine.

26:06

I think what we're arguing is if young people don't want to take an enormous role in something, or they want to take an enormous role in something, we think that's fine. What's more important is that they have autonomy and they consent. So which brings me on to another thing, olivia, that we've been thinking a lot about the states of mind, which is unbelievably pertinent in the school system, is that there's a lot of talk about consent in our society it's usually around sex and relationships, but it's never about schooling. And when we've asked young people how often or when have you had an opportunity to consent to what's happening to you in schooling, the responses to that have been really mind-blowing. We've had young people literally just think for a minute and then burst into tears. That's happened numerous times because it suddenly hits them.

26:48

By asking these questions, they're building a sense of self-awareness that they hadn't been able to see before, because thinking about how systems impact on us isn't mandated as part of education. So the most important thing in our view, psychologically for a human being to grow is understanding ourselves and how things impact upon us and our place, who we are and why we are. When you ask those questions, it's very distressing to begin with. You know. So a young person might realize okay, I haven't consented to what I learn, how I learn, when I learn, who I learn with, at what pace I learn or how that's evaluated ever for 10 years and that's what schooling is that's there's no way

27:22

around that. So the consent element is something that's really come into our consciousness recently. Following that, I had a really awful Twitter pile on when I mentioned consent in schooling, and lots of traditional shall we say teachers really went for the jugular. And there are other commenters on there who are thinking about education in different ways, just noticing aloud how problematic that is. That, if you ask just the question, when do young people have an opportunity to consent as part of their schooling experience, that was so triggering for people that there was loads of ad hominem attacks about me being arrogant, about me being an academic who doesn't understand that sort of thing. You can imagine that happening. So that's another thing that I think the learning communities and home educators are able to do right. You're able to really genuinely invite consent and also accept that if a young person says no, their life is not over, you know. So, if you think about that in a schooling context, if a young person is really not coping, for example, with the academic curriculum and they just remove consent, there are different ways we can manage that. We can try and construct, within that schooling paradigm, ways of including them that doesn't force them so much. So some schools go above and beyond, don't they? And you'll have come across these ones. They'll form like alternative classes, for example within the school, trying to do the best they can within the schooling paradigm to include the young person by allowing them to pursue elements of interest or things that they buy into for at least some of the time. But the general response is through behavior policies, isn't? It is to say, that's oppositional, that's inappropriate, and if we keep doing that, we're just going to keep causing an enormous amount of suffering. Going back to self-determination theory again, if you're only extrinsically motivated, you're not going to thrive, and consent isn't in that theory, which is why I wanted to bring it in, because it's it's a real topic, isn't it? And since me too, and black lives matter and things, clearly great that these discussions are happening. But I guess what I'm asserting is I think it's really important that we actually hold that mirror up to our institutions, and that includes also the biomedical model.

29:32

When people are being diagnosed by psychiatry, have they consented to you labeling them as abnormal? Because I don't think they often have. Has a child consented to be made to learn academically even though they feel astonishing low self-worth from it? Have they consented to that? I don't think they have. So is our goal to teach young people that actually consent is irrelevant, because that's what they're learning? And what kind of adults does that create when they go out into the world? If they then get into a position of power in a capitalist society and they've learned that if you're in power you don't need to invite consent, what happens there?

30:11

So I guess one of our hypotheses is a lot of the issues in our society around consent in adulthood are literally and directly mirrored by the way that schooling treats children, which basically says we can talk about consent around sexual relationships, but if you remove consent or don't actively consent, even though it's causing you profound suffering, that's irrelevant and if you say no, you're inappropriate.

