Education Leaders LIVE | March Reflections

Good morning. Good afternoon. Good evening. Welcome to Education Leaders Live.

Hey, Chris, how are you doing today? Good morning. I'm all good. It is a bright, sunny, albeit freezing day in the shed here in Newcastle, but it's great to be online and some really great podcasts this week.

Absolutely. Well, just to reintroduce ourselves for those who might be tuning in for the first time, this is Education Leaders Live, so it's the live accompaniment to the Education Leaders podcast. My name's Shane Leaning, so I'm usually the host of the podcast that you might tune in week by week, and I'm based out here in Shanghai, China. How about you, Chris?

I'm in Newcastle in the northeast of England, and where the sun always shines, of course. I find it amazing that we forged a friendship and a partnership both work-wise and personally, given where we live. It's pretty special. Would we meet in, was it Bangkok originally, or Shanghai?

Shanghai, and you dropped the postcard off when I was speaking at the festival in Shanghai. That's right. Yeah, I love those little postcards, just to know. I remember it well, and then we seem to meet at different points around the world, and we get to do this once a month, which is an absolute joy. So this show, you might be listening to on the

podcast, and in which case you're just having a listen, and you're not listening to it live, but for those of you who are, you might be joining us on LinkedIn, or on YouTube, or on Riverside. It's wonderful to have you here. We get together on the last Thursday of every month to review the shows that have been happening through the month, but also not just for me and Chris to have a bit of a chat about what's been happening, but for you to get involved as well. So I'm just looking to my left now. I can see we've already got some people

joining us on LinkedIn, so it's awesome. And we've got some people on YouTube as well. So I'm just going to write a little note in the chat. Hi, everyone. Please feel free to ask

questions here, and I'm going to send that, and that goes live straight to you. So please feel free, ask us some questions, get involved, actually become part of this conversation, because that's what this is about, the chance for the community to explore some of those themes on the show. And what a month it's been for the pod. We've had a few things on the pod. We've had a bit of a celebratory episode where I introduced what's been happening

on the show, and kind of a little bit of the background behind education leaders a bit wider than what you may know from the podcast. We had the incredible Dr. Chris Baker on the show, just absolute joy. One of the only people, which includes you, Chris, score actually, who is, in fact, I've got a bias for Chris's, who's been on the show twice. And this was an

absolute knockout episode. Go back and listen to that if you haven't already. And also the latest episode as well, looking at professional development and how much of that works or doesn't work and what some of those challenges might be. So it's been a really good month. I wonder,

Chris, what's been standout for you? Where would you like to start with this chat? Well, I guess before we actually get into that, maybe if people are listening online, they could drop us a message and just let us know where they are in the world. Because I find it fascinating that I'm here in Newcastle, you're in Shanghai, and there's people everywhere.

Listening to this. So yeah, if you are listening live, drop us a line, let us know where you are. It'd be great to hear. So for me, when I listened to the podcast, I picked one up, which I should have done for the previous episode of Live, which was the Selina Boyd one as well, about The Good School's Guide. And it was really interesting listening to that, listening to your

solo podcast and that of Chris Baker. There were some themes that ran through those, but I thought a good starting point would be to talk about where education leaders came from. And it's quite amusing because when I met you in Shanghai, and you dropped that postcard off, I kind of saw you as an established consultant doing what you did. And I was a little bit jealous.

I was kind of like, so I was still in the corporate world. And as many of you that listen will know that, that caused a little bit of tension for me, from an academic integrity perspective. And I saw you doing this great work. And I thought you were the finished article you were established. Actually, as it turns out, you'd only just started. Exactly, and whatnot.

In your podcast, you talked about the fact that you were terrible when you got started, particularly around business things. I didn't see that at all. What I saw was an established individual. So I'm kind of interesting as to where it all came from, what got you started, and how you clearly when you start with something like this, you've got something to say, you've got a message that's important. And I think that's clear with the education leaders stuff.

But there's a danger that if you have something to say, that you end up sort of having a rant. And I'm wondering how you balance being measured in your work and not having with all of that kind of stuff. But where did it all come from? How did it start? Tell us.

