Speaker 1: I get our kids. It's Craig Anthony Harp. It's David
Speaker 1: Andrew Gillespie aka Dag. It's Tiffany and cook a tack.
Speaker 1: We'll start with the pugilist up in the top left
Speaker 1: corner on my screen. Anyway, Hello Cookie.
Speaker 2: Hello Harper. You're right, always, always fabulous or not always
Speaker 2: sometimes a bit wingy.
Speaker 1: Sometimes sometimes you're a fucking nightmare. And sometimes sometimes you
Speaker 1: send me text messages and I'm like, all right, all right,
Speaker 1: I'm going to answer that in four hours or maybe tomorrow.
Speaker 1: I'm going to respond to that. Either that or you're
Speaker 1: sending me photos of cat's peg to fucking washing lines
Speaker 1: or something, or oh look, baby, a tiny miniature hippo.
Speaker 1: I want one. I'm like, you're probably not going to
Speaker 1: get one.
Speaker 2: How good are animal memes? Though?
Speaker 1: Annoying? Uless b We've asked you this before, but you're
Speaker 1: a kind of a dog person. You have a dog
Speaker 1: in your family, don't you too.
Speaker 3: At the moment, actually, because we're looking after one that
Speaker 3: my eldest daughter has acquired because she's a teacher, well
Speaker 3: becoming a teacher, and we'll be going into a country
Speaker 3: posting next. Y and wants to take a dog with her.
Speaker 3: So she's while she's out in country postings this year
Speaker 3: in her prack, she's given us her dog to look after.
Speaker 3: So now we've got two of them.
Speaker 1: Oh wow, and are you? Are you a gushy, cuddly,
Speaker 1: lie on the floor dog person or are you just
Speaker 1: a pat on the head tolerate them from afar?
Speaker 3: Yeah, that second one's probably closer.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I'm shocked. I'm shocked because you're so warm and fuzzy.
Speaker 3: I walk them every morning, though, both of them in
Speaker 3: the bush.
Speaker 1: Oh really, do you live in the bush or near
Speaker 1: the bush.
Speaker 3: There's a bush land across the road from us. Yeah,
Speaker 3: Whi's quite a big lump of bush that the dogs
Speaker 3: like to walk in.
Speaker 1: Are there any snakes there?
Speaker 3: Probably, but I've never encounted them. They probably don't want
Speaker 3: to hang around and find out what dogs are like.
Speaker 1: That's that's yeah. I wonder if dogs are scared. I
Speaker 1: think dogs are scared of snakes, aren't they? Or maybe
Speaker 1: some are summer anyway, this is not very captivating. People like, fuck,
Speaker 1: get on with it out there?
Speaker 3: So why didn't he cut that bed out?
Speaker 1: Yeah? Take that outif I we'll leave it in.
Speaker 3: Fuck.
Speaker 1: It, so I wanted to have a chat to you.
Speaker 1: I've had a few conversations lately and with a reoccurring theme,
Speaker 1: which is education, and I just had one at the
Speaker 1: gym tonight which I left the gym twenty minutes ago
Speaker 1: and a friend of mine, Nigel, shout out to Nige
Speaker 1: and MJ. They owned some childcare centers, kindergarten's, early learning centers,
Speaker 1: whatever you want to call them. I think they're a
Speaker 1: little bit of an amalgamation. But he was talking to
Speaker 1: me about some of the challenges of getting you know,
Speaker 1: getting people in the space who are well qualified and
Speaker 1: good to do the job. How's the state of the
Speaker 1: Australian education system at the moment in your eyes? I
Speaker 1: know that you have free free school dot org are
Speaker 1: you so if you're interested in having a look at
Speaker 1: that everyone, I've looked for a little bit, but I've
Speaker 1: been on there quite a few times and it's amazing.
Speaker 1: Free school one word, free school dot org dot au,
Speaker 1: which is an amazing resource that David and a bunch
Speaker 1: of other people have created at no cost to Australian students.
Speaker 1: But what's your current what's your hot take on education
Speaker 1: at the moment?
Speaker 3: David, it's never been worse. So the Australian education system
Speaker 3: on any benchmark, any benchmark, has never ever been worse,
Speaker 3: and it is not improving and has shown no signs
Speaker 3: of improving since we've been accurately measuring it since about
Speaker 3: two thousand. It's been on a continuous do Ownwood trajectory.
