Lord Jim Knight

Highlights from The Exam Man podcast, Series 2 Episode 12

For this episode we spoke to Lord Jim Knight, a leader and adviser across a variety of areas in education including technology, international schools, assessment and teacher engagement. He was the longest serving Schools Minister of the Blair Brown years. He's currently a member of the House of Lords, Chair of @COBIS, Chair of E-ACT, on the Nord Anglia Education Advisory Board and on the qualifications committee for Pearson. Jim shared with us his ideas on the uses of technology and AI in education and assessment, amongst many other things from his long and varied career!

You've done some quite glamorous roles, looking into your background, Jim. Obviously frontline politics has glamorous elements. Running a theatre company with Sam Mendes, not many people have done that! However we are particularly interested in people's more “boring jobs” because personally we find them the most interesting. I was really interested to hear that you were a salesperson for telephone directories for decades?

Yes. I was running a theatre in Warminster, at the end of the Thatcher, beginning of the Major government, and was really annoyed with how the country was being run, and also how Warminster was being run by local councillors who were all on my management board. So I decided to jack it all in and stand for the council, which meant getting a job. My next-door-but-one neighbour ran a telephone directory publishing company called Denton's Directories, which is a particular West Country phenomenon. And so I thought, I'll go and do that for six months. I'll just sell telephone directories.

Ten years later, I finally managed to escape, having worked up to become a Director of the company and in the end running their print side, which is how I got really interested in tech. I helped them move from analogue to digital around the production of the directories. But I still ended up having to do a certain amount of sales, which I absolutely hated. But I did learn a lot about how to talk to people, how to listen to people, how to cope with rejection- all of which are really helpful in politics!

And in entrepreneurship and business! Skills for life, aren't they? And you must have liked it to do it for a decade - it's quite a long time, isn't it?

Yeah. I managed to get elected ultimately onto the council, became Mayor of Frome, ran Frome for a little bit and was also Deputy Leader of the district council that, amongst other things, licenses the Glastonbury Festival. I found other things to really invigorate my life, alongside my family. So I could put up with what became four days a week at Denton's whilst I did all those other things.

Could we talk to you a bit about how you developed your interest in education and started moving into that area? And how you also blended your interest in education with your interest in technology?

It was a Friday evening. I was running a constituency surgery upstairs in Weymouth Library and my mobile phone rings and I apologize to my constituents saying, I think I need to take it. And I was right because at the other end the woman said, this is the Downing Street switchboard. I've got the Prime Minister for you. And Tony Blair comes on and he says, Hi Jim, you're doing a really good job as Rural Affairs Minister at DEFRA, but I want to move you. I'd like you to be schools minister. And I want you to work really closely with Andrew Adonis. Are you up for it?

And I obviously said yes. And that began my love affair with education, really. I had previously been a school governor when I was in Warminster, but it was really from that point onwards that I fell in love with what someone- a woman called Sarah Ledger who I was on a panel with this week, reminded me of- the Simon Sinek stuff around game theory. The fact that education is an infinite game, not a finite one- there's not an answer to all the questions in education.

Our job really is to be good custodians of the education system so that it's in a better shape for the next generation than how we found it. So the fact that we're always learning, ironically, is the thing that really keeps me interested and excited about it. And then technology is this feature that we've mostly not got right in education in terms of how it's used. But it has the potential, and at times it can realise its potential, to really help teachers and help learners. And it can help stretch what's possible and ultimately allow us to do things that were previously inconceivable. That remains really exciting as we keep traveling on through this journey with education in pursuit of the infinite game.

What do you think we haven't got right then, if you say that we haven't quite cracked it in terms of the use of technology in education? What's lacking?

I think an example would be when I was schools minister. In that time I was responsible for something called the Harnessing Technology Grant, where we gave out an awful lot of public money. A substantial amount of it was spent on interactive whiteboards, which is pretty good technology, but we didn't accompany it with much training.

I'm grinning because I was teaching in a specialist language college in London at the time, and I remember just turning up one day and everything was interactive whiteboards, and absolutely no idea how to use it. That was maybe probably me, but it was quite exciting too.

This was at a time when Apple were bringing out iPads and iPhones without any instructions on how to use them and expected people just to get on and use them, and we did the same with interactive whiteboards. But it's no surprise then that too often they're used as projector screens and as blackboards, but with the added pain of having to turn them off and on, and them going wrong and all the things that go with that. There's been a slight shift in pedagogy, but not much. It's hard to argue that they've added anything like the value that they needed to have done to justify the amount of money that they've cost.

That's an example where we've introduced technology and we've expected teachers to pick it up and run with it and work out how to use it and how to adapt it to what they need to do in their classroom. It's not generally been very well led, and it's not generally come with the professional development that it should do.

So do you think the big issue is a communication issue? Communication and training? Communicating to people why this can help and why it's useful, but then also giving people the skills to be able to use it?

