Sammy Wright, Author Of 'Exam Nation'

[00:00:18] It sounds really, really weird. But essentially I think the biggest problem we have with exams

[00:00:29] and with all forms of assessment is needing them to be accurate.

[00:00:39] All the other things that we've created have atomised in the 21st century and school is

[00:00:47] a place where people actually come together into a building. And I think we need that. You

[00:00:51] know what? It's the last viable bit of community I think that we have left.

[00:01:02] So I know lots of you will be waiting, baited breath here to find out about who the winners

[00:01:08] are of our competition that we launched last week to see in the start of season two.

[00:01:15] Unfortunately for you all, you're going to have to wait till right to the end of

[00:01:18] this episode to find out who the winners are. But fortunately for you, it is an excellent episode ahead.

[00:01:24] So it's been a pretty good week, hasn't it, Sophie?

[00:01:25] Yeah, it's been great. Really good launch season two, isn't it? And really good response to the

[00:01:32] competition. So yeah, it's been really fun.

[00:01:34] Yeah, yeah. And we were really excited on Friday we put out our first kind of bonus episode,

[00:01:39] which is in a new sort of mini series within season two called From The Secure Room,

[00:01:44] which is going to be all about the sort of technicalities of running exams.

[00:01:50] From your perspective, isn't it?

[00:01:51] It's from my perspective. We're going to be putting them out sort of from time to time.

[00:01:56] And it's all about really sharing what I do but also getting some feedback so I can work out

[00:02:01] how I do things better. But also having a conversation with other people who are running

[00:02:07] exams, sharing experience, know how and that kind of thing. So we put our first episode out on Friday

[00:02:15] and that was all about recruiting invigilators and it got a really, really good response.

[00:02:21] And in particular, we picked out this one bit of advice that we got from Sasha Berry,

[00:02:26] who is the exams manager at Notre Dame School in Kingston, Pond, Thames.

[00:02:31] And she actually sent us a nice little voice note explaining what one of the things that

[00:02:36] she does around recruiting invigilators. That's better than what John does.

[00:02:39] That's better than what I do.

[00:02:41] I actually did some stats about two years ago. I put an advert on E-Teach.

[00:02:48] About 70 people started to complete the form and in the end, only about seven got

[00:02:52] to the end of the form because it's just so long and off-putting.

[00:02:56] So I had to start thinking outside the box. I needed a lot of invigilators when I started

[00:03:01] my new school. I needed at least 19 invigilators on Sundays.

[00:03:06] So I decided to trial an open day. That meant that I advertised on the website,

[00:03:14] the school newsletter, the church newsletter, E-Teach, indeed TES, all of the usual places.

[00:03:22] But what I actually asked the invigilators or prospective invigilators to do

[00:03:26] was just to indicate that they were interested in coming along to the open day.

[00:03:30] So then they turn up to the open morning, then they spend some time with me. I talk about exams,

[00:03:36] I talk about what it's like to be an exams officer, how exams run in the school,

[00:03:41] what's expected of an invigilator, the kinds of training that we will provide them with.

[00:03:46] And then we split up into groups. We go on a tour of the school, of the exam rooms and that

[00:03:52] just sparks conversation. People start to ask questions about how we manage different types

[00:03:56] of access arrangements, how it would work if their child was in the year that they're trying to

[00:04:03] invigilate for. This year I had two of my leading invigilators also came along to the open day to

[00:04:09] give a view of what it was like from the other side because of course I can talk about how I

[00:04:13] arrange the invigilation and what I'm expecting of these people. But the leading invigilators

[00:04:18] actually tell them what it's like to be in that exam room for potentially three and a half

[00:04:22] hours. You can get to see which people are friendly, open, starting conversation, who's

[00:04:28] asking the questions, who looks like they're absolutely terrified of what you're telling them,

[00:04:32] who looks like they wouldn't be a good fit really. Hopefully now that I've explained the job and

[00:04:38] the invigilators have explained the job to them, they've got much more of an idea. They actually

[00:04:42] want the job so they complete this application form. They send it back in to me. So last year

[00:04:50] I did my first open day in the new school and I managed to get 15 invigilators. It's a novel way

[00:04:56] of getting them in. So yeah, I'll keep you posted. Last year's 15 were absolutely great.