Speaker 3: So the big question a lot of people ask is why,
Speaker 3: And the answer is a lot simpler than most people
Speaker 3: would tell you, which is that we've inserted for profit
Speaker 3: organizations into the delivery of education in this country and
Speaker 3: have essentially proven that doing so rex education systems. So
Speaker 3: what I mean by that is what most Australians call
Speaker 3: private schools, which are not private schools. They receive just
Speaker 3: as much government funding as so called government schools, but
Speaker 3: they also have the right to charge fees, and inserting
Speaker 3: those into the education system has wrecked the one thing
Speaker 3: that makes education systems work, and that's equity. Education is
Speaker 3: a public good, meaning its purpose beyond the individual purpose.
Speaker 3: The individual purposes, I guess you've learned stuff, but from
Speaker 3: a society's perspective, its purpose is to raise all boats.
Speaker 3: Societies with where most people are educated do better than
Speaker 3: societies where most people aren't. It's a pretty obvious thing
Speaker 3: to say, but for some reason people forget it. And
Speaker 3: so the education system is not charity, it's not a gift.
Speaker 3: It's something designed to increase the capability of the population.
Speaker 3: So it's a public good. And as soon as you
Speaker 3: insert into that competitive pressures with private organizations, what tends
Speaker 3: to happen is that those organizations spend a lot of
Speaker 3: their money competing with each other and with the public
Speaker 3: system for the students that they know will do well.
Speaker 3: Why do they want the students who they know who
Speaker 3: will do well because it's great for marketing, which is
Speaker 3: coming back to the start. Why do they want it
Speaker 3: to be good for their marketing Because they've got to
Speaker 3: compete with each other and with the public system. And
Speaker 3: so you push an education system away from its primary purpose,
Speaker 3: which is to take all comers and turn them into
Speaker 3: better or more educated people, and divert massive resources towards
Speaker 3: internal competition and fighting over the kids who will do well.
Speaker 1: Anyway, Yes, yes, have there been private schools around though
Speaker 1: forever haven't.
Speaker 3: They There's always been private school Every major education system
Speaker 3: has private schools, but they have actual private schools So
Speaker 3: if you look at say an education system like the
Speaker 3: United States or the United Kingdom, which are close models
Speaker 3: for US, they have about six percent of their schools
Speaker 3: are private, and they are truly private. They are not
Speaker 3: subsidized in any way by government. In the United States,
Speaker 3: it's prohibited because the government can't get involved in funding
Speaker 3: religious institutions. And in the United Kingdom it's just a
Speaker 3: matter of policy. They did used to be funded by
Speaker 3: governments or assisted by governments, and they decided they weren't
Speaker 3: going to do that anymore. And so in both cases
Speaker 3: about six percent are fully privately funded. So in those systems,
Speaker 3: what people say is, well, you've got a choice. You
Speaker 3: can be publicly funded and go to a public school,
Speaker 3: which is ninety four percent of the schools, or you
Speaker 3: can opt out and pay your own freight. And that's
Speaker 3: pretty much the way it is in most of the world.
Speaker 3: And that percentage of about six percent, So there are
Speaker 3: about six percent of the population who say, you know what,
Speaker 3: I don't want my kid in a public system. I'm
Speaker 3: prepared to pay for them to be educated privately, so
Speaker 3: I'm opting out. And they don't expect government money to
Speaker 3: assist them, and they don't get it. In Australia, it's very,
Speaker 3: very different. In Australia, it's about thirty five to thirty
Speaker 3: seven percent of the system are so called private schools.
Speaker 3: So why is it so much bigger Because in Australia
Speaker 3: you can opt out of the government schools and still
Speaker 3: collect all the money you would have received had your
Speaker 3: child attended a government school, So you're not really opting out.
Speaker 3: You're getting the same money as if your child still
Speaker 3: attended government school and you're being charged fees. So Australia
Speaker 3: is unique in the world in that sense in that
Speaker 3: we contribute huge amounts of public money and the figures
Speaker 3: here are truly mind blowing. You know, there are many,
Speaker 3: many billions of dollars of public money to private enterprises
Speaker 3: to run a schooling system that would be run cheaper
Speaker 3: and better where it's simply run as a government system
Speaker 3: like it is in every other country in the world. Now,
Speaker 3: the problem with that is that we're wasting billions filling
Speaker 3: the pockets of for profit organizations. Now people often say
Speaker 3: to me, oh, yeah, but the local Catholics not a
Speaker 3: for profit organization, and you know they're not reporting profits
Speaker 3: from their schools. Well, there's profit and there's profit. There's
Speaker 3: the profit you get when you have a corporation and
Speaker 3: you pay dividends, and that's a profit. But there's other
Speaker 3: kinds of profit. I mean, I guarantee you the head
Speaker 3: master at the local Anglican college is being paid probably five, six,
Speaker 3: seven times as much as the head master at the
Speaker 3: state school next door to end. So that's a profit.
