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Rachel, hello and welcome to teenagers untangled the audio hug for parents going through the teenage years. I'm Rachel Richards, journalist, parenting coach, mother of two teenagers and two bonus daughters. Now, whenever I put anything on social media about schools and exams, I get, shall we say? A vigorous response. I think it's fair to say that a lot of us are frustrated by the schooling system, frustrated by exams on behalf of our kids, and even those of us with kids who performing at the top of the league tables, probably have to admit that the way things are currently set up doesn't seem to be creating a healthy modern society, but we're not really sure how to fix it. It's coming to the end of the summer, as I recall this, which means there's been a wave of exam results in the UK and the beautifully timed release of a terrific book called examination. Why our obsession with grades fails everyone, written by Sammy Wright, head teacher of a secondary school in the north of England, and part of the UK government's social mobility commission. For several years, it's been chosen by the BBC as Book of the Week and applauded by reviewers across serious newspapers in the UK. And I found it laugh out loud, really, really funny at times. Sammy, thank you so much for being with us. Let's start with talking about one of the things you did in the book was you went around England talking to a lot of kids and asking them what they thought school was for, and what sort of reactions did you get to that?
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I mean, some of the reactions were just kind of blank faced astonishment, though I would ask such a stupid question. But once I got down to it, it was remarkably consistent. You know, they have a message which comes across loud and clear, which is, school is for exams, school is for getting a career. School is for making sure you don't end up homeless, in the words of one slightly gloomy child. To me, that's the real prompt for a lot of the stuff that I want to say, because none of those are the things that I think school is for. Really. What
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do you think school is for? Well,
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so the the thing that I have found in my time at school is that, you know, I've been teaching for 22 years, and yes, a lot of the things that we do in school set you up for later life. That is true, but they don't have a direct causal relationship. So for example, you know, when you talk to policy makers about school, they can often use this shorthand around you know, grades equals money. Yeah, you get more grades at GCSE, and you'll do better.
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You know, we need to increase the skills across the country, and we'll boost the economy. And actually, you do, if you just take a little moment and think about that, you realize how that that that is just not true. If you look at the kind of things that you can do with top grades.
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And if you take the most academically qualified people in the country, well, they are, by definition, academics. They certainly aren't the best paid.
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Are
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they? No?
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Quite, quite.
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Yeah, good point. And so that, that whole equation there, it basically turns what is a very, very complex and nuanced experience in school into a flattened economic equation, and it's transactional, exactly, exactly, and that's the word which becomes my kind of bete noir in the book, is the idea that everything has to be turned into a transaction. Because ultimately, the way I think about schools, it's a it's a public good. It's like clean water or parks, you know, it's something that enriches the body politic. It makes us all live better lives. If it works well, and if we reduce it to a transaction, then we're doing two things. On the one hand, we're saying, you know, everything's about money, which I don't think is the right moral message to give to our children.
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But on the other hand, we're also offering people the choice, and we're saying, if it's a transaction, you choose to accept the transaction, or you you don't. And my experience the law young people is that they look at the terms of that transaction, they say, well, that's not me. That's not aimed at me. That's not what I'm yeah, you know, it's not my experience of life, and therefore, school's not for me. And I think that's a tragedy, and
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we're seeing increasing numbers of those, yeah, yeah. And
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I think that, you know, the there's two kind of camps that that that kind of child falls into because I think there's, there's children who are turned off school because, you know, for whatever kind of personal reason to do with their own capabilities and their understanding of the world, they don't connect with that argument. But there's also a kind of much higher. Sure thing going on where in the most deprived areas of the country, the equator, the transaction that you're offering seems so far from the daily realities of life that kids encounter that they just think it's not real.
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That's God,
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yeah, so much sense, and that's tragic, and one of the things you talked about in the book was that really grabbed me was this transition from from primary to secondary. Now people are listening around the world, so we're talking about sort of a transition at about between 11 and 13, where kids leave their school which which feels sort of cozy and like a community, and then they go to a secondary school system, which, in the UK is very much, you've got lots of different teachers. You're having to navigate your way around different parts of the building, and you're and things are broken up into separate subjects. And I think you said that, you know, the primary school teachers look at secondary school teachers and say, What did you do to them?