That's right. Back in the day, we had an organisation called Becta, a body responsible for overseeing the introduction and the use of technology in schools and colleges. They did a really good piece of research which showed that the implementation of technology in schools is successful where it is really well led. So that means the school leadership understand why the technology is being procured, understand how it's going to change teaching and learning, and it’s there in their capacity as the leaders of teaching and learning to ensure that it then delivers. Too often that's just not the case. Too often the school leaders, they know how they teach, they know how that works and they've got a lot on. And fair play, I don't blame them. But they shouldn't be spending the money unless they really know how it's going to be used.

One of the things I've noticed over time is, I think, an inconsistency. You get these new tools and then you get a portion of the staff in the school who are kind of enthusiastic about this kind of thing and will use it and use it consistently. Then a portion who won't, so then you just get an inconsistent approach across the school.

That's right. I was reminded again by someone this week of the Adoption Curve, which I hadn't really thought about for a couple of years.  The early adopters are there, but without leadership you're not going to move it through the Adoption Curve from the innovators through the early adopters to the late adopters.

Do you think there's anything in terms of the way that the companies who produce these products, push them into schools? Are there any sort of errors that you think happen on that side as well?

Yes, massively. Of course, it's not all down to procurement and implementation. It is also too often we have producers that are excited by the technology before they're excited about the learning. They're excited about the business opportunity before they're excited about children. So they'll go out and they'll sell it, and some of it is snake oil anyway.

So navigating all of that is one of the reasons why I think, whilst it doesn’t have to be Becta as we shouldn't resurrect something from the dead, we need a body. A body to be able to advise school leaders, people who are making purchasing decisions about what works and why it works and in what circumstance it works, for what sort of children and what sort of community it works. We've got this AI revolution coming at us, and it is going to change the way we all work, including teachers and leaders. And it's pretty scary.

And it already is, isn't it? Even if people don't realise we're using it all the time at the moment, aren’t we? There's again that patchiness that I was talking about, that inconsistency, like some people have grabbed these tools and are using them, and some people haven't.

I'm a Director of Educate Ventures Research, which Professor Rose Luckin runs, and they've published a report recently which shows that it's the independent private schools who are using it much more effectively and they are embedding their advantage, if you like. And then at the other end, obviously, you've got children from disadvantaged homes who haven't got data at home, they haven't got devices at home, and the opportunity for them to be able to use it as learners is obviously very limited. Then you've got generations of teachers who are really struggling. Generally students are way ahead of the teachers in their usage role.

Absolutely. Obviously our main audience is people who are on the front line of managing exams, mainly in secondary schools in the UK and internationally. What do you think are the kind of exciting opportunities, developments, but also challenges around AI, but particularly in terms of assessment?

I think there is quite a lot that we could get excited about. I get somewhat frustrated that we still think, for example, the best way to assess whether or not a young person is going to work out at a university and admit them into a university is by setting them paper and pen exams on small tables in large sports halls every summer. There are better ways than the way we do A levels, the way we do university admissions, and it would transform our school system if we were to move to a more rounded measure.

What do you think that is?

I'm really interested in the portfolio idea that people like Rethinking Assessment are pursuing, where of course it must include a certain amount of summative assessment, some of which might be written essays. A viva is a very long-established, traditional form of assessment, but it's really intensive in terms of the resource. But in this day and age, the technology does now exist for an AI to stimulate the questions to someone who's being examined, if that's what we choose to do, or it could be a human.

The responses can be recorded, they can be turned from speech to text, they can be analysed by AI. So an AI analysis can then inform the human examiner around what's happened in the viva. For example, we know that the Extended Project Qualifications are the best predictor that we have at the moment of how successful someone's going to be at university, but we're worried about AI making it easier for them to cheat when those are written. If we were to examine extended projects by a viva, which is how you then would be examined on your doctorate later on in your educational journey if you went that far, then why wouldn't we be exploring that? We know that with music, dance and drama graded exams, we can lean more on the expertise of the examiner, the assessor in forming a subjective judgment. I think AI will help us to moderate those subjective judgments, and help us to think about using them more widely than we do at the moment.

One of the things about the Extended Project Qualification is the fact that a lot of what you're getting assessed on is not necessarily the content, is it? It's the process that you've followed and the way that you've self-reflected and all that sort of stuff. That is reasonably immune to what you might see as an abuse of technology, just to produce content.

It is, and obviously for our young people, even those who are leaving school now, their working lives will be in collaboration with AI machines. Therefore, part of our responsibility is to nurture in them some of the skills, confidence and competence to prompt engineer, to ask curious questions and to have a dialogue with the AI, not to use it like search, but to have a dialogue where you keep refining the answer, where you might break down the question. And so if you're wanting to produce an extended piece of work, you might say, I want to do this piece of work, suggest to me a structure for the piece of work. And then you can have a conversation with the AI about the structure. You nail down the structure with your collaborator. And then you can start to delve into the individual ingredients within the structure. All of those are what we're all going to be doing in our working lives. Why aren't we starting to nurture that now and include in the assessment, what were the questions that were being asked of the machine? What does that tell us about the intelligence and the curiosity and the knowledge that that individual has? I think those are interesting questions.