Well, it's funny. Thanks for asking, Chris. Because it's funny, actually, that idea that you talk about of maybe seeing from the outside in thinking, oh, this guy's just kind of managing to do it, and it's fully formed, and it's all there. And it's funny what the difference is from the inside to the outside. And it's like the LinkedIn effect, isn't it? Everyone just looks

like they're absolutely knocking it out the park. And then when we actually get to speak to each other, everyone's really challenging. And I think that can be a problem. And it's funny enough, it's one of the reasons why I've tried as much as possible to share openly and vulnerably about the realities of what I do. Because I think there is a danger where

we all kind of look to others and think that. But yeah, gosh, going back all that time now, which was I started, this Education Leaders brand started while I was in my previous role. So it was like a hobby. And it wasn't called Education Leaders back then. I've had two name

changes on this podcast, actually. So it was called Travel Ed. Travel Ed. I was trying to be clever with the Ed thing. Everyone does the Traveled ED. And that was kind of what I

launched as a podcast. It was like a hobby podcast, really, to kind of speak to different leaders. And then when it came to me leaving the organization that I was in, and I was made redundant from that role, like they reduced the team. Well, they consolidated the team internationally down to their London office, actually. And we wanted to stay out here. So

that gave me this opportunity, which I think I need to be transparent about, because not many people get the opportunity to get a bit of paid time to explore something. And that's what redundancy offered me. And therefore, it just made sense to go, well, can I build something off the back of this podcast, which had started to do quite well, like surprisingly, started to get quite traction quite fast. And therefore, the idea of kind of working around leadership, working around those themes and working around empowering schools to be able to lead change for themselves, which was something that I'd learned a lot over my career and felt passionate that we were getting wrong as a sector. Yeah, I guess it

just kind of felt right. If I was to think of those early days, though, I was total scatter gun approach. And I'm glad I was. I didn't know what it was going to grow into. And

I thought, perhaps, actually, I was like, well, I'll try this for a bit, and I'll get a job if it doesn't work. So I'll just kind of have a go and see if anyone wants to work with me. And a few people are saying, come and do some training here and a bit of training there. And then things start to grow. And eventually, it started to narrow. And I go, okay,

get those focused in. And actually, I think it was about that time when everything rebranded to education leaders about a year ago is where everything started to narrow into what it's become today, which is still pretty evolving and messy, if I was to be honest. Yeah. And it's interesting, because meeting you and working with you gave me, you were one of the people that gave me the courage to make the jump out of the commercial world into the freelance world. And there are days where my wife has cursed you for that.

Sorry, Rob. That's fair. That's fair. I'll take that.

It ebbs and flows. We have good months and bad months. And on a good month, she's quite frying with you. But in bad months, she's maybe a little sharper in that criticism of you.

But I think it's an interesting place to occupy. And I think it takes a fair bit of courage, resilience, and maybe even bloody-mindedness to make that jump. And it's a tricky old place to be. But I think what you're doing is fab and looked at a lot of the stuff that you've done, and I'm delighted to be part of it. Interested to know if you've got any

book projects coming up. Am I allowed to say that? Yeah. Well, I do have a book coming up, and I'm literally just in the last bits of conversation with the publisher now. So literally this week. So I will be announcing that shortly,

but there is definitely a book coming up based on cognitive load and leadership, which I'm very excited about. That'll be coming soon. Again, these kind of projects. I literally, I was just chatting with someone on a call just now, and I was like, when you're running your own business, all of a sudden things start to, your to-do list gets massive, and you start to kind of work on a lot of different things, and it's easy to lose yourself. And so luckily, I'm in a little bit of a glass box.

But glass is great for writing on with whiteboard marker. So I've literally, you can't see it, but I've got a very messy glass door to my right, which I've just started to kind of map all the different projects on. And yeah, one of which I've just realized the book isn't on there. It's just, yeah, this is the problem. I keep thinking things.

And over that glass door, you've got a beautifully arranged bookshelf and a very nice vase as well, from what I can see. Yeah, I did. I had help with it. But I think actually on a serious note, I think with a lot of people reach out to me now with that kind of same thing saying, Shane, I love what you're doing. I want to do it. So I can do this.

And I think, you know, my advice nowadays is kind of, okay, but try to remember that the grass does look greener and it looks easier. And that a lot of what I'm doing is, you know, make very little money for some months and a bit of more money other months. And sometimes, you have no idea where your next paycheck is going to come in. And it's a literal feeling that. And sales is not a natural thing that educators lean into, like most of us haven't

really had that experience. So you end up having to kind of work out systems for helping people to get to know what you do and stuff. It's just the whole build it and they shall come, like, is just such terrible advice. They might not be finding your gas bill.

