From decline to top rankings: How England transformed education with Nick Gibb (Ep 49)

(upbeat music) Welcome to Chalkintalk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stockie, a math professor and your host. (upbeat music) Welcome back to another episode of Chalkintalk. Today's guest is someone whose work has had a profound lasting impact on education in England and beyond. Described as the most influential schools minister in England's history, during his decade in office, the right honorable Sir Nick Gibb, led a series of evidence-based reforms that reversed a long-standing decline in academic performance. In this episode, we discussed the state of education he encountered when he first started visiting schools, including the widespread use of ineffective teaching practices and low academic expectations. He walks us through the key reforms he introduced from mandating systematic phonics for reading to improving math instructional methods by studying high-performing jurisdictions to reintroducing standard algorithms in the math curriculum to introducing a national phonics screening check and a multiplication table check and strengthening the national curriculum. We also talk about the strong resistance he faced and how he pushed through it to make real change. His reforms have led to dramatic improvements in international rankings with England now ranking forth in the world for reading and showing major gains in math. His work has begun to shape education policy in countries like Australia and New Zealand. It was truly an honor to speak with Sir Nick Gibb and I hope this conversation inspires others to consider the impact that well-informed courageous policy can have on student outcomes. Before we get started, I have a quick favor to ask. Chuck and talk recently surpassed 200,000 downloads. Thank you so much for listening and supporting the show. If you find it helpful, please take a moment to leave a five-star rating on your podcast app. It really helps others discover the show. And if you know someone who could benefit from the conversations we have here, whether it's an educator, a parent, a policy maker, or anyone passionate about education, please share it with them. Your support helps bring these important discussions to even more people. Now without further ado, let's get started. (upbeat music) It is a pleasure to be joined today by the right honorable Sir Nick Gibb and he is joining me from England. He is a former minister of state for schools in the United Kingdom. He served in that position for a total of 10 years under four different prime ministers with his final year in the role in 2023. He also served as shadow minister for schools for five years. He's a qualified chartered accountant and worked for KPMG prior to becoming an MP. As minister for schools, he implemented a series of educational reforms in England, which we're going to talk about today. And following those reforms, England's academic results improved significantly on international tests, reversing a trend of decline. So as an example, England recently came and forth in the world on pearls, which tests reading for nine year olds around the world, achieving its highest-ever score, they've seen similar improvements in math. Nick was knighted in 2024 for his services to education. A recent daily telegraph article quoted Nick Gibb as the most influential schools minister in England's history. And it is an honor to have you here today and I am so excited to talk to you. Welcome, Nick. - Thank you very much. I'm delighted to be here. - So let's go back to 2005 when you started as shadow minister for schools and just a note for listeners. So in Canada, I think that's equivalent to the provincial opposition party's education critic. So my understanding is that you were concerned about the decline in English education and you started visiting schools. So what led you to believe that education standards were failing? - Well, we were declining in international league tables, such as the one you cited. So pizza, for example, we were seventh in the world in reading in the year 2000. We declined to 17th by 2006, and then to 25th by 2009. And in math, we were eight in 2000, the breakdown to 24th in 2006 and 28 in 2009. So I was worried about the low positionary rib but also the direction of travel because what was going to happen next if it continues to decline? So that way in me, you heard universities saying that the undergraduates starting were less well prepared than previous generations of undergraduates. You heard employers saying that school leaders that their maths wasn't as good as it should be or the reading and writing ability wasn't as good too. I knew there's a problem and I knew for my own experience as an MP when I was elected in 1997 and I started visiting schools and I was told that in the secondary schools of the high schools, that something like 40% of those children starting high school had a reading age below that chronological age and a quarter had a reading age two years or more below that chronological age. I knew there was something wrong and that's why I wanted to find out what was wrong and why and what was the cause of that problem? - When you started visiting the schools, what did you find out? - So every Monday I had a schedule visiting schools on Monday. Maybe I chose Monday because our votes in the House of Commons are later in the day on Mondays. So it means I could get to anywhere in England visit a couple of schools and get back to the votes. And what I discovered traveling around talking to head teachers and teachers to see what I was seeing was that this notion of progressive education, that progressive sounds like a good word. But in the education world, it has a very distinct meaning. It's an ideological approach to the curriculum and what you teach and how. And I discovered really that the degree to which the school was progressive was the degree to which it standards were weak. I was learning what I meant by progressive but what I meant by progressive was a kind of low expectations, less focus on academic study, less focus on children remembering what they're being taught, testing on that and a kind of loose approach to behavior as well in those schools. And I remember going to some second years with some high schools where the whole ground floor was full of classrooms that were non-academic. They were all vocational and you saw a lot of hair salons in secondary schools, which I thought was depressing. Nothing wrong with going into head dressing as a profession. But why was it that all and mainly girls of a low academic ability should all want to go into that particular profession? I found it rather disconcerting and even if you do want to do that and people have made some very good living from being in the fashion beauty industry, you need to be well educated to succeed in those industries. There was something very wrong with our school system and I developed this sort of semi understanding of what I thought I meant was the problem that it was somehow caused by progressive education. The problem I had was that I could only name a few examples of what progressive education meant. It's dumbled across the reading issue about whole word, whole language versus phonics. But beyond that, I wasn't as crisp as clear as I should have been until I read around the subject, books like E.D. Hirosh's, the school to read, and what I don't have them was explained, intellectualing, and with crystal clarity, what progressive education was about, where it came from, and why it was so damaging. Okay, so you went around to the schools and you saw some of these things going on. And I have to ask about math 'cause that's what I talk about all the time. How was math being taught in English schools? Well, we had a thing called a national numeracy strategy that was introduced by the previous government. And what I saw in the elementary school was the primary schools. Whilst they were using the traditional algorithms for the four rules of number, addition, and so on. In addition, they were using a thing called the Dutch reform method, we had a horizontal line. Trezent plus 14, there was several right up the 27 to 30, round the 14 down to 10, add the 14 10 together and take off the three and add it, and so on. So they were basically trying to put into a written form a method that you might use in a mental maths strategy. In multiplication, instead of the traditional long multiplication algorithm, they had a thing called a grid method where they would take, say it was 27 times 120. They'd say, well, there's a 7 on the 20 on this, and then they 100 and the 20 that across the other axis, and then you must buy all these figures out. You talk about sort of a huge number of numbers. You then have to add up, add them all up to come to the figure. Again, the purpose of that was to try and inculcate an understanding of multiplication, but it became the final written method. An in with long division, they didn't do long division, there's just a way to get chunking. So 12's into 254, they go well, 254, I can see there's at least 10 12's there, so these are like 10 12's, 120. Mine is 120 and 257. No, there's another 10 12's there, another 120. I mean, this is designed to demonstrate that division can be repeated subtraction, but this method became the final result. method they were using. Well, I became a minister to fast-forward a few years. I asked to go to the best school in London that was teaching maths in elementary school. Most effectively, I went to the school. I took him out in school with some teachers on this girl from the top form who is I was told was the best at maths in the school. And I asked