Sir Nick Gibb

[00:00:13] So if we've got a very special guest on our podcast this week and I'm always like blown away by your capacity to find excellent guests for our podcast because to be honest with you all, I don't do any of this. If it was left to me, we'd probably never interview anybody. So Sophie, you're a bit of an expert at this. No, most people want to come on the podcast and then there's a few people I've been, you know, targeting slash harassing over the last year.

[00:00:43] Yeah, borderline stalking. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's only a couple of the celebrities are a little bit more. It's the ones where you've got to like go through people. Yeah. So when you say celebrities, like we've had a few sort of what you'd call, I guess, education celebrities on the podcast. But celebrity celebrities, you've been on to some of them. Yeah, yeah. So who have you been on? So Jeremy Clarkson, because of his annual A-level tweet that he puts out, which is quite funny, isn't it? Yeah. He didn't want to come on. He didn't want to come on.

[00:01:13] He was in Saint-Tropez or something. Yeah, when I approached him. So, you know, anyway. And I think that would have been pretty one-dimensional about his tweets probably, wouldn't it? It would have been hard to like drag a whole interview out of that, wouldn't it? I think so. I think so. We'd have had to brush up on farming and stuff. So, but one of the ones that I'm still not giving up on, John. Yeah. Right. This is, so I think I've done a fourth approach to someone that most people might not deem

[00:01:42] a celebrity, but very much a celebrity in my eyes. Yeah. Daniel Daggers. Daniel Daggers. Yeah. From, as you can see from John there, was in a French reality TV series all about real estate in France. Yes. It's like the French. It's like the French selling sunset. Yeah. But more about, more about the real estate than the, you know. Yeah, yeah. It's excellent. Very good. The heels. Yeah. So, anyway. Yeah.

[00:02:15] estate agents who then set up a huge company, did it in Super Prime, whatever that is. Yeah. Is that luxury? Yeah. Yeah. Anyway, he's one of the top people in real estate in the UK. And he was brilliant on it. And then he was on a Netflix series called Buying London. Yeah. Also recommended. And then, because I have been following him somewhat, I saw a clip of him talking about

[00:02:39] exams and how he felt that the current system isn't really fit for purpose in terms of employing younger people. Yeah. And his company have set up a really quite great academy. And that's why he was talking about how he didn't think it was done. And I was like, right, he needs to come on. So, where have we got to with booking Daniel Daggers then? So, yeah, I've got through to the social media manager, who's absolutely lovely, and

[00:03:05] submitted a bit more information to his media team. So, I feel like that's progress. Yeah. And waiting to hear back. So, Daniel, if you're listening to this, which I'm sure you are, we really would like to have you on the exam man. We'd love to have you on Daniel Daggers. I did once approach a celebrity. Did you? Yeah. Yeah. I didn't realise you'd ever approach anyone else. No, I mean, it was my one and only attempt at recruiting a guest. I approached Gary Neville. Interesting.

[00:03:34] Now, you may be wondering why I approached Gary Neville. Now, I saw him. Football Dragon Stan. A couple of years ago. Example. He was interviewed on BBC Breakfast on A-Level Results Day about what he thought about the system. Did they not have anyone else they could bring out? I remember just being like totally perplexed at the time. I was like, why are they asking Gary Neville about the exam system? Did you have a good chat about it? Well, you know, at the time I just thought, I was just like, why are we asking him? Yeah.

[00:04:04] But then I did subsequently find out that one of his projects, he's been involved in setting up a university. It's called University Academy 92. And one of their pitches to prospective students is that they don't have to sit exams. So it's all, you know, like kind of coursework based and that sort of stuff. And he obviously has a particular problem with exams. And so I thought it would be interesting to find out what he thought about them. So I contacted his team in a similar fashion.

[00:04:33] But yeah, I didn't get anything. I've not heard anything. You're not persistent enough, John. Probably not. Or as charming. So who have we got on this week? Oh, the really lovely Nick Gibb. Been really supportive about what we're doing. As obviously such a wealth of experience in schools and in the education system. But it's a thoroughly lovely person to speak to.