Exactly, exactly, exactly. And that's been something that I've often been, that I've been thinking about because those early days, like, I'll be honest, I was lucky. I did have a decent enough reputation that all my work came from just people getting in touch. I didn't do any outreach, just people asking. And that's like amazing. But that's not a

sustainable, sustainable business or anything. And you can't, you can't rest on that. No, not at all. But it's a great story. And I think it's, I love, like I say,

I love the fact that it's built on a bit of vulnerability as well. So good on you for making that jump and being out there and putting in that space. And thank you from both myself and Mrs. Sorer for helping me make that jump. Let's move on because we're under the risk of

perhaps being a bit self-congratulatory in that. Absolutely. Yeah, let's stop. I'm deeply uncomfortable.

Let's talk about Chris Baker, Dr. Chris Baker rather. He really should, I would vote for Chris to be in charge of education full stop. Go on, tell me why. What were you taking? Like, cause I love this. I love this guy.

I'm curious to hear that. Yeah. Yeah. Well, I mean, he set himself up quite well by already sort of talking about Rob Coe's work and the poor proxies for learning and how that led into the sort of poor proxies for, for leadership. And I think there's a, there's a little bit

of a theme that runs true across both of those. I know Rob, I know Rob's work very well. And I know Rob a little bit, he's in the same part of the world as I am and stuff like that. We've bumped into each other. And I just love the fact that they look beyond the obvious.

And I think that the sort of the UK particularly has an inspection model that looks at things very superficially and doesn't really dig behind what's going on with kids and really educating them. We look at those sort of superficial presentations and I really like that. I've got a funny story about Rob Coe and I've got to say that the work that Rob and Stuart Kine do at Evidence-Based Education is great. And we at Coru, we used some of their, their ideas, that idea of sustained CPD to, to build our touchpoint courses, which have only recently gone live. And it's that idea of moving away from one-off training days

and, and moving towards that sort of sustained development cycle. And I think that's a great plan. And I kind of wish Evidence-Based Education went quite as good at it because I think people head there rather than to Coru at the minute. But the stuff that they do is fab. Rob Coe actually built a lot of the,

did a lot of the sums and the maths and the stuff behind Cambridge Evaluation and Monitoring, which many of you, many of the listeners will have used Alice Yellis, Midyas, that kind of thing. So he'd done a lot of work in the behind the scenes for that. And I was at the Barley Schools Conference and Rob happened to be there as well. And that was great. He was a great guy to chat to and have a drink with. And then we went into my session and

I was introduced by a chap called Mark Barber, who's unashamedly a salesman. And he was a little generous with these introductions about my level of expertise, about what went on under the bonnet behind the sort of chem stuff. And so I'm getting ready. I'm okay, you know, as a teacher, that as long as you're a few pages ahead of the kids, you're probably okay. Well,

I probably had more knowledge than the people in the room. That was until Rob Coe walked into the room. I'm doing a presentation about the numbers behind chem. I have never been so anxious as I was then about doing a session. The room was packed. Rob was good enough. He was a perfect

gent. He asked all the right questions, going far enough to put me in a favorable light, but not going so far as to destroy my credibility. Well done, Rob. Yeah, I bought him a few beers for that. He was a really interesting though. And I love the work that they do. And that idea

that we look past what those immediate metrics that we assume make good teachers and good leaders, and we look past those kinds of proxies. Well, this is what I loved. So like for listeners who haven't listened to that episode yet, it was all about poor proxies for leadership. Rob Coe's work was all about poor proxies for learning, like what we're looking for, and just kind of like a quiet classroom or a loud classroom or hands up or whatever it is that gives you a proxy for learning, and it's not a useful proxy. And Chris has really explored,

well, what are those poor proxies for leadership? Do we look at the wrong things with leadership too? And I think one of the proxies you fell foul to from a message you sent me earlier today, Chris. Did I? You've got a coat. Yes, I did. I did. Yeah. There's a uniform, Chris Maker

talks about the uniform of leadership, how you feel the need to conform and establish yourself and look like a leader. And actually, that's something that we do worry about. Do we look the part when we go to work? You might have noticed that my dress code has softened since I've moved out of the corporate world. I'm a little more comfortable in my own skin with that.