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Because, because everything, I mean, obviously there are other things going on. And I always say to our listeners, please don't put too much pressure on your kids, you know, during this this period, because there's so much they're having to deal with that's so difficult. But you sort of highlight that as one of the the key stages where things start to go wrong. Can you talk a bit more about why you say that?
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Yeah. I mean, yeah. I mean, I think that. I think there's two reasons why I'll latch on to that moment. One is just the observational one, which is that, you know, so particularly with kids in the very deprived areas that that form part of the catchment of my school. When they're in primary school, the school can operate in a quasi familial way, you know. So see, teachers are they parent the kids, but actually they also parent the parents, you know. They engage with you in a very kind of direct and emotive way. And if you think of really basic things about primary school, like, for example, homework, primary homework is essentially not really homework for the kid to go and do. It's homework for the kid and the parent to go and do together. Interesting. What a lot of those projects when your kids in year one and two are actually about and things like that requirement that primary schools make. You know, of kind of parents reading with children and you know, they have little reading diaries. They ask for that. Because what they're doing there is they're actually trying to structure and guide the home environment. Once you get to secondary, there's a kind of, you lose that sense of the personal, direct connection with the family. And you know, secondary schools. I mean, in my own school, we really try hard to maintain very good relationship with parents. We do everything we can, but the mechanics of it are so different that it just becomes not possible. You don't have the single point of contact in the same way you've got, you know, 1213, different teachers. It's set up in a completely different way, and that setup changes the emotional tone of the place, and it changes the you know, I think with kids, kids have a kind of radar for who the kind of prime status person is, yes, and they understand who is defining the terms of their social world, and young kids understand that as their parents, and they respond to that. And, you know, they go on the swing and they look up to mommy and daddy, and they kind of they smile, because that's the approval that they're looking for in primary in primary school, the environment, the social world, is very, very controlled by the teachers, and it's very, very much on the teacher's terms. And if you listen to primary teachers, they'll often talk about, well, class, what are we doing today?
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And good morning Miss, and good morning sir. And everyone chanting together. There's a collective action. And in st Matthews, we do this, and this is the way we do things. And it's a really tricky thing, because obviously secondary schools there is a need to move towards independence. But the nature of the way we have the system set up in the UK is that that move is a very, very sharp one, and you go very, very quickly from that quite controlled social environment to one in which the kid looks for the person who holds the status and sometimes concludes that that is their peers, so that is the older kids, rather than the teachers. Now, obviously, in an excellent school, that's not the case. You know. Really good school leaders do control the social space, and they make a culture in which kids succeed, but there's a lot of danger that comes in that moment. Yes, yeah.
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And so the other thing I did want to say on that transition point is that actually, since finishing the book, I realized that lot of the thinking that I did around the history of schools, I read read some further stuff on it, and I realized that the thing that been sitting in the back of my mind is that, of course, when we talk about universal education, we mean primary, secondary schools are actually an evolution of selective education. And even though we now have comprehensive schools, the whole concept of secondary education is a Is it like the model it's built on? Is a selective model? And so you know where in primary you've got all these structures which are about getting all kids together to a certain level, and that being a level that's about their kind of entitlement of citizens and and young people. It's not about kind of who's the best and so on, although it does a bit of that. Obviously, in secondary school, the deep structures of the school are about selection and about classification and about ranking,
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yes, and once you say that, you know, every you start measuring everything, then what you're really saying is, you're saying, if it can't be measured, it's not a value.
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Yeah, absolutely. And I love what you're talking about, because what's interesting to me is there are schools, some of which get a lot of flack and aren't liked. But, you know, the Michaela Academy, which is known for being much more so it's a secondary school, but it's still got that very much, that environment. And I think is it the reach academies who also where they they sort of coach kids through this transition and keep them sort of, you know, at meal times, you sit together in groups, and this is how you and I guess, in a way, what we do is we go from primary socialization, where kids are at home and they're learning from their parents, and then they're in the secondary school environment, and that becomes much more important. And if there isn't some kind of sense of community around them, then obviously they're going to be looking elsewhere, and obviously online now becomes incredibly important, as well as another dynamic in that. Yeah,
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and actually, so there's an interesting example, which I don't discuss in the book of there's a school in London called All Saints, which recently hit the headlines because they'd been arranging a 12 hour day, which was slightly kind of terrifying concept, but I talked to the head. He's a he's a really lovely guy. And basically what, what a 12 hour day actually is, is school and then clubs, and the kids stay for dinner and they stay for breakfast at the start of the day. So it's, it's, it's a way of actually structuring the school day in a way that caters for more than just the the learning and the kind of the quote, unquote curriculum, you know, it's actually kind of giving this this wider spread, and that speaks to something else, I think, which is that, you know, going back to the that idea of looking at the history of schools, you know, we do have a really weird thing when we think about schooling in that it's supposed to be the place that we put our kids, and yet it's really badly designed for that, because no one's job actually fits school hours effectively. You know, we structure what we do with our kids in a way that suits a model of the family that's actually from the 50s, where you've got to stay at home mother who's able to pick them up from school. Yes,
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yeah, absolutely. And all the parents that don't have that are, I mean, I don't know how to cope.
