“If I want children who are ambitious learners and concerned citizens, what is the kind of education that is going to get me there? That is not a values question. That’s an empirical question.”

In this episode, we’re talking to Lucy Crehan. Over a decade ago, she waved goodbye to science teaching in London, and set out to visit the highest-performing education systems in the world. Her book, Cleverlands, describes what schools are really like, in countries as diverse as Finland, Canada, Singapore and Japan. Today she’s one of the world’s foremost experts in comparative education, and has supported national reforms in countries including Brunei, Guyana, Myanmar and the Czech Republic. Most recently she’s been working on curriculum reform in Northern Ireland, and leading the work of the Centre for Education Systems.

We discussed:

  • What inspired her round-the world tour of high-performing education systems
  • Why Finnish schools as the best option (for students and parents)
  • The problems posed by the academy system
  • What classrooms across high-performing education systems have in common
  • Why it’s hard to make good policy (outside Singapore)
  • Leading the Northern Ireland curriculum review

Lucy’s ability to combine thoughtful analysis with first-hand experience of a diverse range of education systems made this a particularly fascinating conversation.

You can listen to the episode on Spotify, or Apple Podcasts, or read the full transcript below, lightly edited for clarity.

What do you actually do, and how did you come to be doing it?

Depending on the audience, I call myself an international education consultant or an education explorer. I study other education systems — that’s how I got into what I do — spending a fair amount of time in other countries. But what I mainly do now is work with regional and national governments to support them with policy design, mainly in the areas of curriculum and teacher policy, but also looking at how systems are cohesive, and how different parts of the system might interact with others. That’s both what I do when I’m working as a consultant, but also what I do through the work with the Centre for Education Systems. Part of it is advisory work and some of it is trying to further the evidence base and make what is out there more accessible for policymakers.

You were a science teacher in London, and you then launched yourself into this world by going on this round-the-world trip. Can you say a bit about what motivated that? And what are the mechanics of going from, “I’d quite like to visit some schools in all these countries,” to actually being able to do it?

I had become quite frustrated, when teaching, with aspects of the system and how education policy affected what we were doing in schools. I’m sure that won’t be a surprise to any teacher in any country, because there are always frustrations that come about as a result of policy. But particularly in my case, accountability policy and how that drove a lot of the behaviours in school. This is back in 2009-2012.

[That] led me to think about better ways of organising education systems, and I could see the impact that education policy had on teachers’ work, and therefore students’ experience and learning. Particularly, this is when Michael Gove — who I know you’ve interviewed — was Secretary of State and introduced the white paper, which was talking a lot about accountability and autonomy, and drew quite a bit on high-performing education systems as a justification. I was confused personally, thinking this — what felt like a very high-stakes accountability system, albeit combined with autonomy — didn’t feel like it was working very well in the school where I was. Speaking to peers in other schools, they felt the same.

I was confused with how that was working in other places, and it just got me to think: what is happening? I studied for a master’s and read a lot about these different systems. I felt that I couldn’t get a sense of what was really going on just through reading academic papers — excellent though many of them are. Usually they just describe a single aspect of the system: just assessment in primary, or teacher career structures. I wanted to see how all of those different policy factors work together in a particular context to lead to student and teacher experiences. Yes, these countries get very high results, but at what cost, was another question on my mind. I had what was at the time a crazy idea — that I would go and have what has subsequently been named a “geeky gap year.”

I had some savings and I decided to buy one round-the-world ticket, which you could get in those days. I wrote to teachers in five of the world’s high-performing education systems and said, “I’m Lucy. I’m a teacher from England. I’d love to find out what’s going on in your country.” I offered to help in any way that I could. Sometimes that was teaching, sometimes that was being a teaching assistant or hearing children read, in the English-speaking countries.

I said, “Can I help?” And, “Can I stay with you as well, please?” Partly it would have been unaffordable — there’s no way I could have done what I did if I was having to pay for accommodation. But it was also because, particularly in some of the countries I went to, like Singapore, people are going to be fairly suspicious of an outsider coming and asking questions about what the good and the not-so-good things about your system are, and not everyone is going to feel comfortable sharing what they really think with a stranger.

I thought if I get to know teachers in each country, and they feel comfortable with me and see that I’m not a threat and I’m not about to report on them to government or anything like that, I’m much more likely to get a better sense of what it’s really like, and also what a teacher’s daily routine is like — how long are they spending marking at the kitchen table after the end of the school day? Fairly obviously, given that we’re having this conversation now, I had yeses. I had lots of nos as well, but I had enough yeses that I was able to go and spend about a month in each country. Those countries were Finland, Japan, Shanghai — obviously not a country but an education system — Singapore, and two provinces in Canada.

I’m curious to know which system you liked most? If you’re behind Rawls’ veil of ignorance — you don’t know whether you’re going to be rich or poor — where would you most like to send your child, and most like to teach?

Behind the veil of ignorance, they are the same, and that is Finland — which sounds like a very boring answer, but I can justify it. I’m going to answer the question you didn’t ask, which is: if I wasn’t behind the veil of ignorance, I knew what I know about schools, and had choice over the school that I send my kids to, I would probably say Canada. There are some excellent schools in Canada, but there’s much more variability. So I wouldn’t risk it if I was behind this veil of ignorance and didn’t know where I was in society, what I would know, or what choices I would have.

The contrast between those two is that in Finland there’s much more consistency in terms of what schools are doing, the pedagogical approaches, and the curriculum. There are differences between schools still, but you can more safely say in Finland than in many other countries that whichever school you go to, it will be a good school.