Speaker 3: You know. Putting in you know, saunas and Olympic swimming
Speaker 3: pools and equestrian centers is profit. So none of it
Speaker 3: improves the outcomes from an education perspective, but it does
Speaker 3: improve the marketability of the school. So the problem we've
Speaker 3: got in Australia is that when we decided to do this,
Speaker 3: and this is a relatively recent thing that we've done
Speaker 3: in Australia. So until nineteen sixty two, no Australian pri
Speaker 3: at school received government money, not a cent, not a
Speaker 3: single cent. In nineteen sixty two they started giving private schools,
Speaker 3: church schools government money. Now why hadn't it been done
Speaker 3: before that, because one hundred years earlier, at the start
Speaker 3: of our education system, we'd made a decision collectively not
Speaker 3: to give money to church schools. Rather like the United
Speaker 3: States has today, and every politician since then had decided
Speaker 3: it was too much of a political risk to risk
Speaker 3: giving money back to the churches until nineteen sixty two
Speaker 3: when the Catholics said, we are so broke, we are
Speaker 3: going under and we are going to flood your school
Speaker 3: systems with all of our kids, and the government's cave
Speaker 3: to it and started handing the money. So that was
Speaker 3: the start of it, and it took us down a
Speaker 3: path that no other country in the world had gone down.
Speaker 3: And at the time people said this is bad news.
Speaker 3: This will destroy equity in the education system, it will
Speaker 3: destroy our educational performance. It turns out, though we're right,
Speaker 3: that was our high point in terms of educational performance.
Speaker 3: It's been downhill ever since.
Speaker 1: Where does Australia rank in the world academically, Tiff, can
Speaker 1: you look that up? Like? Where do we? I'm sure
Speaker 1: there's a global academic ranking? Or who are the best
Speaker 1: students or who get the best?
Speaker 3: There are several Probably the most comprehensive one is a
Speaker 3: test that's done I think it's every two or four
Speaker 3: years and has been published since two thousand. There's been
Speaker 3: ones that have been done before that. There was a
Speaker 3: maths and science one done before that, depending which measure
Speaker 3: you use, Australia was doing really well in about two thousand,
Speaker 3: so we were generally coming in about sixth or seventh
Speaker 3: in the OECD, which is not bad. And now where
Speaker 3: we've plummeted, I think it's around twelve thirteenth, fourteenth something
Speaker 3: like that in the OECD. So it's been a downward trajectory,
Speaker 3: you know, pretty much since we started measuring things. And
Speaker 3: if you ask, well, well, who is the best, it's
Speaker 3: generally in those measures at the moment it's coming in
Speaker 3: around China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea tend to outperform everybody.
Speaker 3: And not only they outperforming everybody, they're doing better than
Speaker 3: even they were in the previous year's tests. So and
Speaker 3: Australia you could say, oh, well, maybe there's something, you know,
Speaker 3: some reason for that. Maybe it's the way, maybe it's
Speaker 3: a cultural thing, maybe it's you know, whatever it is,
Speaker 3: but it doesn't cut it, because our results are worse
Speaker 3: when we only compare it to ourselves rather than just
Speaker 3: comparing it to everybody else. Like the average fifteen year
Speaker 3: old in Australia is now a year and a half
Speaker 3: behind where the average fifteen year old was in the
Speaker 3: year two thousand.
Speaker 1: So hang on, that is so that's in twenty four years,
Speaker 1: they're a year and a half. So developmentally, you mean.
Speaker 3: From the tests, from the test, So these are maths, writing,
Speaker 3: you know, science tests.
Speaker 1: Comprehension, blah blah blah wow.
Speaker 3: Because these tests are standardized on fifteen year olds, right,
Speaker 3: so that they are givenm to a cohort of fifteen
Speaker 3: year olds every time they do it, and they and
Speaker 3: it's meant to measure the same things over and over
Speaker 3: and over again. So so I think it's less interesting
Speaker 3: to compare ourselves to other countries and more interesting to
Speaker 3: compare ourselves to ourselves. And that's not good news.
Speaker 1: How'd you go, Chiff?
Speaker 2: When I put in one?
Speaker 1: Now my browsers, Now now you're looking at shot shoes.
Speaker 3: And looking and cat memes. Ah, here we go.
Speaker 2: I when I plugged in where there's Australian rank in education,
Speaker 2: it says Australia's education ranking varies depending on the criteria used.