[00:04:59] Yeah, I should say as well that for the very first time ever on this interview at the start, we had a few technical issues. And he was so calm, so helpful, so patient. And yeah, it was a reflection of what people had already told us about him. Yeah. He was such a great guest. And I hope you really, really enjoy this one. Just noticed that you've been in India recently.

[00:05:25] And just wondered what you'd heard about the English system and how it's viewed abroad. Well, people are looking at England in the way that in the early 2000s, people looked at Finland in a mistaken way as it happens, because there's a huge time lag in these issues. So they're looking at us, not in a mistaken way. I think they're right at England. Because we have been rising in the league tables, whereas we were falling.

[00:05:52] So that's why I get invited to speak at conferences, not just in India, but in America, around the world. Because they want to know what we did. And I spoke at a conference in Delhi, and they were very, very interested. And from that, more conversations have happened. So it's an exciting country, 8% growth a year.

[00:06:16] And I always worry that, because as a minister, I used to absolutely love meeting ministers from other countries. Whenever they were in London, no matter how small the country or how big the country, if they wanted a meeting with an education minister, I was first a volunteer. But what depressed me at some of those meetings was that particularly low-income, middle-income countries, they were all saying the same things. Oh, we're going to go for 21st century skills, getting rid of our curriculum,

[00:06:45] we're bringing in competence-based curriculum. And some of them even used the same words that the minister the previous day from another country used. So they're getting this advice from the OECD, the World Bank. And our experience is that that advice is wrong. We've been through all that. So I try and convey that. But it depresses me sometimes that a low-income country with enough problems of their own, frankly,

[00:07:14] without these people advising them in a way that the evidence doesn't support. And who suffers? You know, literally the poorest children in the world suffer. And that breaks my heart. And so I'm determined now to spend time in the international world, if you like, talking about these things to prevent that from happening. Because we care about children wherever they are, not just...

[00:07:43] And it must be incredibly fulfilling to be able to do that now, to be able to travel and be able to do this in a different way. It is. Absolutely. It's hugely enjoyable, for one thing, meeting people from completely different cultures and nations. And one thing about not being an MP, people don't realise how restricting being an MP is. I've done 27 years of being in the House of Commons.

[00:08:11] You can't really leave the building because there are votes. Yeah, ever. Certainly not when the parliamentary day starts. And the day may end, meant to end at 10 o'clock, 10pm on Mondays, 7pm on Tuesdays and Wednesdays. But votes can go on beyond that sometimes. And you can't plan ahead because you don't know when votes are going to come. And if you do want to go abroad, you have to get permission from the whips and things.

[00:08:40] So it's liberating to think, to feel that I can just say yes to something and then next thing I know I'm on a plane going to some conference somewhere. It's great fun. Well, my career, I studied law at Durham, trained to be a chartered accountant with KPMG. I was there for 13 years.

[00:09:09] And then I stood for Parliament in 1997 and became an MP for Bognor, Regis and Littlehampton, a Conservative MP. And I've been an MP for 27 years until July 2024 when I stood down, having, I thought, 27 years over a quarter of a century. It's good to say. Was enough, yes, enough for me and probably enough for the people of Bognor, Regis. And I was also a minister during that period.

[00:09:38] So I was the school's minister for 10 years from 2010 to 2024. The mathematicians amongst you will know that that's 14 years, not 10. I had a couple of stints out due to various coalition issues and changes of leader of the party. But I've served under David Cameron and then Theresa May and then Boris. And I served under Rishi Sunak as well.

[00:10:04] So I've served under four prime ministers and I think about six secretaries of state. I stood down in November 2023, having done 10 years again. That was really part of the process of my leaving Parliament. I told the whips I wasn't standing again in July. And that made sense then to ease out of ministerial office as well in November at the reshuffle. Yeah, sure. So those are the highlights.

