Lucy Crehan

"You can have a lovely building but if the teaching's no good, the thing's not going to work."

In this episode, we speak to Sir Dan Moynihan, CEO of the Harris Federation. Beginning as an economics teacher in Tower Hamlets in the 1980s, he became a head teacher in 1999, and the principal of what was then the Harris City Technology College in 2005. The Harris Federation was founded the following year, and now runs 55 schools. He has spent twenty years overseeing its growth.

We discussed:

• London schools in the '80s: " Nobody could imagine that it was as bad as it was back then."
• The difference the Education Reform Act made to leading schools
• How he turned around his first school: "Sounds obvious now."
• Why he moved to Harris City Technology College and how he began building a trust
• How Harris balances prescription and autonomy in school improvement
• The role of the the headteacher: "You can have a hero head - the problem is that's not sustainable."
• How he keeps improving, and what he's working towards now

Dan's career encapsulates the dramatic improvements in English schools, and the underlying changes which have made them possible. The authority with which he can speak about turning around one school - and leading fifty - made this a particularly interesting interview.

"I hate the idea of settling for mediocrity."

In this episode, we talk to Baron Gove of Torry. Entering Parliament in 2005, as MP for Surrey Heath, Michael Gove was Shadow Education Secretary from 2007, and Secretary of State for Education from 2010 to 2014. His subsequent government roles included being Minister for Justice, and Secretary of State for the Environment, Food, and Rural Affairs. Standing down as an MP in 2024, he now edits The Spectator.

His tenure proved controversial among teachers, and consequential for the education system. As Daisy Christodoulou put it, he "set the contours for the next half century." In this interview, I wanted to understand the contours he aimed for, how he sought to pursue them, and what he had learned from the experience.

We discussed:

• His diagnosis of the challenges facing English schools in 2010
• How he sought to make the Department for Education deliver his agenda
• The curriculum review, and why he became closely involved in it
• The balance between autonomy and prescription
• The goals of the academy programme
• What he took with him to the Ministry of Justice and DEFRA
• His reflections on the process, and his approach

Unbowed in his belief that "knowledge should not be restricted to an elite, and that the best that has been thought and written belongs to everyone," he reflected also about how picking his battles, and "a greater degree of imaginative sympathy for people on the other side" might have helped.

"You can learn a great deal from Finland, but you have to get into a time machine."

In this episode, we speak to Tim Oates, CBE. Tim was an education researcher and evaluator of youth training schemes, then worked at the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, before joining Cambridge Assessment in 2006, where he was the Group Director of Assessment, Research and Development for almost 20 years. He’s currently a fellow of Churchill College, working with governments around the world on curriculum assessment. Most recently that’s included the curriculum review for Northern Ireland and work in Flanders.

His areas of expertise include:

• Assessment and international comparison,
• The role of textbooks,
• The successes of the Finnish education system and otherwise; and,
• What makes an effective curriculum.

Between 2010 and 2013, he chaired the expert panel reviewing the national curriculum in England.

We discussed:

• How confident we can be that students in England are learning more
• Why geography responded well to the National Curriculum Review, and how primary English became overloaded
• How he came to chair the expert panel for the National Curriculum Review
• Why reform of the geography curriculum worked so well
• The difference between borrowing policies and learning from other countries
• What's working - and not - in Estonia, Finland, Singapore and Sweden
• The "very un-British idea" that we might be doing something right in England

Tim brought to bear an astonishing depth of experience and wisdom.

In this episode, we talk to Professor Rob Coe. Rob was a maths teacher, then, for many years, Director of the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring. He is now both Director of Research and Development at Evidence Based Education (EBE) and Senior Associate at the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF). Rob has been doing thoughtful, critical, uncompromising educational research for longer than I've been working in schools. When new thinking in English schools gained momentum, he was well placed to influence that thinking.

His work - notably Improving Education: A triumph of hope over experience, the EEF's Teaching and Learning Toolkit, and EBE's Great Teaching Toolkit - has managed that rare balance of doing a wealth of hard research, particularly in the area of assessment and evaluation, while conveying it in clear and accessible ways that make sense to busy teachers who don't have graduate-level training in statistics. I wanted to hear from Rob about what he thought had improved - or at least changed - and why.

