My year in writing
A reflection on 2016 and the things that made me write
2016 was the year that I discovered that I enjoyed investigative writing and errr, ummm, sticking it to the man.
It was a year when I channelled my energies into longer writing formats like Medium rather than time consuming spats on social media.
I launched my writing year by taking a swipe at the patron saint of British neo-trads by suggesting that the emperor had no clothes. It wasn’t personal, rather I had grown tired of a campaign conceived by the political right to infiltrate all aspects of the teaching profession to drive reforms that would facilitate the privatisation of public education and the demise of teaching as a craft.
To me it seemed that, hidden in plain sight, a network had been created to influence the teaching profession to accept their own commodification. They would use “science” as their ally and a Victorian belief that the purpose of school was the inculcation of subject knowledge and the testing thereof. The plot hatched by the politically motivated think tank, Policy Exchange, quickly co-opted the assistance of what, Michael Gove’s SPAD, Dominic Cummings called, “useful idiots”. This included the aforementioned patron saint amongst many others by way of infiltrating the media, academic and teaching community. The allure of power or close proximity to it would seduce many in its wake and still does.
The volume of readership suggested that I’d hit a nerve.
After this opening gambit I thought I should spell it out given that the media, particularly the timid UK education press, seemed reluctant given their burden of implication. The follow-up was another well received article that joined the dots of a network from Policy Exchange and their hidden donors to the offices of 10 Downing St and the British Prime Minister at the time, David Cameron.
The status quo was re-established regardless of a regime change post Brexit when Rachel Wolf’s (one half of the UK’s education reform power couple) number 2 at, the Gove-funded, New Schools Network was appointed Joint Chief of Staff by the newly anointed Prime Minister, Theresa May. In the post-truth, post-evidence reality of Brexit we saw the proposed return of Grammar schools, a post-evidence policy favoured by, the populist right wing nationalist party, UKIP.
Escapees from the education reform plot hatched by Policy Exchange, now crumbling under Mick the Knife’s post-expert, post £350 million a week for the NHS, inability to inveigle his way back into power, led to a bizarre coalition of disciples to form the “Parents and Teachers for Excellence”.
Even the tamed journo’s in the UK education press found this misguided venture somewhat difficult to promote to their readers. Within minutes of it’s launch; as a non-partisan, evidence-informed, group seeking the best for our little ones, it was shown to be the education equivalent of the Tax Payers Alliance. The TPA you’ll recall was an aggressive right wing organisation or “think tank” seeking to starve public services of funding to the point they could be privatised, or at least the profitable parts.
At the very least the launch of the PTE provided some insight about the people who had put themselves up as the advisory council and the network they represented. With some of them working as columnists of the TES it was left to SchoolsWeek in the UK education press to finally join up the dots.
And to think it had been suggested that I was a “conspiracy theorising loon” as one educator described me on Twitter.
From a readership perspective both articles did well traffic wise. Inevitably there was pushback on social media and the now vociferous EduTwitter. The clash of echo chambers lead me to take a time out from social media.
I realised that whilst this work and occasional forays on social media was good for the soul, it wasn’t so good for the wallet. I make my living from consultancies and public speaking engagements, taking on the establishment perhaps wasn’t the most business savvy decision I’ve made. More of this later in the year when I decide to double down on my righteousness.
My early experience of working in a consulting capacity with various large or small organisations was their desire to be more creative and innovative. I’d had one commission when I was working with the leadership team of a FTSE 100 financial services company. To prepare I had read their resumes. All 40 of them had an impeccable educational history featuring a 1st at an Ivy League or Russell Group university and an MBA from the ones we take seriously. What did I wonder could I help them learn?
So I began thinking about the nature of innovation and creativity to try to make sense of my own journey that lead to creating new business ventures that made a noise and inspired others if not a solid return. I think I’m a compass in this respect rather than a map. So I wrote a few articles to articulate my learning about the nature of innovation, creativity and change.
I think these two work well together. The first is about how organisations inadvertently create immune systems to prevent innovation.
The second is about using a purpose beyond profit to steer the organisation and foster spontaneous collaborative innovation.
I wrote that around the time I had an engagement working with Emma Mulqueeny and Natalia Vodianova on a social philanthropy concept. I learned that purpose wasn’t as easy to identify as one might think and it involves a lot of “why’s?”.
This theme of purpose seemed to be the intersection between my fascination with the education sector and my work in the private sector.
In the spring a story caught my eye that seemed to resonate with the concerns around the enforced private sector academisation of England’s public/state schools. It was a story about how Liberia had taken the decision to outsource its entire early years state education system to an American for-profit corporation backed by Pearson together with a number of philanthropists and western governments.
Little did I know how deep this rabbit hole went and to be honest I’m not sure that I ever got to the bottom of it. The story concerned Bridge International Academies, an EdTech company who had developed an app to replace qualified teachers and provide data collection opportunities. I’d come across Bridge before when deciding on case studies for the book I created for WISE (World Innovation Summit for Education / Qatar Foundation). I rejected them on the basis that they were a non-indigenous solution to building local education capacity and because their technology was, in my opinion, regressive.