her to do that very calculation as she used that method and took a five minutes at least to do it when it would have taken a two minutes to do it using long division. I knew then there was a problem that if this was an exemplar of really good practice and this is what they were doing, that there was a fun amount of problem with the way maths has been taught. We had to we had to put it right. And you you're an accountant. So I mean, math is kind of your thing like me, right? And so you must have found this really bizarre. It must be bizarre and the other thing I used to do rather cheekily when I visited primers schools. I had a chat with the year six is the top year as a whole class and I would ask them their tables. And some kids knew their tables, but not every hand went up. I would say a few and a half when put their hands up. And as you got to the harder ones, very few hands went up. And I would talk to the teachers about this. The lady I said, "Do you teach the tables by heart?" And they go, "No, we don't." So there was a kind of hostility. You know, it's kind of road learning. You mustn't use road learning. And I don't know how you can do more sophisticated maths without knowing your tables. I really don't because if you are superfying fractions, you're doing, it's just the most elementary sophisticated maths. You need to know your tables, but you cannot be looking at what seven or sixes are when you're busy simplifying something. I was determined, and I know I would go to schools and they say, "Oh, we are doing tables." They'd trouble me then, and we go, "We go three, six, nine, drop." That is not low knowing your tables. That is counting your threes. Know your tables. It's to know that nine, three is a twenty-seven, as an isolated fat. So the more I went maths, the more errors there was a real problem with not just the written methods that we used for the algorithms, but also, but just didn't know the tables. I mean, it's great that you went and visited these schools because you got to see first hand what was going on, right? If you are a policymaker, I would say this applies to any area of policy. You've got to really understand the sects that you are devising policy for, and hope to be the minister in charge of ultimately. The danger with politics is that people think, "Well, here's what everyone's talking about, so we'll do that. Here's what right wingers talk about. We'll do that. Here's what left wingers talk about. We'll do that." That isn't good policymaking, and good policymaking is immersing yourself in the sector, really understanding what the problem is that you're trying to resolve, and then working out what calls that problem, and then when you work out what causes the problem, then you can come up with some policy prescriptions, but there has to be in that order. But too much of politics is about, you know, let's just do this thing because we hate those people, and it sounds good to our base, and that is a really bad word going about politics. So on that note, let's actually talk about the political side of things, and you made a lot of reforms, and you were, you know, you're a member of the British Conservative Party, and sometimes people think, "Well, you know, maybe this is a left or right issue, but is education a left or right issue? What do you think?" I don't think it is. I really don't. Some of the most articulate advocates of some of the things that you and I talk about in England are on the left. And why wouldn't they be? Because, guess who the children are, who most suffer from an inadequate poorly evidence approach to teaching and curriculum? They aren't necessarily the kids from well-heeled families, who, A, they'll probably get a good education at home, B, they'll do well anyway because they're well supported. The kids are suffer most are those children who come from families that are not well-educated, and they don't have all those advantages at home. And if they go to a school that doesn't teach them properly, either to read or, or mathematics, they will suffer disproportionately more. And the left did politics, you know, they are purportedly on the side of those children. So, of course, there are people on the left that support this agenda. And I'm sad to say there are people on the right who are taken in by all this thing about 21st century skills. And we need to have industry, we need to have the soft skills that they're demanding. So we should teach things in groups and we should do project-based learning. So it's left and right, both sides bad, both sides good. And absolutely what you just said about people being taken in by some of these things, because often what you call progressive education methods, they sound really good, right? It's about critical thinking and 21st century learning and whatever. How did you overcome that, though? Like, how did you become more informed about better ways to teach things like reading and math? Well, we looked around the world as well. So we looked to the top of the pizza league table. So places like Shanghai, Singapore, and we went there and we looked at the Singapore curriculum, which was superb, was very simple, step by step. Here, you learn this efficient written method in addition, carry the one and all that kind of thing. And then on the right in the notes and guidance, it said practice practice practice, we took that approach. We had read around the subject as well. Obviously, I mentioned ED Hirsch, the schools you need to worry don't have them, the importance of knowledge, the importance of automaticity and things like tables, another mathematical number of facts and so on. And then also I was introduced to another author, Daniel William, who wrote, why do students like school? And he made the very important point, that's the working memory, which is where all these high level intellectual activities take place, the critical thinking, the problem solving, the creativity. It can only handle half a dozen pieces of new information that want to, if I gave you two phone numbers, you could probably remember them. If I gave you 25 phone numbers, you would not be able to remember them instantly. You need to have things in your long term memory if you're going to critically think because you can't just think about six things, you must think of six facts, you need thousands of facts and deep knowledge to be able to critically think and be crazy. So in education, William says, it's about getting those that knowledge into a long term memory and that's what the school's meant to be doing, that's what your whole education is about. That doesn't mean boring facts, it doesn't mean cats have four legs, it means sophisticated knowledge about the battles between the executive and parliament in history and so on, and the complexities of chemical formulas and chemical reactions, all the vast quantity of human knowledge has been created over thousands of generations, is what you're trying to get into the long term memory of young people. And then from that, you'll be able to perform those critical thinking because absolutely those three skills, critical thinking, problem solving, creativity are really important in a modern economy like Canada and Britain. Of course, they are, but you just don't get them by teaching them. Today's lesson is critical thinking, because as I said, you need, they all based on, on getting knowledge into a long term memory and also their domain specific. So if you're good at problem solving in maths, you know, don't expect that maths professor to be able to fix your car necessarily, they might be able to, they'd be on a car mechanics course and they'll become very clever, but just because you're good at problem solving in history doesn't make your problem solving maths, it really doesn't. Then that's something that the progressivists just seem to overlook that it is domain specific. Is that what you refer to as a competency-based curriculum? So in Canada, I hear people sometimes talk about a three-seize curriculum and the idea is to focus on critical thinking, creative thinking, and collaborative thinking. And by the way, I would say these are all things that can't be defined or measured. So you, you call that a competency-based curriculum in England? Yes, I do. And the problem with these, and what they'll say about shoes, well of course we teach knowledge. When we're teaching those three seeds, we teach knowledge. The problem is the knowledge takes second fiddle to the skill, and therefore all the knowledge is geared around teaching that particular competence. And we introduced a competence-based curriculum in 2007, and that's what happened. So it isn't just those three skills. It's also things like the domain skills like historian understanding evidence and chronology. As they were trying to train all our children to be historians one day, the most were not. What we want children to know is some history, and we want them to be able to write and pray see and read quite complex history books is really the skills that we want. And so what happened with that history curriculum for example in England is that because the knowledge didn't really matter, it was the skills that mattered. They were schooled for teaching the same knowledge over and over again. They were teaching the tutors, head to the eighth and all that, and the causes of the Second World War. But what about all the great things that happened prior to the tutors? What happened about the stuff that happened in the 17th century when our constitution was basically formed, the Bill of Rights and the Civil War that we had. I mean the kids don't even know we had the Civil War. And there was a survey done by a professor in the economics in Cardiff