But yes, and he talked about the trench coat and a kid asking him if he was the new headmaster. And he said, well, no, but why? And he said, well, you're wearing a coat. And it was the French headmaster. And I have a trench coat in my wardrobe. Do you have a trench

coat? No, I don't think I was ever like, yeah, no, I don't have a trench coat, sadly. But I can visualise that coat. And I think probably I have wanted one.

That's inspirational. Exactly. Exactly. But I never, yeah, yeah, I never made it to that point where I got the trench coat. But it is funny. I love how a child pointed that out, Chris.

Yeah. From the mouths of babes, as it were. I think it was an interesting one that he talked about not being in your office, the head who has to be visible and out there and stuff like that. And I think that this really went to the heart of what leadership is, what are you trying to do as a leader within a school? I noticed that there was a recent story in the news back here in the

UK of a head that had his office on a wheelie trolley. And he used to walk down the corridors with it and do stuff on the corridors and things. I've seen this on YouTube videos or something. Yeah. I mean, there's all sorts of confidentiality issues that go in with that.

And the idea of being able to concentrate on something. I think that for me, I need to split my administration and my kind of interaction with people really. I can't be doing one or the other. I end up making a mess of both. And I kind of thought back to a school that I worked in

and there were two different heads. One didn't have a computer on his desk, but he was always present in the school and his deputies and assistants did the admin. And there were occasionally accusations that this head teacher was lazy. And then there was the follow on head who was known as the arch administrator and unkindly, but he did a lot of administration.

And he didn't do a lot of that being about talking to people and the accusations against that sort of lack of that lack of interaction and engagement were sort of made against that subsequent head. And I think that you can't get it right for all of the people, but you've got to define what your role is as a leader within an organization. And the first head did that quite eloquently and well. I thought didn't hide behind the computer went out and about.

He had a board of sweets on his desk rather than a laptop or a desktop machine, which I thought was brilliant. It's funny though, isn't it? Because while I guess this gets to the heart of it, it's very difficult to define what a good principal or a good head teacher or a good leader does because you will end up resorting to poor proxies for what that is. Because I know a leader who I worked for, who was probably the most visible leader, like walked the corridors day in, day out, likes constantly seeing teachers. And the school that that was in, it was not the place for that

because there were systemic issues behind the scenes that needed a leader to grasp, to manage up, to kind of sort out and to get working. And so he had this kind of like veil of presence. And yet he wasn't present in the task that needed to do. And yet I've seen other leader who was not very present and self-admitted that they weren't very good at kind of like being in teachers' classrooms and seeing people regularly and talking to teachers. And yet they did more like this is

one of the best leaders that I worked with, did more for the school than I've ever seen a leader do in terms of working behind the scenes to make things better for the teachers, make things better for the students. So I always feel like it's like a bit situational and you've got to be able to, you can't just lean on your box of what works for you before as a leader or what you've seen before. This links in to Selina Boyd's episode, the sort of storytelling one. So in is from the Good Schools Guide and they visit schools and they find out about what it really is. The schools don't pay them, they do a sort of an evaluation of the school if you like.

And one of the core principles that she talked about was not starting with the head or what have you, you're starting with the parents and finding out how they felt. And ultimately that to me is the test of leadership. It's how the people around you feel in terms of their, you know, whether it's the students, whether it's the teachers, whether it's the parents, whether it's the wider community around your school, it's about how they feel towards the choices that are made within your organization. And I look at this and I think that it is tempting to get drawn into that kind of the great man syndrome, I think Chris Baker refers to it as in that episode, that we're looking for one person to carry the whole thing.

And I wonder if the role of a leader should just be to set the tone and then let everything else kind of follow it's not its own path, but kind of almost have a life of its own, if you're like, you know, empowering those people. And I'm drawn back to that work of Steve Monday, that kind of distributed leadership rather than delegation. I know we've been working on delegation earlier this week, so I'm sorry about that if that goes against that. This is in my intensive program, by the way, for anyone who's wondering what that's about.