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And I think what's, what was fascinating was you, right at the beginning of the book, you, I think you started thinking about this book as a result of what happened with covid, and I love the quote, when the grades were so, so at that time, they weren't sitting exams, they weren't even allowed into the school, so we were all stuck at home. And it was, I think nobody really understood how it was going to play out. But one of the things that came out of it was that, you know, you go, Well, we have to have some way of assessing whether these kids did any good at all. And the grades were then assessed in a different way, which was kind of based on what the teacher thought the kids should have got. And when the grades were released in the morning. This was August 2020. The normal, this is your quote, the normal joyous hysteria was replaced by an atmosphere of stunned fury.
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Why? What was What? What?
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Because this is at the nub of this is kind of like we, you know, do we have exams? Why do we have exams? And when you take away exams, obviously it was a panic situation, and they were just doing what they could, but this is the result. So what was going on there? So I
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think the the emotional content of that moment was the lack of control. They, you know, the normal thing that you have.
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You know, I've just literally done it this morning. I've been in my school, and I've watched you have, yes, yeah. So I've watched them kind of come in and they bounce around, they open their results. But fundamentally, it's a, it's a, it's a conversation between them and their own experience. And so, you know, when they do less well, they remember the exam that they sat, and they go, Oh, well, this and that, you know.
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And they might think it's unfair, but equally, they know that it was their experience, whereas on that day, the thing that was so disorientating for everyone was that you're like, you just had this kind of diktat handed down from on high, that this is your results. You thought it was this, but it's actually this, and you're totally out of control with it, yes, and, and I think the thing that you know, you'll know from the book that what happened in my mind from there is that I realized that that sense of a lack of control is also what many kids have on a normal results day as well. So there is a kind of, you know, there's, it's all dependent on your own experience. Because if you are someone who you know, to take any number of examples, someone who's had a bereavement during your results, or someone who's been struggling with a very difficult home life, and you're battling through, and then you get to your results say, then often you have a lack of control there as well. And you know, the really naughty thing that you get with this is taking away the exams was awful, right? Then having them in the way that we've got them is also really difficult, and it's, and I
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think it doesn't work, but does it? Is it not working? And I think one of the points you make is that the way the school systems are set up at the moment, with the grading patterns that we have, is that it's designed so that someone fails for someone for people to win. People fail. And that is a really, there's a stark contrast between that and the way that, for example, we have driving tests. If someone fails their driving test the first time, you don't say, Oh, I don't think driving is for you, you know. You say, Go away, try, you know, have another go. And then they come back and they learn, and eventually they get good at driving. And these are core skills that people may or may not need for their life, but so is Maths and English, and it's an interesting concept. So what is it possible to have a system of grading where you don't have people who necessarily fail? Yeah, I
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mean, so I think there are several different options that one could look at, but I think the first thing I would say is that what you've got to do is kind of separate off the different functions of what an exam system does. And you can actually see this very easily in the names of our different qualifications. So you have your General Certificate of Secondary Education, which you do at 16, and then your advanced level, which you do at 18. And that tells you a lot of what you need to know, because the advanced level is where you've decided to stick with a course of study, and you're pushing yourself to a higher level. And it is quite right that that should have a kind of much more intense academic structure to it, and it might fit in with university study, etc. A General Certificate of Secondary Education, however, doesn't have that burden. What a general certificate is saying is like you've said the example, like the driving test, a general certificate is saying you have reached that general stage of competence in a wide range of things. So the two ways that you can think about how you might change grading with a general certificate are that you can think of it in terms of a threshold, so it's a pass or a fail, and then you do something else beyond it, to do a kind of finer grained and it may well be a descriptor rather than a kind of gradient. So you say you've passed your the phrase I use in my recommendations in the book is a passport qualification. So you say, right, I've got my passport qualification that says I'm ready. I'm finished school.