Things have changed since I was there. Finland has taken some different approaches, which I think are probably not very sensible from an educational perspective. But back then, nothing particularly flashy or exciting, just:

  • Well-trained teachers — lots of training and they’ve had lots of practice in classrooms with good feedback before they’ve even got into a full-time teaching position.
  • A solid curriculum that gave guidance to teachers on what they should be teaching.
  • High-quality resources, textbooks and so on, that teachers used.
  • Quite a bit of teacher autonomy — once they’ve got that training and those resources, they can do what they like and meet the needs of the children in front of them.

Most importantly, from a veil-of-ignorance perspective, it’s a system that really supports all students and identifies if students are falling behind. They’ll identify that early on and will put support in place. They’ve got really good multidisciplinary teams: there’s a support system that sits just outside the education system — and importantly, outside the education budget — which makes a big difference to schools and how they operate, because it means that teachers aren’t having to be psychologists, counsellors, social workers, and everything else that you end up having to do in the English system.

When Tim Oates came on, he and I talked a bit about how Finland hasn’t lived up to its promise and has declined from its initial PISA peak. You’ve mentioned things that you are less enthusiastic about. None of those moderate that conclusion?

I probably still would send them there on balance, because I think there’s enough resistance in the system to some of the newer ideas from the teachers who have been there for some time. I went back to Finland a few years ago and spoke to the teachers that I stayed with, these three wonderful women. They were all complaining about what was the new curriculum at the time — and practising what many teachers practise all over the world, which is a resistance to the policy that they’re being told to implement. There’s also wider surveys — there was a survey by YLE, which I think represents the teachers’ union in Finland, showing the majority of teachers felt that the curriculum was actually increasing inequalities for students. Teachers are not broadly happy with the reforms that have happened. I probably still would say Finland, but I haven’t been back to all of these countries recently enough to give a good answer.

I wouldn’t want to send them to somewhere like Singapore, even though Singapore is a paradigm of good policymaking — just in terms of the amount of thinking, planning, the time they take to implement things, and how research-based it is. But because of a combination of cultural and historical factors, it’s a highly competitive system which drives some unhealthy behaviours — the same as Shanghai, actually — in terms of how much work students are expected to do outside of school. I wouldn’t want to send my children there for that reason.

Where would I most like to teach? Finland again:

  • Teachers are well supported.
  • There are good resources available.
  • They’ve got all the knowledge at their fingertips in terms of pedagogical content knowledge — that intersection between not just good teaching in general but good teaching of maths.

But crucially, they work less than most other countries, and that’s not just less than the countries that I went to. If you look at the OECD data from TALIS — the Teaching and Learning International Survey — Finnish teachers are one of the countries with the least hours working, which is appealing, and I think it’s one of the reasons why teaching is still a very popular profession.

The reason they’re able to work less comes down to a number of factors. You can break it down into how long they’re spending on planning and how long they’re spending on marking.

  • They don’t have to spend as much time planning because there are high-quality resources that are based on the curriculum — although that might have changed now that they’ve changed the curriculum and encouraged a different approach.
  • They don’t do as much marking, or they take into account the different subjects: if you are a teacher of Finnish literature, for example, you teach fewer lessons in a week, because it’s taken into account that you’ll be spending longer marking.
  • They also do quite a lot of whole-class feedback. Rather than marking all the homework — it’s the same in Shanghai, actually — they’ll start the lesson by saying, “Let’s get out your homework. Let’s go through the answers, and you can mark yourself or peer-mark. Put your hands up if you got it right or wrong,” and then if it’s something that everyone got wrong, right there and then they will do some teaching addressing that. So it’s not only a workload saver, but quite helpful pedagogically as well.
  • Then, as I mentioned, other workload in England is driven by doing a lot of things that are student support — if you had a nurse, a psychologist and all the additional support, you wouldn’t have to do that.

I was in Singapore recently. It led me to go back to my conclusions from visiting Singaporean schools about a decade ago: there’s nothing in Singaporean schools that made me think, “Wow, we’ve got to do this in England,” but every single component of it works well on its own right. You don’t need the flashiest teaching or the best homework — the homework is good, the curriculum is good, the training is good, and so on. It felt like what you said there about Finland potentially echoed that: all the pieces of the puzzle are right.

You mentioned at the outset the importance of cohesion in the system. What does cohesion mean in these terms? Why does it matter? Where you see it done well?

Sticking in Singapore for a moment: all of the different pieces of the system — what they will be learning in initial teacher education in terms of particular theories or approaches — will be aligned with a framework which continues once they’re in the classroom. The professional development they’ll be receiving when they’re in schools aligns with what they’ve already learned in Initial Teacher Education (ITE). Whereas in some countries they’re coming from completely different places — a whole different approach to teaching: what you learn about in ITE and then what you’re encouraged to do once you’re in schools.

Curriculum and assessment — obviously really important for those to align, because what you’ll sometimes have is a system in which the curriculum is telling you to do particular things, but the assessment system measures something else. Naturally, teachers in schools — especially in higher-accountability systems — will end up teaching the assessment rather than the curriculum. It’s fundamentally important because it makes the job for teachers really hard otherwise. If you’re pulled between different places, with the inspectorate saying one thing — that you ought to be teaching in a certain way — but that’s not what’s going to help you to support the children to do well on the assessments, which is ultimately is also how you’re also judged by parents — it’s a central planning issue, in terms of that alignment.

To put words in your mouth: why are we not so good at this in the UK?