Speaker 2: According to UNICEF, Australia ranks thirty nine out of forty one,
Speaker 2: high in middle class income countries achieving quality education. But
Speaker 2: then it says our world class universities are ranked in
Speaker 2: the world's best and the country is second in the
Speaker 2: OECD for education and educational outcomes. In terms of student performance,
Speaker 2: Australian fifteen year old's rank ninth in the world for
Speaker 2: reading and science and tenth for maths.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I doubt that ninth and really I don't know.
Speaker 3: I mean it depends, it depends what year you're looking at.
Speaker 3: So it's a moving target. But the consistent message that
Speaker 3: has been coming through is that it has never gotten better.
Speaker 3: It's been getting worse and worse and worse. And sure
Speaker 3: we'll come in off a high base compared to many
Speaker 3: many other countries. I mean, we had and still do
Speaker 3: have a high quality education system in world terms. It's
Speaker 3: just going backwards very very quickly. The other thing that
Speaker 3: is worth mentioning about it is that as part of
Speaker 3: those tests they do something called an equity measure, which
Speaker 3: is what is your chance if you are in the
Speaker 3: bottom quartile by inco So sorry, I should say income
Speaker 3: is the greatest predictor of performance in the Australian education system.
Speaker 3: The more money your family has, the more likely you
Speaker 3: are to do well. So if you want to know
Speaker 3: whether a child's going to do well. All you need
Speaker 3: to know really is how wealthy their parents are. And
Speaker 3: private schools use that as part of their marketing because
Speaker 3: they flip it and say, well, it's because of us
Speaker 3: that the wealthy kids are doing well. It's actually the reverse.
Speaker 3: It's because the wealthy kids go to those schools that
Speaker 3: those schools look like they're doing well. So wealth it
Speaker 3: simply gives you more advantage. It gives you more of
Speaker 3: a head start, it gives you more resources, it gives
Speaker 3: you more access to better quality teaching. You would know
Speaker 3: this from sport. There's a cumulative effect in sport. I forgot.
Speaker 3: It's got a really fancy name, and I.
Speaker 1: Just want it.
Speaker 3: The Matthew effect. It's where if you are in the
Speaker 3: so a lot of sports have a birth date bias,
Speaker 3: right where if the sport age group starts in January,
Speaker 3: then kids who are born in January do better than
Speaker 3: kids who are born in December, because when they're a
Speaker 3: five year old, that's a year's worth a difference. That's
Speaker 3: going to make a big difference to a five year old.
Speaker 3: And if you're slightly better when you're a five year old,
Speaker 3: you get a slightly better coach when you're a six
Speaker 3: year old, and you get a slightly better coach when
Speaker 3: you're a seven year old, and you get a coach
Speaker 3: when you're eight year old, etc. And that effect flows
Speaker 3: all the way through until you start looking at a
Speaker 3: professional sports team, say like an AFL team, and you
Speaker 3: start to notice and this is true. The study has
Speaker 3: been done that the birthdays cluster around the start point
Speaker 3: for the age groups in that sport. So if that's
Speaker 3: a July start date sport, the birthdays are all in
Speaker 3: July or August. If it's a January start date sport,
Speaker 3: they're all in January or February, And that's that effect
Speaker 3: flowing through. And the same thing happens in education, not
Speaker 3: so much with age, but if you've got a slight
Speaker 3: advantage at the start, then you are performing slightly better
Speaker 3: than your peers, and you might get access to better
Speaker 3: teaching the next year, and then better teaching than a
Speaker 3: year after that, and then better teaching the year after that.
Speaker 3: So that effect accumulates and correlates most closely to income.
Speaker 3: So why does this all matter? Well, they have this
Speaker 3: equity measure, which says, what are your chances in a
Speaker 3: given education a good education system, that shouldn't matter. In
Speaker 3: a good education system, it shouldn't matter how rich you
Speaker 3: are or how good your parents are, because brilliance or
Speaker 3: genius is not determined by income. It's determined by genetics.
Speaker 3: So you know the these They have this measure called
Speaker 3: an equity measure, which says, if you are in the
Speaker 3: bottom quartile, so you're the bottom quarter of the population
Speaker 3: in terms of income, what are your chances of getting
Speaker 3: to the top quarter of academic performance, so you start
Speaker 3: at the bottom from an income perspective, what are your
Speaker 3: chances of getting to the top the high performing education
Speaker 3: systems in the world, which is you know the ones
Speaker 3: I said to you before the agent ones. Mostly your
Speaker 3: chance of getting to the top is seventy five percent,
Speaker 3: so you have a seventy five percent chance of getting
Speaker 3: out of the low income trap that keeps your educational
Speaker 3: performance that low and getting into the high performance academic outcome.