That's fascinating. Can I ask you about the review going on at the moment of Curriculum and Assessment. Have you had any role in that? Are you involved in any way?

I'm not involved in any way. I did manage to speak to Becky Francis yesterday, and I managed to collar a member of the panel who was innocently traveling back from Manchester on a train. I spent two hours talking to her about the Curriculum and Assessment Review on the train journey, poor woman! But I will put in a submission, and I strongly urge everyone to do that. I'm hopeful that Becky will want some of us old timers, the grey beards, to come in and have a session once they've had the evidence in and the submissions in, and had a chance to look at that and think about it. We have people like Estelle Morris and Nick Gibb and David Blunkett, myself, Nicky Morgan, Ken Baker even, who've stuck with education through thick and thin since they've been in office. And just bounce some ideas off of us, so that we can add in a bit of our experience about what works from the past.

Absolutely, because it's cyclical, isn't it, in education? You see things come back and then the big conversations happen again.

Yes. I was talking to someone who was in the room when Gove and Gibb last did a big review of the curriculum. The two politicians were saying, well, most of the problem is there's just too much content in the curriculum. We need to strip it out and get back to the big ideas of the subjects. And now we've got a curriculum that's again bloated full of content and we need to strip it back to the big ideas of the subjects. That's just the cycle of what happens, and so part of this process is just to do that. In a way, my fallback position on it all is if that's all that happens, that would be a good thing. We can then trust pedagogy to do breadth, to do relevance, real life skills and all that kind of stuff.

You've obviously talked about some quite big ideas around technology and AI, but are your expectations of this review limited in the sense that it's not going to be a full transformation of the system?

The assessment review itself has been really clear in its remit. And what Becky said is that they're interested in evolution and not revolution. And I think that is the right judgment. I'm sort of reluctant to admit it, because I'm impatient!

When I talk to the people who work in schools, there is a tension. They are terrified of the workload attached to change when they're already overworked. But they're excited about the opportunity of change and moving to a slightly less formulaic, monotonous churn of teaching and examining. I had a great conversation with the Institute of Physics, which really stuck in my mind - they don't have time to teach the big ideas of science. How are you going to stay in the profession if you haven't got time to teach the things that are most exciting and most interesting?

And the reason you went into it.....

Exactly.

You said once about qualifications generally that they are no more than a proxy for what a person can do. Can you explain what you mean by that?

I worry that we have a whole system in education that's obsessed by qualifications as being the proxy. When you're an employer, when you're an admissions tutor or whatever, you want to know what an individual is capable of. And so you look to the qualification as being the indicator, the proxy for their capability. But an individual has a lot more than their suite of qualifications. That's why I'm interested in the portfolio model.

Can I just push you on that? Do you genuinely believe that is true, that when someone sits in front of an employer, what an employer is prioritising is the qualifications?

Well, not necessarily. But most employers, if they are blessed enough to have a surfeit of candidates, will sift on the basis of qualifications, and then they will interview in order to find out the rest. So, the fact that they do interviews is evidence that they agree, it's a proxy for what you can do, but they then need to be able to talk to you and have, if you like, the viva, to be able to really understand whether or not you're the right person.

The only other thing I wanted to ask was about your role on the Qualifications Committee for Pearson. Could you just let us know a little bit more about that?

It's a sort of semi-regulatory function. Ofqual requires it of Pearson that they have this group of us, chaired by Mary Curnock Cook, to oversee the compliance and the quality control around the delivery of the public exams that Pearson do: the GCSEs, the A levels, the BTECs, etc. I enjoy it. It's a chance to peer inside the black box of how these things are done. It's extraordinary to go up to Rotherham and see the massive warehouse where they're all scanned and then sent out electronically to examiners.  To understand the whole process is interesting.

Pearson, as an example, are waiting to hear from Ofqual about whether or not they’ll be able to offer an option on on-screen English GCSE next summer, which they've been doing on the IGCSE for some time with some success. That's the beginnings of where I think the exam world would like to go in being able to use technology. Another use of AI, is handwriting recognition. An Apple Pencil on an iPad is now really strong. One day we wouldn't need to have that warehouse in Rotherham. You could do it all by writing on a tablet.

It's one of those mad things, isn't it, where the efficiencies and innovation that you could do seem to be quite obvious, but the actual implementation of it is quite difficult, isn't it?

Well, it's really hard when it's very high stakes. You can't afford error. Now we can have a debate about whether it's too high stakes, but it is what it is. I don’t see that changing in a hurry. So we have to be cautious and make sure we get it right.

That is what comes up time and time again on this podcast, isn't it? It's around the high stakes nature of exams. It's just too important to do change in a knee jerk or wholescale way. It has to be that kind of iterative process.

It's been lovely to speak to you and meet you. Thank you so much for your time.

I've really enjoyed it. Keep in touch!

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