There are a couple of reasons. It’s partly political, because an advantage that Singapore has — not that I would necessarily want to live in a system like this from a political perspective — is that it is essentially a one-party state. It’s officially a democracy, but the same party has been in power since Singapore became independent, and that’s likely to continue, which means that they can plan for the long term. They can take their time, really think about policies, look at how a policy aligns with everything else, and then implement it at a pace that is sensible.

In most modern democracies, the timescale involved is too short for change to be done at a sensible pace. If you come into power — you are a new secretary of state, you’ve got quite a job if you want to try and align everything that has previously not been aligned, and to do that all before you get voted out. There is often a rush on, and politicians are having to choose the highest-yield things and implement them, which may not then actually fit in with the rest of the system — they might run out of time, before they can reform the assessment or the inspectorate, for example.

Secondly, it’s partly how the civil service is structured. You’ve got teams working on different policies. In a country like England the civil service is very big. Those people aren’t necessarily regularly meeting to see how cohesive these ideas are. Different teams do their thing. The end result is not always alignment.

Can I give a third reason? It’s been fascinating being involved in some policymaking over the past few years in various places. What you see is that it’s human beings who are writing policy or curriculum, and they come from different ideological perspectives. Even within one government, there are tensions and pulls in different directions. The whole education system and all the different policies are not written by one person with a single vision in mind. They’re the result of lots of different people with their own ideological leanings and values, trying to push their own thing, so they end up all pulling in slightly different directions.

You said you had a lot of questions about the accountability system in England before you set out. You’ve then gone and visited all these schools. Did it make you more sympathetic to the accountability system, or the changes that were being made in English schools at that time?

No. It made me so sad and frustrated, because I would be sitting having these conversations with teachers in different countries, and what they were saying was just so sensible. It was just: this is how we would all treat each other if we all recognised that we are adults and professionals. It was not as high-stakes as it is in England in any of these places. I was like: “Yes, this is how it could be. Why would it not be like this?” When I say “like this,” let me be more specific. There is accountability in these places. The local or national government, or both, collects information, quantitative and qualitative, about how schools are doing in a number of different areas. But how they use the results of that is very different.

In England, it feels high-stakes because an Ofsted inspection — even when they’ve removed the single-word gradings — produces a report that everyone can read. If you’re a headteacher and it’s a negative report, you’re publicly embarrassed by that. It’s a huge motivator, which I suppose is probably the rationale behind English accountability policy. But it motivates you through fear and compliance, which is not the best environment within a school for learning and improving. Often, the timescales aren’t such that they can support the school to actually understand what the issues are and implement what might be solutions — you know, professional development: you’re not going to see the results of some of that until a couple of years’ time, but you need to improve by next year. So it encourages lots of quick fixes.

Whereas in these systems, the result of a school underperforming — when they do have that information — tends to be some form of support so that the school can improve. I know that there are various ways in which that can happen in England, although what support looks like is very fragmented once you’ve done badly in an Ofsted inspection, or your results are bad. But in other systems, you don’t wait till you’ve already had that high-stakes judgment.

The superintendent in Canada will be in and out of your school all the time, and they will notice that things aren’t going so well. They will be looking at the data. They will be having conversations with the headteacher at the time, saying, “Let’s look at this data. This isn’t going well. What should we do about it?” It’s still accountability, but it’s professional accountability from someone who is there acting as a critical friend, rather than a stranger who has come in to make a judgment on you that will then be public. It felt very different in schools. It allowed for genuine professional decision-making rather than compliance.

That’s a good segue for us to talk about the English education system. How do you see English schools having improved over the last 20 years?

A couple of things spring to mind that have improved since I was in the classroom. I do think that the overall quality of the debate is particularly impressive in England. I suspect, and I’ve got no evidence to prove this, that that has been encouraged by the move to an academy system, where schools were encouraged to take different approaches and have more autonomy, including free schools. People did try different things. With that freedom — there are downsides for sure — but because there have been people trying new things, looking to evidence, thinking, “What is the best way to do this?” it has stimulated a lot of really healthy debate within England in the professional community. Particularly a focus on evidence-based education: we’re not going to make changes to our schools entirely based on ideology. Values are important, but we’re also going to look to see, “What is the evidence about this particular area that we’re looking to improve that would help us to live by our values, or to reach the goals that we say are important?”

Another would be the curriculum and the focus on curriculum — they’re two separate things, really. There was a new curriculum in 2014, which I definitely think was an improvement on the previous one in terms of that focus on knowledge and on being more specific. It’s not just a focus on knowledge: it’s often just called “knowledge-rich,” but it incorporates subject-specific skills too. The first part of it is introducing a new curriculum, but then also the focus from Ofsted, when Amanda Spielman was overseeing it, on curriculum and curriculum conversations has encouraged schools to think more deeply about curriculum — about what they’re teaching, and the order in which they’re teaching it — has enhanced the conversation around what makes for a good school curriculum.

The debate was the first thing that I noticed that led me towards having these conversations. At international events, you would end up with a group of ten people and everyone would be like, “What about 21st-century schools?” And the two Brits in the room would be like, “Hang on — this is what the evidence says.”

You’ve mentioned academies — are there other things that you would point to that contributed to England going down this particular path of being more interested in the evidence, and that reaching more teachers and school leaders?

Nick Gibb had a lot of influence. He was in a ministerial post in education for a long time, and he paid attention to evidence and spoke about it. In terms of some of the policies that he implemented, or set in motion, they forced teachers to engage with those ideas — because, “We’re having to do the Early Career Framework now, so what is this and why is this?” It wasn’t only those who wanted to have that professional conversation and would dig into this stuff of their own accord, but a greater group of people were having to engage with it. This is about debate. It’s not about groupthink and everyone necessarily thinking the same thing — many teachers may disagree with what Nick Gibb was advocating for. I don’t agree with everything he did. Just having to engage and think about it has been helpful for the system.