Speaker 3: In Australia, that percentage is twenty nine percent, so you
Speaker 3: have a only twenty nine percent chance of escaping your
Speaker 3: destiny as determined by your income in Australia, which the way,
Speaker 3: is lower than the OECD average of thirty three percent.
Speaker 3: So bad education systems don't let you escape your destiny
Speaker 3: as determined by your income. Good education systems make it irrelevant.
Speaker 1: Wow, I am, I was trying to find I saw
Speaker 1: some some is it Norway? Finland? Is it one where
Speaker 1: like they've got a phenomenal education system where every teacher
Speaker 1: is the minimum qualification is a master's degree for all teachers.
Speaker 3: And Finland you're talking, you're thinking about right, Yeah, Finland
Speaker 3: has a system that is entirely, entirely public, So there
Speaker 3: are no private schools in Finland, and you are sent
Speaker 3: to your local school, so you don't get a choice
Speaker 3: about where you go. You go to the school whose
Speaker 3: geographic area you live in. End of story. So resources
Speaker 3: are distributed evenly and equitably throughout their education system. And
Speaker 3: now people bang on about that thing about having a
Speaker 3: master's degree. That's really just an artifact of the way
Speaker 3: their tertiary, their university education system works. The studies on
Speaker 3: degrees and performance in teaching tell us absolutely clearly that
Speaker 3: it makes absolutely no difference to the performance of a
Speaker 3: teacher whether they have a master's or not. So don't
Speaker 3: judge a school on the basis of whether it's teachers
Speaker 3: have got master's degrees because it makes no difference. What
Speaker 3: makes a difference is their experience. So how long have
Speaker 3: they been a teacher? And you want that the answer
Speaker 3: to that to be preferably more than three years because teaching,
Speaker 3: like every other job, you're learning on the job in
Speaker 3: the first three years. But if they've been there longer
Speaker 3: than three years, then their experience matters much more than
Speaker 3: any master's degree they could do.
Speaker 1: So true, so true. Obviously I can't say too much,
Speaker 1: but I had I had a couple of people work
Speaker 1: for me early days in my gyms who had PhD,
Speaker 1: so literally doctors of exercise physiology, and they did not
Speaker 1: do great because they just couldn't train people. They couldn't
Speaker 1: they couldn't build connection and rapport, they didn't understand, they
Speaker 1: didn't have great social or emotional or situational intelligence. You know,
Speaker 1: one or two were good. But yeah, so that doesn't
Speaker 1: surprise me that little fact. What about like China and
Speaker 1: Singapore and the like, who kind of that above average?
Speaker 1: Is that because culturally there's a big focus on the
Speaker 1: importance of education.
Speaker 3: That's that's usually the knee jerk answer people go to.
Speaker 3: I think that's probably more racist than anything else.
Speaker 1: Yeah, how was that racist? I'm saying this much.
Speaker 3: Everyone's their story about the smart Asian kid in their class.
Speaker 1: You know, I would have thought if I had have
Speaker 1: said they were dumb, that would be racist. I feel like.
Speaker 3: A kids Asians, I don't know.
Speaker 1: I feel like that's a positive attribute to say they're smart. Yep,
Speaker 1: go on.
Speaker 3: Yeah, but it's also not the explanation. So the explanation
Speaker 3: is that they have a fundamentally different approach to teaching.
Speaker 3: And this is really interesting because when you graph the
Speaker 3: amount of time see Australia, America, the UK have a
Speaker 3: system that says the best teaching is having a teacher
Speaker 3: in front of a class all the time. That's where
Speaker 3: you want to teachers. You want them in front of
Speaker 3: your classes. And so the average hours in class for
Speaker 3: a teacher in the UK, the US, Australia are all
Speaker 3: about the same. It's about twenty five hours a week.
Speaker 3: So the average secondary school teacher spends about twenty five
Speaker 3: hours a week standing in front of a class. The
Speaker 3: average teacher in Singapore or China or Korea spends about
Speaker 3: half that time standing in front of a class.
Speaker 1: Wow.
Speaker 3: And the other interesting thing that you want to put
Speaker 3: up against that is the average size of the class.
Speaker 3: So the average size of a classroom in Australia is
Speaker 3: about twenty to twenty two, so there's about twenty to
Speaker 3: twenty two kids in a class. Now, this is quite different,
Speaker 3: by the way, to when Australia was performing really really well,
Speaker 3: which is in the nineteen sixties, when it was about
Speaker 3: forty was the average in a class. So twenty two
Speaker 3: in a class in Australia twenty five hours in front
Speaker 3: of it for the teacher. In Asia, it's about thirteen
Speaker 3: hours in front of the classroom per week, and the
Speaker 3: average class size is closer to forty. So the two
Speaker 3: things that we are constantly told matter in our education
Speaker 3: system don't apparently matter in the systems that are flogging
Speaker 3: us that.