30:37

So that's just another bit to add in that. I think we've got to face up to that as a society, because if we don't, the lessons that that's teaching children is extremely repugnant and pernicious. It surely cannot create adults who are then going to be good husbands, wives, managers, whatever. If that's your internal working model of how the world should treat others and the other thing is, it's just going to lead to psychopathology, isn't it? Because people don't have any autonomy and they don't feel competent and they don't feel they belong. They're not going to be able to do anything but suffer, and I guess there's a lot of the children that the families that the podcast families listen to, sorry. Well, that'll really resonate, I'm sure, and I wonder about consent as well, to what extent that resonates with parents.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

31:25

No, absolutely Chris. That's what I was thinking. I mean you, you as a parent, don't have that autonomy yourself with your child who doesn't want to go to school. And I've experienced this myself, as have many of my listeners, where your child, the thought of going to school, is so scary and frightening and they just can't do it for whatever reason. It is, whatever you know, whatever is causing that, it's real, you know, know, and they are in high amount of stress and you have the school calling you saying you have to send that child in. There are fines, there are prison sentences. It's been on, uh, social media, it's been on the radio last, this year. I mean, you know, is your child really sick? Is it just a sore throat? And they're, you know, they're not. So you, as a parent, almost feel like this, this, the state is coming down on you. And I've experienced, I, you know they're not. So you, as a parent, almost feel like this, this, the state is coming down on you. And I've experienced, I was, you know, there was one point where I was actually dressing my daughter because she, you know, she did not want to go to school.

32:16

And I, that was my, my watershed moment. I said you know what? I'm never doing this again, alexandra. I'm not making her go back to school until you understand and address the issue that she is having in terms of socialization at school. That was her particular issue and I said until you can help us with this, she's not going to school and I'm exerting my right and I'm telling her she doesn't have to go. But up until that point, as a doctor, as someone who really follows all the rules, never tells a lie and is a really honest person, totally, you know what I mean it was really hard to stand up and say no, exactly, and you've been conditioned by that exact thing we just talked about, haven't you?

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

33:01

That you don't have the right to consent? Yeah, and schooling just is self-evident and there's no such thing as consent. And you know, know, so many parents, I mean, have been through what you've been through, olivia, and it's really heartbreaking to watch the guilt that comes along with that and all the other emotional complexities. So I just think we have to look at that much more carefully and that's one of the things we're working on. And I'm just to shout to square peg as well, because that's one of the core things that the roots of all square pegs work. And ellie costello's an unbelievable stuff in terms of getting some of this narrative out there, just by working her butt off, really, and making connections with people who are in positions of authority. So I do think there's great people out there, and that includes a lot of families who are working on this stuff, and that gives me a lot of and I'm just seeing more and more of this work happening very slowly and more and more people leaning into it and starting to sort of pull back the sort of veil of obscurity that materialism has sort of pushed onto us for generations. And it's difficult, isn't it. It's slow, and some people are very entrenched in that ontology and they think that schooling is great and it needs to stay as it is, and so there's lots of competing ideologies. But I think if there's one thing to take away from what I'm trying to say today is that the schooling paradigm and the biomedical paradigm as well, in terms of diagnosis etc. It's not based in evidence. They're both profoundly ideological, and if you ask someone what's the actual evidence that schooling works, there's never been any.

34:36

So all the research around education assumes that schooling is fine, generally speaking, and the research then begins from that assumption. What we're trying to do square peg states of mind and um with some of the researchers I'm working with at IOE, some of the students is not start from that point at all. It's to start from the point of how are you? How's it going? Because when you start with how's it going, what we then perceive is you can genuinely construct some evidence around what's happening to people. If you just say schooling is fine, let's do a study that figures out how best to move dyslexic children up to sub levels of progress. Or if you assume that everything's fine and you do a study that researches the impact of a school report or checklist for behavior. That might help a few children in a very, very, very marginal way, but it's not going to change any of the underpinning ideologies that cause severe distress.