In some systems that I have been in, there’s less of a conversation about it. It’s more an acceptance that this is obviously a good thing, this is “the thing” — we’re not going to talk about why, or necessarily talk about any evidence underpinning it. We’re just going to do this because it’s modern. “21st-century skills” or “21st-century schools” — you put “21st century” in front of something and it becomes somehow inherently good.

The OECD has had quite a big role in this as well, in terms of that narrative. Many countries are very influenced by the OECD. Why wouldn’t they be, seeing as it’s an enormous international organisation that’s highly credible? If they’re coming out and saying, “These are the skills of the future and this is what you should be doing,” for many systems, why would you question that? Perhaps it’s also about having had some politicians who are more obstinate — for want of a better word — in terms of saying, “Actually, we don’t necessarily agree with the big global organisations. We’re going to think for ourselves.”

Another thing, in international terms, may be the institutional architecture. I remember Professor Karen Edge talking about how in Canada, if you’re a teacher, you work in a school. Because we’ve got think tanks, companies, charities — loads of other places you can go, it supports people with teaching experience to work full-time on curriculum design or whatever it is they wouldn’t be able to do in the classroom. That potentially creates that marketplace of ideas. A friend who teaches in Singapore describes himself as a cog in the machine: if you’re in Singapore, there are a lot of great institutions that help you to become a better teacher. But there aren’t competitor institutions where you can say, “We think the narrative on the teaching of reading isn’t quite right, and so we want to test X, Y or Z.”

Let’s talk about what England is doing less well.

We talked about accountability and the stakes involved in the accountability system. I wanted to counterbalance what I said before about the academy system having generated quite a lot of innovation — I think that’s been a really good thing. I should also have mentioned the subject hubs, which have been a very positive influence in terms of supporting schools with specific subjects and giving them curricular materials. But overall, it’s fragmented — that’s the trouble. You have got these schools doing amazing things and being very successful, but it’s not consistent across the system. Some schools are not doing well and are not particularly supported. The benefits have been with some schools or students, not with all students.

You see problems with the fragmentation of the system and the fact that it’s not area-based now, around issues for children with special educational needs — in terms of who ultimately owns responsibility for that child, when each school is acting either as an individual or as part of a multi-academy trust that’s not necessarily geographically based. Looking at some of the studies or the evidence on the outcomes of these types of systems — academy chains, charter schools in America, free schools, friskolor in Sweden — it’s not a particularly helpful lever for overall system improvement. Some schools do better, some do worse. If I was a politician looking to improve the education system within a limited number of years, it would not be the lever that I would pull. System structures are very expensive, a huge disruption, and I don’t think for overall that much benefit. I think you could probably achieve the innovation gains without having an entire system that was encouraged to move to being academies.

I am a very late convert to academisation, having come to realise that it may be quite a useful mechanism to be able to have a way for a new organisation to come in and help a school that’s really struggling. The previous interview I did was with Dan Moynihan (CEO of the Harris Federation), who said, “We’ve taken in all these schools. Two-thirds of them when they came in were in special measures. They’re now all doing really well.” I just want to put the counterargument: I do see academies making a big difference for some schools, even though there are clearly cases where schools have been left orphaned — they’ve got a PFI building and no one in the region wants to take them on.

There are some where it’s helpful and some where it isn’t. If you’ve got a very successful school chain — and there are several which are doing very well and have a good model for how to improve schools — that is going to be of benefit to that school. But then there are others that aren’t particularly good, and they can take over a school and not improve it, but with a huge amount of disruption and heartache, potentially for the school and the headteacher.

It’s also seen as a big threat. When that school’s trying to get better, the threat is: if you don’t get better, you’re going to get taken over, and then you’re going to lose all your autonomy and have to do things just like this school chain says. Some of those school chains are highly prescriptive in what schools have to do and how they have to do it — exactly what PowerPoints they have to teach from — that’s not necessarily helpful for teacher morale and teachers staying in the profession, which is another huge challenge.

It’s a complex picture. It’s not that academies are good or bad. It’s good in some ways and it has helped some schools. But at a system level, it leaves pockets of the country and some schools that are not experiencing the kind of support that they need to actually improve.

If you’re a special adviser to an education minister, and they ask, “What should I do?” You’re probably not going to tear up 20 years of everything, but you’re going to dial academisation down. What are you going to dial up instead that’s going to help these schools that we struggle to help?

Probably more of some of the good things we already have. I mentioned the subject hubs — having subject expertise available to all schools to come in and work with the maths or the English department on improving teaching and curriculum, based on the particular needs of the school. It’s also a kinder way of doing it — rather than saying, “This school is just failing in general,” is to say, “This school needs some support in maths or in history, so we’re going to call on the relevant subject organisations to come and give some bespoke support in that area.” Likewise, if the weakness is school leadership, maybe extending the role of existing leadership organisations or setting up a new one where the function is to support leadership in schools.

They have a model in Shanghai where if a school is underperforming, they partner it up with another school that’s doing well, but in similar circumstances, so it’s not completely contextually different. They fund a couple of senior leaders to go for six months and spend time in that school. It’s not just a consultant who maybe hasn’t themselves been in school leadership or in a classroom for a long time, which sometimes happens with consultants — I say that as someone who is one of those people, but I don’t ever advise teachers on how to teach, that’s not my job. You would have someone who is a practising school leader, can go in for a decent amount of time, and work side by side with the leader of the underperforming school and build their capacity. They’ll sometimes half take over, so they can model what they would do, then gradually withdraw, and go back to their original school.