University, and he was testing undergraduates. These were undergraduates. And they didn't know who was the Malakim Britain during the Spanish Amado. Well, clearly it was at the first they didn't know who Brunel was, what his professional was they didn't know, they couldn't name a single 19th century British Prime Minister of Sun did. It was about the percentage were very low in this survey. So, this was the problem. And you might think, "Well, does it necessarily don't know a 19th century prime minister?" So, I say it does, because you can't really be a critical thinker about politics or indeed history. If you don't know what happened in the big battles that happened in the 19th century, in the 18th century, in Parliament, the abolition of slavery, the reform of the electoral system, we're basically brought in democracy, not totally, because we couldn't vote by the end of the 19th century, but we went from, you know, only a small group of people voting to vast majority of men being able to vote during the 19th century, and that was extended in the 20th, early 20th century to the whole population. And the response to that, though, would be, well, you could Google it. So, what do you say to that? And that's a lot in your arguments. They now say, "Oh, I, this was not like an amazing 1920s, there's a thing Hirsch talks about, that this isn't new. No, this is new." And what they said in the 19th century is, "In teachers' colours, Colombia, New York, is statuary at all, really stand from the Basinal philosophy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau." So, this, if you look it up, look it up in Nannis, Wikipedia. You don't need to go through the boring process of remembering this stuff. You can just work it up all the time. The danger of that is, as I said, your working memory hasn't got time to look that up, or the capacity to look it up and remember, together with the other 35 things you have to look up to be able to form a view about something. So, it is us only in Olsen's, even with AI, even with all this information to our fingers. I can look up anything. You can look at anything you want if you know what to look at. But you just can't do that at the same time as trying to work out or solve the particular problem you're trying to solve. You just have to know stuff. Otherwise, it just becomes too cumbersome for you to be able to solve that problem. We're going to get to the math reforms, and we're going to talk a lot about the math reforms, because I'm really excited to hear about that. But let's start with reading. So, what are some of the reforms you implemented with respect to reading? By the way, kids are struggling with reading. It's struggling with math, and those improvements in reading have a bigger impact on math than they do on the English in our self-righteous studies. Reading matters to everything, including math. As I said, I was worried as an NP about children's reading ability. I knew something was going wrong. And in 2003, I met a lady called Ruth Meskin, who was a very complex head teacher of a primary school, who realized herself at the way she had been trained was wrong. And she learned about phonics and she tried this in her school in East London, a very deprived part of East London. And all her kids were reading. And she became a beacon school, people go and visit and find out. And then she devised the proper scheme of core read writing. I met her and she introduced me to this whole debate about the reading walls. There'd been going on since the 1950s, again, started in America, and then came to this country. The debate was the whole language approach to the teacher reading, where you repeat high-prequency words, and you learn by sight because that's how accomplished experienced readers read. And the argument is that you should try and teach that skill to beginner readers. And it just essentially, it doesn't really work. And if a bright kiss, I'll read anyway. But for less able to, or even some bright boys who then just end up memorizing texts, they don't learn to read. And then it's exposed by the time they're nine. They realize actually you can't read these more complicated words than the history lessons on. I then ran a campaign before we came into government about this and got the last government, the previous government, to make a minor change to the curriculum. But when we came into office, we were ready, because I thought that wasn't the one going fine enough. So we chose a national curriculum to require teachers to teach reading, using systematic synthetic phonics, learning the sounds of the alphabet, and then to blend them into words, cat and cat. We introduced a phonics screening check. This is a test for six-year-olds, very controversial because you're testing six-year-olds, but it was done in a very not stressful way. The child would read to their own teacher from this list of 40 simple words, 20 of which were pseudo words. They weren't real words because we wanted a test that children could know how to decode when just learning these words on site. When we introduced us in 2012, it was compulsory in all primary schools in the state sector, 58% reached the past mark. And then each year it went up, and then by the time COVID came, it would reach 82%, and then it did do it to COVID down to 75 and it's crept up now, it's back up to 80%. Forging the restoration of the test. What's interesting is when you go around to primary schools, you will actually see it happening. It's not as if this is just some paper exercise and teachings or teachings of the test. There has been a genuine change in all our primary schools. In my own view, some teaching best for another's, it shouldn't be 82%, it should be 99%, frankly, passing, and there shouldn't be a gap between disadvantaged children and the national school, which there is. It's a lower figure for disadvantaged, that shouldn't be the case, this is not. Dependent on your family background is just a mechanical exercise, just if it's taught well, they'll know it. And as a consequence of the phonics screening check, we went from 10th in the world to 8th and then from 8th, in the most recent polls to 4th in the world. We're really about to have nine year olds. And the phonics screening check has been adopted by some of the states in Australia, starting with South Australia in 2019. And now, New Zealand has adopted the phonics screening check in that country as well. So it's spreading around the world. And what I know is that it works. It absolutely works. Phonics is the way to teach children to read with all the evidence from the United States reading panel that managed to study in Scotland that was undertaken. And it's it's one for to see. And it sounds like a simple reform to make, right? This is just a quick phonics check at age six. You said, though, that it was a bit controversial. So what kind of opposition did you face? Oh, massive opposition. People write less as the times. People accused us or just teaching children to bark at text. This was the phrase, you're just teaching kids to bark at text. And what they would, what they have misunderstood was that they were conflating comprehension with reading. They said, really isn't just about barking at text. Of course, it isn't. Of course, it's not. But you can't read if you can't bark at text. So if you can't decode these squiggles on the page, you won't be able to comprehend. So they conflated comprehension and coding. And you need both. You need to teach the skill of decoding. So you're teaching the scales of the piano at the same time. You need children to increase the vocabulary you need that needs to be read to every day by the teacher in a vocabulary rich environment is where it should be taught. So it's sort of a cabaret increasing at the same time. And then once they have managed to decode effortlessly words, then you can move on to the children reading more and more books on their own, increasing their speed of reading, which is very important. And then their love of reading. And children love it if they can do it. If you're, if you are eight or seven and you struggle with this thing because somebody's told you to look at picture, look at the context, try and guess the word based on what you've known so far. I mean, it's just a nightmare. It's just unpleasant. And children give up. I mean, one of the one of the technical things about this whole issue is it's very important when children practice their phonics, they use a book that is finically consistent with what they've learned. So don't have a book with elephant. If you haven't done the pH graphene, so that when they're practicing, they can do it. Don't make them find other strategies for identifying the word elephant if they haven't learned those particular sounds. So where did the strongest resistance come from? It came from the academics in the universities. Of course, we've been teaching generations of teachers to teach using whole language or whole word as it was or multi-curing. So their careers were bound up in this methodology. It came from some people like authors, some famous children's authors in this country thought it was, we'd kill the love of reading. And they were just wrong. They don't think they had the best of interest in it. They were just mistaken. And then of course, the early years lobby campaigned against it. So did a lot of the trade unions who didn't like the test, particularly in what schools held to account through the test. Even things like testing six year olds was controversial. Having 20 false words, that was controversial. Even within the phonics movement, that was controversial. But we just plowed on. And we had to make all kinds of decisions. And hindsight