EP 34: Rethinking Education: Unmasking Failures and Embracing Innovation with Dr. Chris Bagley

Speaker Dr Chris Bagley

Please excuse any errors as this transcript has been automatically generated

Dr Olivia KesselHost00:06

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. In this episode we will be speaking with Dr Chris Bagley, a psychologist with an interest in educational transformation and systems change. He is director of research at Social Enterprise States of Mind and a tutor at the Institute of Education University College of London.

01:06

We will explore together the origins of education and the sad reality that not much has evolved over time in our current system. But there are pockets of education emerging under the radar which are looking at education and learning very differently. So welcome, dr Bagley. It is a true pleasure to have you on the Send Parenting Podcast. You're an educational psychologist and you focus on educational transformational change, so I am so excited today to pick your brain about education, especially because there are some problems, i would say within the education system in the UK that I've uncovered during my parenting journey And I've listened to some of your podcasts and read up on you and you have some really interesting insights into not only the current education system but kind of where we've come from, kind of some of our misconceptions about education or the foundation of where education is developed from. So I guess I'd like to kick it off with saying welcome and asking you what your views are on education in general.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest02:19

I guess to start Hi Olivia, thanks for having me Very nice, big, broad, open question. To begin with, i like it. So what are my opinions on education? Well, i guess it's probably helpful to start a couple of years ago when I got into the education sector. I say a couple of years ago. I was a teacher for five years and I've now been a psychologist for about 10 years and throughout those 15 years I guess what's happened in my mind is a gradual at first but then a deepening transformation in my perceptions of what education is.

02:50

And the discrepancy between education and schooling and the extent to which it's possible for schooling to meet the needs of all young people has dawned on me over the last decade in particular. Being an educational psychologist and working in people of fail units and with excluded young people and the youth justice system and child prisons those have been my main areas of practitioner work. It's just dawned on me that all of the young people I work with, pretty much the school system, has either actively impeded their mental health, in some cases harmed it, with a very small minority of those young people, which is obviously now hundreds and hundreds of young people and families, being in a very much less content and significantly less happy state of mind as a consequence of education, and those of families where, for example, they become marginalised or ostracised in some way from the school system, sometimes within a school, or sometimes permanently excluded. They're often invisible, aren't they, to the vast majority of young people in the country, but obviously, to me, they've been the people that I've been working most closely with, and I've been marinated in the family dynamics and the schooling dynamics and the societal structures that impinge upon the school system that allow that to happen. So I guess, if I summarise my school view, really, it would be that it's not possible for schooling in its current form possibly in any form, and we might talk about that to meet the needs of all young people and to genuinely be education for all, and I think there's a very significant difference between education and schooling.

04:26

And one other note on that is I'm not saying that schooling in its current form you know, discrete academic subjects, for example in secondary schools, and doing examinations that are written, are horrendous for all children. They're certainly not. Some children thrive in that environment. Some people like that way of learning. Some young people respond positively to it. What I am saying, though, is I think we've got to be very careful and I don't think we are being careful as a society in positioning education as one very specific, narrow, one-size-fits-all thing And having done that we're causing a lot of problems for young people and families And I know that you know many listeners to the podcast a little bit will have had experiences whereby they haven't really felt that schooling is constitute education and it may well have constituted something much more harmful. So I guess the short version there, but I think that's probably where my experiences have led to.

Dr Olivia KesselHost05:19

It's very interesting points you make there, because there's a general consensus among the local authority, or what I've heard is that you know we want to have a one-size-fits-all approach, because then we're not segregating or segmenting children. And my thoughts lie with yours in that one-size-fits-all doesn't work And homogenizing makes it challenging. Yes, there are some that will thrive, but there are those that will not, and the system is based almost on a one-third failure rate. That that's acceptable. So, um, it's a conundrum, because how do you then educate the masses?

Dr Chris BagleyGuest06:00

Yeah, it's a good question And I think that's where my work with states of mind started really. So I met with a really interesting person called be her, but who I'm still working with at states of mind. She's the founder and I'm director of research there and we wanted to ask young people you know, what are the social determinants of your mental health and well-being? and What happened then Olivia was a gigantic tsunami of dialogue and Emotion and real strength of feeling about the school system and the fact that the school system isn't Something that's perceived by teens, and we've spoke to young people across many, many, many schools now. The entire of Newumbura, for example, in East London, has had access to states of mind's work and be, or I have engaged with young people in all of these schools. So you're talking thousands of young people now and the trends are very, very stark. And we've obviously got data to back this up and it you can see it in the OECD data, you can see this in the World Health Organization data, you can see it in data released by the Edge Foundation recently and many other spaces. That it's it's not working for young people And we wanted to try and figure out. Well, what can it look like in a completely different World, with a very different world view, and what we've tended to do at states of mind is use and I participate your action research approach, which takes a very different stance to the prevailing education reality We have, and what you do then is you position young people as active participants rather than passive subjects. So what that entails is co-production, working with young people to think together about what education means, about what things I'd like to pursue, about what questions They'd like to ask, about what kind of data they'd like to generate. How would they like to put that data out to other people, how do they want to disseminate their knowledge? And you're probably aware of the break in the silence project, which is where we co-constructed with some young people over four years, an education evaluation framework.