[00:10:32] And we'll come on to some of the things. I was also shadow school's minister for five years in opposition between 2005 and 2010. And that was an important period because that's really where we did a lot of the work preparing for government. So I spent every Monday visiting schools up and down the country.

[00:10:52] I wanted to try and understand why our schools, why our education system was declining in PISA and TIMSS, these international surveys. And I think Pearl's as well. Yes, I think before I was shadow school's minister, I was on the education select committee for two years.

[00:11:13] So in that period, and covering my ministerial time, I probably visited over a thousand schools up and down the country. And why that's important is you really learn about the problems facing schools. You can see how and what is being taught in schools. And that really helped me to understand why we were declining.

[00:11:37] And it helped me formulate, together with Michael Gove, the shadow secretary of state and then secretary of state, what we saw as the solutions to this problem. And then the other one key thing to mention is the people I met. So I didn't just visit schools. I talked to people that had views that I thought were in tune with the way I was thinking, such as Ruth Miskin, who was the sort of phonics guru. And I read around the subject.

[00:12:05] So I read Edie Hirsch, Dan Willingham and others, which really gave me an understanding of what progressivist education was all about and why it was failing our education system, and particularly the most disadvantaged. And really that helped us formulate what we saw as the answers. And then, of course, in the most recent league tables, PISA, we've gone up from 27th in 2009, when we were still on the decline.

[00:12:35] That was the lowest point. We're now 11th in England. And in PIRLS, we've gone from 10th to 4th in the world in the reading ability of nine-year-olds. So that really shows that the analysis of a problem that we developed in opposition and the solutions to dealing with that problem, so far as the international sort of objective league tables are concerned, it was the right answer. Not everybody will agree with us, but at least now we are rising in those league tables, not declining.

[00:13:05] So, Nick, would you sort of say that that was, of everything, your kind of proudest achievement in government? Well, I think, yes. Having gone up both in maths, 27th to 11th in maths and reading, yes. But more than that, I think I helped, together with Michael and the Academy's programme, we helped, if you like, unleash a renaissance of thinking by teachers themselves. I mean, you talk to educationists in other countries.

[00:13:34] They say that there's something unique about England where the teachers are blogging and writing. They're attending research ed conferences organised by Tom Bennett. So they have taken control of their own profession, about issues of pedagogy and content of the curriculum and the philosophical approaches to education. Now teachers are talking about those.

[00:13:58] Jim Callahan in 1976 spoke about the fact that the education professors felt it was their fiefdom. How dare Jim Callahan, Prime Minister, talk about education? How dare even teachers enter this secret garden that was education policy? And I think we've opened the gates. I think we've taken away the fences to the secret garden so that teachers are now in charge of their own profession.

[00:14:25] I think that is my proudest, I think, contribution to that. It wasn't solely me or solely Michael. It was also the fact there was social media. But of course they have social media in other countries and they don't have this same, if you like, liberated teaching profession who are discussing these things in those countries. Yeah. Yet. Yeah, no, that's very true. Nick, can you tell us a little bit about how you specifically ended up in an education role?

[00:14:54] You know, what was it that made you want to move into that particular sphere of politics? Yes. I mean, I came into politics because of ideas. It was ideas that drove me. It wasn't becoming famous or, you know, the power or whatever it is. And I just was driven by ideas as a teenager, as a young man at university. And those ideas were not education, actually.