sounds like a sensible thing to do with the finite screen. We came up with that policy. And that's hard. Let me just work up the device to test. Let me just set the past mark. And so on. So every step of this journey in phonics was controversial. And people forget that when they look back and say, well, of course you did that. Everyone's in very good phonics now, of course. I see they're not even now that there are some people who still periodically criticize the last government for being obsessed with phonics. Well, it looks like you were right. The test scores tell us that. Do they not? Well, you, I mean, we're forth in the world, but it's more than that. We don't just do this to go up in international e-tables. We do it because we want children to enjoy being educated and they do enjoy. And I get, I meet parents, friends of mine who've got children or even sort of acquaintances and people I don't know who know me will say, you know, I was thinking of you. My five-year-old came home and they're reading, I've only started school and they're sounding out the letters just like you talked about and it's wonderful and that's very gratifying as a policymaker and I've met so many children prior to 2010 while I was visiting schools. I just want an example like I cite in articles I've written about a girl, this is in 2009 just before the election, I went to see a school. I went there not to see phonics, I went there to see a voluntary reading scheme or voluntary reading. I'm exhibitionist, nine-year-old girl, Reed, there's a book about dinosaurs and she just could not read a single word. Eventually, she read the word even and there was rejoicing, you know, and I said, "What do you mind if I just do this?" I just covered up the letter, I'd cover it up the first letter E, I covered up the E even and I asked the girl if she could just read that word and she could not. So in many ways, there was a wild guess she got the word even and she couldn't read the word then and it was so obsessing to me because this girl was a couple of years away from high school, she could have been taught to Reed and she haven't been. I don't think you'll see that, the example of that today in our primary schools and that's the very particular circumstances present in that child. And I should ask because you mentioned that there was resistance from education academics and some children's authors, what about the classroom teachers? Yes, there was resistance because who am I, this isn't it, Gipfellow, Michael Goe, the Secretary of State, one's a journalist, one's a charge of accountants, nine of your teachers telling us, "I've been here for 20 years running this classroom, who are you to tell me how to teach reading?" So there was that, I had to say, and they had a point, but so did we have a point, we cite all these evidence. So there was resistance, but the bus, you know, when they sit, when they're implemented in a school and they see these children reading, it does change minds, it really does. Okay, so let's move on to math, my favorite subject. So what are some of the reforms that you implemented in math? Well, we really did focus on primary, that was where the real problem lay, and all that of course then does impact on what happens in secondary. And as I said earlier, we looked around the world and we looked at the Singapore curriculum, I went to Shanghai and Hong Kong and saw maths in those two parts of China, and it was astonishing, those children were two years ahead in Shanghai at the top of the league table. And what we learned was, there were 42 in the class, so these weren't small class sizes. One teacher, very focused engaged, but they took every step of the algorithm, whole lesson on a tiny step of the algorithm. They contrast that with what I saw in England, in a school I was taking to, where they spend half the lesson teaching these children the long multiplication algorithm. I went around the class and three courses were put in the line in the right place. Then after about 20 minutes of this, the teacher then said, right, think about your laptop, you're going to learn the Japanese method, and this was some kind of weird triangle thing, I had never heard of it, then I'll say, I'm sure you know all about it. But these poor kids, they had hardly grasped all the complexities of the long multiplication algorithm, and yet they're and then does to try and learn this other method. So the good thing about what's happening is Shanghai was that it was whole lesson, just on a tiny bit of the algorithm, and we had a lot of exchanges with Shanghai, our teachers going out to Shanghai, we had Shanghai teachers coming to England, and they love coming to England, and they saw some of our more creative approaches of the art, some things they liked. But they also taught maths in the way they teach maths and Shanghai, and we had a exemplar lessons, I remember going to C1, and they had this wonderful teacher, I think it was the year four she was teaching, grade four, it was a whole lesson on two digits by two digits times two digits, both ending zero, so she did 70 times 30, so 70 times 30, what's the first, what's step one, throw away the zeros, what are you left for, seven times three, what are seven times three, twenty one, how many zeros do we throw away, two, how many zeros do we pick up, two, twenty one, zero zero, the answers, twenty one, I was around the room, every single child was getting it right, and as she went through the methodology and how she said it out, every single child was getting it right, it was wonderful, and there's a whole lesson on that, and then you could then the children did other examples of other two digits, so we learned from that, we did those exchanges as well over several years, until COVID, and I think it's just been resumed I think, because we were trying to introduce a concept called maths mastery, every child should be adding and subtracting fractions, because it's not string theory, it just might take some children a bit longer and need a bit more support and help, but they should all be moving on at the same time and learning the same thing, so we learned that concept of maths mastery, we brought it to England, we set up a series of maths hubs, these are sort of schools who are doing it well, because natural centre of excellence in the teaching of mathematics that we contracted to come in and make those schools even better, and then we spread that practice across the maths system, so we changed the natural curriculum, which is a legal requirement, year by year, setting up precisely what needs to be taught never yet, that was controversial, one of our people resigned over it, one of our panel members of the curriculum review, because they said it should be keystays by keystays, the keystays is about three years or four years, keystays two, we wanted it much more precise, this year you will learn this, this year you will learn this, and in fact it wasn't done by ten, it was done by a year, and it was very detailed, and then we started work on the multiplication tables check, so we already started and implemented the phonics check, which are the same principle, but for multiplication tables, we wanted every child to know the tables to twelve times twelve, not ten times ten, which is a previous system, twelve hours a day, that's twelve months a year, twelve is quite a useful number to be able to multiply, and by year four, not by year six, and we brought in a test, we were given six seconds to answer each question, from the moment they said ready to announce question, their new six seconds to answer it, twenty five to questions, but it took many years to pilot to get it right, I remember this year, I think twenty twenty we rolled it out, but it was middle of Covid, so we kept it voluntary to after Covid, I think of twenty twenty two is compulsory, twenty seven percent of children received four marks, twenty five, twenty five, and the average score out of twenty five was twenty points something, and this year it's just risen up to I think forty two percent of children have got four marks in the multiplication tables check, and when you go around schools now, and I asked children the year six or year five indeed, every hand goes up, they all know, they all know their tables. And so that's at age nine, another simple thing to implement that probably has a huge impact, so the phonics test and the times table test, those are excellent ideas, and really we should be able to implement that anywhere, right, I mean everybody, everywhere needs to know those things, so it makes a lot of sense, did you do anything about calculators? We did. One of my predecessors took out, when I was out of office, she took, she said no, we got no kind of phases at the end of primary school tests, so we have a test anyway, it's already in place, before we came into office, at the end of primary school and re inviteing a maths, and we just picked two of the calculators out of her test, there's plenty of time to calculate this, and the next, you know, five years of high school plus two years of sixth form, for doing more sophisticated maths, let's just use this primary school phase to make sure that the proper arithmetic and mathematics is firmly embedded. So I want to ask about your changes to the math curriculum, the politician might have some ideas that the curriculum should be changed, and they give this to the people that work in the Department of Education, and those people have their own ideas about how the math curriculum should look, and there might be some differences of a ping-in, I'm just curious how you selected people to work on that curriculum and ensure that it didn't get hijacked. Well, this