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And then within that passport qualification, it says within this, I excelled at this. And this was the thing like, you know, so you can have descriptors within it, which give a bit more, you know, analysis of what you've done, but essentially it's a document saying I got to that level, and then beyond that, you can go on and start going, right, okay, because I've got my passport, I'm now going to specialize in French, and I'll kind of do something that's more graded.
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There's actually a really interesting suggestion, which has come out recently, and I talk about somewhere else, I'm not sure I mentioned it in the book, is the idea of thinking it in terms of music grading. So what music do? Grades do is they say do grade one. So if you pass that, do grade two, and actually, so each grade is not a measure of how well you did in one test, it's a measure of how much learning you've done. So if you've got grade eight, that's saying I have a significant body of learning and skill that I've developed over a number of number of years within that, you know, you still have your distinctions, merits and passes.
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There can be a little bit of kind of, you know, recognition within there. But essentially, what you're trying to do is you're trying to use the system to recognize not a ranking, but instead a volume, right? And
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interestingly, with music, my daughter gave up the piano. I think she was doing grade two. She said, I'm bored.
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And I said, okay, but just keep tinkling away. And then she re entered at grade four. Was it four or five, you know? Because she'd still, she carried on practicing to herself. And so there was a there was a bot she had, she developed a body of knowledge, and they just said, there's no point you're doing grade three, you know, you so that that makes it more flexible. Yeah. I mean, it's harder for the education, so I think one of the difficult things is having an education system that copes with this. And interestingly, one of the people who reviewed your book was Michael Gove, and he's known in the UK as someone who championed, you know, having league tables between different schools and Ofsted, which is the kind of body of inspectors that goes into schools and checks whether they're doing well, and you know, and that it kind of pits schools against each other, essentially with them with an aim. And he and he said, actually, this book proves that we need exams. This book shows that actually exams are a good thing. And I'm interested in your reflection on that. What do you do? You think it's as clear cut as that? So,
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I mean, I,
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I love getting that review, because basically what it says to me was, it said that, you know, in the UK, there's a very divisive discussion on education and teachers. You know, you talk to a teacher, and it's all kind of people. People are lovely and reflective, but you go onto Twitter or x or whatever, and you kind of look at it and everyone's like a prog or a drag, and they're saying, you know, these are the opposing ways of interpreting it. And what I loved about that review was that it was showing that what I was saying was cutting across those, you know, lines of argument. So I really, really appreciated it. I did think it was a politician's review. He spent a lot of time using what I'd said to justify what he thinks, but he is right in one sense, as I explicitly say we should not get getting rid of exams. Exams are a really useful pedagogical tool. Why? Because, basically, if you want to teach someone something, you know, all the cognitive science and also anyone's personal intuition says, Well, what you do is you test yourself. That's how you figure out whether you know something. So you know to get rid of that as a tool would be, you know, cutting off your nose to spite your face. But I think the point I would make is that the issue isn't exams. It's how we use exams, and it's the kind of using them for this kind of really fine grained ranking. And I think that, you know, one of the things so as an English teacher, one of the things that I know is that I can have and again, I've just been talking to students about this today. You know, a student who was disappointed in the result. I talked to them because, actually I know I could have two essays in front of me, and one day I'll say essay A is better, and the other day I'll say essay B is better. And actually there isn't a concrete answer that says it just is not factually correct.