[00:05:03] A such a great idea isn't it? Yeah, yeah, yeah, brilliant. It's such a good idea and I just

[00:05:07] kept thinking that this is a really, really great opportunity isn't it, doing an open day like

[00:05:14] that to find other positions within the school as well. So like I was thinking about surely

[00:05:19] some people who turn up and you think, God, you make a really, really good TA.

[00:05:24] Yeah, yeah. Or like an admissions officer or something like that. So like you'd obviously

[00:05:29] hope that you'd pick out a bunch of good invigilators but also you might find people there who,

[00:05:34] you know, if you were looking at, you had a vacancy at the school that you were looking

[00:05:37] to fill, you might find people there who would be good for that as well. And it's a way I

[00:05:44] guess of schools sort of accessing their entire community, isn't it? You know,

[00:05:49] if there are people within the community who are looking for work, then what a great way to

[00:05:53] find out all the many interesting roles that you could do within a school that you wouldn't

[00:05:58] really know about. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. And that idea of schools as

[00:06:03] sort of focal points within their community links us very nicely to our interview that

[00:06:08] we've done this week. So we spoke to Sammy Wright, who is the author of Examination,

[00:06:16] a book that came out over the summer which has made quite a lot of waves. And so we were

[00:06:20] very pleased to speak to him and to find out more about how he feels about exams and plenty of

[00:06:26] other things within the education system. I should also point out that Sammy is not

[00:06:30] someone who just has a theoretical interest in education. He is also a teacher and a senior

[00:06:37] leader with over 20 years experience in the sector. And he is currently the head of school at

[00:06:43] Southmore Academy in Sunderland. So Sammy, we first came across your book when someone sent me

[00:06:50] an opinion piece that you'd written that was sort of sensationally titled Should We Abolish

[00:06:57] Exams? And working exams I kind of thought, you know, why is this guy trying to make

[00:07:02] us redundant? But then I actually read the piece. And yeah, and obviously you have a very nuanced

[00:07:13] take on the kind of the role of exams and their sort of function as a method of assessment. So

[00:07:19] could you talk us through a bit, you know, how you see exams operating within the current system

[00:07:25] and also your kind of view of exams more generally? Yeah, so I mean, like sometimes

[00:07:33] one can't avoid headlines. It was a good headline! It was a really good headline!

[00:07:39] Yeah, I mean I clicked on it! But yeah, like you say, I think the position is actually much more

[00:07:45] complex than that. And really, you know, my book is subtitled, you know,

[00:07:49] Why Our Obsession With Grades is for everyone. And I think that I do want to draw a distinction

[00:07:55] between exams and grades, and also, you know, between the action and the use of it. So I think

[00:08:02] that's probably where I'd start, is in terms of where we are now, because over the last couple

[00:08:09] of decades, you know, a lot of the focus on school improvement has been about how we can

[00:08:14] measure the outcomes. We've ended up in a position where we focused a lot on a couple of key qualities

[00:08:22] of exams. So if you look at the last round of exam reforms, they were all about comparability.

[00:08:31] And you know, the big thing that Michael Gove objected to in the previous set of GCSEs and

[00:08:37] other qualifications at level two was that you had some that were quote unquote easier

[00:08:42] than others. And that in his mind created a problem, because it meant that, you know,

[00:08:49] you couldn't directly compare a result in, you know, child development to a result in

[00:08:55] maths. And as such, I think that's the basic logical fallacy that I object to.

[00:09:01] The idea that everything has to be comparable, and that we can possibly produce a authoritative

[00:09:08] ranking of saying, you know, this is the best score. And then this is the next best score.

[00:09:14] And these kids are therefore ranked in this precise order. Because anyone who actually

[00:09:20] works in schools knows that there is a lot of complexity goes into how kids achieve.

[00:09:26] I'll give you an example. You know, young man that I know, who's a lovely young man,

[00:09:31] really delightful. He's 15. He's just done his French a year early. And he has smashed it.