We discussed:

• The reasons for grade inflation in the 1990s and 2000s, and the limits to educational improvement
• Why Assessment for Learning made little difference in English schools
• What we can and can't learn from international tests
• Why health so much better, and education hasn't
• How we can scale effective teacher development
• The role of the Education Endowment Foundation and the successes it has had

Rob's answer were characteristically thoughtful, original, and thought-provoking.

Daisy Christodoulou is the Director of Education at No More Marking. Daisy was at the forefront of a movement of bloggers and thinkers which sought to change how teachers thought about student learning, and what they did in the classroom. Her 2013 book, Seven Myths about Education, contrasted good practice - as described by school inspection reports - with the evidence around how people learn.

Daisy trained with Teach First, worked at Ark Schools on curriculum and assessment design, then moved to No More Marking, where she's working to make assessment faster, more accurate and more useful.

She recently published her fourth book, I can't stop thinking about VAR, which applies her wisdom about assessment to the football field.

We discussed:

• Why she wrote Seven Myths: what Ofsted reports showed about perceptions of effective practice in the early 2000s, why finger puppets aren't a great way to teach Romeo and Juliet, and the initial reception the book had
• Her role at ARK Schools and what King Solomon Academy was like
• Michael Gove as a Maoist, and his lasting significance for English schools
• The academies programme, the shifting role of trusts, and whether it would ever be possible to unwind academisation
• Her advice for countries trying to improve their school systems

Daisy was as thoughtful, entertaining and erudite as ever, but I particularly enjoyed her fair-mindedness, as she jumped to offer both argument and counter-argument unprompted.

Sir Nick Gibb focused on education as an opposition MP from the early 2000s. From 2010-2023, with two brief interruptions, he was Minister for Schools. Nick's interest in specific aspects of teaching - notably phonics and knowledge-rich teaching - go back over twenty years. He spent his time in government pursuing lasting change in what and how English schools teach. With headteacher Robert Peal, Nick recently published Reforming Lessons: why English schools have improved since 2010 and how this was achieved, describing this work.

With an array of possible topics, my main goal was to understand how Nick led the Department for Education, how he designed change, how he saw it unfold, and what he'd learned from the experience. Nonetheless, the result was a wide-ranging and fascinating conversation. We discussed:

• Why he first focused on education policy and how he set out to learn his brief and identify ways in which education could be improved
• How to make a government department work, the importance of working through legislation line by line, and why ministers are wrong to blame the Civil Service for their struggles to implement policy: "If you know what you want to do, I think you'll find that the British Civil Service want... to implement."
• The relative importance of standards and structures, and how his thinking changed over time
• The design of the phonics policy, and why it worked: "You have all these levers and then you start moving them and you realize they're actually either not connected to anything or they're made of rubber. You can't just pull one lever and say, permanent secretary please implement phonics. Because nothing will happen."
• Areas of concern, including recruitment and retention, the effect of the Ebacc on the arts, and why children's love of reading is falling.
• What he'd have done differently, and the advice he would give other countries trying to improve their education systems

John Jerrim is a Professor of Education and Social Statistics, and the Director of the Quantitative Social Science Research Centre at UCL Institute of Education.

I particularly wanted to learn from him about England's performance in international tests - one of his specialist subjects.

We discussed:

• How John came to write so many papers - and how knows what makes a paper a good idea
• The world of international tests: who runs them, who takes part in them and what's in it for countries, schools, and students
• The reliability of these tests: in the early 2010s, John argued that England's scores on international tests had fallen because of changes in testing methods. England's test results have tended to rise since then - could we rely on those results?
• Why the next round of PISA results in England won't be comparable with the last few rounds
• John's take on why test scores have gone up in maths - and what hasn't gone so well
• Other elements of John's research, including a recent paper on diminishing student engagement, and a paper on the performance of students of East Asian backgrounds in Australia