It's really good. I'm a big fan of it. You should sign up. But the point being that actually, if you can have a team of people that are empowered, then they can bring those different facets to it rather than leaning on that one, the great man syndrome that Chris Baker talks about in his episode. Yeah, I definitely at least lean towards that type of leadership. But then I

guess there's always the other side of like, well, what if you run a one form entry school and you haven't got a deputy or other leaders, you just kind of got a team of teachers, you might, you know, you might need to kind of be a bit more on the ground and kind of doing some of that that work as well. And I think it speaks to the idea that, yeah, there are so you need to look at your situation in front of you and work out. I think coming back to your original point, what is the definition of my role? And do I understand the definition of my role? And then even more importantly than that,

do the people who I serve understand the definition of my role? And have we agreed that we agreed that together? That can go a long way to stop in this tension between this them and us mentality that can come up. I think as well, he touched on something else about the idea of that need to be busy, you're expected to be busy all of the time.

And I think that leadership is a creative craft in many respects, you need to have time for things to percolate, you need to approach stuff when you're maybe not harassed. I think about my best moments in leadership. And they certainly weren't when I was under time pressure. And I think about my worst moments in leadership. And they were when

I was under time pressure trying to get stuff ticked off the list. Yet we gravitate towards that busyness because that's what's sort of expected from us. We rock up to work in a trench court and we look busy. And we have guilt, don't we? We have guilt

when we're not busy. And it's funny, even just like if I looked at leading my own business over the last two and a half years, at the times where I have made some of the best decisions as a leader have been at the times where I felt like I had space and I kind of gave myself that permission to have that space. And yet we just constantly, you can think when you're in a school, I remember at that time when I'd be sat in my office and going, I've just cleared my emails and stuff. And then you're just looking at your projects and going, what should I do now? And then you have this intense guilt. Someone's going to come along

and say, look at Shane, he's just not doing anything. He's not busy. And yet that's insane because as a leader, you need that time to think and you need that time to strategize. You need that space to be able to make really good decisions for those people you serve.

If you're just like that leader who is never there, never in their office because they're constantly here, there, and everywhere, then when are you actually having that chance to think about how you lead? And that position is not sustainable long-term. You see burnout. And burnout is an issue amongst school leaders, particularly amongst teachers. And we're starting

to see it amongst youngsters because that philosophy is percolating down into the classroom level. Every lesson counted. That was probably the first incarnation of that being sort of foisted upon students. Best will in the world. I think it's important that kids get to school and are

there for most of the time. But every now and again, a kid is not in a position to go to school for whatever reason. And their wellbeing or their state of mind needs some healing or needs a little bit of space. And they need to be out of the kind of pressure cooker that maybe they find themselves in at school. And I think that's true for us all to do our best thinking.

My best thinking happens when I'm out for a walk with the dog around when I'm sat in the office, that kind of thing. Yeah, it's interesting because I think like to kind of bring that all to one of my bigger reflections on the episode was that the idea of poor proxies for leading is so useful. But then as Chris and I touched on slightly, how do you define good proxies, like useful proxies for leadership? It's a very difficult thing to start to look at, right?

Well, that was kind of where I was drawn to that Selena Boyd episode. It is Selena Boyd, isn't it? I've got that. Yeah, Selena, brilliant. This is last month's episode. We didn't get a chance to chat about

it last month, but yeah, check it out. Selena Boyd, brilliant. Yeah. And it was that kind of idea just about how people felt around you and within your school. And it's that concept of school culture, belonging, engagement. And I think,

ultimately, that's got to be the test. And that context is going to differ from one place to the other. What are people actually after? Where's the value in what you do and how you set the tone? And I think one of the dangers is that we've been tempted into promoting good

administrators into leadership roles. And good administration is an element of leadership. It's necessary, but it's certainly not sufficient. And it falls a long way short of preparing people for real leadership. And the genuine leadership, that autonomy to make decisions,

be responsible for them, stand by them when they go wrong, take credit for them when they go right, is very rare until you're actually in the top job. We talked about that this week. I've got to run this past someone before I get signed off for it. That kind of idea.

