Episode 152: Education policy makers – Who’s holding them accountable?

Andy Psarianos

Hi, I'm Andy Psarianos.

Robin Potter

Hi, I'm Robin Potter.

Adam Gifford

Hi, I'm Adam Gifford.

Andy Psarianos

This is the School of School podcast.

Welcome to the School of School podcast.

Welcome back, everyone, to the next episode of Feedspot's number two podcast for teachers from The School of School.

Adam Gifford

Was that the recordings when I was away Andy? You rather been secretly -

Andy Psarianos

It happened while you were away, Adam, for some reason.

Adam Gifford

Good stuff or something. Yeah.

Andy Psarianos

But yeah, so what an achievement, huh? And we're here to talk with the regular pundits here. We've got Adam and Robin.

Robin Potter

Hey. Hey.

Adam Gifford

Hi, Andy. How are you doing?

Andy Psarianos

I'm doing well. I'm doing well. I think one of the things, we often talk about accountability and education, but when we talk about accountability and education, it's always usually focused on schools and on teachers. Well, what about the policymakers? Who's holding them accountable? I mean, one could argue that the voters are. I'm not sure. I think that's a bit of a crock, if you ask me. Why shouldn't we be holding policymakers accountable like we do teachers in schools?

Adam Gifford

Listen, I think it's a fantastic point, and I think that in terms of the voters being able to hold people accountable, that's chance. Because if you have a successive government, same party and government for a long time, then maybe outcomes of the policy decisions that they make, we get a chance to say, "No, we've had enough." So there's a general election coming up in the UK this year that the conservative party's been in power for 13 years. So maybe this is the type of the length of term that you can say, okay, well let's look at some of these policies.

But it's chance, right? It's chance. So if another government just had one parliament, then the voting doesn't... We may not be able to vote on policy in the same way, but I think it's a really, really important point you raise because these are really serious decisions that are being made and they impact massively on children. So, is there a sort of professional liability at the point of making a policy decision that's going to affect millions of children for the rest of their lives, and what does happen if it doesn't work?

Andy Psarianos

Can't think of anything more high stakes.

Adam Gifford

No, I can't. I can't. In two ways. One, because the outcome for the children. Secondly, because the amount of taxpayers money that goes into ensuring that the success at the end is a community, a population that's a happy, productive, all those sort of measurements that we might use to measure a society, see if it's successful. But I don't know that there's any accountability is there? Is there?

Robin Potter

Not really, because we can be upset about it. We as taxpayers, we could recognise that a policy isn't working, but then how do we, besides not voting for that particular party at the next election, possibly because of that policy, how else are we supposed to, I don't know, demonstrate our unhappiness with what they've done? What do we do about it?

Andy Psarianos

The system needs to change in order for that to happen, I think is what I would conclude. If you really sit and think about it. So when you look at systems where those who are ineffective get pushed aside, I don't know, the capitalist system is probably the most easy one to understand. It's like if you're the CEO of a company and a company's failing, right? It is a public company. The shareholders aren't going to tolerate it. So you're going to get pushed aside and going to put somebody in who can actually do the job. And if they can't do that, if they can't find someone to run the company effectively, the company will fail and the system takes care of it, right? It's like good companies evolve and they last long time. Bad companies die because the shareholders kind of keep it accountable. The investors keep it accountable.

I don't think you can run a political system that way, but maybe there needs to be some kind of change. So what ends up happening is everybody tries to blame the last mile. They try to blame the teachers, they try blame the schools for everything that's going wrong, when actually almost always the problem has to do with, the problem is more systemic in nature. I think if you can set proper goals and get people motivated and invest the money wisely in all these things, they're all policy decisions. The system will work. We know that because it works in other places in the world. Yeah, I don't know, but how could we keep them accountable?

Adam Gifford

We are living in a democracy and that's unlikely to change. So if we can accept that there are going to be people that are going to be the voice of the people voted in, then I think that as part of that, I wonder how decisions would change if as part of that you sign up to, there's a liability part of it, the effectiveness of the policy that you put in, you predict that when you are likely to see outcomes for it. So we'll use education as an example, that the systemic policies that you put in for education, you can't predict that something's going to happen in a year. You might be able to, and you'd be held accountable for that.