[00:09:39] He got a nine, 99%. They're really, really well. It's entirely coincidental that his parents have

[00:09:47] got a holiday home in France and they're fluent in French. As a former French teacher, I knew

[00:09:52] you were actually going to say that. And you know, that's not, you know, like we are

[00:09:57] measuring definitely his fluency in French. You know, that is going to tell any employer this

[00:10:02] kid is French. And that's an important piece of information. But what it's not going to tell

[00:10:07] any employer is the general sense of wider aptitude. And that again, is one of the issues

[00:10:14] with the exams is that I mean, it's not, it doesn't tell us nothing. But it's not, you know,

[00:10:19] it's not the same as saying, this kid is absolutely the brightest kid you will ever meet ever.

[00:10:24] Yeah. Because actually, the reason he scored that is to do with other circumstances too.

[00:10:30] So you have to have a division, you know, we've tended to treat particularly GCSEs as these

[00:10:36] general measures of aptitude, these ways of kind of ranking and defining kids, you know, in a

[00:10:41] quite a specific fine grained way that are supposedly then going to be applicable to

[00:10:47] whole series of domains that are irrelevant to the actual qualification. So, you know, you might

[00:10:54] for one example, Birmingham Medical School for years, I'm not sure whether they still do it,

[00:11:01] but they used to insist on a certain, you know, range of a seven A stars at GCSE in order to

[00:11:07] get onto a medical degree, which seems odd to me, given that those seven A stars might

[00:11:15] mean a lot of different things. Yeah, yeah. Might be good if you're going to be a doctor in France,

[00:11:19] I don't know. So what how do you think exams should be used? What would be an effective use of

[00:11:27] exams within the system? And what would be an effective kind of, if not a grading system,

[00:11:32] alternative system for kind of for assessing students? So I think the key thing, you know,

[00:11:40] use that term general. And I think that that is what we've, what we miss, I'm going to kind of digress

[00:11:45] slightly to the history of schools because I think this is a really important point. You know, we

[00:11:50] think we have universal schooling in Britain up to the age of 18, right? That is the legal

[00:11:55] position on it. But actually the way that's developed is we had universal schooling that

[00:12:00] was primary education for many years. And you know, until 1944, secondary education was always

[00:12:07] selective and, you know, specifically geared at kids going into the academic sphere.

[00:12:14] What happened in 1944 is that we created compulsory secondary education, but we did so on the same

[00:12:22] model of the previous selective education. So we had the grammar schools, the secondary

[00:12:27] moderns and the technical colleges. But in effect, the secondary moderns and the technical

[00:12:32] colleges were new definitions that were invented and not defined very well. And the process over

[00:12:38] the next couple of decades was that, and it wasn't given by government, by the way, it was

[00:12:43] driven by parents, was that essentially they all said, you know, secondary moderns are short

[00:12:49] changing our kids, we want the grammar style education. So when you get to the comprehensivization

[00:12:54] of secondary education, it's actually a grammar isation of secondary education.

[00:12:59] Right. And that, you know, I'm not saying good or bad, but I'm saying we have to recognize

[00:13:04] that all of those structures are designed with an academic end in mind.

[00:13:12] Yeah. And we have never as a country really grappled with what it would take

[00:13:16] to give actually a good general education that is applicable to all and would be relevant for

[00:13:22] all careers. So that I think is the first point I actually in my book, I don't really recommend

[00:13:30] changes to post 16 partly because I didn't want to give teachers a total heart attack.

[00:13:36] Just at the start of terms.

[00:13:40] But because I actually essentially there are problems with post 16, but basically

[00:13:45] they do what they say on the tin. Yeah. And a level prepares you for academic study.

[00:13:51] A, you know, BTEC prepares you for the world of work. You know, they are

[00:13:58] effectively functional. And because you have that much wider choice, they fit with the path

[00:14:03] that people are taking. What doesn't fit is the idea that everyone at 16 needs to prove

[00:14:08] themselves in a very narrow academic sphere. What would schooling up to 16 look like if

[00:14:17] you could sort of ideally tweak it in a way to kind of get the outcomes that you would like to see?

[00:14:22] So I mean, there's a lot of things that I end up suggesting because I mean, the book is not

[00:14:27] just about example, it's about kind of the wider ecosystems of schools as well.

[00:14:30] And purpose of school, isn't it?

[00:14:31] Yeah, exactly.