I thought no more about Bridge until WISE decided to give them an award in 2015 based on nothing more than some flowery words on their entry form. By this time my relationship with WISE had been compromised by a number of disagreements on editorial and publishing decisions, one of which was the lack of an electronic version of Learning {Re}imagined. Regardless I remain grateful for the opportunity they provided me in the creation of it.
I was granted an interview with the Liberian Education Minister, George Werner, who gave me a frank assessment of the challenges in Liberia that his government were determined to solve post-conflict and post-Ebola. The stark reality is that there are no off the shelf solutions for growing your own education system. Add to that the political necessity to show measurable results quickly it’s no surprise that the “school in a box” concept offered by Bridge was attractive.
This was followed by an interview with Shannon May, the most visible co-founder of Bridge. To support the interview I came in to contact and interviewed a cast of people who had engaged with Bridge. I began immersing myself in what had been happening here and how an EdTech App was being used as the basis to own and operate a huge number of schools. This would include the hiring of people trained to deliver lessons that they receive from Bridge via a digital tablet.
In the mind of a technosolutionist, who can reduce the complex into a set of clicks and data to be automated, this is a phenomenal solution to a huge problem. How do you provide access to quality education for every child on Earth?
Scaling requires standardisation to reduce or remove the friction that enables scale. Silicon Valley types talk about exponential organisations that identify the points of heavy-lifting that can be replaced by digital innovation. So Uber, for example, disrupted the taxi industry by establishing a global digital platform that joined the dots between demand and supply via a smartphone.
To suggest that Bridge aren’t on to something is to be caught up in the tsunami of hubris that surrounds what they actually do. The problem, as I see it, is that they made a leap from EdTech company to owner of 500+ schools so that their tech would work reliably and even that hasn’t been entirely proven. If I was on the Bridge board and the purpose really was to provide access to quality education for the poor I would pivot. I would open up the technology so that it could be developed in the public domain and support governments to build capacity rather than go head to head with the worlds teaching community and try to be the Uber of education.
Transportation and education systems are different. Teaching is not a delivery system, it isn’t Fedex.
This article took a lot of time to research and required me to “lawyer up”. I was fortunate that I could call on many specialists to sanity check and support this investigative project. As I progressed more things came to light, more documents appeared, and it became fishier than Billingsgate on a sunny day.
After publication a whistleblower inside the organisation directed me to a document that appeared to be the latest Bridge investment prospectus. The document, full of glossy pictures of smiling African children in their school uniforms in their smart classrooms, showed how poverty was a market worth tens of millions of dollars. It also showed how student, parent and teacher data gleaned from their digital platform could be monetised via marketing and surveillance purposes.
I approached several national and international media outlets with the story not for personal income, although given all of my research and work had been unfunded it would have helped, but for legal support if things got messy.
The response from the mainstream and why it’s unlikely you’ll see me make the transition from where I am now to a mainstream media outlet was frustrating. The nicest response from a left-leaning national newspaper in the UK was:
“Wow, it’s quite a big story, isn’t it. I just don’t have space or resources to commission something like this. It would take a lot of words, a lot of space, and a lot of lawyering, and for it to be featurey enough there would need to be some colour — and I can’t afford a trip to Liberia! So I shall have to pass.”
My point was and remains that what is happening to education on the African continent and Indian sub-continent will, as long as we believe education is a delivery and testing system for subject knowledge, find its way to state schools throughout Europe and America.
By November all of the Bridge schools in Uganda were closed by the Ugandan government over concerns about poor sanitation and its curriculum. Meanwhile in Kenya the government and other organisations are placing pressure on this US corporation.
Three months after leaving the investment banking sector to join Bridge, their head of communications who worked as my handler, left Bridge to return to the banking sector. Make of that what you will.
Back in the UK and an organisation called Transparify published their annual think tank transparency report. Unsurprisingly, as I’d been complaining about to anyone who would listen, Policy Exchange was at the bottom, the least transparent about who they worked for and who funded them. Now, I had been banging on about this for more than a year on social media as well as earlier writing. I wasn’t the only one given that I was in good company with the likes of journalists, George Monbiot and Owen Jones making similar points. That said I think we were all filed under “left wing gob shites”. But, in my mind, this wasn’t so much political but a concern for the future of our country and an attack on The Commons.
A year earlier I’d had a public exchange over Twitter with their head of education who made a poor fist of denying the right wing nature of their policy proposals.
Close friends with good intentions suggested that I had taken leave of my senses as a result of what appeared to be my obsession with Policy Exchange and their unelected, unregulated but very real influence on government policy. To suggest there was a revolving door between Policy Exchange and the British government was hardly hyperbole.
The Transparify report was published just after Mick the Knife had, at his wife’s behest, downed Boris Johnson in order to make his own pitch for Prime Minister in the post-Brexit constitutional crisis. Mick was the founding chairman of Policy Exchange who’s founding objective was to return the Conservative Party to power after they were demolished by the Blair-led Labour Party in 1997. Now Mick was on primetime television telling the world that we’d had enough of experts and being told what to do by faceless elites.