is the challenge of every minister and every department, you really have to know your own mind, and therefore you have to have done the research, and you have to build up allies who really, who share your outlook, who share your analysis of the problem that has put it right, so we made sure that we had a chair of our curriculum review who was in tune with our thinking, but even then, as I said, we appointed one to people who didn't agree with it year by year, and they resigned in a bit, you know, half, but it's a nightmare doing a curriculum review, I wouldn't wish it on my worst enemy, I remember one example, and there were many of these types of examples where in the Notes and Guidance it said practice, learn how to do these things, practice, and this word practice, we're in right through the curriculum, I counted with the word count 64 times, it went out for informal consultation with the maths teaching community, came back, the officials in the department had excised the word practice, every reference to it, I was furious about this, and I rang up the chair of the curriculum, what's happening, and he said, there's an ideology that says that practice is boring and tedious, and I pray back, essentially, and I think the lesson is, you have to get across the detail, every document, and I was as serious in doing this as a minister, and everything I touched, you have to be on top of the detail. all every single piece of paper that goes into what we have in England called a red box, which is what ministers get every night and all the weekends. Because otherwise things either incompetently slip through or deliberately try to slide it through, so you have to go and topple that. And go yourselves, I had a big battle over the use of a comma in six figure digits. They didn't want to have a comma in a million, they wanted to have, so having a comma after one or a comma after three zeroes or a comma after six is it? They wanted to put a space. And I said, well, no, no, you're not having a space, you're having a comma because that's what we all do. And no, no, no, no, you've got people from Europe coming to England and they are as thoughtful, comfortable to say, it's just any fair, they have a space. And I said, no, no, having a comma, because that's what the times newspaper use is and that's what's in all the government documentation. We're going to have a comma, you know, in both tests, a primary school and in the curriculum. And they fought really hard. I didn't understand why they were fighting hard, but at the end, it was just such a bulk as idea. I just said, look, I'm the minister, ultimately, it's kind of, we're having a comma. It's kind of life you lead as a minister. You sit for battles every day. Every day was a battle. There's no question. Every day was a battle or some sort. I think you're pretty tough. I think a lot of ministers would just say, well, I'm going to listen to the experts, right? I'm going to listen to my experts and they would just let this go. And I mean, what you did by standing your ground, that is just amazing. And it would have a huge impact on a lot of kids. And I wish more ministers of education would do this type of thing. It is interesting. We had lots of debates that weren't necessarily as battles strewn as that. So for example, what year do you do the final screening check? There was an argument for doing these in reception. So you're not wasting a year or I felt that was too soon. There was like them for doing it in year two. I thought that was too late. In the end, we settled on year one, end of year one, which is kids were being there nearly two years, but that stays in our system. And there's another argument about when you do the multiplication tables check. We chose year four, nine year olds, because if you wait until year six, then the worry is the schools will just obsess about multiplication tables and they'll neglect the other stuff. Didn't want that. I don't want to just replace multiplication tables as a whole lot more than that. And there were big debates about long division. There was a whole bunch of experts who indeed, including people that I trusted who thought long division should wait for high school. And I just said, oh, this is simple. This is just an algorithm. It's not. This is not string theory. So we should talk about teacher training because you can implement these reforms and you can tell teachers that they should use systematic phonics and they should teach the standard algorithms. But if they're being told not to use those approaches in teacher training, that's going to undermine those efforts. So I'm wondering if you can talk about your reforms to initial teacher training. As you raised, we didn't really touch teacher training properly until 2018. We came into office in 2010. And basically, my experience had been both an opposition and in government that I was not hitting a brick wall talking to the educational faculties of the university. So they just didn't really want to debate. And I would go to visits and I would be taking to a meeting room for 90 minutes, so talk at me. And there was no dialogue. So what we did do is to train is we tried to take the power of the training of the teacher to the school level. So it had to be brought in a thing called school direct where teachers scores and cells direct the training. But they still had to use the universities. So in the end, we introduced a thing called the early career framework with a better curriculum for teachers in the first two years of their career in the classroom after they left university and done their postgraduate certificate of education. And that was evidence-based. It was based on all the things teachers really need to measure classroom behavior, knowledge, all those things as set of ethics. And it was all evidence-based. We set up a thing called the Education and Diamond Foundation where I got a wax work center back in 2010. They signed off on everything that was in this early career framework. And it went down well, extra mentoring for teachers. We then took that upstream to teach a training and we said, right, we're going to use the same principles. This is going to be what we call the core content framework or what teachers should be taught in their training at an educational faculty of university. And they all said they were supported. I didn't know they really did in reality. And then we got the inspectorate to inspect those faculties on the basis of that core content framework. And some actually didn't get through that inspection. Then we decided to do a market review of future training. And I mean, essentially we asked every school center teacher training and universities to reapply for accreditation. They had to demonstrate how their courses were in tune with this core content framework. And some didn't get through that. And they had to revise their system some and then some dropped out when they couldn't do a teacher training. And then we said, right, now show us a documentation. You said you do it, you signed up to it, now show it. And that's when a lot fell down. They had to redo the documentation. So it's a hard slog. We had a lot of controversy with simply the top university's auction came, whereas in particular said we were interfering with our academic freedoms. We said no, you can teach what you like, but we are the the contractees. If you like, you are our supplier. We're giving you this money to train all our teachers. We want you to train them in accordance with the evidence. So you do what you like and other things you want to do with the teachers, but you have to learn this. And in the end, they can, they can see you. And I think, I think it had had an impact. You know, you hear things about whether in reality, they're delivering it on the ground, but it, I think it has had an impact of just making sure that teachers are trained in accordance with the evidence. I do hear, I do hear schools I trust saying to me that the teachers that are coming through now, the newly qualified teachers are not as imbued with a lot of the progressivist biology that previous generations of teachers have been. So I think it has been, I would say partially successful in before we teach the training. So just following up, I think you said something about there was a way for schools to train the teachers. Can you say a little bit more about that? Well, we have the thing called school centered initial teacher training, where they can train their teachers. What they can't deliver is a postgraduate certificate of education, which most graduate teachers want. They want that extra bit of paper. So then they have to use the universities. And then we had school direct, where again, they could, they could direct the training either to another school center, the initial teachers training or to a university. So we were just trying to give more control over what was taught to those training teachers to the schools than before. And with the school centered initial teacher training, you can give them qualified teacher status. You just couldn't give them a PGCE. And I think that's something that I'd like us to be able to change in further reforms. We also established a national institute of teaching. And the idea behind that was to take the principles of really successful schools and multi academy trust like Michaela or Alcan Harris and get them to train teachers in tune with that approach, because we know that's very successful. And that has been going up few years now and is proving successful. There's kind of competitive challenge to do the existing university providers. Okay. So they'd get like a content degree in some subject, a teachable subject. Exactly. So teaching is a