07:56

Now, that was really painstaking, slow, complex work and this idea that that's woolly or easy, or In some way letting young people off the hook, to sit down with them and ask them if you wanted to explore the world around you, if you wanted to co-create something, what are you going to do? The idea that that's easy is completely ludicrous. It's much easier to teach a preset, predefined authoritarian curriculum and remove children from a school climate where they don't fit in or where they're non-compliant. It's much easier to do compulsion than co-creation. But what we've demonstrated is not just us doing this. There are other schools around the country doing this and they wouldn't describe themselves as schools and maybe we'll come on to those. They feel like learning communities and democratic schools Yeah, definitely one. They're taking a similar approach and the young people are not going to hell. You know they're not suffering and Again, i'm not saying all children you go to school suffer. But what we have learned from talking to many, many, many young people, teenagers in particular and you can see similar patterns in primary, but it gets worse in secondary school when the level of compulsion gets ratcheted up. We can see the damage that's caused by that, and I guess what we've tried to demonstrate I think we have done and the young people created a documentary. They've spoken to the Education Select Committee. They've presented numerous conferences. I'm in touch with them every month. They're part of the Beyond Offstead Coalition who's currently pushing back against that.

09:23

Now, here's the thing with this, though right. The current school system as it sits Would not define that the young people have done any work there, because there's no exam, there's no objective measurement of their success, there are no grades. Everything is done in a dialogic sense. So all of the assessment and evaluation is done by human beings talking to one another and co-developing research, questions, tools to explore the world and then co-deciding how to generate data and What to do with that. Now, those skills are absolutely critical for a human being growing up in the world. But then what they also do is they don't standardize things to the point where some young people are immediately going to be marginalized. What it does and what we're starting to call this is constellation leadership is it allows young people to be part of a constellation, and What that basically means is in a constellation, different stars are brighter at different times. Right, depends how you're looking at the constellation, depends what time of the day It is, what day of the month. That is what the activity is. So what we notice is when you use participatory action, research approaches or you use co-production as your worldview Rather than standardized curriculum, what you'll notice is young people's various different strengths and Challenges emerge and they begin to know what they are, and what you can then do is figure out with them How do you want to approach this problem and some young people wanted to talk about it with others.

10:51

They'd be the ones presented to their headteachers or doing the conferences. Some of the other ones, they prefer to write about it. So we've got this review for progress and development, which these young people co-created, and some of them really wanted to write And that bit. Others were really keen and we didn't quite get on to this because we run out of time. They wanted to create some artwork to go with it and others were really good at organizing, so they organized Focus groups for teachers and the organized focus groups with the students to discuss.

11:18

You know, how should your school be evaluated? What should the success criteria be? So, as you can see, there's loads and loads and loads of skills and attributes you can develop there alongside knowing yourself. But to get back to what I said a minute ago, the school system as it currently stands would position that nothing's happened there, that no work has taken place, because there's no pre-objective Outcome, there's no standardized assessment. So that's just one thing. And then you know there are lots of learning communities in England at the moment who are taking a more self-directed or consent based approach to educating young people, where young people are at the center and they're leading And they're co-producing with adults what the curriculum looks like. And there are obviously democratic schools as well, like all around Europe, and this is not really well known about, but it's very fascinating area.

Dr Olivia KesselHost12:06

How does democratic schools differ from self-directed? I'm familiar with self direct, more familiar with self-directed education versus democratic education. Is it similar in philosophy?

Dr Chris BagleyGuest12:16

I think it really depends. You know, i think You'll be aware of Summerhill School, i'm sure, which is one of the first to trial this, and there are lots of others around Europe that are slightly different. But yeah, i think self-directed education in England at the moment tends to be more based around younger students. So there's lots of primary-age self-directed learning communities, for example, and I, to be honest with you, though I think the main philosophies are quite similar and they overlap significantly. But what you might get in a democratic school, for example, is older young people, certainly still in the European context. So some of those young people then they might wish to be taking exams, right, they might want to go to university, and we can't subvert the normal Tenets of the school systems all around the world. So it's a bit different in that sense. But what they have at their heart, i think, is a co-production of what the rules might be, co-production of what the curriculum might look like and co-production around everything from What to do in an altercation and how, to what the consequences of that might be, to what are we going to learn next Tuesday at 10 o'clock. And I think, if you think about John Dewey's work, who start one of the early, you know, advocates of this sort of thinking, and Derry Hanham, who you might be aware of is, is really pushing this hard and he was on James Mannion's podcast recently talking about this This idea that you can't become a Democrat unless you've done democracy. And that's at the heart of democratic schooling, you know, and Being a Democrat, knowing how to listen to other's views, knowing how to self-regulate, for example, when someone's views disagree with yours, knowing yourself, knowing what you actually think, recognizing that there are limits to what you think and that there are different forms and Structures and opinions in the world that might not agree with yours. These are very complicated things, aren't they?