35:32

So we're trying to sort of move away from what really brilliant education philosopher, gert biesta, calls complexity reduction. So we're trying to embrace the complexity and embrace the uncertainty and go okay, what's your experience of these institutions? How can we find out more about your experience of those institutions and others and then co-construct different ways these institutions could be or a completely different institution, and that's what we construct as evidence-based practice. We don't perceive that evidence-based practice can start by just completely accepting an institution that is quite clearly causing huge stress. It'd be like someone owning a car or a brand of car with a massive fatality rates and, instead of evaluating the car itself, look at the weather on the days when it happened.

36:19

It doesn't make sense. You know. You've got to look at the actual fundamental thing that's going on with the object causing the pain. You know, and it's um, it's really interesting that that's. It shows you how deeply schooling paradigm has got around our consciousness, that almost all education research just assumes schooling's fine, it starts from there and and from that mispoint you miss the entire point, and it's very evident with your example there.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

36:44

With the car, it's like, oh yeah, why wouldn't you look at the car? But we don't make that leap. But it sounds like, chris, you do have hope for the future. Your passion in terms of rethinking education and your rationale is just. I mean, it blows my mind as well. Every time I talk to you it gets my neurons firing and fired up. You're writing a book, I presume, about this topic.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

37:08

Yeah, it's really exciting.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

37:10

Can you share with us what you're writing about?

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

37:11

Yeah, so I'm writing a couple of books, but there's probably the one that's most pertinent to this conversation is the States of Mind book. So we're not quite sure what to call it yet, but maybe it'd be called States of Mind, exploring Democratic Approaches to education, or something like that. And it's linked with the project I explained earlier, the Break in the Silence project around the young people constructing an education evaluation framework. It's just one of our projects. So my colleague Bea Herbert, who's the founder of States of Mind, she also did projects. One was called the Wellbeing Ambassador Project, where young people would work with other young people in the school to figure out how is everyone feeling here, how do people perceive the mental health needs of our colleagues, our peers, to be met, and then they would co-construct different ways of re-conceptualizing that, feeding it back to the school leadership team so they could change practices. So those it's the same kind of approach, right, but just like different topic.

38:00

But the book is really trying to bring all of this work together and it's sort of structured in two parts. The the book is really trying to bring all of this work together and it's sort of structured in two parts. The first part is really delineating how the schooling paradigm and the biomedical paradigm mirror one another and we've touched on that today, how you have a schooling paradigm that's really focused and undergirded by what what I'm sort of working title of this is sort of activating cognition, and I think the activating cognition that's underneath everything is fear of uncertainty, fear of losing, and built on top of that, I'm calling it the nest of fear. It's the first time I'm saying this to anyone, by the way, outside my colleagues, so it's it's a little work in progress, but this is what the book's based around. So you've got the nest of fear here, which is like uncertainty and fear of losing, and then out of that you get this materialism, which is the idea that everything that exists and it has value is objectively measurable and can be standardized, and from that emits the schooling paradigm and the biomedical paradigm. The biomedical paradigm, of course, suggests that the way that you deal with mental health and you'll know this as a doctor, of course is in the same way you deal with a you know e-coli, which is you diagnose something that's innately or biologically amiss with the person and that person is either normal or abnormal. So that's very materialist. So it's based on objective, standardized criteria, ignores the psychosocial elements, the person's experience, you know if they're being abused, if they're struggling in school. None of those elements of the presentation are acceptable to our biomedical paradigm. So you'll get young people diagnosed as adhd or conduct disorder, oppositional defiance disorder, etc. Etc.

39:42

And in the schooling paradigm what materialism looks like is standards, accountability, so progress, eight and that's the excellence narrative, and those things just encircle the whole schooling paradigm itself. Everything within schooling is based around those things. And then, of course, rampant and non-consenting data generation. So the amount of data that is generated on young people without parents knowing and without young people knowing is extremely problematic and quite concerning. And with the onset of ai, most parents will now be aware that things are being trapped using algorithmic, mathematical operations where parents are essentially being judged and their children are being judged based on very specific success criteria. That is again materialist. And now that's moving online, so you're going to have data following people online for their whole lives. So this is part of the materialism.

