12 April 2023

Sir Kevan Collins is a member of the department’s Education Innovation Council and founding CEO of the UK’s Education Endowment Fund. In 2021 he was put in charge of England’s post-COVID education recovery. Join us as we chat to the former East London teacher about the purpose of public education, why equity matters and the biggest challenges educators must face from COVID.

Show Notes

• Purpose statement for public education

Transcript

Intro: Teach is produced on the traditional land of the Kaurna people. The South Australian Department for Education would like to acknowledge the traditional custodians of the land and pay our respects to all elders past, present, and emerging.

Dale Atkinson: Hello and welcome to Teach, a podcast about teaching and learning in South Australia. My name is Dale Atkinson from South Australia's Department for Education, and today something with a bit of an international flavour. I'm joined by a man called Sir Kevan Collins. He is the founding Chief Executive of the Education Endowment Fund.

He's also a member of the department's Education Innovation Council. Uh, which is chaired by our CE. So he's a, an important advisor to the strategic direction of our department. Sir Kevan, thank you very much for joining us.

Sir Kevan Collins: It's great to be here.

Dale Atkinson: Can I ask you first about, uh, the parochial question as a South Australian, what are the advantages and disadvantages we've got as a jurisdiction

Sir Kevan Collins: In the, in the work I do supporting South Australia, it's, it's interesting reading the data because I think the big advantage is obviously the brilliant people that work here, and all the data shows the successes and the progress you've made, but also the size. Because one of the things we've learned about education is the more personal you can get, the more down you can get to know the individuals, the more progress you'll make.

And the size allows you to really get into the detail and that's where the answers are. Not in grand, big plans, but in meeting the needs of individual children and working with individual schools, the 700 or so schools that serve here.

Dale Atkinson: So it's really the interface which, where all the, all the work gets done, isn't it?

Sir Kevan Collins: Yeah.

Dale Atkinson: So let's talk a little bit about equity. You spent some time, a lot of time in Tower Hamlets as Chief Executive there an environment where there is a vast span in terms of the haves and the have nots. Can you tell us a little bit about your view of equity and why our schools and parents should care about it?

Sir Kevan Collins: Equity matters not just for the child who is underserved, but actually equity matters for everybody. If you look for example, at Australia, let's do this, the country rather than the state here. If you look at Australia's results in PISA And the desire to move up if that's what you want to do. You cannot do that without raising the tail.

The dragon lag of having some children left behind makes everyone suffer. The other thing we found in the UK and the work I do with UNESCO and and other parts of the world is when you serve the most disadvantaged children, well everybody benefits. You become a better teacher, a better school, and more effective organisation.

That's true of special educational needs as well. The biggest challenge of our generation educators is how do we make sure we don't leave some children behind because there are growing gaps. And the bad news to bring to Australia is when you look at the gaps, they're widening. And this big challenge of how do we narrow gaps and bring everybody with us to the promise of education, if you like, is the challenge.

Dale Atkinson: Can I talk to you a little about how we address this in a, in a post COVID environment? A lot of the researchers sort of indicated that there has been impacts, not just on learning outcomes for students, but on wellbeing indicators as well. What should we be looking at post COVID in terms of helping our kids?

Sir Kevan Collins: What we learned through COVID and I was the National Education Recovery Commissioner for the UK appointed by the Prime Minister to work on COVID, and what we learned through COVID was that education affects the whole of the child's life. It's not just that maths scores go back. Or English scores go back. We learnt that mental health, socialisation, a whole range of things have been impacted by not going to school.

What that reminds us then is schools aren't just about academics, they're about the whole child. The impact of COVID, unfortunately, on all the data everywhere has been greater on the most disadvantaged children. So how do we deal with the legacy if we're not careful of COVID, that we've got widening gaps?

You know, children have had access to computers. Children who had parents who were highly educated supporting what, that's one story. But there were some other children who didn't have connectivity, didn't have resources, and this is the biggest disruption since the Second World War on, on education in, in most of the developed world.

And it goes without saying that it's going to take a long time and it has to be a broad front across the whole of a child's life. Not just more maths and English, but more sport, more choir, more drama. In England, 19%, uh, drop in the number of kids taking part in sport. These habits have been broken of being involved in these activities and we need to rebuild them.

Dale Atkinson: And so what have you seen in your experience of site systems, individual schools are doing this well and what are they focusing on?

Sir Kevan Collins: I think there are three domains that people are beginning to focus on. The first. You do face down this thing of learning loss. Those of us who working, for example, early education, will know the phrase from someone like Jim Heckman, the Nobel Prize winning economist, 'skills, beget skills'.

And if you haven't got some skills that you would've acquired in early learning that has a deficit, it begins to catch to you later on. So we have to cover the loss off. The second we've seen is that these broad social skills, these habits of learning and social skills have to come before you do the hard academic skills.