[00:14:33] But if we're talking about assessment, the thing that I think is key is in

[00:14:41] just challenging this idea that we have to have a million separate assessments for

[00:14:45] so-called separate subjects. And, you know, that is an interesting suggestion in terms of some of the

[00:14:53] prevailing research and ideologies of the last decade, which has been dominated by the idea of

[00:15:00] knowledge rich education work, ED Hirsch and people like that to effectively say, you know,

[00:15:06] get the building blocks of knowledge right, and then the skills will follow.

[00:15:10] And they also say that knowledge is domain specific. It doesn't necessarily transfer

[00:15:15] from one domain to another. What I think is really interesting with that is I essentially

[00:15:19] agree with that research, but I question how it's been applied. My feeling with it is you have to

[00:15:25] think very carefully about the actual specific knowledge in each subject. So the best example

[00:15:30] is English and Maths. You know, we do English and Maths in this siloed way, but of course

[00:15:35] they're exactly the very definition of something which isn't siloed.

[00:15:39] Yeah.

[00:15:40] Yeah.

[00:15:40] So English, English comprehension I think should be assessed by your history essays

[00:15:45] or your citizenship essays.

[00:15:47] Yeah.

[00:15:47] Because why do a whole separate exam where you're being shown a random text that has no relevance

[00:15:54] to anything and encourages all of this time spent looking at random little bits of stuff,

[00:15:59] which doesn't actually give you any bloody knowledge?

[00:16:02] Yeah, yeah, yeah. Are you not a big fan of the English GCSE exam?

[00:16:07] No, no. Do you know what? I teach English. I teach the literature and the language

[00:16:11] to the same class and I got some lovely messages from my students at the end of last year.

[00:16:16] There was one particular girl who said, you know, I've loved the class. It's been fantastic.

[00:16:22] You know, I'm paraphrasing. She had lots of nice things. And then she said,

[00:16:26] but please stick with literature. Don't teach language. It makes me die inside.

[00:16:32] Lovely. Excellent.

[00:16:34] I don't know if that's my teaching or the language. But either way, I'm not a fan.

[00:16:44] Is there anything else that you would like to see come out of the curriculum and assessment review?

[00:16:49] There's obviously some really big things that you're discussing in the book around this,

[00:16:55] but is there anything specific, anything else that you would like to see particularly related

[00:16:58] to assessment? One of the one of the impetus behind writing this book was I've been on the

[00:17:03] Social Mobility Commission for three years. And in that time, you know, I'd had to

[00:17:07] make recommendations to government. And we were always in this awkward position of having to

[00:17:11] present something that we thought people would listen to. And so you find yourself constrained

[00:17:16] at all times by what the norms are. And so I was very keen in this book to write what I thought

[00:17:23] and to present recommendations that were quite big, and you know, and actually

[00:17:29] were not just constrained by possibility or political acceptability. However, having said that,

[00:17:37] the other thing I did find in looking at it is how the best educational reform is long term.

[00:17:45] So I, you know, when I look at the curriculum review, I, it's not just that I don't expect

[00:17:49] it to come up with the conclusions that I came, but I wouldn't want it to in the short term.

[00:17:56] What I would hope for is in the short term, some fairly straightforward things like

[00:18:01] thinning out the content in GCSE exams, removing the requirement for eBAC,

[00:18:08] you know, changing the primary curriculum a bit in terms of the SATs. And the,

[00:18:17] I mean, this is also coming through the Offstead reform, changing the kind of the subject

[00:18:21] specialism at primary, which I think has been really difficult, particularly for small primaries.

[00:18:27] So there's lots of little things like that that I think are really quite urgent and need doing.

[00:18:31] And then what I would hope is that it comes up with some big thinking that could actually be

[00:18:36] presented to the, you know, to the population at an election in five years time. So we could

[00:18:42] actually decide, does this seem like a thing that we would want to do? And then that then

[00:18:46] would have a mandate and could have that, that long afterlife. Because I think that's

[00:18:51] an interesting thing when we look back at Gove's reforms, that's the last time the system was

[00:18:55] underwent major reforms. And I also think if he presented those reforms in a little bit more,

[00:19:02] with a bit more time, a bit more space and a bit more inclusion of the teaching body,

[00:19:06] he wouldn't have had the kickback that he did. Because actually most people I know now respect

[00:19:12] some of the kind of basic underpinnings of them. You know, like me, they might criticize

[00:19:17] specific ways they were implemented. But again, I think if he'd consulted and listened at the time,

[00:19:23] then that could have been our end out too. So I think it's a real lesson in how

[00:19:27] when we need bold reform, we need to bring everyone with us. And that's what I would hope for.