And it's yours. You can make the decision, but make the right one. If it goes wrong, it's your fault and you're going to be pilloried for it, sort of idea. I think that we need a slightly healthier approach to that distributed leadership within an organization for it to work. And then you can set your proxies. But until you do that,

when you're carrying it all yourself, concentrating it in one place, it's never a good idea. Yeah, I agree. And it's a good segue actually. So Chris, you mentioned like the intensive leadership program that Chris is currently on the program with me. We've got 18 leaders from

around the world doing an intensive leadership program, looking at 10 core leadership levers that are really quite human levers at their heart. In fact, not thinking about high level strategy and how do we make this big kind of strategy, but how do we do those human interactions? And this week we were talking about delegation and distributed leadership and looking at those different levels. And together it was really interesting because we really unpicked the idea that there is subtlety in how you ask things. And there

can be such a gap sometimes between what you think you've asked someone to do and what they've received. And it's so interesting how a lot of delegation can kind of fall apart and you think you're trying to distribute leadership and then you get frustrated that people are not taking it on board or doing it in the way that you were hoping that it would be distributed. And so you end up taking it on yourself. And actually it needs a little bit of kind of like looking at, well, how have I delegated it? Have I looked at the right level of delegation

and have I made it explicit in the exact way that would have been useful? It was really interesting to hear participants this week kind of pulling apart, like, do you know what, I can see why that might have fallen apart for me and why that delegation didn't work because I've not quite made it clear. One of the most powerful tools that I put to use as a teacher was I'd get my kids to write me a school report at the end of the year. Now some of it was a little bit... Some of it was abrasive. What were the ages you put?

I used to teach a lot of sixth form, but also sort of GCSE. So they were that age, old enough to be rude, certainly. I would not do that to a group full of teenagers. Yeah.

But you know what, that process, it was like the equivalent of it sort of teachers 360 feedback. You got insights to things that you would have never seen yourself. I think Chris Baker talked about it, that idea of opening yourself up to that feedback. You look at the work of evidence-based education, and one of the things that they talk about in their frameworks is 360 feedback, which is a pretty widely understood concept now. It's an interesting one,

that if you are able to open yourself up to that, you can then start to turn what might be a difficult relationship into something developmental, because it gives you room to give something where perhaps you'd have just got frustrated and pushed harder. So I kind of really like that idea. And yeah, it's not a comfortable process, particularly if you're at the vanguard of that, doing that in your organization, and you're the first one. But equally, it's not necessarily that comfortable at the other side, giving that feedback. And I think if you can normalize it and start that process,

and get that rolling, it's hugely, hugely valuable. And yes, there were things that kids said to me about my teaching that upset me, and things that made me laugh. Apparently, I type too loudly. There was loads of kids said that.

Was they? That was the thing. I love that. I type too loudly.

I'll tell you what, my fear used to be, Chris, when I was a teacher, do you remember there was a website, and I'll forget the name, it was something like ratemyteacher.com? Ratemyteacher, yeah. I was absolutely terrified. I hope that website doesn't exist anymore. But I remember,

I think that was one of the most terrifying prospects for a teacher to go low. It was unfiltered. Any student could rate their teacher from any school. There was also an incident at one of my schools where one of the kids had done a website about the head teacher outlining the fact that he was a vampire. I mean, they'd done this amazing bit of

prose. Everyone in this school, apart from the principal in question, found it quite amusing. Creativity, top marks for that. Absolutely, yeah. Okay. I think the next one was one that you did about CPD.

So that was this week, which for context, yeah, I put like a little survey out on LinkedIn a few weeks ago, just to saying, what's the impact of workshops usually that when people come into your school and host a workshop, what's usually the impact? Around 100 people put it back, and only one person said it was impactful. Only one, the rest of them said it was either a total waste of time, or just it was nice at the time and had no impact later. One person, and I'll be honest, I can see who it was. It was a person who delivers training.

Yes, it was impactful. So I think we could discount that in the survey. Whether you like it or not. I was making a voice for the people who go into schools.

Which got me just interested, and then someone mentioned the teacher development trust report. I love the stuff that teacher development trust, I think they've just become part of the chart at college, actually. Yes, they have. Good institution, the chart at college.

Yeah, very, very good. Although sad to see the TDT lose its independence in that way, because I just love what they do. But I'm sure exciting, exciting things ahead. But yeah, it got me down that path and looking at some of their research that they've put together.

But yeah, be curious to know what you took away from the episode, which was just out this week. Yeah, the thing that I took away, I think he said that there was, was it a billion pounds being spent on teacher training and CPPD? Yeah. Well over half thought it was engaging, but useless.

Which that's a lot of money being spent on something that's useless. So I guess there's a question in this for me. Where does the responsibility lie and what are the barriers to that training actually having an impact? Is it the trainers? Is it the people that are delivering that stuff?