[00:15:21] They were about the economy because I was an accountant and did law at university. And so I was driven by the ideas of Friedrich von Hayek, Friedman. I believed strongly in monetarism. I came to the view that that was the way to control demand and inflation. And I believed in the free markets as a way of creating wealth and opportunities for people. And so that was what drove me because you saw before you two were born that in the 1970s,

[00:15:49] we were the sick man of Europe, so far as our economy was concerned. And I thought Mrs. Thatcher, Ronald Reagan, they had the right ideas. So it was those, that that drove me into politics. When I got into power, when I got into Parliament in 1997, I started my career in the, I was a shadow of treasury minister in opposition and I became a shadow of trade and industry minister. But then I felt, you know, the arguments about the free markets and monetarism,

[00:16:19] I felt they'd been won. I was wrong, actually. We saw the resurgence of Jeremy Corbyn and the hard left in British politics. But at that time, I felt the argument had been won. And so I turned my mind to the other issue that I felt was very pressing. And I'd been to school, maybe we'll come on to this, between 1965 and 78. And I knew about progressive education. I knew that I'd fought a by-election in Rotherham in 1994.

[00:16:46] And my school visits there during that campaign, they were saying some very old things, the teachers I met. And so I thought, well, this is another area where ideas, and bad ideas, in fact, are contributing to damage to British society and to our education system. So I decided I would engage in those issues.

[00:17:13] And I'm very glad I did, because there's a huge ideological debate about how you conduct an education system. And I was very engaged in that. Yeah. And obviously, in government, Nick, you were able to implement some of those ideas that you have. I was wondering if we could turn to specifically talk about the reforms that were made to the GCSE and A-level qualifications of around 2015, 2016.

[00:17:41] Could you tell us a little bit about what your thinking was behind those reforms? What was driving them? And what were the particular kind of priorities that you had when you were redesigning qualifications? Well, as I mentioned earlier, I was very influenced by the ideas of Hirsch. And Hirsch was a... He's an American. He's still alive. He's in his 90s. He's an American academic.

[00:18:05] And he believes that a lack of knowledge in the curriculum in America contributed to the widening gap between disadvantage and advantage. Because advantage kids at home have a lot of knowledge that they just get naturally, going to the theatre, talking about books and so on. And if you come from a disadvantaged family, you don't have those. And he says knowledge builds on knowledge. So the more you know, the more you can know.

[00:18:32] So his example is, if you say, look, electrons orbit an atom in the way that planets orbit the sun. If you don't know that planets orbit the sun, that, you know, that simile doesn't really work for you. So it just leads to widen gap. And then the other book I read was, at that time, was Daniel Willingham, who wrote a book called Why Don't Students Like School?

[00:18:55] And he makes the point that if you want to be a critical thinker or a problem solver or be creative, you're using your working memory. And that can only handle six or seven pieces of, or even fewer, pieces of new information. So if I gave you three phone numbers, you could probably remember them. If I gave you 25 phone numbers, there's no chance that you'd be able to remember them. But if you want to do critical thinking, you need access to masses of information. You can't just critically think about six things.

[00:19:22] You need to know a whole bunch of things in order to make that critical thinking meaningful. So how do you get instant access to that information without having to Google everything every two seconds? By which if you want to Google six things, on the seventh, you'll have forgotten the first. So you've got to have this stuff in your long-term memory, which is what Daniel Willingham says.

[00:19:42] So I was worried from all my discussions with curriculum experts and other people that we had a competence-based curriculum introduced in 2007. That much of the GCSE content was competence-based. It was about teaching the skills of a historian, the skills of a scientist, as opposed to the extensive. There is some knowledge, of course, in all GCSEs at that time. But the knowledge was geared towards these skills.

[00:20:11] And so we wanted to restore knowledge, the centrality of knowledge to the GCSEs. And we wanted to also put them on the par with the qualifications that were being used at that age group in the best-performing countries of the world. So we asked Ofqual to rank our qualifications against other countries in the world.

[00:20:36] And as part of the reform process, they were making sure that the assessments were on a par with those other countries and jurisdictions. Okay, that's interesting. So I'm guessing from what you're saying that, Nick, you kind of reject the dichotomy, if you like, between knowledge and skills. So you don't see them as kind of separate things where we need to pursue one or the other, that they are kind of interlinked in that respect.