Speaker 1: Which is of counterintuitive. Those two those two bits of
Speaker 1: information or data, they seem yeah.
Speaker 3: So the big question then is why what would what do?
Speaker 3: They can't just be those two things. There must be
Speaker 3: something different about what they're doing. And the answer is
Speaker 3: the teachers are not in front of their class because
Speaker 3: they're observing someone else in front of their class. So
Speaker 3: they are running as pairs or more than pairs where
Speaker 3: it's actually two teachers in a classroom. One of them
Speaker 3: is teaching, the other one is observing them, and maybe
Speaker 3: there's even a third one they're mentoring them. So they
Speaker 3: are running as a team and that it is a
Speaker 3: collegiate approach to teaching, whereas in Australia and the United
Speaker 3: States the United Kingdom, the approach to teaching is it's
Speaker 3: your class your classroom. We throw you in there, you
Speaker 3: teach for an hour, we throw away the key. No
Speaker 3: one's going to watch you, no one's going to observe you,
Speaker 3: no one's going to give you any peer instruction, no
Speaker 3: one's going to give you any mentoring other than the
Speaker 3: usual to conflict type thing once a year where we
Speaker 3: say yeah, Bob can still teach. So that's what goes
Speaker 3: on in Australian English UK classrooms is we tell teachers
Speaker 3: this is your ship, go run it. In those Asian
Speaker 3: classrooms there's nothing of the sort going on. It is
Speaker 3: a very team based thing where there's constant assessment from
Speaker 3: your peers, constant mentoring from your peers, and you are
Speaker 3: also delivering it to your peers. So it's a team sport.
Speaker 3: In Asia and in Australia. It's very much an individual sport.
Speaker 1: So there's somebody who's listening to this.
Speaker 3: Just now, let me just finish on Sorry, I wanted
Speaker 3: to finish on the class sized thing. So how do
Speaker 3: you pay for it? Well, you have twice as many
Speaker 3: kids in the class?
Speaker 1: Yes, yes, yeah, well that makes sense. It's I don't know,
Speaker 1: I'm surprised, but kind of not when you when you
Speaker 1: explain it. So somebody's listening to this and they've got
Speaker 1: to put their kid in a school in the next
Speaker 1: year or two, whether it's primary school or secondary school.
Speaker 1: Have you got any advice for people trying to figure
Speaker 1: out how to do that in a way which is
Speaker 1: best for the kid.
Speaker 3: Yeah, so there's a couple. There's actually quite a long
Speaker 3: list of things to look for in schools from the outside.
Speaker 3: So that book that I wrote that the website is
Speaker 3: based on the Free school The book is called Free
Speaker 3: Schools and it came out twenty fourteen. It actually has
Speaker 3: the whole back half of it is a guide to
Speaker 3: a parent for a parent on what to look for
Speaker 3: from the outside because schools are hard to judge from
Speaker 3: the outside because they all kind of look the same
Speaker 3: and you've got a lot of marketing, particularly if they're
Speaker 3: asking you to pay for it, and it's so what
Speaker 3: I've done there is go through all of that and
Speaker 3: weed out the stuff that doesn't matter, like you know,
Speaker 3: class sizes and all that sort of thing, and talk
Speaker 3: about the things that do matter. So there are three
Speaker 3: things that really really matter in a school. The number
Speaker 3: one most important thing in a school is none of
Speaker 3: the things anyone would ever say, but which as soon
Speaker 3: as I say it, you'll say, of course, which is
Speaker 3: don't have a principal who is a psychopath?
Speaker 1: Okay, how do we well? The problem with psychopaths, as
Speaker 1: you know, is they're often intelligent and charismatic and charming
Speaker 1: and good at job interviews.
Speaker 3: There's often a really, really good way to tell in
Speaker 3: a school, which is go and visit them in their office.
Speaker 3: Psychopaths like are really showing. Their office is their castle.