You have to get children back into the habits of learning. Teachers will talk to you now quite often about behaviour, low level disruption, kids not attending. So you got to get the habits of learning first. And then you've got to work on the skills. And then the third bit I think, is this, um, opportunity to really understand how technology, now there's been a kind of breakthrough in technology that's a positive legacy.

If there are already from COVID, we should grab hold of and rethink education as this blended experience between the use of technology. Never, ever without the teacher that's going to not be, instead of that as well as, and how do we think about those two things, but critically, the broad experience, which I think COVID taught us children really need in schools now.

Dale Atkinson: You started your career as a classroom teacher. What do you wish you knew then in terms of teaching children that you know now from your experience?

Sir Kevan Collins: It's almost like you wanna go back and apologise to those children because, Uh, and I was lucky, I taught, there was one group of children, we had a, what's called vertical grouping in London, east London. It was 40 years ago. A third of the kids were, were of one age, and I had the youngest kids all for all three years, every day. And of course now I know that I wish I'd been better skilled. I wish I'd known more. I look at teacher training and I think it's great, but we need to kind of develop it.

So this being intellectually curious about what I do and about how children learn, I think is kind of driven by my ongoing guilt about the way I serve that first group. So I wish I'd known a hell of a lot more.

Dale Atkinson: So taking you back to that Tower Hamlets experience, and I know Tower Hamlets had a reputation for being quite innovative as a local government area, and local government in the UK has a remit that's more akin to State Government in Australia.

So responsibility for things like education, child protection, aged care. So a fairly broad remit, I think one of the things that Tower Hamlets was looking at and, and had enacted was really going out to the community and talking to them very actively about how they wanted the money to be spent and resources allocated.

Sir Kevan Collins: Sure.

Dale Atkinson: What are the kind of things that we can learn as an education system from that approach?

Sir Kevan Collins: So when you look at the challenges of serving, I think any kind of community, what we've realized increasingly is that you can get a disconnect between those of us that want to do the best and sit in big offices running the system and those on the ground who are the communities. As they get more and more diverse and the needs kind of develop and they get more and more complex. It's hard to keep ensuring that the classic old services deliver. So you've got to be more creative about how you engage with people. So in Tower Hamlets, for example, which is if you take free school meals as a proxy for poverty, we had the most kids in England and by 10% more than anyone else. And when I first got there, it wasn't me who did this. Our results when I was teaching at the beginning were pretty much the worst in the country. Interestingly, now they're in the top quartile and for every year group in England, and they outperformed somewhere like West Sussex, which is interesting because, uh, these kids, 70% come with English as second language and there's poverty now.

I think the big step, and it was unusual for someone to be a, a primary school teacher and then to become the chief executive of the council took a long time. But the interesting thing we learn was one, you have to work with the crane of your communities, so you have to go to where things are quite interesting.

You have to work with the moss, you have to work with all sorts of community groups where there are lots of conversations that need to be thought about. What are your values, what are their values? What's non-negotiable in those spaces? You also have to be ready to do things that were innovative. We, in that example, to the budgets, we spoke to young people and so the community across all ages and said, what do you think we should do with the money?

And we actually put money on the table and said, you decide. Young people overwhelmingly suggested we spend it more on older people in their lives. Older people overwhelmingly said we should spend it on young people, but giving people the chance to really take ownership meant a different relationship with the activities.

And I'm a great believer that the people who use services are the best source of data and information on how you improve services. And by the way, the other thing about improvement is its habit, not an event. So this took 20 years of sticking with the knitting, which people like to kind of keep innovating, but sometimes you've gotta stick with it and the grind it out.

Dale Atkinson: So that takes us very neatly to a conversation that's going on here in South Australia around the purpose of public education and a thing that our chief executive has kicked off in terms of a discussion at every level about what are we for in public education? What's your focus on that? What is your take on the purpose of public education moving into 2023, 24, and the next century?

Sir Kevan Collins: I mean, I'd like to start the conversation just a slightly different place, and that is what kind of place does South Australia want to be? Is educations one of the biggest drivers to create the place you'll be in the future? What kind of lives do you want children to have in the round? And then how does education play a part in that?

Because the one thing I'm absolutely certain is that education plays a part, it's essential, but not sufficient to describe and create the lives you want for children if you want them to flourish and thrive. So you've got to ask, how healthy do you want children to be? What achievement do you want children to have?

How do you want to participate and make a contribution to the lives of South Australia? What about the economic wellbeing of our children and what about their resilience and wellbeing? Education has a role to play, but we just can't load it all education. Well, we have to think about that in the future, and education is right at the centre of that ecosystem.

Dale Atkinson: Sir Kevan, those are some excellent questions for us to think on and to leave on. Thank you very much for your time. You are needed by our chief executive to, um, provide him with some advice and a discussion point. So I'll let you get going, but uh, thank you very much for your time.

Sir Kevan Collins: Thank you very much indeed.