Or does their responsibility finish at a particular point and there's a responsibility incumbent on teachers and so forth to pick that up and run with it? And I think one of the interesting things that I remember from working as a teacher, and particularly as a school leader, is that there was definitely a reluctance to engage with research. There was active skepticism around research and there was active skepticism around trainers and what they were offering. I guess that drove me towards a question, why is that the case? Why are teachers cynical about the training that comes in and why are

they reluctant to use it? Because most teachers want to do the best for their kids in their classrooms. So where does that barrier happen? Where does it occur? And I sort of wondered,

what is it? I wonder if you just eased back on the workload a little bit and gave them that headspace that we talked about earlier that was important for leadership, important for youngsters, important for any kind of creativity. If you just eased back on the workload a little bit, which is clearly a resource decision, would you be able to then create a higher level of engagement from that earning and support or not? Or maybe there's something more fundamental that I've missed in that whole process? I think you're right. And I could bang on about this all day. I literally

just did a keynote last week in front of a load of PD leaders about this very topic, about why so much of... I talked about it, about why teachers have the rolliest eyes of any sector, I think. Because teachers have seen it. They've been there. They've done that. They've seen the

trainer come in. They've seen the leader who said, hey, we're going to do this new thing and it's going to be great. And it's turned out not to be great. Or it's left the school within two years. Most change fails. I think all of that leads to this kind of fatigue.

But I thought your first point was really interesting, Chris. And it's something that I've had a few arguments with a few people about actually, which is where does the responsibility lie when a trainer comes into your school to deliver training for impact of that training? Now, the people I've had arguments with would say on a trainer level, well, the trainer can't hold any responsibility because they're not there to implement it. So it's not fair to hold the trainer responsible. Agreed. But there is a problem with that

in that that means that we have developed this system where trainers don't feel accountable for the results in the schools and are not held to any standard or account. There's nothing to regulate in trainers, by the way, in schools and things like that. And therefore, there are definitely a great many consultants, trainers, companies that with good intent, definitely with good intent, but have managed to get themselves into a position where they are going into many different schools, charging a heck of a lot of money, a billion pounds has been spent across the UK. And that's just the England, that's just England, tiny little England, and not actually having a long term impact. And yet they keep rolling it out and the same

and same again. So from my perspective, I do think it's a shared responsibility. I do think there is an ethical responsibility for providers to at least gather data of how impactful their programs are by going back to the schools and being vulnerable enough to ask two years later, what's happening with that? And if nothing happened, logging it and making changes to the way you implement or the way you collaborate with schools. I think, for example, something I

do with schools that I made a strong judgment call to do is not just doing one-off workshops with schools, switching off one-off workshops. I might only have one face-to-face touch point with the school still, but I will always make sure that the way we planned that before is very in depth. And it means that I've got as much access to their community as possible and that it is followed up with some sort of coaching relationship or something where I am directly invested in making sure this implements over time with you. I feel like more CPD providers need to be taking this approach with schools. Yeah. And it's interesting. One of the things

that we offer with one of our courses is we go in and do a workshop with senior kids first. You often hear the criticism, if you're going called to do some CPD at a school, well, that's all very well, but it wouldn't work here because you're not familiar with their context. And that's an entirely valid perspective to take because it's very difficult to know their context before you go in. So one of the things that we offer is we sort of bookend the workshop.

The first one is with a selection of senior kids. So we use that to sort of help support the kids with a set of frameworks and a lot of it's around digital literacy and responsible use of things like AI, et cetera, in their studies. Well, from that, we're able to glean what they're using stuff for. We're able to understand the perspective of the youngsters in their school.

And that perspective is not something that even the teachers might necessarily know. And we can then bring that context forward into the CPD and the support that we offer the schools. And that's been a nice way to work that because it's allowed us to contextualize what we're doing. It's quite a flexibility to do that. And maybe you'll move

away from that sort of very static model of CPD that we need to go through. And it can sometimes feel a little bit woolly when you're putting that out there as a project proposal because they're like, well, what will we do in part two? And you're like, well, depends a little bit on what happens in part one, I guess. It can be uncomfortable for schools. Yeah, totally.

And often the people signing off on that, are we looking to sign off on a little bit of an unknown? Yeah. So yeah, from a sales perspective, it's quite hard. But from an educational perspective, I think that's absolute gold. And it's what we do in the classroom in the end.

So we should be experts in this. And yet, we still have these radically different systems. I mean, this is my pet peeve that I talk about all the time, isn't it? We have these great processes and that approaches to pedagogy in the classroom. And we get better and better at them.