Speaker 3: Their office is There's awards all over the walls, there's
Speaker 3: pictures of them meeting the Prime Minister, there's pictures of
Speaker 3: them accepting awards. There's all sorts of memorabilia all over
Speaker 3: the place. It's the most glorious office you've ever seen
Speaker 3: in your life. You go into a principal's office and
Speaker 3: it looks like that, turn around and leave. You go
Speaker 3: into a principal's office where he's got the same desk
Speaker 3: as everybody else in the school. He's got a stack
Speaker 3: of papers on it, you know, a third hand, three
Speaker 3: hundred year old computer sitting on it, and is just
Speaker 3: you know, getting on with the work. That's the kind
Speaker 3: of guy you want to be looking at.
Speaker 1: Soor girl or girl or girl? Yes, so now you're
Speaker 1: getting in trouble.
Speaker 3: And in all primary schools probably it will be a girl. So,
Speaker 3: which we do about another day, is why is it
Speaker 3: the primary schools are dominated by a female workforce? We
Speaker 3: can do that another day. But anyway, so.
Speaker 1: The one is, don't don't have a principal who's a psychopath. Yeah,
Speaker 1: what's two?
Speaker 3: Two is have us a a staff group that are
Speaker 3: working on ways even though they are restrained by being
Speaker 3: in a system that tells them they've got to go
Speaker 3: into their own classroom and ignore everybody else, but are
Speaker 3: still trying to even though that's the plan. Have some
Speaker 3: sort of peer mentoring going on in their organization that
Speaker 3: is more than ticker box stuff, so where they're actually
Speaker 3: on their own time perhaps or before school or whatever.
Speaker 3: It is organizing peer mentoring type meetings where they're talking
Speaker 3: to each other and their leader about how to do
Speaker 3: their job better. Wow. So that kind of thing happening
Speaker 3: in a school is a very very very good sign.
Speaker 3: And then the very last thing is look at the results.
Speaker 3: And I don't mean the results everyone tells you to
Speaker 3: look at So everyone says, I can go to my
Speaker 3: school and you can see this school's got all the
Speaker 3: green high performing results, etc. All that tells you is
Speaker 3: that the school has got a lot of rich parents.
Speaker 3: What you want to look for is progress, and if
Speaker 3: you have to drill down into it. But on that
Speaker 3: Naplan website, on the my school website, once you go
Speaker 3: past all the glitzy front end stuff with all the
Speaker 3: green things that show that they've got rich parents or not,
Speaker 3: there is a bit called progress and if you go
Speaker 3: into that, it produces a beautiful graph that tells you
Speaker 3: whether the kids in this school do better than kids
Speaker 3: with the same demographic characteristics. Those are the schools you want.
Speaker 3: So if you match these kids with the same with
Speaker 3: kids with the same demographic characteristics all over the country,
Speaker 3: which is what that does, it's a powerful database and
Speaker 3: they come out better. That's a school you want because
Speaker 3: they are beating the odds. They're getting back to that
Speaker 3: equity thing that I mentioned at the start, where they're
Speaker 3: improving your chances of success by giving you performance that
Speaker 3: outstrips what your economics says you should do.
Speaker 1: Such a fucking interesting chat, this chat, I know nothing
Speaker 1: about all this stuff. I've just been informed and enlightened.
Speaker 1: We've got to go. But before we go, well done,
Speaker 1: you just explain to people quickly, if you would be
Speaker 1: so gracious, you're honor free school dot org dot au.
Speaker 1: What is that? Just tell people what that is?
Speaker 3: So that is a library. So I'll give you a
Speaker 3: slight bit of background. Sorry, I'll go a little bit
Speaker 3: longer here than just got it.
Speaker 1: We've got all the time.