But if we assume that these changes are going to take a long time, 10, 20 years, if there was some sort of accountability where you literally had to come back, there was something, there was something that you could be held accountable as to whether or not that worked, then maybe the decision making process would be a little bit different. It's difficult though because other political parties could come in, pull funding, all that sort of stuff. And so the goalposts shift and then that accountability, it's difficult to decide. But I think that if there were tangible outcomes to what you did, the decision making would be, has the potential to be different. But how you implement that, it's a really tricky one. It's a really, really tricky one

Robin Potter

Because don't we go through our schools, our local schools first? A parent maybe expresses, maybe a group of parents are unhappy with something that's happened at the school. Maybe it gets escalated and maybe it's escalated to the district. So now you have leaders at maybe a local level being involved. Does that get escalated then beyond that? How do you escalate something so that it's recognised at a higher level and dealt with?

Andy Psarianos

So fundamentally, that's a really important fundamental question that you're asking there. And I think it's any institution, regardless of what type of institution it is, has this inherent communication problem, which is that communication tends to flow from the top to the bottom. The policymakers or whoever then say and do whatever they think is right, but the information coming from the grassroots back up is much more of a challenge. It's much harder to get information about what's happening on the ground floor up the system without it being filtered because it might go through four people before it gets to the policymaker or five people or five institutions, even. So it goes like, okay, parent talks to teacher, maybe talks to head teacher that somehow gets to the district. Well, who in the district or the governing body hears that? They probably hear it from the head teacher.

So they hear that perspective. Then that moves up and that moves up, and each time it gets filtered a little bit because the head teacher's going to want to protect his own best interest or he's going to protect his school. He's going to want to protect his teachers. He's going to want to protect the kids in the school, whatever it is. Those are all motivating factors that may encourage him to tell the story with a particular flare and each time that goes up. So the person at the top, what they're hearing is that actually what happened or has that been distilled so much that it becomes a different story? This is an institutional problem always. How did the policy makers actually know what's happening on the ground floor? I don't know mean unless they go and visit schools, but even then, schools are going to put on - if the politicians are coming to their school, they're going to put on a show. Right?

Adam Gifford

And I think the other difficulty is, on one hand, I know we've talked about this before, that policy, systemic change takes time. So that's the first thing. So if a policy is introduced, on one hand we're saying, well, we've got to give that time to embed. We've got to give that time to take hold. And so the real measure is a child that's born into that system, that's going to be the true measure is whether or not that system work. Not a child who's had seven years of one system and then three years of another. Is that a fair reflection of it? But then the flip side of that is that if we want to talk to politicians about policy and some of which that I think even before they're implemented, there are some policies that if you talk amongst, pick any group that has got an interest in schools, might say this is crazy.

Why are we doing this? Why is this going to be policy? And so without giving it that chance, I think it is a difficult one because we want systems to embed so we can decide their effectiveness. But in the same breath, I think that we want to be pretty immediate with some things that if we're thinking this is just, there has been policies and education that have been ones that well, when rationale for them and justification is more of a, it feels good as opposed to research suggests this is good, then it's quite right and proper for educators, parents, communities to speak up and say. So it's trying to sort of, I don't know whether there's that sort of middle ground filter that says we need to be thinking really clearly about the policies of which many have worked, by the way. There's been things that have worked really well, but other policies that perhaps haven't worked so well.

Andy Psarianos

Absolutely.

Adam Gifford

But giving them time, those ones that history research tell us needs time. But it is, it's really tricky. It's a really tricky one to juggle.

Andy Psarianos

It's the consistency. We've used a personal fitness, well, I have anyway, personal fitness analogy so many times now, but it really holds true. We fixate about whether or not you should be running, rowing, or cycling. Well, we should all be cycling. Cycling is better than running or it's better than - rowing is better than both of them or whatever the case may be. And we talk about all that stuff. And in reality is that's not what's going to make a difference. It's going to make a difference. You show up every day and do it, and you do it for a long time and whether you're rowing or you're cycling or, yeah, the reality is if you don't show up every day and do it for a long time, it's not going to make any difference. And that's kind of the point, right? You got to show up, you got to do it. You're got to lift weights. You can show up and you got to do it for a long time and for a long time, you're not even going to notice any difference. All you're going to notice is that you're sore, right?

But it's true, right? It just takes a really long time before it has a significant effect. The same is true here, right? You got to say, we're going to do this, you got to stick with it, and you got to continuously improve and eventually you'll get to where you want to be. You just got to know where it is you want to be. That's actually the difficulty. Often with policymakers, they're just looking for headlines. They're just looking for saying whatever it takes to get them elected, and then they don't really follow through.