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There isn't some kind of absolute standard of essay Ness that you could call on to say this is the best one. And I think the problem we have in our system is that we have painted ourselves into a corner where we believe that's the case. We believe you actually can make a standard judgment. And you know, when I teach creative writing, you know, I'm a fiction novelist as well, and so I love teaching creative writing. I really relish it. With my current class, I went to town on this. I did some great stuff. I thought it was all fantastic, and we produced really interesting bits of writing, and then my colleague marked it, and she said, you know that they're not going to get a very good mark because they haven't used colons, colons. I never use colons,
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right? Yes, but, and that's the thing that drives people nuts, because they're trying to find things that they can actually do, tick box exercises, so rather than Yeah,
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to make everything comparable actually detracts from its educational value. So I would make a plea for having exams, but like maybe making them less accurate,
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that's that I'm. I knew that, what do you mean? Well, just as it like not making less, but like saying making fewer claims for their accuracy, right? So you do the exams for an educational purpose, but you're not saying this is the final word, because they are subjective, and there are problems in the methodologies of
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them. Yes, and I did a level English, and I distinctly remember there was another guy in my class. We both got the top grades, and his essays were completely different to mine. They blew my mind. I was so scared when I wrote his essays, because they were, you know, fine tooth comb through the the texts that we were dealing with, and I thought, I can't compete with that. Then I wrote in a completely different way, and somehow we both were considered to be good. And that's the point. Is, that it's this, you know, but I couldn't understand how they were measuring it, and I still don't really understand today. But I think when you start taking things down to, you know, whether you've got a colon or not, it starts to make it really difficult to appreciate the process and the wider the breadth. And interestingly, because the other things are so we've got tests, but then there is things like, you know, people talk about coursework and then continuous assessment and teacher based grades. And I think you've mentioned in your book all those things and why none of them really work as well as a test.
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So, so I mean the thing, so if you take coursework as an example, I mean, it's an obvious problem with nowadays, which is, half the stuff you get is AI Nico period has
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copied your homework. What are we going to do about it?
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You know, it's a genuine problem that, but, but at the same time, there are ways around that, but, but like, essentially, if you think of, you know, one of the key problems in educational terms between students who come from more advantaged backgrounds and those who don't. The key problem is, you know, the level of support and structure you have.
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And so as soon as you make anything reliant on work that's done at home, then that does change the kind of fairness of it. So I mean the coursework and, you know, obviously continuous assessment, it comes with the burden of the fact that actually you're keeping the pressure on the whole time. So there are different things that come there. But I think one of the best examples, again, I do discuss it in the book is this, this the extended project qualification, which, you know, some people who have kids in the UK might be familiar with. And it's a fascinating qualification, because essentially what it says is, go away and do something, and we will assess the process that you go through, so kids can choose to, you know, maybe I've had them choose to write a novel, or to, you know, build a bike, or to put on a play, or to, you know, there's all sorts of stuff that they will end up doing.
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And, you know, it's a really tricky thing to assess, because you have to kind of say, you know, someone starts with a high level of skill, and then they just exercise that skill.
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They're not going to get the grade. They have to start from progress from a low base. They have to show organization. Now, the thing with it is that it is massively open to abuse. You could easily, you know, if, if you wanted to, you could make it. You know, get loads of people to help you and do a fake project, etc, but the way you avoid that is by having no high stakes attached to it. So when this was designed in partnership with the universities, it was designed as a way of, kind of guiding people towards University style study, and they said explicitly it was never going to be asked for as the main part of someone's offer for university, and it's not included in the main part of the performance tables. It has a role in both, but not it's not a significant part of them. And so what that means that takes away the incentive for schools and for students to game It means that we as a school can allow kids to fail. We just let them crack on. And it means that actually, because not not so much is riding on it, we can use the assessment as something that is educational and about teaching rather than about outcome. But then don't they just
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slack off.
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Because I remember Angela Duckworth, you know, the woman who did the fantastic TED talk on grit, and she said that she introduced she said, I'm going to do, I'm going to do this whole thing where there's no grading and everything. We're just going to, you know, it's the process that really counts.
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And she said it was a disaster, because the students who they only focused on the things where they were grades. So everyone was doing other people's courses and not really bothering with hers. And isn't that always the problem? Things like that?
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Really unfortunate? Yeah, no.