14:07

And I think democratic schools, they always have these ideas at their core, whereas the school system, generally speaking, doesn't have any of that as part of its Formative offer, does it so? and that's not the fault of teachers, of course. You know teachers have a very, very difficult job to deliver a very narrow curriculum and The only world view you can really hold when you're doing that is one that is already Held by the system itself, the formative structures and the ideologies. So you need to Position yourself as a school in a league table in competition with other schools. Young people are in competition with with each other, aren't they? There's a very specific set of criteria that schools need to meet through off-stead, which includes moderating the language. So it's very specific types of words used. It even goes that intricate, and teachers are Surrounded by this, aren't they? they're encompassed by it.

15:02

And What I think self-directed learning communities doing, the democratic schools, is they're trying to remove those shackles in a very Direct way, in a very overt way, part of their ideology and philosophies. And we've got some students at the moment at IOE, the Institute of Education, who are looking at the extent to which Young people in mainstream secondary schools perceive that they have autonomy versus young people in self-directed learning communities. Because we want to try and start looking into this and gathering some information, gathering and generating data on it. Because, as a psychologist, one of the things I'm very clear about and it's absolutely well demonstrated in research on belonging, their self-determination theory, locus of control, other theories is that if a young person, or any human being, doesn't perceive they have any autonomy, doesn't perceive they have a sense of relatedness to others and doesn't feel like they have a sense of Competence in what they're doing, they can't thrive and, what I'm sure a lot of your listeners will have found is those things get subverted, often by the school system, particularly if a child has I'm going to use inverted commas SEN. And the only reason I'm doing that, olivia, because I actually would argue that the school system itself creates these pathologies in many cases.

16:18

And if the education system was more flexible and Allowed curricula to be co-produced, as I've already explained, hopefully in some depth there You wouldn't have these young people being labeled as things like dyslexic, adhd, oppositional defiance disorder, conduct disorder, things that are always being presented to me in psychiatric reports. But those things are coming out because they're suffering and they're not Perceiving autonomy and they don't perceive their competent and they don't perceive that they're connected to the young people around them very positively, because they're always being marginalized or excluded. So Long-winded answer there, but I feel like Those are the differences, if that makes sense, between the sort of self-directed education and democratic school context and the mainstream school context. So they're very stark, aren't there, those differences?

Dr Olivia KesselHost17:05

It's really interesting to me though, because you know, my background is a medical doctor and I come from a background of you know I was train 30 years ago and it was very much paternalistic. We tell you what to do, we don't need to worry about it, you have no autonomy as a patient. Actually, that doesn't work. You know, 50% of people don't take their medication, they don't remember what you tell them in a clinic's visit, and so it is been evolving, that actually autonomy, empowerment, getting the individual to take care of their own health care, and that they're an active participant in their health, in fact, the major participant in their health, and they need to be Provided with the tools and techniques so that they can actually take control of it.

17:47

And I see a lot of Links between that and education, because it's kind of similar. We, we tell children what to do, we tell them what they should learn, and then, if they can't do it because it's, you know, test that they can't take, it's multiple choice or whatever then they're stupid and that's it. You know, instead of actually giving them the the rain, so to speak, of their education or being part of that educational journey with schools and with and, as you say teachers are in the same. They're being strangulated by demands that are being put on them by offset and rules and regulations and what you should learn and what's gonna be tested on a G S G C. Why would they want to learn anything that wasn't gonna be on the G C C, you know? so that you know they're also constrained and not part of the, are not empowered or have any autonomy as well. So I think there's. I thought medicine was the Neanderthal in the world, but actually, the more I delve into education, i think it's actually behind healthcare.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest18:47

I mean, they're both there, are they?

18:50

They're both very similar yeah you know, obviously I'm a psychologist, so I sit between education and mental health and There's a really strong pushback, and this takes time because this is so embedded in our culture and maybe we'll come on to the history at some point. But The medical profession and the mental health profession and psychiatric profession, however you want to define it, and the school system, they work in this very complex, symbiotic way whereby the underpinning ideologies are very much around Individualizing pathology, aren't they? so there's something wrong with you as an individual. You are the problem, and the school system is that, and I can diagnose it exactly. So I can. I've got this list of symptoms here right, which is a checklist of phrases that are in themselves, entirely biased and created mainly by white male psychiatrist in America as part of the diagnostic statistics manual.