The idea is you’re building the capacity of the people in the building. There’s not a risk of firing the headteacher — obviously there will be some circumstances in which you do need to fire a headteacher. But usually it’s a case of building up capacity rather than getting rid of them, which changes how it feels to be an underperforming school and the decisions you’re making. Your full attention can be focused on, “How can I make the school better,” rather than: “If I don’t manage to get these numbers up in the next six months, I’m going to lose my job.”

At the end of Cleverlands, you offer some lessons for school systems. Do you want to run us through what they are? You were saying, “Despite the fact that culturally and historically these systems are very different, here’s what one might wish to draw from them.“

I came up with five underlying principles. I didn’t suggest policies, because policies need to be different in different countries — partly because of system coherence, partly because of culture and other aspects of the context. But underlying the policies of these countries were these principles.

The first one was about getting children ready for formal learning. That reflects the fact that in most countries, including most high-performing countries, they start school significantly later than we do. In the UK, the typical school-starting age is four or five — whereas it’s six or seven in all the countries I went to. Initially, it makes little logical sense: you have less schooling and you do better in reading, maths and science. But the picture is much more complex than that. In many of these countries they have preschool, so children are in the educational care of the state, even though it’s not called school. They are in an environment which is supportive of their development and early learning.

The quality of preschool really matters. OECD data suggests that attendance in early childcare education settings does have a big impact on results. People talk about Finland, because Finland does this well — there are certain qualifications you have to have to be in an early childcare setting. It’s obviously different if you’ve got someone who’s maybe slightly older, with an undergraduate degree in early childhood studies, compared to a nursery staffed by 16-year-olds on their summer job.

The takeaway, and the reason that matters so much — it’s not just about having more nursery and less school. For historical or cultural reasons, we start school earlier in this country, which means children have to be in the educational care of the state during the school day. That’s a positive thing: we have this time with these children, so how can we best help them? But sometimes what happens is we expect too much of them too soon. Some children are not yet ready to start a more formal curriculum, and they get left behind right from the beginning and never really catch up.

You can see that in the data on summer-born children, for example: they do worse, not because they are somehow less capable, but because they are younger. We start with them when they’re not yet ready to understand what it is that they’re being taught in Reception. Having a bit longer to have really rich educational environments — where they are developing physically, emotionally, socially, they’re learning the routines of school, learning to focus their attention for longer, because they’ve got joint attention — they’re sitting on the carpet together and singing nursery rhymes. These countries will still be doing some early literacy and numeracy. There will be counting and tracing of letters in the sand. It’s not that nothing is going on. They just leave it a bit longer before starting the more formal curriculum. That means you’re able to bring more children along with you, rather than leaving a higher proportion behind who weren’t quite ready to take it all on.

The second — I have become more nuanced on — was: design curricular concepts for mastery and context for motivation. All of the systems I went to, although Finland has since changed, had curricula that were specific about the concepts and abstract ideas that children should understand. They wouldn’t necessarily say, “Everyone has to study Mount Vesuvius” — where that would be a particular context in which we’re teaching about some important concepts. But they would say, “Everyone’s got to learn about volcanoes and how volcanoes form.” A volcano is an abstract concept because it’s not referring to one specific concrete instance of a volcano.

This is a really important distinction within curriculum, because being specific about the important ideas and concepts within each subject that students need to learn allows for clarity for teachers: this is what we’re supposed to teach them. It allows resource providers to develop materials that teachers can use that support that curriculum, as opposed to curricula in which they don’t specify those concepts or ideas, and they have much vaguer, broader statements about physical features in general, or even, at a more high-level, some systems are focused on general skills.

One of the reasons some people don’t like specific curricula is they say, “Teachers should have autonomy to teach based on what the children are interested in, what the teacher’s excited about, or their local area.” That’s why the distinction between concepts and context matters. If you’re not prescribing the context — you’re not prescribing Mount Vesuvius, or The Taming of the Shrew, or Dizzee Rascal — you’re leaving the particular instances up to teachers. That’s where most of the autonomy is necessary to make this relevant and local. I think that’s a good balance. All of them were sufficiently specific with their curricula that it supported teachers and students to make progress over time.

The next one is really important, particularly in the context of England at the moment with everything going on with SEND reform — that’s supporting children to take on challenges, rather than making concessions. It’s another big difference between what I experienced in England and what I saw in the countries that I was in, and it relates to that first point about getting children ready for formal learning. If your assumption is that all children will follow this curriculum, move through it, and achieve what is written in it year by year, then the system and schools can put in place strategies to support children to do so. That is what they do. Part of that is: we’ll wait until everyone’s actually ready to start, rather than just starting and some children won’t be ready, but maybe they’ll catch up later, or we’ll put them in a different table and give them easier work, or later on we’ll put them in a different set.

Children in the bottom set often will not get the national curriculum. We say they have the national curriculum, but they’re not exposed to all of it, because they’ve fundamentally got a different curriculum — not always, but in many cases.

That was a key difference. I’ve subsequently been to Estonia as well, which takes a similar approach: “This is what we want all children to learn in this year. If a child is struggling, we’ll identify that early on, because we can see — almost each lesson, certainly each topic — what they are and aren’t able to do, and put in the time and support to help them reach that level.” If you do that all the way through — I’m not saying any country does this perfectly — the gap doesn’t get bigger. There’s always going to be some kind of gap. Children don’t all come to school the same. But you can keep that gap at a manageable level, so that you don’t need to put children into different sets necessarily in secondary school.