[00:19:39] The thing I'm thinking a lot about at the moment, and I'm not necessarily proud of this,

[00:19:45] but I am actually reducing the number of GCSEs that kids are taking. Because, you know, like

[00:19:53] intellectually, I want them to have the breadth, but they can't cope. It's just too many exams. So,

[00:19:59] you know, if we can get them through with doing, you know, eight exams, eight subjects or even seven,

[00:20:07] actually, that's why I increasingly start to think is I just want to get them to the next

[00:20:10] stage ready because the system doesn't seem kind enough to them at the moment.

[00:20:18] Sorry, Sammy, will you try and offer breadth in a different way?

[00:20:22] Yeah. So, you know, so the way I'm trying to think of it at the moment is that actually,

[00:20:30] and this is all very kind of early days and so on, but we're increasingly thinking in terms of

[00:20:36] how, you know, you approach year 10, you have your options process going into year 10.

[00:20:45] Some kids will have more options than others depending on, you know, whether they can cope

[00:20:49] with the demands of it. But then you actually revisit again after the end of year 10 and you

[00:20:54] have built into the timetable a chance for people to actually drop down an option because

[00:21:00] actually to be fair, that's what I did when I did GCSEs. That always worked well with

[00:21:04] the A level system, you know, when you did an AS and then dropped down because it means that you

[00:21:09] can actually make a reasoned assessment. I'm not doing so well in this. I think that actually

[00:21:14] I'm going to concentrate on the others. You've still had the benefit of a year of it.

[00:21:18] You know, you haven't missed out on the chance to look at something, but

[00:21:22] you're focusing on the things that you're going to try and get the grades in going forward.

[00:21:34] Sammy, can I, I'm just going to get very technical about exams for a second with you.

[00:21:38] John loves to do that.

[00:21:43] You don't think that exams in and of themselves as a method of assessment are a bad thing,

[00:21:50] right? I just wanted to clarify that. That's your position, right? You're not saying they're

[00:21:55] brilliant, but it's sort of like the Churchill thing of like, you know,

[00:21:59] exactly. So could you explain to us your views on other methods of assessment and why you think that

[00:22:12] they, or maybe just talk about what their strengths and weaknesses are relative to exams?

[00:22:17] So this is where I have a thing which has been formulated in my mind and it sounds really,

[00:22:24] really weird. But essentially I think the biggest problem we have with exams and with all forms of

[00:22:31] assessment is needing them to be accurate. Right. That does have weird, I'm not going to say that.

[00:22:39] Because what the accuracy thing and this kind of idea of being able to put a label on it,

[00:22:46] that foregrounds the summative nature of an exam. The fact that it is kind of saying,

[00:22:51] right, ultimately at the end, this is what that person is. Whereas I'm not sure that's possible.

[00:22:56] And I am much more interested in exams and assessment as formative things. As in, you know,

[00:23:02] the reason I think exams are worthwhile and we shouldn't be getting rid of them is they're a

[00:23:06] very, very good way of making sure people go away and learn things for themselves,

[00:23:11] which is a far better way of embedding them and actually learning them.

[00:23:15] Yeah. And a skill for life, isn't it?

[00:23:17] Exactly. I've got quite here from your book, Sammy, where you say the point of revision is not to pass

[00:23:23] exams, rather it's the point of exams to make you revise and fix the knowledge and skills for their

[00:23:28] own sake. So that's basically what you're saying, right? That you use exams to deepen knowledge.

[00:23:34] Exactly. Exactly. And I think that's how we need to approach assessment in general.

[00:23:38] I think we need to know that the weaknesses of each method, we're not kind of like being blind

[00:23:44] about it, but we have to actually incorporate that into the way we use it. But the other thing I'm

[00:23:48] going to say about assessment is the extended project. Oh yes, you write about this in the book,

[00:23:54] don't you? You're quite a fan, aren't you? Yeah, I really like it partly because it was one of my

[00:23:59] first experiences of kind of whole school leadership. I introduced it in 2008 when it

[00:24:05] first came out in my then school. And I was fascinated because essentially to me what it

[00:24:09] seems like is that the extended project is quite an ambitious idealistic qualification that you're

[00:24:19] testing how far someone journeys from their starting point and how they organise themselves.