And even if you know, this is the other problem that often we don't discuss, even if you know what the right thing as a leader, even if you know what you need to do to fix a problem in your institution, call it the institution, the education system, even if we did this, things would be better, getting people to do it is really, really hard. Getting people to actually initiate the change and make it happen is really, really a whole other skill thing. Ben Horowitz is the one that said it really eloquently in the context of CEOs. He said, there are two types of CEOs. He said, "There are the visionaries who know what needs to be done, and there are CEOs who know how to get things done. And very rarely do you have someone that has both qualities." It's very rare.

Robin Potter

Okay, let's go back to your fitness analogy though. So maybe you have a personal trainer who works with you to motivate you to -

Andy Psarianos

Keeps you accountable.

Robin Potter

Keeps you accountable, and keeps you consistent. And you're doing this all the time because you're not going to do it unless the personal trainer shows up and gives you the programme and encourages you to do it.

Andy Psarianos

Puts the weights in your hand and says, "Lift this." Right?

Robin Potter

Sure. Yeah. And the personal trainer got certified because they took these courses. They found out what's current, what would be best for their clients. So now five years later, turns out that we shouldn't be eating a certain way or we should be cutting this out of our diets and we actually shouldn't be over cardio intense. And so now the personal trainer has taken another course, they found out the current situation, and they've brought this to the client and they're motivating the client. So now looking at that from a policy perspective or so is it like the government, then you've got your local lawmakers, and then it's filtering down into the schools and kids.

Adam Gifford

But picking up on that Robin, and using that analogy, I just think that there'll be some things like there's been people who have been fit for thousands of years, and there'll be some elements of that that will remain the same, and we fine tune it. But if you look at a professional sports team training, they're going to be active. So no one gets fit by just sitting on the couch for their whole life. So there's some things that are just fundamental. This has always been the case, and it will always be the case that until we know different, this has worked for this long. So the likelihood is that it's going to keep working for the same length again. And I think that I'm thinking about education amongst all of this, that if you think about, say medics, the professional bodies in medics, I don't know, I don't work in this, but if there's medical policy being talked about, often you'll have someone from, I don't know, the BMA, the British Medical Association talking about it, or the Pilots Association or someone.

So you've got this professional bodies. The one thing that I often find missing is a professional body for education. When education policies are being talked about, is there a strong enough voice in the room that when these policies are being talked about? And that to me that when I look at these other professions and think, actually do what? Would government go ahead without consultation with the medical fraternity? Or do they accept that the medics know? Now, it's not to say you can't have politicians, you need them. You have to have policymakers as part of the decision, the allocation and money and all that sort of thing. But I think that's the part of it is whether or not you've got the personal trainer in the room or is it someone that's not there?

Andy Psarianos

Well, all too often what happens in various different countries is that there is not a body that represents, there isn't a body that doesn't exist to represent teachers or the education system in the way that it does, let's say with the British Medical Association or the College of Surgeons here or whatever in Canada, whatever it is, where you've got this body that tries to protect the best interest of surgeons or doctors or whatever, medical people in general versus let's say more - so the bodies that do represent teachers tend to be more kind of -

Adam Gifford

Well, they tend to be more political. The unions are political. It is political.

Andy Psarianos

They're unions. So they're not there to protect. They're not there to protect the interests of education. They're there to protect the interests of teachers or head teachers or whatever. So it's a different vibe. They do get a bit of a voice, but it's the same. Really, there should be a governing body that has the best interest of education in mind and it would include suppliers as well as educators, suppliers, I mean people who make stuff for teachers or whether the tools and all that kind of stuff where they would get together and discuss these things in an open forum. But I don't know, man, it's so far from our reality right now.

Adam Gifford

There is a sort of, I mean it's sort of newish teacher's council that's been developed. But I just think that the difference is, if you turn on the radio, this is in the UK, but I suspect it would be similar in other countries, is that the voice of the professional body, I don't hear it. And I'd been listening out for it. So when education policy is being talked about, you hear the voice of the unions, like you've said Andy, but in terms of a nonpolitical professional body, if I asked a hundred teachers, what is that and when did you last hear them? And what decisions are being made and how does it protect education? It would be very interesting, the answers. But I would suspect that people wouldn't be as informed as you'd hoped they would be with professional body. And I think that's the missing part, is that some policies, and I might be doing a disservice to them, but it just feels like some policies with politicians, where's the challenge?

Andy Psarianos

Thank you for joining us on the School of School podcast.