Singapore sets significantly from quite a young age. But in the other systems — which are not only high-performing but more equitable — they don’t set children until probably age 14 or 15. Typically maths is earlier, which is particularly interesting given the study that’s been all over Twitter recently around setting not having a negative effect on the lower sets for mathematics. It is mathematics that Japan and Canada start setting earlier than in other subjects, because it is such a hierarchical subject — you have to know A before you can do B. It does make more sense. But in most of these systems, they don’t do that. The intention is that all children will take on the same challenges.

There are a few things that make that possible. Not only the specific curricular concepts — we understand what children should be doing that will support them to access next year’s learning — but also what’s called “focus” within the curriculum literature, which is not having too much in the curriculum. I think that probably is a weakness of certain subjects within the National Curriculum in England at the moment. Science, for example, is much more full than in many other countries. If you’ve got too much to cover, there’s not time to make sure that all children have understood it before you move on — to take that mastery approach. That is a problem for supporting all children to make progress.

I did mention children with special educational needs, so I want to follow on from that. Obviously there are some children who cannot access all of the curriculum, because they have severe educational needs, to the extent where they need someone to feed them, are non-verbal, and various other issues. There are special schools in these countries, but with quite different approaches in different places.

What will happen in Finland, for example, is they will assume in the first instance — unless a child very obviously cannot access mainstream school — that the child will be reaching the same standards in the curriculum. They will identify early if there are any issues that are likely to get in the way and give them the support they need developmentally, in terms of extra help, pre-teaching or whatever it might be. If it transpires after a few terms that, “We’ve put all of these different supports in place and this child is still struggling to keep up with the rest of the class,” they might disapply them from a part of the curriculum, but still teach them within the same school.

So in Finland, they’ll have a different class for children who have special needs — a smaller class size where they will have a professionally-trained teacher with a master’s in special needs — officially that’s the case, although sometimes they can’t find enough. There is still an expectation that all children will meet these curriculum goals, we’ll support them to do so, and children will only be disapplied from that if they have tried everything and a psychologist has been involved. Even then, the children are still accessing some of the curriculum, and joining the mainstream classes for some subjects, on a case-by-case basis.

The fourth was: combine school accountability with school support rather than sanctions. We’ve discussed accountability, so I don’t need to talk about that.

The last one is about treating teachers as professionals. Most people would hear that and think it means giving them complete autonomy and let them do whatever they want. That is not how other professions work. That is not how a profession is understood if you zoom out of education. A profession is characterised by a shared body of knowledge that everyone in that profession knows and uses. The autonomy comes in in using that body of knowledge to meet the needs of the person in front of you — be that in a court case or in a GP surgery. There’s a huge amount of professionalism, autonomy and thinking involved in terms of: how am I going to use this evidence base that I’ve learned about in my professional studies to meet the needs of the person in front of me? But there are still standards around — this is evidence-based medicine: you can’t just innovate and do whatever you like. I think sometimes we give teachers autonomy without doing that essential first bit, which is making sure that they have a shared body of knowledge that they are secure with.

In Singapore, all the teachers will have, in initial teacher education, evidence-based mathematics pedagogy. Then they will go into classrooms and start applying that, and they will have further professional development to make sure that they are building up that body of knowledge and skill. We don’t always have that in other countries, where sometimes teachers won’t have very much training at all and will then be thrown in to make the best of it and given lots of autonomy. That can be a problem. Other systems will have teacher career structures as well, whereby it’s not just that you’re a teacher and then you’re a teacher for your whole career with no change of status or responsibility, unless you go into some leadership role.

The book is now ten years old. You’ve spent most of that time visiting countries and had the chance to keep learning things. What new insights have you had?

I haven’t actually Harry, because in the time since I wrote the book I’ve had two babies, there’s been a global pandemic, and it costs a lot of money to travel to other countries. The countries that I have been to…

You’ve been going to help them…

Exactly. I’ve not been visiting high-performing systems to learn from them. I’ve been visiting systems where they’ve wanted me to help with something, which are usually not high-performing. What’s been interesting in terms of the travel I have done is visiting a couple of lower-performing systems — below the OECD average — where I had the opportunity to do a similar thing to what I did in Cleverlands: not teach, but observe lots of lessons, because I was asked to observe lots of lessons and then write an analysis.

The difference between the pedagogy in these lower-performing systems and the pedagogy I witnessed in the high-performing systems was so stark. One of my biggest surprises during the initial research was the commonality in pedagogy in very different cultural contexts and education systems. The surface features were different — whether they called the teacher by their first name or called them “sensei.” What they were fundamentally doing, in terms of the overall structure of a lesson and the interaction between teacher and pupils — was very similar. Then I went to these other systems, and the pedagogy could not have been more different. I do think there’s something in that: pedagogy obviously has a large effect on student outcomes.

I don’t know if you’re allowed to name the countries, but what were the things you weren’t seeing?

The countries were Sweden and the UAE. [I’ve written about the problems of the Swedish education system.] The contrast was essentially — in more than half of the classrooms I visited in those two countries — the overall structure of the lesson would be the teacher saying, “We’re going to carry on working on our projects from last week. Off you go — make your PowerPoint about witches in the 16th century,” or, “We’re going to carry on with the project we started last week,” or, “We’re starting a new thing today. I’d like you to get into groups, go on the internet, fill in this worksheet about this medieval king, and then at the end of next lesson we’re going to present to each other.” The teacher would then go around individually and help different groups. It was much more project-based and student-led.