19:43

Now, if people let that sink in, that's ludicrous, isn't it? immediately, and once you decide that that's what reality is, you know that's a very specific ontology and obviously ontology for those listeners who aren't necessarily aware of the boring philosophical conundrums that academics are always whistling around But that's basically how you would view what reality actually is, and you touched on two things there, olivia, which are really interesting. So there's one ontology which suggests that Everything is measurable in an objective sense inverted commas and you can do that through creating checklists And standardizing human beings in a very simplistic way So that you can then create, basically, either a grade or a level of pathology and in the mental health system you might have. This person meets the criteria for ADHD Because they've done some questionnaires with the child and the family and the school often, and certain boxes have been checked. Now, obviously, this is usually problematic because it depends on the parents perspective. Now, parents have very interesting perspectives on their children, don't they, which the school might not share. The child has another, completely different perspective, and how do you actually marry those things up to then? go, well, this is reality because there are three different truths there. So we talk about this for hours.

21:08

Right, there's an ontological problem there in that who's reality there is the right reality And is the psychiatrist checklist true reality? I mean, i would argue that's not a very helpful way to assess again, inverted commas a human being And that's what the exam system does to write. It creates a standardized set of questions That are then assessed in a very problematic way With another, underpending ideology that deliberately consigns one third of the young people who take those exams to failure. Now, those are very dehumanizing measures. So if you take the ontology of what we might call positivism, which is everything is measurable, you can use an objective checklist essentially to rank human beings On anything really, if you're really extreme in that direction. But what you've touched on there, olivia, is the more social constructionist ontology, which is this idea that human beings can co-create knowledge together.

22:04

That is very difficult in the social world to have a standardized, normal common sense truth, for example, about what is a mental illness or what is a pathology. And there's a very strong clinical psychology movement that's starting to get more and more, in my view, grounding and Notice from people outside the psychological community as well, which you might be aware of, called the power threat meaning framework, which really centers these, are these power discrepancies that you touched on a minute ago, whereby you have a professional who has this training, who has the power to decide who is ill and who is not ill And therefore can diagnose or pathologize a human being and consign them even to hospital, based on simply their one and soul opinion And applied to the education system, we have a very oppressive exam system that does the same thing it decides, or a group of people decide, what an intelligent person is And what a good behavior is, and doesn't consider any of the outlying extraneous constraints or factors or systemic irregularities in that child's life, and labels them, and you have the same thing going on there, right? So I guess what we were talking about earlier is a more constructivist form of ontology world view, whereby education, in my view and we're now seeing this more and more, more and more Is best positioned as something that is co constructed by human beings, because you're never going to be able to find a one size fits all, a standardized best practice of education. It's never been the case for the entire human history. It's never going to be the case, and because of our political and social history, though, we live in a world where the norm is towards competition, standardization, objective measurement And systemic pathologization and labelling of people who don't fit into a predefined norm, and the predefined norm was always defined by the same cohort of human beings, always a very well positioned, wealthier elite, and that's gone back thousands and thousands of years, and what you then have now, though, which I think is even more pernicious, and this is something that people like Foucault were very good at describing is this sort of idea of governmentality, that idea that what we're now doing as a society is we're policing this ourselves as well.

24:26

So it's not just elites now are pressing us. We don't have kings telling us these things, but these ideas have become so internalized and so entrenched and so signaled into our society, almost like veins in our body. They just flow through everything. That is very difficult to take a step out of it and look at it and see it for what it is. So you'll have. most people would perceive that diagnosing a child who's been traumatized and abused as having an attention disorder would think that was fine. Now I think that's extremely problematic. Or to describe the young person who is an academic achiever when they were looked after child and didn't have a safe home for the first 10 years of their life And you can decide that they're not clever based on that is ludicrous. But most of us accept that. Don't mean it in society Because it's so deeply embedded in us and the ways we've been conditioned through schooling etc. So it's very complicated stuff. This Even I mean.

Dr Olivia KesselHost25:23

Look at the statistics of people who are diagnosed as having neurodiversity just because there's some are born babies, i mean. So that it's very, but again it comes back to the wanting to label something you know, wanting to diagnose, wanting to label, wanting to explain, not wanting to look at the system And how the system isn't actually working, which brings us nicely into. I would love for you to share with us the history of education and how, how have we come to be in this place?

Dr Chris BagleyGuest25:55

Yeah, that's the big question, isn't it? and that's Pretty much the question I started with about five years ago with a book I'm trying to write called shadow cultures and the tyranny of school and state, because I Wanted to know where this has come from. And I've been working in education most of my adult life and 99% of the people I work with and I'm sure it was the same for you in the medical profession I'm not bad people trying to harm other people. You know, then, teachers are not Tyrants, so I don't want people to think that the book is describing teachers or anyone in particular, as a tyrant, but what we have is very complicated structures and ideologies that go back a very, very long way, and I think the first school houses were dug up essentially in ancient Samaria and they're about 4,000 years old, and One of the things that blew my mind about that when I learned about it is the fact that at that point, you had young people sitting in rows writing on tablets with teachers marking their work. They've been Tablets dug up where teachers describe what the environment was like, and you have everything that we still, that we have today, generally speaking, in place.