[00:24:24] And if you look at it, you could think, oh god, this is a bit woolly. You might say, oh,

[00:24:29] this is a bit open to abuse. People at home could sit and really help you with this and

[00:24:35] you could get a tutor to help you with this and so on. And actually that hasn't been borne out by

[00:24:41] what's happened with it because what happens with it is the amazing thing they did when they put

[00:24:47] it in place was they framed it in consultation with the universities as something that would

[00:24:53] never be asked for as the main offer for university. It might help if you misdegrade,

[00:24:59] but it wasn't a core requirement. The universities promised that. It wasn't included in the main

[00:25:05] part of the league tables. And because of that, there's no incentive for the teachers to turn a

[00:25:12] blind eye to that kind of gaming. There's no incentive for the kids. We can actually let them

[00:25:17] fail. Yeah. And that's an amazing thing educationally to be able to say the one that you cocked up,

[00:25:22] sorry mate, you're not getting the grade. Isn't it also with the EPQ as well? There's

[00:25:26] quite a lot of assessment is in there of like the processes that are followed as opposed to

[00:25:30] the end result, the outcome, which means that actually is harder to gain in that respect as well.

[00:25:36] Yeah, definitely. Definitely. It's well designed like that. But I think the point I would say with

[00:25:39] it is you can genuinely at the end of it have a question about really was that on better than

[00:25:46] this? And again, it actually because they're so divergent, it is genuinely impossible to say.

[00:25:52] And I think you just have to hold that uncertainty and go, yeah, I'm not,

[00:25:56] you know, the purpose of this qualification is not to be able to say definitively X is better

[00:26:02] than Y. The purpose of it is for the kids to have had an amazing learning experience.

[00:26:07] And for potentially an employer or university to be able to know roughly, does this person manage

[00:26:12] to self organize? Can I ask you, I'm going to do a first on this podcast. Can I ask you a

[00:26:24] philosophical question? All go on there. Is that the first? In all the episodes?

[00:26:29] Well, no, we probably have. We just haven't realized it. The answer is of course, yes.

[00:26:35] Okay. So one thing, one question that I had going round in my head when I read your book was,

[00:26:41] does Sammy believe in meritocracy as an idea? Not is there a meritocracy? Does it function?

[00:26:48] But does he believe in it as an idea? I think the thing with it is,

[00:26:54] right, so I think one of the big things that we have to understand in the modern world is scale.

[00:27:02] And that is one of the things we often have a philosophical or theological,

[00:27:06] the ideological framework that comes from times when the scale of populations that we were

[00:27:12] talking about was much smaller. So for example, within a village, I think you could have a

[00:27:16] meritocracy. You can apply judgment and people can be in the places that they're

[00:27:21] they're supposed to be. But the problem is when scale changes, then a lot of the other

[00:27:27] incentives change. So for example, in Britain today, if you are notionally competing against

[00:27:34] every other person in Britain, then it is genuinely impossible to equalize that playing field

[00:27:41] for two reasons. Number one, you just can't have everyone being in the same circumstance.

[00:27:44] Yeah. And number two, you know, say we're talking about, you know, meritocracy in terms of civil

[00:27:52] service, all bloody jobs are in London. So if you're asking someone to enter into that world,

[00:28:02] and I'm not saying all the jobs, I know that there are jobs that are...

[00:28:05] There's a tax, there's a tax.

[00:28:06] Yeah, occasionally.

[00:28:08] But the good ones are in London. If you really want to make it in that world,

[00:28:12] you go to London. And that means that you are asking people to, if they are more

[00:28:18] rooted in the local community, you're asking them to give up a lot. And I think that's the

[00:28:22] point is I think that what we don't talk about in meritocracy is costs.

[00:28:27] And I think for a kid like me growing up in a middle class home, there were very different

[00:28:33] costs to moving. You know, I went from Edinburgh where I grew up to Oxford for

[00:28:38] university. And it was a massive dislocation, right? But it wasn't that much of a dislocation

[00:28:44] because of various aspects of the cultural capital I grew up with. That's a different cost

[00:28:49] that you're asking me to pay than you would be asking someone from a different background to

[00:28:53] pay. And that's, you know, meritocracy is always phrased entirely about the benefits.