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Great idea
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it is. It is a real problem. But, you know, the extended project, I think, is a good example of where they've got the balance right. So what they've done is so they there is a grade on it, you know, there is an assessment process you can. Can kind of, you know, you get an A, B, C, D, E, etc, on it, if you get a good grade, then you can use it to make up for if you've got a bad grade in one of your other A levels. So it can be of use. It's just not the primary use, and because it is and in the key thing from schools point of view is because it's not measured directly in the performance tables. It takes away that incentive. Whereas you know what happens when, when you have this kind of very, very tight structure of performance tables, league tables, and accountability and and ranking is it means it puts all the onus on the school to get the kids to succeed. And that has a kind of equal but maybe opposite effect on grit, which is it takes the pressure off the kid and puts it onto the teacher. And you actually often get that thing of the teeth of the kid turning the teacher and saying, Well, you know, you need to get me this great. What are you going to do about it? What are you going to do about it? Intervention, you know. So, yeah, and, you know, don't get me wrong. I think that what I what I want to do in this book, and a lot of the stuff I'm trying to talk about, is to talk about paradox in education, to talk about the complexity of it, and to admit the fact that actually there isn't necessarily an answer that is going to solve all these problems, and that maybe what we need to be doing is thinking which are the problems we can live with and which are the problems that actually we need to address.
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What
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a great way of putting it yes, because you can't fix it all. No, you know, what? Where do we need to actually focus? What road do we need to be focusing on? And I loved how you talk about how we, you know, we, sort of a lot of us think about exams as being like maths, where there's a definite answer, whereas it's you were saying it's more like English. You know, a life is more like English. With this kind of that, it's things are much more complex than that and that. If we make people feel like life is all much more like maths, we're really misleading them.
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Yeah, and it's and again, I have deep anger burning about this colon issue.
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But I always come back to because, to me, that is taking the wonder of something like English and trying to nail it down. It's trying to pin a butterfly. And I think that, you know, if everything becomes about rigor and precision in education, then what you lose is the possibility of having those conversations in which you say to a child, you know, one of the things that I say to many of my students is, you know, I'll kind of introduce literature to them, and I'll say to them, you know, ultimately, a lot of time, what we're going to be talking about is love. And they go, look a bit freaked out. No, we all feel love. And, you know, I say to them openly what I hope for you to to feel in your adult life, as I hope you, you know, encounter love, and you engage with love and then. But I also say, you know, love is paradoxical and complex, complicated. So, you know, put your hands up if you love your parents. Dutiful. Put your hands if you've ever said I hate you to your parents, go up as well.
00:33:15.720 --> 00:33:17.579
It's like you have to have both.
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You have to have that understanding that one doesn't negate the other. And then actually, yeah, that the complexity is the texture of life. And if we don't teach people that in schools, then we're not readying them for life.
00:33:31.519 --> 00:33:41.140
Yes. And I love that as a way of saying, Well, this is the problem with just having tick box exams situation where it's you fail or you win.
00:33:37.519 --> 00:33:46.359
And I just want to come back to this whole concept of schools as communities within communities.
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And you know this the language of them being part of a crew and the cons. And I What's really interesting is what happened in covid where where kids were denied access to a social community. Kids were not in school. And some people, I remember listening on the radio and people saying, oh, and people saying, oh, for some kids, this is such a relief.
00:34:04.980 --> 00:34:28.099
They don't have to go in every day. You know, it's very traumatic for them, but I think for a lot of kids, my kids, particularly, as well as all lots of kids I know, found it really, really stressful, depressing, difficult, and they missed out on so many skills and so many interactions that they need to build a whole person.
00:34:22.219 --> 00:34:43.119
And I'm just, I'd be so interested in how you think that that so you know how covid affected the narrative of what school is for. Because the worry I have is that with absent, all this absenteeism, people are going, well, we've proved you don't need to go to school. You know, you don't need to be there.
00:34:44.739 --> 00:34:59.918
Yeah. I mean, I, I it certainly changed my opinion on it, because I think until covid, I've never properly considered the role of school as childcare on a really basic level society ground to a halt because, you know, you can't.
00:35:00.239 --> 00:35:06.059
And actually manage your work while you've got your kids sitting there. And, you know, certainly with young kids, actually,
00:35:06.059 --> 00:35:09.420
you need to coming in in the background while you're trying to talk exactly.
00:35:09.960 --> 00:35:43.179
And you know, the thought experiment that I've posited with with people sometimes is, if I said to you, I could give you a pill that you could feed your child, and it would just drop all the knowledge they needed into their head at the age of 12. Would you then be happy with them just going out and living their adult life? And obviously I would hope go, No, I don't want them. So that tells you instantly that actually, school is not just about the delivery of knowledge.
00:35:43.480 --> 00:35:47.079
It's a place for them to grow.