That was also shared with me by the teachers as being good practice. To the extent where I was visiting a school in Abu Dhabi, went into a maths lesson, and the teacher was standing at the board. It was highly interactive — she was working out something, asking students for their input, lots of backwards and forwards between teacher and students. I was being shown around by the headteacher, and we came out and he said, “I’m so sorry about that. She shouldn’t be spending that much time at the board. She should be getting the students to do their own learning.” It was a very stark difference.

Whereas in Japan, in most schools in Canada, Shanghai, Singapore and Finland — Finland is often the one people are surprised about; it might be true now, but back when I was there, when Finland was high-performing — once they’re out of that early-years phase, the structure would be: the teacher explains what they’re going to learn, or introduces a problem to start with, or gathers everyone’s attention and introduces what they’re going to do. The lesson of 40-50 minutes would be divided up into 10 or 15-minute chunks. One of those chunks would be the teacher explaining something — usually not a lecture; usually, “What do you remember about this?” with lots of interaction between students and teacher. A chunk would be independent work, trying something out. A chunk might be group work. But crucially, that group work was focused: “This is a specific thing I want you to do. Work in your groups. In 15 minutes we’re going to come back together.” Joint attention of students to teacher, so that each group can then share what they found. “Let’s compare. That’s interesting — you did that problem that way, and you did it a different way. Can you come up to the board and show us?” There was much more whole-class joint attention on the teacher, and the teacher was much more in control of the pace of the lesson. And it was more varied — rather than one activity where the students are finding something out, it was chunked up into different activities every 10 or 15 minutes. That was common across all of those countries.

This will be a surprise, particularly since Tim Oates and I slated Finland when we talked. It’s good to have the good news shared as well.

Tell us about the Northern Ireland curriculum review.

I was asked to undertake an independent review of the curriculum in Northern Ireland — a strategic review is what they called it — and to comment on how to improve it, whether it was fit for purpose, and whether they needed a new curriculum framework. I didn’t have very long to do it. This is very much related to what we were saying earlier about political cycles: if you want to get something done, you need to do the review and the implementation in a fairly short timeframe. I spent lots of time in focus groups speaking with lots of educators — teachers, headteachers — parents, business leaders, various different interest groups or civil society organisations — and then wrote a report about what I thought the problems were.

Some of the problems in Northern Ireland, as in any country, relate to the wider system. My remit was very much the curriculum, so I stuck almost entirely to making recommendations on the curriculum rather than the wider system. On the curriculum, two things came out. One was that lots of the problems shared by teachers related to the lack of specificity in the curriculum, because the curriculum was very high-level. It gave a huge amount of autonomy to schools in terms of what to teach. Often teachers would say these two things in the same breath: “The flexibility is great, we enjoy the flexibility and being able to change what we’re doing based on student interest or calling on local resources in our area.” But because it’s so vague, it means it’s interpreted very differently in different schools, which can lead to inequality between schools and different opportunities within schools.

One teacher, this is in the call for evidence — so I spoke to lots of people but also people sent in their thoughts on paper — was saying that she had a daughter in one school and taught in another, and she had three students join her school from different areas all in the same year, and yet what they knew and could do was vastly different. Some of those students had not been underperforming in their previous school, and yet what they were able to do was so much lower than what she would expect in her own school — and that was all consistent with the curriculum. Hugely different standards.

There were also issues at transition. Year 8 is the first year of secondary school in Northern Ireland, and lots of Year 8 teachers would say to me, “Sometimes they know nothing about my subject.” In science, for example, some were saying they had been taught next to no science. Obviously there’s huge variability — some schools would be teaching good science. But in other schools — because what was in the curriculum was so vague and was joined up in a subject called The World Around Us, which is science, technology, history and geography all together — it meant that they learned next to no science, or what they did do was a few whizz-bang experiments that were fun and smoky, but they didn’t arrive knowing anything about science. Teachers felt they had to start from scratch in Year 8, and there was then a rush to try and get them to know enough in Key Stage 3 to be ready for GCSEs.

The other big issue that came up was a subject called Learning for Life and Work, which is Personal Social and Health Education, citizenship, and sex education combined into one subject — careers and employability as well. That’s something really valued by students — they said, “We really want to learn this stuff. This is really important to us.” But it was almost entirely neglected by secondary schools, because there was so much in other subjects they had to get through to be ready for GCSEs that it got completely squeezed. There weren’t and aren’t specialist teachers, so often it was whichever teacher happened to have a free period. Lots of students told me that what actually happened was they sat down, the teacher said, “Get on with your homework — I’m going to do my marking,” and they didn’t actually do the subject. That’s another big issue, and it’s a trickier one to fix with curriculum alone. We are introducing a new curriculum framework to address the specificity issue, and there will be a new subject with similar content to Learning for Life and Work. But curriculum content alone won’t solve that problem, so there would need to be wider reform as well.

How was the report received?

It was received remarkably well, certainly within the educational and political spectrum. I made a real point — for genuine reasons — of speaking to people who were involved in the design of the existing curriculum, and listening to the rationale behind it and what was good about it. My recommendations were all based on how to keep the strengths of the existing curriculum while also making it better. I think that’s why it was well-received: it wasn’t a case of, “This is all rubbish and we need something completely different.” I made the point that we don’t want a pendulum swing. It is possible to go too far in the other direction, and we need to retain the strengths while addressing the weaknesses.

So it is now being implemented, and you’re still inviolved with that?