[00:28:58] And it never has that calculation, calculus of cost in it. I would say that there is

[00:29:04] a possibility for meritocracy. But it lies in something that I found astonishing

[00:29:13] when I started work on the Social Mobility Commission. The first presentation I had

[00:29:18] was from the late John Hills, and he showed us the Gatsby curve, which shows the direct

[00:29:23] correlation between inequality and social mobility. Basically, if you've got an

[00:29:28] unequal society, people don't move as much because it means that people hoard opportunity

[00:29:33] and the penalty for not moving becomes much bigger. So if you actually want a meritocracy,

[00:29:43] then what you have to do is ensure that to the best of your ability,

[00:29:47] everyone has a social welfare safety net. Everyone has the same grade of employers in their area.

[00:29:55] Everyone has the social infrastructure that actually allows parenting to happen.

[00:30:04] All of those things that we've neglected in this country, they're the essential things for

[00:30:08] meritocracy to actually work. Okay, so you can't sort of, so I guess what you're saying is that

[00:30:14] you have to do a considerable amount of work before you can instigate an idea of,

[00:30:20] so you can't say meritocracy is not like a free floating idea of itself. Yeah, okay,

[00:30:26] okay, that's interesting. Well, there you go, there's a first. We're gonna have to do that every

[00:30:31] week. I think it might be tricky. Could you could you just give us your view quickly on

[00:30:44] technology in education and maybe touch on technology in exams as well if you've got

[00:30:51] anything to say around that. Yeah, yeah, so I mean, I think this is a really difficult one,

[00:30:57] but there's a basic principle which I would say which is when we invented the car,

[00:31:03] if we had then used that to mean that we never walked, I love that. We would be very, very ill.

[00:31:14] And you know, I was saying to my students, we don't write essays so that we've got an essay.

[00:31:20] No one needs the essay once you've done it. I just put it in the bin.

[00:31:25] But we write them to have written an essay. So in that sense, I don't think it makes any

[00:31:31] difference to what you might do in the curriculum because hopefully what you do in the curriculum

[00:31:35] is designed around what will allow kids brains to expand. But I do think that

[00:31:43] the justification behind handwritten exams is increasingly going to be hard to defend

[00:31:51] for two reasons. I mean, there is a scientific rationale that actually sometimes there's great

[00:31:56] fluency when you're writing by hand. But there is a kind of separate thing which is that if

[00:32:06] you look in schools across the country, increasingly people are putting kids in

[00:32:09] for use of laptops. Yeah, yeah. Oh yeah, because you say about the touch typing,

[00:32:14] why aren't we assessing touch typing? Exactly. I literally have been doing that with my son.

[00:32:21] Right. I have, you know, I spoke to him yesterday. I asked him about various things and I said to

[00:32:26] him, do you, you know, what would you enjoy about school? We had a nice candid conversation.

[00:32:32] He said he hates anything when he has to write. I said, do you mind typing? He says no. So I

[00:32:36] said, well, let's do some touch typing. Let's do that because it just seems to me like I would love

[00:32:44] a world in which we all had little Moleskine notebooks, but I don't think that's the world

[00:32:50] that we're going to get. And I think if we just, if we make handwriting a bar to success,

[00:32:55] then I think that we're going to exclude a lot of very able kids. But then handwriting in

[00:32:59] Moleskine notebooks will become more exclusive and more exciting.

[00:33:04] Yeah, exactly. Exactly. Exactly. I guess one of the things they like with your analogy with,

[00:33:11] you know, walking in a car is that you can't know like there will be unintended

[00:33:19] consequences say if we sort of stopped teaching kids to write, do you know what I mean?

[00:33:24] Like because we don't necessarily know what the connections are between writing

[00:33:28] and other skills or other kinds of brain development. We don't actually...

[00:33:34] Not for certain, yeah. We don't have any long term.

[00:33:36] I would say I don't think I'm advocating that we never teach kids to write.

[00:33:41] I just think that by the time you get to 16, if we're talking about that kind of

[00:33:47] general preparation for adulthood, it seems... And it's also,

[00:33:53] it's almost the case of the decisions already being made.