00:35:43.480 --> 00:36:22.280
It's a place for them to be as they're growing up. Now, I think what's really interesting in this is, I'm sure this is a book which you and your listeners have encountered that the anxious generation. By Jonathan Hayden, yes, and I think it's a really interesting book. I think it's powerful for schools because it gives us essentially, ammunition for making the case for smartphone free schools, which I think is the right thing. I don't think the the I think it's more polemical than perhaps, you know, all the evidence justifies. I think you know, but you know, that's fine.
00:36:22.280 --> 00:38:16.199
It's a useful book to exist in the public sphere. But I think the thing that people perhaps are not paying enough attention to in it is his discussion of free range childhood and risk in childhood and social interaction. And what he ends up saying, I think, more powerfully than his stuff about phones. I think really, his issue with phones is that it stops other interactions. And I think it's the other interactions which we need to focus on, that kids need to have that social space in order to test themselves against norms, to establish who they are, to slowly, kind of detach themselves from their parental home. And you know, essentially that is, you know, rightly or wrongly in our society, we've set up that school is the place in which you do that, and school is a place that we make safe for children so that they then can have those interactions and develop in in ways that their own inclinations guide them. And I think if we, if we just see it in terms of the knowledge delivery system, then we're missing something really, really profound. And, you know, I'll actually, it's not also, you know, everything's entwined here. You know, I'm, you know, it's my em force to moment only connect. It's all it's all together. And I talked to a young man today who passed his GCSE English literature, and it was a brilliant, brilliant result for him, because he'd asked me three years ago. You know, he was absolutely on track for exclusion, really, really problematic kid, lots of difficult things going on with him. And you know, there he was.
00:38:09.480 --> 00:38:20.599
I talked to him about how he's going to change his attitude.
00:38:16.199 --> 00:39:19.559
How, you know, he was talking about going on to study do do football at college, and he's saying, Yeah, I've learned so much this last year, and I'm not gonna be antagonistic, and so on. And yeah, you know, you're thinking that I'm leading towards the point to which school fixed him. No, he got a really nice girlfriend, and that settled him, and he spent all year with her, rather than his, you know, more more destructive mate. So he got, he knuckled down, and she showed him a different route. And I think that is something that, you know, money can't buy. But again, it makes my point that that the things that are going on with kids are not they're not simple. We can't reduce them to, you know, a grade or a number or a moment or a policy. We have to somehow make schools places in which there's space for growth.
00:39:20.099 --> 00:39:20.659
Yeah,
00:39:20.778 --> 00:39:52.958
that's a brilliant way to end this. I, you know, what I've said to my daughter, who's just got her GCSE results, is all the way through. I kept saying to her, I'm so much more interested in what you learn about yourself than than any grade you get at the end of it, because it's the it's the journey, it's the the way we grow and develop and, yeah, and it's not a journey to, you know, it's not a kind of like, just get it done and then then you're an adult, it's, there's so much going on, isn't there? Absolutely. Thank you so much for being with us today.
00:39:49.418 --> 00:40:02.398
It's such a vital topic, and I know our entire community feels very strongly about it. I'll put your book details into the podcast notes, and if they want to find. Online. Where would listeners go? So
00:40:02.400 --> 00:40:14.340
I'm on LinkedIn, and along with lots of lots of education, I am on X slash Twitter, but a lot of us are kind of moving over to blue sky.
00:40:09.179 --> 00:40:24.920
So signing up for that, yeah, so you can find me on there, if you just search Sammy, right? I think you can, you can, you can locate that. But you know what I would say is that anyone who wants to get in touch, I'm always happy to talk over these issues.
00:40:25.519 --> 00:40:27.019
Thank you. Yeah, brilliant,
00:40:27.019 --> 00:40:32.119
but I love it, and that's it for now. If you if you found it interesting as a listener, why not pass it on?
00:40:32.119 --> 00:40:43.420
Just ping somebody else and say, Hey, listen to this. It's really good. You can listen to any of my other interviews and episodes at www teenagersuntangled com.
00:40:39.019 --> 00:40:50.199
Feel free to email me at teenagersuntangled@gmail.com I get lots of questions. Love putting them on the podcast, and you can even leave a review.
00:40:50.619 --> 00:40:52.480
That's it. Have a great week.
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Bye, bye For now you