And then we get into leadership and we forget about them and we bring a sort of 19th century model to the way we approach it. And it blows my mind that we can't translate from one to the other. Yeah. But there we go.

Well, that's a whole conversation in itself. Listen, Chris, this has been a great conversation and all the episodes we've talked about, we will link to in the show notes. So if you're listening on the bonus episode, that's part of the Education Leaders Podcast. Go and check those previous episodes out. I think you'll enjoy some of those conversations. But Chris,

before we kind of finish today, I'm curious, what are you looking forward to over the next month? Or have you got any reflections or thoughts as we look ahead? Yeah. I've got some work going on with you, which you know about. I'm going to leave it to you as

to how much of that we do or don't disclose. But that's really exciting for me. I've got some workshops with parents over the next few weeks, some worried, concerned parents, a little bit of joint wellbeing stuff with parents and children, focusing on the idea that yes, your exams are important. And yes, you've got to work towards them. But when you get into the exam, well, the biggest asset in the room is you,

not the amount of cramming that you've done or what have you. And actually, there's a balance to be had. One of the themes that I've seen over the last year is a lot of students getting very angsty in their approach, because it's all very high stakes. And I think that some of that stress that teachers and schools feel is maybe being passed on to kids. And

we're maybe stealing a little bit of children's peace of mind from them in the process. And we maybe need to look at that a little. So I'm doing some work with some families on that, which is quite rewarding work. It's really meaningful, meaningful work. And yeah, it's great to hear. And yeah,

I've got a few things where we'll be finishing up this first cohort, the education leaders intensive, which is going to be really nice. So we've got some good work ahead with that and some nice work with schools. We've also got some incredible podcast episodes coming up. I'm just looking to the side here, because next week I've got the most incredible episode with Meg Lee in the US on the science of leading. The science that we're thinking about,

the science of learning, but the science of leading and how we can use some of our knowledge of the science of learning to think about that. And then we've got some also some phenomenal guests come up that we've recorded. I record these podcasts like three months, sometimes four months in advance. And I'm just sitting on like this treasure trove of just wonderful conversations, desperate to get them out. So yeah, stay tuned for some absolutely awesome

conversations. And on that note, there is a far lesser podcast that's available on various streaming platforms. And that's the Corrie podcast. We've had a little bit of a shift, a little bit of a shift, and it's being recorded tomorrow with my good friend and colleague, Kaylee Leisure. It is Leisure

because she's married to an American. And it always makes me wince when I say Leisure. And forgive me for saying that, I'm sure. But we've shifted it from a news roundup, which was a little bit passé to a research roundup. So we're digging into some of the

current research education in education and talking about where it applies. Is it useful stuff? And so on and so forth. So there's a little bit of that going on, recording that tomorrow.

I have a far quicker turnaround on the Corrie podcast, but that's because it's a little less, I'm a bit further behind on my journey than you in that respect, I can assure you. Well, also, if you were doing news and research roundups, but they were like, four months out of date, that would probably be a bit of a problem too. Well, there is an average view. And where can people find that, Chris?

Okay. Corrieeducation.uk is probably your best bet. You can look us up on YouTube, you can look us up on Spotify or on LinkedIn, and it's just Corrieeducation.

No dots, nothing like that. Corrieeducation.uk. These modern web addresses, they're confusing the hell out of people because one of my websites is educationleaders.co. That's like the opposite, right?

You got my code, did you? Exactly. You've got the UK. And do check that out. I love it. I follow you on YouTube. That's

where I mainly see you and Kelly pop up and I just love your reflection. So I'm looking forward to the next research digest as well. That's going to be awesome. Yeah, Kelly's great as well. She's based in the Czech Republic,

another friend that's a million miles away. There you go. I love that. Well, thank you so much for tuning in today. I think today,

sadly, we had a bit of a tech issue on LinkedIn, but it seems like it's been streaming just a black screen. Maybe people got the audio, but we will repost this out there, make sure it's out there so you can watch on YouTube if you want to watch back, or you can listen on the podcast. But Chris, thank you. It's been great reflecting with you today.

I really appreciate this. It's a highlight of my month this, I promise you. Great to see you here. Absolutely. And I will see you at the end of April.

Excellent. Take care. Take care. Bye-bye, everyone.

Bye now.