[00:33:58] Because so many kids do use laptops and because it does seem, you know, I don't have the stats for

[00:34:05] this but certainly anecdotally, it does seem that in smaller private schools a lot of kids use

[00:34:10] laptops. Yeah, in a lot of schools or almost all. I mean, and not just in private schools either,

[00:34:14] so you get these schools that like Chromebook schools and things like that, don't you?

[00:34:17] Yeah. And what's your sort of view on the use of technology more generally in education? Like

[00:34:24] are there any risks that you see, not from the technology itself but by the way that people

[00:34:31] want to use it or introduce it?

[00:34:35] Yeah, I think that we have to really bear in mind that, you know, one of the big messages

[00:34:42] I want people to take out of the book is this notion that school is a home, it's a place for kids to be

[00:34:49] and if we think that we can... You know, the thought experiment I do with people is if I said to you,

[00:34:55] I imagine, you know, so you've got a 10-year-old, if I say if I could give your 10-year-old a pill

[00:35:01] that would contain all the knowledge you needed and that would be it, didn't need school,

[00:35:06] would you be happy for them just to leave school? And I think most people would say no.

[00:35:12] I want them to do that because actually school isn't just the knowledge and I think if we kind of...

[00:35:19] Yes, I think there's ways in which AI and ed tech can help us but I think we have to be quite careful

[00:35:25] to say that what school is doing is not just delivering knowledge, it's doing... It's acting as a...

[00:35:35] You know what? It's the last viable bit of community I think that we have left.

[00:35:42] I think that we have all the other things that we've created have atomised in the 21st century

[00:35:50] and school is a place where people actually come together into a building and I think we need that.

[00:35:55] So, you know, I'm really looking forward to saying this phrase, my book is available from all good booksellers.

[00:36:02] This surely isn't the first time you've said that yet. Do you know what it is?

[00:36:06] Yes! It is! Oh yes! That's great! That's the victory for us.

[00:36:16] I hope you enjoyed our interview with Sammy as well as buying his book.

[00:36:20] You can also interact with him online, you can find him on LinkedIn and also on Blue Sky Sammy.Right.

[00:36:28] So the moment you've all been waiting for. Yes, baby!

[00:36:32] We have the winners of the competition that we launched last week to launch the start of

[00:36:38] season two. As you said, had a really great response to the competition. Some really funny

[00:36:44] messages. I really liked the one someone who said, I love competitions. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

[00:36:50] The emails were so nice that I'm sort of like disappointed that some people haven't won because

[00:36:56] they sent us such nice messages. Because we actually did do the proper thing if you said a

[00:37:00] random name generator together. Yeah, yeah, yeah. And also you may remember from the last episode

[00:37:06] that I said that we would be monitoring who sent emails to John at and who sent emails to Sophie

[00:37:14] at theexamman.com. As it turns out, they all come to, it's one of these where it's got like those

[00:37:22] are subsidiary emails to the central email which is like hello at theexamman.com. And it turns

[00:37:29] out that they all just come to that email address anyway, so we don't know. But yeah, I mean,

[00:37:36] I still feel like I can't probably won. A few of them were just a high Sophie, so we'll take that.

[00:37:43] Yeah, anyway, on to the most important things. Okay, so prize number one which is a box of

[00:37:51] very exciting treats from the local area to us, Brighton and Sussex. And also an exam screen

[00:38:00] subscription is Kelly Fielder of Regents Park Community College. So congratulations.

[00:38:06] Well done Kelly. Where's that? Where's Regents Park Community College?

[00:38:09] In Southampton. In Southampton, correct, well remembered.

[00:38:12] And prize two is going to Laura Bridal of Silverdale School in Sheffield.

[00:38:19] Well done both of you. Your prizes will be with you very, very soon.

[00:38:23] As soon as we can work out how to package all the breakable items.

[00:38:25] As soon as we work out the postage, they will be with you.

[00:38:29] Thanks so much everyone for listening and to this week's episode. Hope you all have a great week.

[00:38:37] Thank you so much for listening to the exam man podcast. We really, really appreciate

[00:38:41] your support. Remember that you can access it on all the major podcast platforms,

[00:38:46] give us a rating, give us a follow and we will catch you next time.