27:07

We have Harsh chastisement for young people who stand up, talk out of turn, don't speak in the language Akkadian, which was the language of the day. If they speak in a different localized language they would get beaten. We have parents essentially sucking up to teachers, giving them gifts so that they can make sure that the child gets better treatment, and We have standardized assessments. We have yet learning about epic, very royal praise, poetry and veneration of what was at the time the monarchy. If you live in England, very difficult to see how that hasn't had to, how that shifted, because it hasn't. The coronation was recently. We don't want to get too sidetracked by that, but many of the essential aspects of school loon Were laid down there and you can see this also in ancient Egypt. So one of the things that blows my mind about that is that the history of the West, in schooling terms, is actually the history of the East and North Africa. That's where it started, that's where it came from, and There's a really clear sense that People at the top of the social hierarchy were the ones who should be schooled, the ones who should be become scribal, learning to read and write. There was no sense that anyone in a lower, set part of the social hierarchy should do that and I Can't talk for too long on this live because obviously it's a very complicated subject, but I think what what we notice from that is that there have been some very common themes Throughout history around that what education is for and who it was damed to be for.

28:39

And If you look at, for example, ancient Greece, the Hellenistic era and ancient Rome, rome adopted many of the patterns of schooling that we see in Greece, but there's a very specific idea that white elite essentially people like Plato, isocrates, aristotle, xenopharm there are lots of characters in this time formulating and writing about the first school houses, plato's Academy, for example, being one of the first, and the word academic comes from Plato's Academy. So that shows you where these ideas have come from, and Two of the core ideas from that were People are individuals. We're not really existing in a cohesive whole. The idea was you learn as an individual. We still see that now, the idea that a curriculum is Not something that's up for debate. There is no co-construction of curriculum. There never has been. It's always been a very set, predefined, inflexible set of knowledges that were to be learned by an Upper class or an aristocratic class, and you can see that in Greece. You can see that in Rome and When we obviously had the Roman Empire land in Great Britain in the later part of the sort of first century BC And we had the development of of the Roman world in England.

29:57

And then you have things like the seven liberal arts, which were first codified by a Roman called Varo More than 2,000 years ago. And the thing that is fascinating about this is that the seven liberal arts Involves three core subjects. So the idea of three core subjects is an extremely old concept. So we had dialectic Rhetoric and grammar, and then you had four additional subjects. So not only do we have this idea that there are Very specific set of curricula, one of the things that's been inherited from our Ancient past is this idea that you need three core subjects that everyone must learn and then additional subjects which become The flowering of the intellect as you learn those subjects.

30:46

And if you fast forward a bit further along to the Christian era, we still have a very specific hierarchical sense of what education is, and It was essentially the clergy and the aristocratic class most of the clergy who were the learned during the Middle Ages, and The poor at that point were living mostly in serfdom or at least abject penury or poverty. And it wasn't really until the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries that ideas around Education for the masses, as you framed it earlier, might be something that's worth doing. And by the time it got there, that was after the Protestant Reformation and what we then had was a very, very, i'd say, aggressive and oppressive sense of what should be learned. And the very famous Henry the 8th and Elizabeth the 1st, the Tudors they set these things in place which I think listeners will find really intriguing. So the first thing was an absolutely rigid curriculum based around the book of common prayer and Fascinated the same grammar that was taught in BC, in Rome, people like Donis or Donatus and Priscian, who are Roman Latin writers, and what you'll notice here all the way through this is an absolute obsession with Recreating a made-up, invented sacred past. That kept happening over and over and over again. And if you look at the curriculum now, we still have that don't mean to large extent people like Nelson and Churchill etc. Venerated in a very un controversial way, but you have the book of common prayer, you have the acts of supremacy.

32:18

So if you're gonna be a teacher, you have to be a Protestant and you have to be subject to visitations. So that sounds like like offset, doesn't it? because it was like offset. So you would have these three things and I think you can trace. You can trace the development of modern teacher training all the way back to the 16th century under Elizabeth the first, because to be a teacher now You have to sign up to the national curriculum if you're a secondary school teacher, can you even imagine if you went in the school and went I'm not teaching the national curriculum. You'd be struck off. That's what visitations were about in the 16th century. You would have elite clergy visit schools that were run by Other clergy or lay people, either in the developing cathedrals or in monasteries a bit earlier. And if you weren't teaching the book of common prayer and you weren't making people become good Protestants And they weren't learning the specific types of grammar, you'd be ostracized, you'd be marginalized, you'd lose your, your pay, you'd be kicked out of the profession.

33:18

Today, if you don't follow the curriculum, if You don't teach young people in a very specific way to pass exams in a very coached, force memorization way to quote one of the young people that's what she called it you are you would be struck off. There's no way that can even exist and This all really became codified 500 years ago, and I should probably stop rambling about the history now. But you can see that the basic elements of it are Trying to restore a sacred past that never happened. So always looking back to the past and an education was better before we need to recreate what was before and you've had people like Michael Gove Quote people from the 19th century like Matthew Arnold, and say we have to learn the best that's been thought and said. But the obvious problem with that is that's what gov thinks is the best that has been thought and said.