40:38

And then the next bit is sort of overt practices that you see coming from that. So you'll see things like high. So you'll see things like high stakes exams. You'll see things like diagnosis. You'll see things like exclusion, suspensions, etc. So what we're trying to do is sort of diagnose that sort of nest of fear.

40:54

And then our proposal is nest of faith. So the idea is faith in common humanity, so that's faith in our capacity to build things together without a rigid, codified framework, and the other one is faith in ourselves. So I just perceive that those two models they're so fear-based that they make no assumptions about what we're actually able to do together as people. We've completely submitted to essentially mathematical algorithms to define who we are and how we're labeled, whether that's a checklist for a strengths and difficulties questionnaire in the mental health world, or an exam score that is coded online, or a young person's report that's sort of red, amber or green. These are all bizarre, datified ways of conceptualizing human life.

41:42

And we're talking about, in the nest of faith, believing in ourselves that we can actually identify who we are and why we are, both within ourselves, in an internalized self-awareness fashion, and also with others. So from the nest of faith we get this thing, and I'm still working on this, but I think the idea is a sort of safe uncertainty, so just sort of embracing the fact that everyone's different, every community is different. We shouldn't be scared of that uncertainty. We need to embrace it and we shouldn't be scared of not having pre-defined inflexible curricula either. If you look at how human beings have evolved over many thousands of years, that's come through people co-designing stuff together, um, and that moves us away from this really illegitimate, problematic datification narrative that you have with the materialist ontology.

42:35

If you have a safe, uncertainty ontology in terms of the way you think about the world, you embrace the mystery and the uncertainty and the messy miracles that human beings are, and and then from that you can get things like co-production. You can get these like authentic listening. You can get things like critical thinking and authentic creativity. And what you can get from that, if you think about some of the states of mind work, is you can get kids making documentaries like 17-year-olds making documentaries. You can get 17-year-olds talking to politicians like 17-year-olds making documentaries. You can get 17-year-olds talking to politicians. You can get 17-year-olds writing presentations and delivering them to head teachers. And all of that comes from what we call in the nest of faith, which is a belief in common humanity and ourselves, and all of that emanates out from that.

43:18

So that's kind of what the book is about, and then in the second part as well. We're going to present some case study examples of what that looks like actually in action, evidenced by our own practice. So that's really exciting me at the moment, to be honest, getting all this sort of work we've done over a long time, yeah onto a page so that people can have a look at it and see what they think. You know, and it's uh, you know there are a lot of people who are going to hate it, of course, because it's very contrary to the prevailing winds, shall we say, around what education is. But we think it's got value.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

43:54

I think a lot of people are going to really appreciate it, though, as well, chris, because people are so caught up in that nest of fear and that their child doesn't fit in that nest of fear that they can't even think about a nest of hope. And you know different ways. And if you look at the world and all the oh gosh, every time I turn on the news there's a flood here, there's this happening there. You know, we need to think. We need to have people who can collaborate, who can think out of the box, who can meet uncertainty and challenge. That's what we need in terms of preparing our youth for for the world that they're going to inherit from us.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

44:31

So I look forward to reading it, as I'm sure. So what? Do you have? A timeline, or is that putting too much pressure on you? I'm still at the proposal stage, olivia. I'm getting way ahead of myself, but we've had some interest for well you know the proposal is the big bit once you've got the proposal down, if if you've nailed that properly, then the rest should be easy.