It’s now being designed. I’m the deputy chair of a curriculum task force that the government set up, which is overseeing the design of a new curriculum. We’re not actually designing the curriculum ourselves — we recruited lots of teachers from Northern Ireland, and also experts from Northern Ireland and elsewhere, to form subject working groups, which designed these curricular frameworks. It’s all still very much in process. The working groups have mainly finished that, and it’s now being finessed — things like coherence across the piece, checking the children have got the maths they need to do this bit in science. Then it’ll be reviewed by the minister, and go out to consultation with the public. That will be the real test, because perhaps it’s easy for everyone to agree with a review where you haven’t actually put what you are saying into an actual curriculum document.

There were five principles. A very clever civil servant who suggested that not everyone would read the report, and I should probably come up with some overarching principles. I hope that the curriculum we’ve jointly designed embodies those principles. I’d be very interested to hear what the general public think, and particularly what educators within Northern Ireland think of the curriculum we’re proposing. There is a decent amount of time for everyone to prepare for it, because it wouldn’t be implemented until 2028.

When you’re consulting with individual countries, bringing up two children, and helping Northern Ireland update its curriculum, you also help to run the Centre for Education Systems, which had a really interesting report recently comparing curricula internationally. Do you want to say a little bit about that work and what you’re trying to do there?

I was invited to join the central team setting up the Centre for Education Systems as an organisation a couple of years ago, and I leapt at the chance because the brief was: we’re going to study 14 education systems in depth, policy area by policy area, trying to understand what is effective in different countries, and then make that evidence clearly accessible for policymakers. What I do as a job, but as an organisation. The idea is not simply to look at individual policy areas, but also to start to have a look at things like system coherence. To be able to say, “In this system, they have aligned curriculum, accountability, and attendance policies in this way, and therefore it’s working well.” The idea is not to tell governments what to do, but rather to present different models, options and their outcomes.

Our first research question on every project we do is about purpose: “What are they trying to achieve?” Because it’s a values-laden area. We’ve done enormous studies on curriculum, special educational needs and disabilities policy, and on accountability, and we’re just finishing one on assessment. We’re able to start seeing the interactions between these, which is really interesting. All of those are available now — except the assessment one, which will be available soon — on the website, and there are summaries of each. For anyone who’s really geeky and wants to dig right into it, there are full country reports on 14 countries on curriculum, for example, as well.

How easy is it to take the depth of wisdom you’ve got and be listened to by domestic policymakers?

That’s a hard question. It very much depends on who the individuals are and their educational background — not in terms of what school they went to, but in terms of what they’ve read, how involved they are, whether they are coming from a background where they have engaged with educational research, or whether they’re coming — as politicians often do — without an education background.

If I’m completely honest, it probably also depends on who has talked to them first, because you can get on a reading journey. If you start off reading a certain book and that forms the beginning of your schema about education, and then you follow up links, and then you start to read this, and then social media doesn’t help — you follow certain people and that encourages you to look at other things. This is not a fully formed thought, but I think probably if I’m the first education consultant to speak with a politician or civil servant who is new to the education department, it’s probably easier to help them or to convince them of certain things. Much harder if someone’s been working in education for a very long time and has certain entrenched ideological ideas — although I am always open to debate and changing my mind. But when I have invited that debate, sometimes people haven’t wanted to have it. It’s just: “This is what we believe. These are our values.”

That’s often the issue. Education is a very values-laden area, and it should be. But what I think people sometimes get confused about — or are wrong about, if I’m speaking plainly — is they think that the evidence is less relevant because, “This is our value, so this is how we’re going to do it, because we value collaboration, therefore this is what we’re going to do.” I think that’s internally incoherent. If you value certain outcomes — for example, in Wales there are four purposes of the curriculum, very clear values, which I agree with completely, and values underpinning the curriculum, which I agree with mostly — you need to then ask the question: if this is the end result — I want children who are ambitious learners and concerned citizens — what is the kind of education that is going to get me there? That is not a values question. That is an empirical question. You have to look to the evidence to answer it.

It’s hard because there’s not always enough evidence that answers the questions you want to answer. But we do have to engage with it, and not all systems do. Coming back to what we were saying about England: at least we can have the argument and we’re arguing on the same terms — we’re going to be drawing on evidence to try to prove our point. It’s much harder to win an argument with someone who thinks that evidence is irrelevant. I’m exaggerating slightly — no one is going to say that evidence is irrelevant. And yet in many systems, there will be policy announcements that have no justification whatsoever. They just state, “We know this to be true.” No reference. And that bothers me.

You’ve now got two kids, so you could enrol them and get a different perspective on other countries. Will there be a Cleverlands 2? If so, where would you want to go?

We did actually think about taking the kids to New Zealand and putting them in school there, but they’re so settled in their current school, and we wouldn’t be guaranteed to be able to get back into it, so we haven’t. I am writing another book, but I’m not taking my kids with me.

As any parent knows, an excuse to travel away from the children…

Quite. It would be a very different experience with my kids. I’m writing a book on curriculum and on knowledge, and — if we’re being very fancy-sounding — on truth. A similar style to Cleverlands, drawing on lots of international comparisons and trying to make it as accessible as possible, but also evidence-based. I will be drawing on curricula within the UK, because I’ve had experience with all four home nations in terms of the curricula and the different approaches there. I will also be going to New Zealand and Australia — there are some very interesting things going on there. Of course I’ll be drawing on what I already know, having been to the high-performing systems I went to for Cleverlands, so I’ll probably get back in touch with a few contacts and ask some follow-up questions about what’s changed since I was there initially.

We’ll look out for it. Lucy, thank you very much.