Speaker 3: So when I was doing the research for the book
Speaker 3: Free Schools, it became really really clear that there was
Speaker 3: a type of teaching that worked really effectively with kids
Speaker 3: who had access to very few resources, very few education
Speaker 3: and so poor kids in the United States. And what
Speaker 3: they figured out was that the average teenage kid, I
Speaker 3: know this is going to come a shock to you,
Speaker 3: but does not have a very long attention span. And
Speaker 3: they found that putting them in a class and asking
Speaker 3: them to concentrate on anything for seventy minutes was just
Speaker 3: not going to happen. They found out that actual new
Speaker 3: content delivery in the average high school classroom was less
Speaker 3: than ten minutes, and the rest of it was you
Speaker 3: know whatever, practice, padding, chatting, whatever, but the actual delivery
Speaker 3: was only about ten minutes. And they said, well, why
Speaker 3: don't we put the ten minutes in an instructional video
Speaker 3: where we just tell the kids ten minutes worth of
Speaker 3: what they need to know and then and we get
Speaker 3: them to watch that before they come to class, and
Speaker 3: then we spend the seventy minutes in class practicing whatever
Speaker 3: it is. So that's called flipped classrooms, where you do
Speaker 3: it that way. You put a video out that the
Speaker 3: kicker and just watch on their phone or whatever, and
Speaker 3: they can then come to class and actually practice it. Now,
Speaker 3: that's a great idea, except you need the videos to
Speaker 3: be created, and in Australia they just didn't exist so
Speaker 3: or they were hard to find. So my kids would
Speaker 3: come home they hadn't understood the math they were supposed
Speaker 3: to be doing that day in school. They'd get on
Speaker 3: the YouTube and they'd Google up whatever it was, and
Speaker 3: they'd get some idiot American professor who may or may
Speaker 3: not be right, teaching them something that may or may
Speaker 3: not align with the curriculum that they were supposed to
Speaker 3: be learning right, But that's what they got. So I
Speaker 3: decided I'd start a charity that addressed that issue, which
Speaker 3: is get Australian teachers teaching the things they teach every
Speaker 3: single day in their classrooms, line up their content with
Speaker 3: the curriculum, make their videos more no more than ten
Speaker 3: minutes long, and publish them. Free school dot org to
Speaker 3: you is eight and a half thousand of those videos
Speaker 3: Australian teachers teaching in alignment with the curriculum. So when
Speaker 3: your kid doesn't know what on earth it was that
Speaker 3: the teacher that was standing in front of them that day,
Speaker 3: because they happened to be the pea teacher filling in
Speaker 3: for a week, doesn't know what on earth they were
Speaker 3: supposed to learn, they can go home. They can see
Speaker 3: ten other teachers from Australia teaching exactly the same content
Speaker 3: in ten minute bytes. That's what free School is. And
Speaker 3: there's a new thing we've added to it, which is
Speaker 3: we've gotten teachers now well, actually they have. This was
Speaker 3: their idea to go through the external exams for this
Speaker 3: is for Queensland, for maths, so far, go through all
Speaker 3: the external exams, the past papers, pull out all the
Speaker 3: past paper questions, line them up by topic, and teach
Speaker 3: you how to do those problems and work through them
Speaker 3: with you in a short video. So the kick can
Speaker 3: go to any particular thing they're supposed to be studying,
Speaker 3: find a teacher or several teachers showing them how to
Speaker 3: do those problems which are pretty likely to be on
Speaker 3: the external paper.
Speaker 1: It's you never cease to amaze me. Yeah, I don't
Speaker 1: know how on earth you do all the shit that
Speaker 1: you do. But it's like I don't know you and
Speaker 1: I have a love hate relationship, but you do do something.
Speaker 1: You do do some incredible shit. You are very annoying,
Speaker 1: but you do do some very good shit. Now you're not.
Speaker 1: Really that's amazing.
Speaker 3: Besides, I try to be annoying.
Speaker 1: No you're not. You're not at all. You just remind
Speaker 1: me how clever i'm not every time I talk to you.
Speaker 1: But it's good. He school dot org dot au. Is
Speaker 1: that it? Have you got a last final?
Speaker 3: Yeah, you're done that'll do us. That'll do us for today.
Speaker 1: All right, we'll say goodbye affair, Tiff. I want you
Speaker 1: to jump on tonight and start studying.
Speaker 2: I was just I was just having a quick squizze
Speaker 2: at the website. Oh yeah, yeah, there's a photo of
Speaker 2: David that I never get to see. You know, there's
Speaker 2: there's four faces behind the organization, and three of them
Speaker 2: have these incredible professional photos. And someone has obviously dug
Speaker 2: through david archives and found the best that he was.
Speaker 1: Do you know who? Do you know who? Gilespo's analogous
Speaker 1: to like Who's who is? Like Banksy?
Speaker 3: You know, like artist who? You never know who he is?
Speaker 3: He's a mystery.
Speaker 1: Yeah, he's like a fucking enigma and he does all
Speaker 1: this incredible ship. No one knows what you're like that
Speaker 1: and if people are thinking, what is Craig talking about?
Speaker 1: So David's done hundreds of episodes with us. I don't
Speaker 1: know how many, but probably a hundred, and I've never
Speaker 1: seen his I think I've seen his face once in
Speaker 1: a photo, but he has his screen black like like
Speaker 1: he's some fucking covert operative every time. So he gets
Speaker 1: to see my hand.
Speaker 3: It's so that I can it's said that I can
Speaker 3: sub in an AI when on board.
Speaker 1: Yeah, exactly. The real David's actually out playing golf.
Speaker 3: That's right, exactly.
Speaker 1: All right, Well say goodbye off heair but for the minute.
Speaker 1: Thanks mate, appreciate you.
Speaker 3: See you later