44:43

I mean, I've written, probably me and Bea, but predominantly me because Bea's had twins. She won't mind me sharing that. So she's quite busy, so I've written the vast majority of it.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

44:52

I can imagine.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest

44:54

The proposal is almost done and we've got some interest from some cool publishers, so we think it's going to happen and you're really excited to share it. And I think what you just said there is so powerful. And the more we think about stuff, the more we've realized it generalizes. So things like the climate, things like the natural world, if you grow up in a world where everything is entirely and hyper-individualized, so the only thing that's legitimate is your own individual success, competing with others whether that's school versus school, child versus child that doesn't breed a capacity to look at what's going on around you and invite consent. And I'm also talking here about animals and trees. I mean our perception is that why are we assuming that we should just destroy things without even considering whether that thing has consented? And I mean I wouldn't necessarily call them things either. These are sentient beings, you know. Trees are alive, animals are alive, the planet is alive. So if we don't invite the consent of those, I'm going to call them colleagues.

45:56

If you read some people's books, you know there's a brilliant book called Brady and Sweetgrass, which I recommend to any listeners to read, which is talking about traditional forms of ontology, really in the American Indian world, and you will obviously know more about this than me, I would imagine, in some ways. But talking about how you conceptualize the planet, nature and how it's there, conceptualized as colleagues, rather than things, they require consent, you know, then there was a huge amount of ritual and right behavior around, you know, inviting the consent of nature before you take things from it. And again, this, this language, is anachronistic, I think, because it's not an it and it's not a thing. There's a plant there in the corner of my room. I don't treat that as a thing and I don't, you know, I'm not going to just rip it out of the ground without thinking about whether that's the right thing to do for this particular living organism. So I do think. Again, this all reflects in the school system, because there's no space for you to, within the school system, to go. What's going on around me? What do I need to do to really deeply consider what the needs are of the things around me? It's all about following those material structures, isn't it? And getting those credentials, and that's all it is.

47:10

Now, if we want to have a planet whereby, as you just said, people are able to co-construct ways of being successfully together without arguing and just falling immediately into ad hominem arguments and splitting people into good and bad. You've got to practice that that doesn't just happen. So there's this bizarre thing where people leave school and then suddenly they're expected to A have great self-awareness, know who they are and why they are. They're supposed to be great at working together with people. They're supposed to understand the world, how to engage with political structures and institutions. And I've worked now with a lot of young people at university level and they haven't world how to you know, engage with political structures and institutions. And you know, I've worked now with a lot of young people at university level and they haven't got a scooby-doo how to do that.

47:50

And it's a kind of laughing ongoing joke um, sardonic joke, you know, amongst a lot of university lecturers because they're like, well, the students are coming here and they don't know how to do anything apart from follow curriculum.

48:03

And I get a bit frustrated with the academics sometimes because I'm like, well, that's not their fault. Now you can't walk into a university environment and suddenly know how to you know, pose research questions, explore them and think coherently and strategically with other people and co-produce outcomes. That takes a lot of practice. So I think that's one of the things we're trying to link in with. So it's like how can we help people to really think about genuine consent, psychological approaches that invite flourishing? Self-determination theory is just one lens. There are many others like locus of control and many other theories that will also align. And also, how can you co-produce realities that are going to mean that our species and our planet thrives? And I don't see that schooling is meeting any of those needs right now and that materialist ontology, where everything is standardized, doesn't allow it. We've got to move to a different ontology and I think it's happening slowly and in some places.

Dr Olivia KesselHost

48:59

Which is a good way to end, which is hope for the future.

49:03

That ball is rolling and I think your book will highlight it as well, and I'm going to very much look forward to you coming back onto the podcast when you've published the book or just beforehand, because I have a feeling that a lot of my listeners will be very interested, including myself, in reading it. And it's just, it is such a pleasure that you and the fantastic, intelligent people and kids that you work with, you know, who have been formulating and testing these hypotheses and these ideas, and all the learning communities out there. You know. A big thanks, actually, because all of our children are going to benefit Maybe not ours right now, but our grandkids, our great grandkids, hopefully as this education system and, as you said, your passion in terms of rethinking the education system and doing things differently. So I want to say a big thanks, chris, for coming on the show again and celebrating our birthday, but also it's just such a pleasure. You have an incredible mind and it's been such a pleasure for you to share.