34:05

So we have a very specific curriculum, we have a very specific set of hierarchy. Still, we have top, middle and bottom sets and schools still don't we? we have grammar schools, still in England. So there's an idea that there's an elite set of young people and There is a lower set of young people and teachers use that language because they're forced into it through setting and streaming practices and We also have a very rigid accountability system and her majesties inspectorate started in the 19th century, but you can see it's evolved.

34:32

But we still have this idea that there are certain ways of being, there are certain ways of acting, there are certain ways of speaking, and there are very specific patterns of behavior that you must do in schools, otherwise you will be marginalized, closed down, turn into an academy, and it's all based on fear and threats. So I just thought I'd throw in a couple of different bits of history there. They're very obviously that it's much more complicated than this, but there are very specific themes that have led to this point, and if you put that in with our new sort of Economic system, which you might call neoliberalism, you have this idea that everyone must compete, otherwise everything falls to pieces. If people don't compete, though, they will be lazy and fail and they won't do anything. And the idea of metrics has come in the mid to late 20th century In a much more stringent way than it did before, although this did start in the 19th century. So we have competition and metrics thrown into that as well, and it's a very toxic, muddled ideological combination that people perceive to be.

35:28

Common sense There is, but if you ask someone what's the evidence base for schooling, there isn't one.

35:34

It's a purely ideological way of conceptualizing education that's grounded in everything from Christianity very strongly so to the liberal arts of ancient Greece, all the way back to the schoolhouses of ancient Samaria, and What it does very well is it recreates the social hierarchy very successfully, marginalizes the third, bottom third which has been present since ancient Samaria of society, and It absolutely does not allow any capacity for that social constructionist worldview.

36:04

We touched on earlier the idea of co-constructing with real human beings in their context, so that you can Co-design what the truth is, what reality is, and imagine what you could do with young people with a send if you were allowed, if you had the space to sit with them and go. Well, let's think about an education that might work for you. And it's very difficult to see how that can happen within the current framework of schooling, which is why I'm a bit skeptical around schooling as a concept in itself, and I'm working at the moment, as you might be aware, with lots of organizations who are Reconceptualizing things outside the school system or doing it within the school system in a very interesting way.

Dr Olivia KesselHost36:45

That's a long answer, apologies that does sound interesting because it you know, i agree with all of your points there and I think you know why is it such a huge surprise that we have social and health and Inequalities in our society based on how we're setting people, how we're setting children up to become adults, but then How, how you do change that within the monolith monolith that is the mainstream system, but also, or do you just divert from that as a parent?

37:14

you know, um I It's a question i think a lot of parents especially send parents are forced to to address because that their child can't cope, and those are the kids that have the support of the parents, and i know that you work with a lot of kids that don't have support of parents as well. But Change mainstream is gonna take a lot and it's interesting to hear that there is are that i've met some amazing teachers who do work within mainstream and do change things to a degree, not outside the curriculum, but In terms of well-being and things like that. But it's a challenging, broken system and it can get disheartening, i think, as a parent.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest37:55

Definitely, definitely, and there are no short term solutions that are very obvious, because it's such a deeply embedded system with so many different contradictory ideologies that are underpinning it, you know. So you have all these paradoxes. Like You know, competition improve schooling, but then, when you look at the data on that, competition does is it creates an enormous amount of segregation because people are competing, they want to remove Products inverted commas in their school that are not going to create this perfect model of exam results and league table position, so they remove the children, and there are dozens and dozens of other paradoxes. So i guess My view on it would be that There are pockets of resistance going on in schools. So one of the things that We've been doing it states of mind, and i've been doing with the institute of education is working with the academy trust called big education, and there is there a school based academy trust, of course. So they have four schools in new and borough in London, but what they are trying to do within the sector, within the current system as it stands, is introduced, whenever they can, aspects of thinking And acting that are more psychologically healthy. So they have a sort of head, heart, hand model. So the idea being that it's important to use your hands to do practical vocational things. It's important to think with your heart as well as your head what do you like, what do you enjoy, what are your aspirations? And also there's the cognitive element that you know, what am i learning, what are the things that i would like to gain more knowledge about? And they're trying hard, and there are lots of people doing that, and this xp school in Doncaster who there's a documentary about them that was released recently is fascinating and They are again trying to innovate within the system. So it's not a desperate situation, because what we're having is a range of people pushing back in different contexts, and I guess my position on it, though, is that I think we need to be able to demonstrate and this is where my sort of Professional career is going, i guess and it might be of interest to parents of young people who have been defined as having said because What we're trying to do is innovate outside the sector, so you don't have any of the ideologies that pull you into doing things that you feel to be problematic.