[00:21:05] You cannot teach the skills in isolation of the knowledge. So people think these are transferable skills, that you can teach problem-solving, that you can teach critical thinking. All the evidence from cognitive science in recent years is that you cannot, that they're all domain-specific. So that's the issue. So if you want children to be problem-solvers and to be critical thinkers, they need to have deep knowledge.

[00:21:34] And from that deep knowledge, you will become a critical thinker and a problem-solver. But if you downgrade the knowledge and specifically teach those skills, you will not get those skills. And that's what Hirsch explicitly says in The Schools We Need.

[00:21:53] He says, paradoxically, you know, the school system in America at that time, in teaching those skills, was ending up with students who did not have those skills. Whereas if you had taught or did teach a knowledge-rich curriculum, you will have children, young people, who leave the education system with those high-level skills, which is what all modern economies need. So they come as a consequence of knowledge.

[00:22:22] They are not a prerequisite to knowledge. And that's a huge intellectually important issue that we had not stumbled across but had researched. And if you read Daisy's book, Daisy Christodoulou's book, Seven Myths About Education, she says you cannot teach a novice the skills of an expert. You can't teach an eight-year-old or a 12-year-old how to be an expert historian.

[00:22:51] Because those expert historians and scientists have spent 20, 30 years acquiring the knowledge that made them into experts from which they get those skills. So if you want to get our young people anywhere near the kind of level of skills that you want, you've just got to teach knowledge. And knowledge isn't just fact. Knowledge isn't, you know, a cat has four legs. A quadruped, you know, is a four-legged creature. That isn't knowledge. That's facts, which are important. But knowledge is complex.

[00:23:20] And what happened with our history curriculum, and even before the 2007 competence-based curriculum that was introduced by the QCA, was that because there was such an obsession with the skills, the knowledge became very simplistic. So you didn't understand, so you might be teaching, I don't know, the Tudors or, you know, or the causes of the Second World War.

[00:23:46] But the facts became very simplistic because you were trying to inculcate these skills. Whereas it's far better to teach the complexity of knowledge. It's a complexity of history. There are different views about different players. Why was there a civil war, you know, in the 17th century? All these issues are complex. And from that complexity, you become a more sophisticated thinker. And that was lost in a competence-based curriculum.

[00:24:12] And what was happening in our schools was that children were just learning the Tudors and the Second World War. They didn't teach the 17th century. They didn't teach children about the Bill of Rights or the battles between Parliament and the executive. None of that was being taught. And they are really important. They underpin everything about modern politics. And that was just not being taught. So we had a big job to do to try and rectify that. Yeah.

[00:24:40] I'm wondering, do you think that some of this focus on skills rather than knowledge is less to do with ideology and more just to do with technological development? So particularly with the advent of the Internet and Google and sort of this idea that because knowledge is so freely available and so accessible that it no longer has as much importance, if you like, and we can kind of do without that kind of. Absolutely.

[00:25:08] That is still the principal argument by the OECD, the World Bank, the advice they're giving to countries around the world is all based on that notion. But that notion isn't new. They were saying this in the 1920s. You can always look it up in a encyclopedia, in a book. You don't need the knowledge. But as I said earlier, if you want to critically think, you can't be busy looking up the capital of France. How many miles is it to America? What is the boiling point of water?

[00:25:38] Is iron a metal or a halogen? What is a halogen? You've just got to know this stuff because otherwise you basically overload your working memory with new information. And the ability to critically think with masses of new information is just zero. So that's why it's so important that children have knowledge. And the trouble is, it sounds so appealing and compelling to say, oh, children don't need to learn all this stuff.

[00:26:07] They can just use AI and Google. Very compelling. And it makes life much easier. But, well, it's not just me saying it. The facts are, the reality is, if you don't have a lot of knowledge in your long-term memory, you will not be able to perform high-level functions. And this idea that you can teach somebody to be a problem solver.