graduate profession. You either do a bachelor of education from the age of 18 for four years. All the most common roots is to have an undergraduate degree in something provided that's a relevant degree for the subject. You then get a PGCE to become a math teacher or physics teacher at all. So you mentioned the education endowment foundation. Can you say a bit more about that? We were very unhappy with the quality research and evidence from the educational faculty. We felt it was poor quality. So a typical piece of a piece of research might have been, we tried this thing. Now as a ten teacher said it was great. There was a real buzz in the room. And therefore we think it's great. So that's going to roll it out. That is not evidence. That's an opinion. So we want to proper randomize control files or interventions or metrics of teaching or curriculum. And that's why we gave this body this money to do this £137 million. So which in the context of the austerity in 2010 when we were dealing with the aftermath of the banking crash was a huge sum. To spend over 10 years with the interest as well on evidence so randomize control trials. And it proven very effective. They've had real credibility with the teaching profession. Very well run organisation. We have renewed there a 10 year thing with another 120 million to 10 for another 10 years. And it's a very successful. It's a what work centre as part of the global to what works centres. And it's one of the most successful things that we have achieved. So as well as saying what does work, one of the really good things about it is it says what does not work. So a lot of the sort of snake oil that there's too much of it around an education was, you know, they'll notice our things as learning styles. I can't tell you, these things had real currency in the school system. And the EEF just debunks them. So there's just the just the evidence for this. approach, so don't use it. I mean, they have a thing called the tool kit and that is very well used, not just by teachers in England, but internationally people are using this tool kit. Any teacher can look it up. This is online, right? Yes, it's online. The whole whole of resources online that anybody around the world can source. UK government stuff tends to be able to source globally. Okay, so our Canadian listeners and our American listeners can go to the Education Endowment Foundation to find out what works. No, exactly. So there would be a very pleased to help. Are there any other changes that you made that you want to mention? We tend to behave your policy that I mean, I think behavior in schools is an ongoing challenge. I wouldn't say we have cracked it, but it's so important to children are misbehaving or they're not focused, they're not learning. As we gave teachers more powers, we clarified what the regulations said they couldn't could not do whether they could confiscate. We used to have a rule that for a child to go into detention, you had to give parents a written 24 hours notice. You know, this just is absurd. Now they don't have to do that. They just go into detention the same day after school for a half an hour or whatever it takes and the school I went to visit last week. Two hours in some cases if they receive multiple detention notices during the day, it really is important. We changed the rules about expulsions and suspensions. We had cases where children would be expelled for a very serious knife crime or something in the school and they'd appeal to an independent appeals panel. The appeal would award the appeal and this kid would go flouncing back into school again and we said no, the head teacher even after the appeal is won by the child. If the school doesn't want them back, they don't have to tend back and this just gave more confidence to schools and to heads to do what they have to do to maintain good behavior in the school and this school I went out his couple years ago. It's called Dixon's Trinity in Bradford. I mean they do there. It's exemplary. This is a school that serves very disavante as part of Northern, Northern England. The children there are focused and studious and serious and happy because the behavior is such that they can just work and they want to work. They want to get on. I'm not saying we've achieved that across the school. We absolutely haven't and COVID has created some new problems but we certainly took some good proper steps forward in improving schools and to enable to implement behavior strategies that really do work. Any other changes you want to mention? We also change our curriculum, our qualifications. We've just brought them in the GCSEs at 16 and A levels at 18. We made the more knowledge rich and more rigorous, more modest par with international standards of the best performing countries. The other thing we've not touched on is the whole strutful changes that we introduced. I say all our schools until 2010 were really run for decades centuries have been run by the local authorities. We saw a 150 round England and we learned from the charter movement in the States, from the free school movement in Sweden as well and we basically wanted to give schools independence like a charter school. We gave the power to any government body of an academy of a school to leave the local authority and become what we call an academy which is essentially a charter school and now we're in a position where 80% of high schools are now academies and 40% of primary academies and you say well why does this matter because well they have autonomy over many of the decisions that they want to take and it means that they can be free to challenge the prevailing orthodoxies that had until we came into power really dominated the local authorities and it's very difficult. I remember going to a school in my constituency in Sussex where I said doing multiplication tables checking she said no I'll ask the local authority whether I should and that filled me with horror you know you should decide not some person advisor in the like authority who presumably would say no because they were dominated by that they progressive ist ideology so we did that and now what's happening to those charter schools academies is they're amalgamating into multi-academy trusts sometimes just three or four schools sometimes 40 and and they're using the back office to promote really high quality training and curricula in those schools and it's one of the reasons why we are improving internationally in the league tables as fat or told me we have a liberator if you like the teaching profession in England to debate these issues to discuss them to to innovate to bring in more evidence-based approaches to math teaching or reading or or the curriculum or behavior policies that wasn't possible until we gave these schools that level of independence. So let's talk about some of the results so when you started making reforms you didn't have concrete evidence showing that they'd work you took a risk you stood firm you made the changes but now you do have some evidence I think that your reforms actually worked so can you talk about that? Yeah so we are going up in those international tables and we are now for in the world in polls performance in reading literacy and that's only when we were eight five years earlier and we were 10 five years before that and they attribute that and if you read the report they attribute it to they fought their focus on phonics and the reason we've gone out, the reason why our scores are high is because of the lower training you've been improving and that really fills me with joy we haven't got there because our ableist children became even more able although they have that hasn't pushed up our position it's the lee state who have become competent readers that's pushed up our score that is everything we dreamed of when we set about this reform program in math we've gone from 27th in 2009 in pizza to 11th in the world and delighted by that result as well and there are similar figures in Tim as well particularly at grade five in late surreal elementary schools well so so you're right what this is enabled us to say and demonstrate is that all the theories that we had about knowledge of curriculum you know East Asian approaches to math teaching phonics to the teaching of reading that was all based on what we'd read and theory and studies like Clack Manage show you this reading panel or so on but now we've got concrete evidence based on international surveys that show us going up now people say well you know your actual scores have gone down because of covid or they say oh well he has all relative but we're not going down you know we're going up that's the point and yeah and you do see it's in you do see this change in schools you see better discipline you see more sophisticated in math being taught you see children knowing their tables you see them being able to read and the fewer children struggling i'm always open to challenge so if you can say well you you're not delivering on this metric or that metric let's have a look but every metric that i encounter points to the success of this approach to policy and you kind of have a comparison group because unlike england scotlin and whales didn't implement the same reforms so tell me a bit about that what was going on in scotlin and whales and how have their student outcomes compared although i was the uk education minister i only had jurisdiction over schools in england and there's an education minister in scotlin there's one in whales there's one in Northern Ireland so all the education policies have developed matter and they were very critical of our approach to education form and they went not to implement our reforms they went further and went