40:11

So, if you're a school, those kids have to do the exams, so you can have a head, heart, hand approach, but they've still got to do the exams. So if that child is being severely traumatised by having to do exams, that is making them feel very stupid and extremely stressed. The school can't change that. So there are certain things that you just can't negotiate, really, if you're a school and you can be flexible. So I wrote a chapter in a book for square pegs recently about what you can do with young people who are Feeling that they're going to be marginalized, and you can do lots of things. So, for example, you can Make sure that that young person experiences as much autonomy as you can possibly feet manage within that school system.

40:52

So there's one young person I work with Who's in a brilliant school in south London where I used to be a psychologist, and One of the things that absolutely work for him is having an hour every day where he wasn't doing the set academic curriculum, the exam based, standardised stuff, and he was able to just follow his interests and they had a group of young people in each year group and for an hour a day they did whatever they wanted with a really wonderful Teaching assistant and a trainee teacher, and that one hour a day was a buffer. You know, it was in the middle of the day it was just before lunch, so before lunch they could decompress, do something that they really value, that they took a real interest in. They were co-creating together. They were doing dialogic evaluation, so they were talking about each other's work, helping each of the build on the work. The teacher was linking them with people outside school. Now, my personal perception is that's what education should be, something that looks a little bit like that.

Dr Olivia KesselHost41:48

I mean, that's what life is, is that if you think about it like you want to find what you're interested in and that's where your career should take you, whatever that is, and then in that career you collaborate with people and you network with people and you find solutions with people and you can see big business. Now they don't want that because Model who just wants to take authoritarian commands? they, the world, has problems that need to be solved, that need, need collaboration and need different stars. Like you said, in that satellite We're not teaching our kids or educating our children to succeed in life. Even and interestingly, that example that that's that was their happy place for an hour so they could tolerate the rest of them. You know the school day, but actually that hour is preparing them for the rest of their life, exactly and it was a little preach into the converted here, Chris.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest42:40

No, no, it's a very, very good point and you put it really eloquently and it's one of those things where It's heartbreaking to be a psychologist in some ways, and I have to say it's been the last couple of years being in the prisons And the proves people refer units has been. It's really difficult for me personally as well as professionally, because you can see that some school systems or some schools themselves, because of the pressures upon them, because of the government's ideology around high standards of behavior and Rigid behavior policies and zero tolerance and things, they don't feel able to do that sort of thing that I just described. So you sort of walk into a room and you can be aware and you'll know and maybe this is even you, olivia But you walk into a room with a parent and a school and you'll just know that there's not going to be any flexibility Around Taylor in the curriculum or providing anything bespoke for that young person So they can meet their fundamental human need for autonomy and belonging. And that's really heartbreaking because you can just then see the trajectory of that. You know that that child is not going to cope. You know that child's going to start acting out or internalizing their distress, their distress. And ordinarily what you'll see is and This is obviously not completely the case and human beings are complicated and All of that but often the boys will externalize that distress, but they'll throw a table, they get into a fight, they'll swear at a teacher, they'll stop attending lessons by bunking off, going around the school, banging on windows, all of these things that you've seen many times and sometimes the young women or young ladies will internalize their distress and That might result in self-harm or things like that. You know, you can sort of see it coming.

44:20

And I guess one of the things that's been really heartening in some of the schools I've worked in is that they have Really tried to take on board that a human being Has fundamental needs and we've talked about autonomy and belongingness being two of them and Competence been another one, perceiving that you have competence, and without those things It's really impossible for you to go into the world or navigate the world feeling that you have any self-worth. And it's very difficult sometimes to observe that young people are on the special educational needs register at schools and You can see the distress ratcheting up and escalating when they don't have those fundamental needs met. And Often then you look around you in the school and you'll recognize, having consulted with a lot of members of staff, that they feel very hopeless And they don't really know how to manage that in a school system that Actively tries to impede those fundamental needs. And it really is that extreme. I think the school system actively impedes many of the fundamental human needs, not just of students but of teachers, and There's a really growing number of teachers coming out now and you would have seen this, i'm sure calling themselves recovering teachers, because they've had to go into schools and you have things like don't smile before Christmas. You know you've got to get these young people into line. You've essentially got to coerce them into doing things that they don't necessarily want to do, and no one goes into teaching to do that. Well, some people do, actually, and you know that's very problematic in itself. If you need power and you want control and that's part of the way you meet your needs, that says something about that individual teacher, doesn't it? But the vast majority of teachers, they want to support children to thrive in the world and they go in and they're in this paradoxical situation where they want to teach and they want to support young person to flourish When they get into the system, they realize after a while some of them that The school system is thwarting young people's fundamental needs and Not allowing them to thrive.