I called into question why the mainstream media and education press afforded Policy Exchange the oxygen of airtime when it wasn’t clear who they represented. This resulted in an odd exchange on Twitter with the deputy editor of the TES.
I was grateful when, later in the year, the baton about think tanks was grabbed by Ross McGill, AKA TeacherToolkit
Around the same time the New York Times had begun an investigation into think tanks and turned up a bad smell around Brookings Institute who, it appeared, had crossed the line from impartial policy research to corporate lobbyist. This was interesting to me because it was an organisation that I respected and where I had friends. However, this relationship was strained when I discovered that they had done a copy and paste of Bridge International Academies promotional material and served it up as research. To be fair to Brookings, they had named and thanked everyone who had helped them in their research. They just neglected to inform readers that all of these people were Bridge employees.
Meanwhile back in the UK, we’d just about got a new government under the leadership of Theresa May who swiftly appointed Justine Greening to Secretary of State for Education. Greening had previously been Secretary of State for International Development (DFID) where under her watch a £4 million grant was given to, you guessed it, Bridge International Academies. So that’s British tax money going to a US for-profit venture bankrolled by Pearson, Mark Zuckerberg, Bill Gates and a host of others. No wonder there’s been a peasants revolt.
On July 31st, artificial intelligence pioneer and educator Seymour Papert passed away. I hadn’t realised how much of an impression Papert had made on me when I met him in my late teens whilst working for a educational computing manufacturer. But his passing made me think about what had happened to our dreams of a technological transformation of education and school.
Somewhere along the EdTech road the collective “we” hit a fork. One direction retained the vision imagined by Papert and his peers where computers facilitated independent inquiry, collaboration and problem solving. The other direction was one designed to reinforce an already out of date pedagogy based around content distribution and testing. Large corporations with a vested interest in content ownership and testing naturally favoured the latter using their financial muscle to keep things as they are, only digital.
With Artificial Intelligence about to go primetime it struck me that if we could rid ourselves of 20th century business models driving policy we could see a genuine transformation of education rather than the conclusion of its industrialisation. I wrote a couple of pieces to draw attention to this. One was to spell out the consequences of prioritising standardisation over personalisation and fetishising data driven teaching.
The other was a reflection on what Artificial or Augmented Intelligence could mean for education. Would it be used to reinforce industrial education processes or would it be used as a tool for entirely new ways of teaching and learning?
Bizarrely my questioning of the EdTech sector and its investor community made me persona non grata in many of the circles in which I had previously been highly regarded. Somehow just questioning the efficacy of technology in this context was regarded as anti-modern and anti-technological. Today I and too many colleagues are having to preface any criticism of EdTech deployments with “I’m not against technology…” and this is unhealthy in my opinion.
I tried to touch on this here:
Assessment and the stranglehold it has over education reform featured a number of times in my 2016 canon. At a time when technological advances suggest significant change to the future and nature of work it strikes me as odd that we continue to train kids to compete with machines and pass tests. Surely education should be about preparing young people to live well in the world together?
No one has a crystal ball but there are things we do know about the century in which our children will live, love and work. Anything that can be measured will be automated so blue collar jobs will disappear. As an example, self-driving vehicles from cars to haulage will have a profound impact on the employment ecosystem that exists around todays vehicles. But it’s not just blue collar jobs that are at risk. The middle class occupations that are rule or regulatory based in nature, for example lawyers or accountants, will be under threat from Artificial Intelligence software. The reality will be that the only jobs available will be the ones that machines can’t do.
We hear a lot about “Post-Capitalism” but it’s hard to understand or imagine the winners of the Monopoly board redistributing their wealth. At the same time it’s hard to understand how the wheels of 20th century capitalism can continue to roll if the majority of people are poor.
Within the discourse about education we’ve heard a lot about 21st century skills but in my view we need to be discussing and preparing for 21st century challenges.
A few years back when I was running Learning Without Frontiers I used to publish a newsletter called “Disruption”. It was intended to be a rallying call to think about how our education systems could be positively disrupted as a result of advances in technology. It occurs to me that if we want to change things then this has to start with assessment, the tail that wags the dog of learning.
Several times during the year on social media I was reminded that I wasn’t a school teacher and don’t spend my days working with a classroom of children. To be fair that’s an accurate description and skilled teachers who are passionate about their craft have my utmost respect. One of those teachers, Joe Bower, passed away at the beginning of this year and my last post of 2016 was dedicated to Joe:
There’s so much to read or explore on the internet and I try to provide more signal than noise. According to the Medium analytics my articles have been read over 500,000 times during the year. I’m guessing that it wasn’t only my mother reading them so I want to thank all of those who took the time to read my articles, share them or offer feedback. I hope that the year ahead brings you everything you need and a lot of what you want.
Graham
Bonus videos
Designing Education for Purpose (Dubai, April 2016)
Innovation on Purpose (Zagreb, October 2016)
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