[00:26:34] And I've seen a math curriculum that's all geared to problem solving. Of course, you want to make sure children understand the math they're being taught. And you give them, as in the Singapore curriculum, they use the phrase word problems just to make sure they are understanding the math that they're being taught. But you can't teach somebody to be a problem solver in math, say, and then say, okay, now you're a problem solver. Can you go and fix my car?

[00:27:02] Now, you know, it's just when you think about the idea that these are transferable skills across domains is just nonsense. You know, you think you can solve problems in international relations because you studied some of that. You know, now go and deal with a nuclear power station. It's got a meltdown. I mean, it doesn't take more than 10 seconds of thought to realise that this notion is absurd.

[00:27:32] And yet, it is a dominant viewpoint amongst educationalists worldwide. And this is all really affected by the developments in AI, isn't it, Nick? It would be really, really interesting to hear what you think about AI and how you think it's going to affect exams and the education system more broadly in the future. Well, AI is very exciting. There's no question about that. It can be used to save teachers, you know, hundreds of hours.

[00:28:02] But you've got to be careful with it. So if you're creating a test, if you're creating some teaching materials, you've got to use very, very careful protocols. You know, several thousand word protocols to make sure that they are only looking at high quality information. And you've got to ring fence what the engine's looking for. It can also do a lot of work in terms of back office stuff for teachers.

[00:28:27] And you hear, you know, I think there's a possibility that you can use AI potentially to teach if it's, you know, you can make the AI some kind of robot-y thing that's the best teacher in the world in math. But, of course, children are children. They're not adults who can handle these things. They need the emotional involvement of a human being.

[00:28:52] Particularly as you get down to the younger age, they form a very close relationship with their teacher. And so there'll always be, no matter what AI is able to develop, there'll always be an absolute need for teachers in the classroom, even if they're aided by, you know, expert ways of conveying complex concepts to children. But in terms of exams, there are a worry.

[00:29:17] I think coursework type assessment, I think, is very dangerous now because, you know, children are using AI all the time in their essays and things. And they, you know, they need to know, you know, you're not asked when you get homework to write an essay or do some work.

[00:29:36] But there's just no point in using AI to do your work for you because the teacher doesn't ask your child to do homework in order to sell the product that they're making. And that's the end of it. The purpose of asking a child to write an essay or to do homework is to help that child learn. And if all they're doing is asking AI to do it for them, they'll achieve nothing. So that is a worry that teachers have. So, sorry, Nick.

[00:30:05] So do you think that coursework in qualifications is pretty much dead? Well, I think children need to know to understand that they need to do coursework in order to develop their education. But if they cheat, it's like doing a crossword. You know, you can do a crossword. You can look it all up on the Internet. What's the point? You're not going to get a prize. You do a crossword for your own satisfaction.

[00:30:34] If you just look everything up, then you're just wasting your time. And children need to have that inculcated in them by their teachers. But it does mean, I think, that the idea of continual assessment and teacher controlled assessment that we got rid of when we reformed the GCSEs and A-levels, there's absolutely no case for bringing that back now because it is absolutely open to cheating. And so it would render the whole assessment.

[00:31:03] And we got rid of it anyway, even without AI, because there was no correlation. In fact, the correlation was just awful between what children were achieving in controlled assessments and what they were getting in the exams. So that's why it went, really on the advice of off-quarter the regulator as much as anything. Yeah, that's interesting because we actually spoke to Amanda Spillman in a previous interview. And she made quite an interesting point about coursework, which was one we'd really considered,

[00:31:31] which was that a lot of the time we thought the issue with coursework was that, you know, from a more privileged kind of background, then you're going to get lots of help. But her argument was actually that what was happening in schools was that students who were of a lower ability were spending so much time in class with their teachers focusing on getting this coursework done and getting it right and getting a good grade for it, that in the end, they weren't getting a broad curriculum,

[00:31:58] they weren't getting broad learning, and actually it was having a really detrimental effect on their overall learning. Yeah, it is interesting, as well as the fact that the proportion getting top grades was significantly higher than the proportion getting those grades in exams. So it just had no validity in terms of the regulator. Yeah. So Nick, just looking ahead now to the, there's an upcoming curriculum and assessment review.