46:18

And then two things I've noticed happen. Some teachers, then, to manage that cognitive dissonance, that sort of contradictory thinking they're having, will either strongly identify with the system and And try not to think about that thing, because if you think about it it's quite painful, right to think that you might be Doing things that are not helpful for young people or even sometimes harmful. Other teachers will become much more revolutionary, you know, and they'll try and push back against those things by doing after-school clubs or meeting young people at lunchtime to talk to them about how they're doing, or Creating various different activities for young people. But they're doing that in spite of all of the other responsibilities They have. And what I tended to observe is those teachers often burn out Because the core aspect of what they're doing doesn't align with what they are perceiving to be what's needed to support young people to thrive.

47:11

And again, that is all founded upon a very complex history and a very specific set of evolving circumstances that have meant that schooling is about standardization, creating a hierarchy and maintaining it and positioning people as economic commodities rather than human beings, and sort of neoliberal system where competition means more than Mental health and well-being. So there's lots going on there, isn't there, but I think there are great pockets of resistance going on, you know, and that's moving and changing all the time. There's more and more young people being taken out of school to be homeschooled I'm sure you're aware of all the the data on that and, obviously, at Square Peg, we've been doing a lot of work with parents who have not coped in In navigating the system, and their child clearly hasn't coped, and that's growing all the time, and we're getting more and more news reports about it, pushing back against the children's commissioners view, obviously, which is forced attendance is crucial, whereas, obviously, my view as a psychologist is School can't meet the education needs of all young people, so it's not possible to assume full attendance ever, unless you want to damage young people's mental health. So those are very Contrary positions, aren't they, though? So you've got the views held by, probably, people like yourself and I live here, and lots of parents and lots of professionals and lots of teachers The school can't meet the needs of all young people.

48:33

But then we have the status quo position, which is very deeply embedded and entrenched over thousands of years, which suggests that there's only one way to educate the state knows what that is and The state is essentially the authority. And I think at the moment, if I was to Say what I think is happening, i think more and more people are shifting to that first position And I can really see that happening, and there's more and more learning communities and more and more people Looking for things that are outside the state sector and less deference, and I feel quite hopeful about that. But obviously that you know that doesn't really help your parents now Does it. You've been through the system and have really suffered, to be fair, but But, you know, i think, understanding the system too.

Dr Olivia KesselHost49:14

I think for me it's been a journey to understand education and to break some of those myths in my own head that this is, this is, this is the way it should be, this is how I was raised, this is how you know what is wrong. I think it, you know what we've been discussing today. It cracks your head open a bit to allow yourself to question, as a teacher, as a parent, as a Young adult who's gone through the system of education to understand that no, maybe it's not right And maybe this isn't the way things should work. And you know I like your examples that there are parents who are taking incredible steps to take their kids out of school, juggle jobs, you know, put them in self-directed or democratic learning communities. They, they are trying to do things differently and they the importance of a child's well-being, which also is being very undervalued, or even Question that you know. You know, does a child suffer from anxiety? does a child, you know, this mental well-being? can it be damaged by school? I think all of those things are starting, as you say, to gather Momentum into a tsunami, and that's why I really wanted to have you on the podcast today and I really appreciate your time is that Understanding where education or schooling has come from, seeing that those foundations aren't as strong as our psyche kind of tells us based on our experience and our past, is the first steps that lead to change. You know, and the more people that are awakening to this and questioning it and fighting back against it and doing things differently, that's how eventually we will reach change.

50:51

And I can just encourage parents to Keep looking for those schools. You know what I mean and even you know if you have to look through 40, 50 schools I know I've been through my journey. I've talked to lots of parents who've been through their journey Don't just accept that that that the school your child's in is the only option out there. You know. Explore, see what else can be done, because there are, there are other options. Changing the whole mainstream system That's gonna take decades, but there are things you have within your power as a parent to change your situation with your child. And And then, sadly, there are children that don't have that, who don't have those supports, which is where you come in, and You know other organizations come in to help those children who don't have those supports or don't have those advocates within the system. So I want to give you a big thanks for your for your Intelligence and your expertise today. It's been a real pleasure to have you on the Send Parenting podcast.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest51:48

Thanks, i really enjoyed that. Thanks, olivia. I hope it all goes well in the next podcast and you're doing a great job. So do keep up the good work, because it is making a difference.

Dr Olivia KesselHost51:56

I Really hope so, and I get some wonderful feedback from people that it is helping, because I think knowledge is power, and Just that big step of hearing someone as educated as yourself talk about This might not be right. If I'd heard that as well, i think I would have started my questioning a lot earlier. It took me a long time. I was very conditioned to agree with the people in power, even though I'm a doctor. Do you know what I mean? So there's there's a journey there. I think that all of us have to go on.

Dr Chris BagleyGuest52:28

Thank you, no, thank you.

Dr Olivia KesselHost52:32

Thank you, send Parenting Tribe for listening. If you enjoyed the podcast, please leave a rating or review, as it'll help us reach more people. You can also follow us and comment on Instagram at Send Parenting podcast. We'd love to hear from you, wishing you and your family a good week ahead. You.