more progressive so scotlin introduced a curriculum for excellence a competent spaced curriculum and then subsequently so did whale and we are able to to break down the uk's piece of score between the four nations you look at england's math scores as i said we went from 27th in 2000 and we went up to 11th in 2022 scotlin in maths went from 21st in 2030 down to 30th in 2022 and then his science as well scotlin went from 16th in 2000 line to 30th whereas we in science went from 16th to 13th and the same in whales whales they're reading but went from 35th in 2000 line to 33rd so they're just languishing in the thirties same with maths they went from 37th in 2000 line down to 40th the down to now 33rd and science again 27th in down to 34 so they basically languished either gone down or they just haven't improved and they're down there in the thirties the one exception is reading in scotlin whether the same position that we are in england they don't take part in pearls so it's hard to know precisely what white is their in pieza that the same level we are which is 13 different pearls where we're four this is 15 year olds and the only explanation I can work out scotlin is a small country compared to england in terms of population but they Two of the most important phonic studies took place in Scotland. One is in Flat Manager and one is in West Dunbartonshire. The only conjecture I can come up with is not evidence-based because we don't have the evidence is because they've had all this phonic's attention in Scotland, but it has fed through to their reading. But in terms of the curriculum for excellence, which is absolutely a competence-based type curriculum, we see that we see the effect on science, we see the effect on maths, it's being a disaster. And I've been doing something of a crisis in both countries, both Scotland and Wales, over these things are these results. - I mean, the government has changed in the UK, right? So what impact will that have on the reforms? - Well, I obviously worry about these things. I mean, we live in a democracy. I think if people want to change policy dust, you know, that's the way it is. The two things that worried me, one is a bill introduced called the children's well-being and schools bill. And that tries to undermine some of the autonomy that the academy's had. And I think that's a very dangerous move because that autonomy is part and parcel of the success. It's given those professionals the freedom to do the things that they were prohibited from doing, either directly or through soft power, with totally of the majority of you that prevented them from doing things. So I worry about that. They want to make the natural curriculum applied to all the academies and so on. All kinds of different things that I'm not sure are necessarily wise if you want to free up the profession to do what they think is right. And they've also conducted a curriculum review. And I was worried about that because I saw people on the panel. I didn't think they were necessarily somewhere, but not all of them were in tune with our thinking that maybe behind our successful reforms. The politics came to the rescue, though, because the narrative should press over Bill, I talked about the legislation, was so damning on the government because they said it was a government not ready to high standards. That the Prime Minister's office was very worried about. That narrated and I think they intervened to make sure that the curriculum review didn't change things as dramatically as it might have. So the interim report came out a couple of weeks ago and I was relatively sanguine about what I saw in that review that I don't think it will undermine what we've achieved in terms of improving the curriculum. What's interesting, though, I think I might have touched on this earlier in your podcast is that the teachers in this country now really are engaged in the debates about curriculum teaching methods. In a way, I definitely are in to the same extent in other countries. If they blog and they write, we have this thing called Research Edge, which I know has come to Canada and come to the other parts of the world, but it started here. Tom Bennett, teacher in London started this. And all the bloggers, there are many of them. I'd like to plug my book on your podcast. - Yeah. - Coming out in late August, September called Reforming Lessons, and it's about our reforms. And in that, I talk about the importance of the blog with teachers, teacher bloggers, and scores of them without hundreds. And some really good ones come to debate in a really extensive way and in a very high caliber way. That's really important, and that you can't put that genie back in the bottle. So whatever government comes in, the debate about the importance of knowledge, the importance of direct instruction by teachers, the importance of phonics and traditional approaches to the algorithms and mathematics and so on. That one go, those ideas are out there now, and they have achieved, I think, a critical mass amongst the thought leaders in the teaching profession. So I'm confident that these reforms will, the fundamentals of the reforms will stick, even if bits of it are chipped away out by future governments. And I'm hoping it will spread, but I believe, spent some time in Australia and that beginning to debate these issues. As I said, we've got the phonics green checking few of the stays, but they're talking about not many ports of knowledge, less of a impressive minister in the state of Victoria, the labor minister. - Ben Carroll. - Ben Carroll, he's very impressive. And again, it's an example where this is not right left, this stuff, it really isn't. He cares about the education of his constituents of his in his state. And this is where the evidence points, why wouldn't you implement this? I think this movement is spreading at a very wonderful education sub dream New Zealand, Eric Stanford, who's implementing the sheep, I said the fine chap, it also is implementing a knowledge rich curriculum and she's reforming maths. It's hard work, but it's worth the effort 'cause you're affecting the lives of millions of children. And there's all the evidence that if you're well educated, you're more likely to be in a job, you're more likely to have good health, you're more likely to have good mental health. So there's a lot to play for in guessing the education policy, right? What we're short of in England is educated people. We need more graduates, we need more maths graduates, more physics graduates, more graduates in the arts and so on. More people educated to the best that their ability will bring them, whether it's a knotted degree through a apprenticeship, whatever it is, whatever level we're talking about, whatever skill you need, you need children to be well educated to get into it. So for an economy that's crying out for these skills on this knowledge, your education system is the only lever that will deliver that. So if you have a failing education system, you are ultimately well failing economy. - And we've been sounding the alarm bell at the university level for years about this. We know that students are coming out of high schools, not really prepared as well as they should be in math, and there are fewer and fewer of them every year. It is a serious situation. - You guys need to be because you know, the things you're talking about on this podcast series, all the evidence is there about how to teach maths in the most effective way. And we've just got to make sure that evidence trumps ideology in the delivery of our education system. - I want to ask you some questions about advice, if you can give some advice on a few things, because obviously you're in a unique position. And I think you have a lot of insights and perhaps some good advice that you could give. Let's start with this. So suppose a politician or a policy maker is listening and they want to become more informed about education. So what books would you recommend they read? - I would certainly read Edie Hurts. I would say that's the starting book. That's Edie Hurts, H-I-R-S-C-H, and it's the school gym we need and why we don't have them. I read it on the beach in South Carolina on a holiday in 2006, and it basically answered all the questions while I was struggling with it. Very helpful indeed. And then there's Daniel Willing and I mentioned earlier that right now students likes to call that explains the importance of knowledge in terms of cognitive load on the working memory where all the pilot or sophisticated thinking takes place. That was again, I believe there's other books as well, a slim volume, but has webbed this country, England in terms of teachers reading it. And that's Daisy Krista-Dueler's book, Seven Myths About Education. There's my book, of course, you must, that's absolutely essential, reforming lessons, post-borrowed leads in the autumn. And there's other books like progressively worse than anywhere that's still available. We've been by and like co-author some years ago, 2014, called Progressively Worse, published by Civitas. Again, it explains the history of our education to some England. You can either be one of those books. I would read Hirsch. - So if a member of the government party, a government minister say, wants to implement reforms like you did, what advice would you give them? - Well, you have to decide the policy. You cannot rely on the civil service for policy. I have a huge respect for our civil servant in Britain. Civil service in Britain. They're very good at implementation. They are absolute past masters of implementing things. They are not good at policy development. And why would they be? They don't take part in debates. They don't have