[00:32:26] I'm guessing you're reasonably protective of your reform. So what are you hoping slash expecting to see from that review? Well, I hope Professor Francis is true to her word when she says evolution, not revolution. I'm not precious about what I did in office. I am protective of our education system. There's history around the world.

[00:32:52] It's littered with examples of very effective reform that's undone, Portugal, Spain, by subsequent ministers. And then you see, you know, the country goes up in the league tables and then these reforms come in and they start declining in the league tables. And it isn't just about, oh, league tables, oh, wow. Those league tables reflect reality in the classrooms and the quality of education of millions of young people.

[00:33:17] So, you know, I just think they've got to be very careful that everything they recommend has evidence to back it. Yeah. And there's so much more knowledge now about cognitive science and evidence from around the world about other reform programs. That, you know, Becky Francis just needs to make sure that everything they recommend has that evidence base. And we have the Education Endowment Foundation that she ran after Kevin Collins.

[00:33:44] So there's a, you know, they have a massive library of evidence, randomised control trials and so on. And they've analysed other research and they've, you know, defined this quality by a set of criteria.

[00:34:01] So they can reach into all those resources to make sure everything they recommend is backed by that rather than some sort of knee-jerk ideology, ideological reaction, which is what you're seeing, I'm afraid, from the government in the Children's Wellbeing and Schools Bill, which is the schools part of that bill are just terrible. I'm optimistic in one sense, though, that, you know, governments come and go, ministers come and go.

[00:34:33] And as I said at the beginning, the thing I'm proud of is the unleashing of, you know, the intellectual renaissance of our teaching profession. And, you know, I meet teachers now all the time, even after I've left Parliament. I was yesterday meeting the CEO of the City of London Academy's Trust and, you know, they really do understand the evidence about the most effective way to run a school. And that's repeated up and down the country.

[00:35:02] There are, you know, tens of thousands of teachers who really do understand the importance of knowledge. They value the freedoms and autonomy that academy status has to enable them to implement these most effective methods. And that won't change. The genie will not go back into the bottle just because a Labour government decides that they don't agree with all that stuff.

[00:35:27] So I remain optimistic because the teaching profession really does, has embraced evidence. A thousand, you know, a thousand teachers turn up on a cold Saturday in September to spend a day, the first weekend in the new academic year, to attend a research ed conference at some school somewhere. That's the profession we have today. So I'm optimistic about the future of our education system.

[00:36:02] Thank you so much, Lec, for your time. Yeah, it's been really enjoyable. Thank you. Very insightful. And I think we managed to talk about everything we wanted to. We also wanted to say on a personal level as parents how amazing phonics is. Super. How old are your children? Our seven-year-old, isn't it? And I remember thinking, oh, no, I don't like this. I don't know. No, no, no, no, no, no. But how on earth does this help? It's some sort of witchcraft. Yeah, literally, it is actually magic. That's wonderful.

[00:36:29] And the thing about it is, it's not just the mechanics that can sound like words. It's the confidence that it gives those children. Oh, they love it. I mean, they just absolutely, yeah, I love it. So it's been a really fascinating sit from that perspective. But yeah. It was a battle. And people forget that it really was a battle, the phonics battle. And there's still some holdouts who, you know, occasionally write to the newspapers and say it's all about barking at print.

[00:36:56] But like everything we did, Michael Gov and I did really from 2010 onwards, it was an intellectual battle. And we had to marshal the arguments as well as we could. But now we have pearls and we have Pisa and we have Tim's, which absolutely makes the argument much more compelling. Thank you so much for listening to the Exam Man podcast. We really, really appreciate your support.

[00:37:25] Remember that you can access it on all the major podcast platforms. Give us a rating. Give us a follow. And we will catch you next time.