constituents. They don't tend the kind of political events that I have attended all my life, because that's not what they do, and not what they should do. They're not meant to be going to those things and having those debates. But that's where policy is made. It's the thinking of the honing of ideas where policy emerges. You just not emerge from a civil servant who's good at implementing. Sitting down in a piece of paper saying, well, I resolved this problem. And the other thing that civil servants tend to do is that they think they represent the sector. So if the sector says you don't need multiplication tables, then that will be the view of civil servants. You don't need multiplication tables, because that's what the sector says. So you mustn't rely on them. Therefore you must have your own analysis of what the problem is you're trying to solve and how to solve it. So you need to do the work. And those years in opposition, if you're in opposition, you're not in government. You've got to reuse that time to do this work. It's quite hard to do it if you suddenly thrust in to become an education minister from defense or something. But if you are, then you've got to do the work. As a minister, if you're already successful in that role, you've really got to form your own analysis using the fact that you, as a politician, have come up through the political system. It's not a bad thing. But the media is so disparaging about politics in a democracy that sometimes politicians think that they agree with a journalist. Oh, I must be bad. I must be sleazy if I'm in politics. No, it's a worthwhile, absolutely proper thing to want to do, to use your ability to serve the public in a democratic elected thing, so have confidence and do the job seriously by engaging in the debates and immersing yourself into the education sector to find out what it is you're trying to solve. Then the other bit of advice is to find your allies. So while it's great things about visiting schools every Monday for five years, is that I met people and I met people who I felt in tune with and to share my analysis of what was going wrong. Then you grapple those people to your house with I am bonds because they are the people that you want to help and there's lots of examples now of where I've done that. Take them headteachers I'd met, ask them to head up panels whether it's a teacher's standards panel or curriculum or whatever it is, and it done a brilliant job. So I think you need to find your fellow travellers, the people that share your analysis and have trouble and then they will help you. You can't do this in a way of self, but you're an accountant, you know, what do I know. So I had expert friends in every field. I had Tom Bennett who set up research there, but he was also a behaviourist. I had Ruth Miskin who helped me for all the stuff I'm reading. I had a lady we haven't mentioned called Debbie Morgan who worked at an education company but who was brilliant in bringing that Shanghai maths approach to English schools. I had Ian Bulkham who headed our teacher training reforms, but before that he's a linguist. He headed our review of how to teach foreign languages in our school, which is a terrible mess and he tried to put that right for me. So in every field you get your experts who will help you and you identify who they are. Not because the civil service tell you they'll tell you the wrong people, you gotta find your own by being out there in the schools, you're in your ab team people. So that's the other strong advice I'll give. And then finally one bit more, and that is about compromise because if you want an easy life as a politician or as a minister, compromising will make your life much easier. However, if you compromise on what you know to be the right way to improve things, every compromise you may chips away at the success of those reforms, every single one will, even if it's by a tiny percentage. So the initial view is do not compromise, but then you will have to compromise where you absolutely have to, so right compromise on the number of things. Sometimes I regret to affect the compromise, but for example, the phonics screening check, it would have been lovely to have published the results of those on a school basketball basis in the way we do our end of primaries with tests and reading writing maths. If I had done that, I'd think we've had a boycott of the tests by the unions and it wouldn't have succeeded. So I said, we won't punish it at a school level. We will be available to these spectres to see, it will be available for government to see and the local authority to see, but we won't publish it. As a consequence, we've had that test in place since I tried to troll and it's still the test of time. So you do have to make compromises, but only when necessary and not where it's just for an easy life. Let's say you're an advocate for education reforms. So like a parent advocacy group or someone like me, I'm a math education advocate. I have been for many years. Do you want to persuade a politician to implement real reforms? What do you think is an effective approach for doing that? There's a case for trying to get to know a politician before they take office, if possible. Because they then have the time to really get into the weeds. If they're that type of politician, I mean, I would say it meets as many politicians as you can in government and out of government. And then you've got to try to identify the ones who are listening to you. You can tell that lesson to you because they're looking at their watch after 10 minutes and you're wasting your time really with those ones. So find the ones who are really interested in what you have to say and are concerned. Those are the ones you need to sort of spend time with then, whether they're in office or in opposition, but in some way, the better if they're in opposition, so you can be able to take up time to really immerse themselves into all that completely. You know everything about maths. You're a maths professor and you will assume all kinds of knowledge, a non-mathematician like me or how, and we just don't have it. And so you'll have to take us through what it is you're talking about, and particularly at the new to the education world. But there's no point in doing it. They're not interested if they just sort of want to hear it because I want to be the prime minister. So this is a stepping stone I'm going to get from here, I'm going to become the child of EastJet for the finance minister, then I'll be prime minister so you can borrow me for 10 minutes. That's where you're wasting your 10 minutes of that person. I mean, I met yesterday online a lady called Maria Murray who runs a reading league in the States and so she's all in favour of phonics and so on in terms of reading her advocacy group as half a million supporters and they aren't just any old supporters, they are teachers and people that actually can help. So I think forming those kind of groups can really be powerful because you then have the resources to lobby governments and also if you've got that kind of group, it can make a big difference and parties will have to listen to them because they've got half a million people that will write in to members of parliament or around the country. So I think those kind of groups are really important. I mean, that's kind of, I think, how we ended up with these right to read inquiries in Canada. So I had someone on that was talking about the Ontario Human Rights Commission, right to read inquiry and that was the result of essentially a grassroots parents organization. So I'm going to end it off with this final question, what are you most proud of? You did so many things, it's extremely impressive. You've got to be unique in the world for having accomplished so many reforms and quickly too that have had a great impact. So what are you most proud of? Well, I'm obviously on the cloud of the changes to reading. I just think Charlie now are able to read and there'll be hundreds of thousands of children who will be so struggling today who are not. But I'm also proud of something else and that is this liberating the profession thing. There's a phrase that is called the Civil Gallery of Education Policy. And there was a speech by James Callahan in 1976, the Ruskin College speech and he started with that speech by saying he was criticised for daring even as Prime Minister to enter this world of education policy that politicians should not dare to go into. But teachers were banned from this garden as well. It was meant to be the preserve of education academics and I think we have torn down, not just the gate, but the whole fence around this garden. And I'm most proud of that actually, the teachers now take control of their profession. And there'll be lots of teachers who don't agree with a single word that either you or I have spoken but fine. But least the debate is happening now in the teaching profession and not being told by some advisor whether they can teach multiplication tables in their school, they can debate these issues themselves. I'm most proud of that. Yeah, you have a lot to be proud of and you can sleep well at night. You've done some amazing work and I hope you come visit us in Canada. We could use someone like you over here. Lots to come again. It's been an absolute honor to have you on the podcast and I really appreciate you taking the time to come and talk to me and my listeners. It's just been phenomenal to listen to the things you've done and it's been a real pleasure. Thank you for having me. It's been a fun talking to you and more power to your elbow and for your doing this wonderful. Thank you. 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