Sept. 14, 2016 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
39:36
3412 Philosophy for Children | Stephen Gorard and Stefan Molyneux
Is there a simple and cost effective way that we can improve child education? Stefan Molyneux is joined by Professor Stephen Gorard to discuss the results of the recent Philosophy for Children (P4C) and how education can be improved by teaching reasoning and argumentative skills to children.Stephen Gorard is Professor of Education and Public Policy at Durham University,Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute at Durham University, and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Birmingham. For more on Professor Gorard, please go to: https://www.dur.ac.uk/education/staff/profile/?id=11539For more on Philosophy for Children (P4C), please go to: http://p4c.comPhilosophy For Children Study: https://v1.educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/uploads/pdf/Philosophy_for_Children.pdfFreedomain Radio is 100% funded by viewers like you. Please support the show by signing up for a monthly subscription or making a one time donation at: http://www.freedomainradio.com/donate
This is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom, Maine Radio.
Very happy to have Dr.
Stephen Gorard with us.
He is Professor of Education and Public Policy and a Fellow of the Wolfson Research Institute at Durham University and Honorary Professorial Fellow at the University of Birmingham.
He is the author of nearly 1,000 books and papers.
Boy, a little bit more ambition, Dr.
Gorard.
You can actually get to 1,000, including, quote, Philosophy for Children, Evaluation Report, and Executive Summary.
Thank you so much, Doctor, for taking the time today.
So, there has been a kind of approach, at least in the past, in the study of children and critical thinking.
And Jean Piaget, one of the, I guess, early to mid-century noted developmental psychologists, put forward the argument or had the impression that children really weren't capable of much critical thinking until about 11 years.
Or 12, and for some other belief systems it's around 7 and so on.
But I think it's fair to say that children are very receptive and benefit significantly from Socratic dialogue and philosophical approaches to questions earlier than puberty.
Is that a fair point to make?
I think that's right.
I mean, there's going to be a huge range anyway.
I mean, presumably, even if they were valid, they were very general ages.
We noted...
A large variation in the ability of children to engage in these things.
One of the things that wasn't very variable is how much the children wanted to engage.
So even the youngest, even those who had particular learning difficulties and so on, were very keen to have their voice heard.
And one of the things that the teachers told us was that children appeared to become more communicative, more engaged with the class, as a consequence or...
Thank you.
Children want to talk about the big issues in the world.
And of course, I think philosophy is foundational.
Reason equals virtue equals happiness, as the ancient Greek mantra sometimes goes.
And children want to be happy, and they're very curious about the deeper elements and aspects of life.
Now, I wonder if we could talk a little bit about Matthew Lippmann called, quote, "the most influential figure in helping young students develop philosophical thinking." Now, he started his movement, Philosophy for Children, in the 1970s.
Why, oh why, oh why?
Is this not part of what people understand about pedagogy and how to teach children?
Because it seems very important to me.
Well, it may be that it is.
There are many things that go on in education.
People push for, I don't know, formative feedback or something like this.
And what they're really describing is what often good teachers are doing.
And what an intervention like ours tries to do is to see what's the impact of asking other teachers to do similar things.
I don't mean that...
Teachers reinvent philosophy for children in the Lippmann style.
I just mean that a lot of the things that go on in it might go on in classrooms anyway, unobserved.
And that good teachers might try and get engaged children in exactly that kind of way.
You know, the talking circle is one part of it.
One of the important aspects of it was asking the children what it was they wanted to discuss.
And of course that required some preliminary work in terms of...
Getting them to understand the difference between factual questions that you could simply look up on the internet and philosophical questions and other kinds of questions that we simply couldn't answer.
That could go on in a classroom anyway.
It's interesting for me to note as well that in sort of the grim repetition of history, one of the things that stimulated him to want to teach philosophy to children was looking at the political win-lose aggressive upheavals taking place on university campuses.
It seems to be that we're kind of back to that place again with some of the hypersensitivity, political correctness, and so on.
So I think his approach was to say, well, look, if people have gotten to college and they're this bad at debating or this afraid of other ideas or alternative approaches to the world, we've got to start solving the problem earlier.
And it seems like we're kind of back in that place again where if this work had been done 10 or 15 years ago, we might have a lot more civility on campuses at the moment.
We might because we don't know how it would actually cash out in the future because so far the assessments have been relatively short term.
We looked at the impact on cognitive attainment and on actual outcome in terms of literacy and numeracy.
I was surprised to discover that there was any evidence of an impact on literacy and numeracy because I can't quite work out what the What the mechanism would be for that short-term gain.
But I guess motivation could be one if it's a valid finding.
Well, the argument could be as well that numeracy follows logic and language to a large degree follows logic.
And so if you teach children how to reason, then they'll find other things easier.
I mean, I remember when I was a kid, studying geometry also seems, you know, you were making a series of logical arguments.
Let's talk about philosophy for children.
We did speculate on that, but we couldn't say from the data we had that that was the reason.
Right.
So philosophy for children, this is something that has been around for quite some time, I guess 30 or 40 years.
And I'm sure, of course, it's been refined, but I wonder if you could help people understand how it is approached, how it is implemented, how the teachers are trained.
Yes, I can try.
Obviously, in some ways, I'm not the best person to do that, because we were employed fundamentally as the evaluators for the system, and we worked with the developers who were the ones that did the training and so on.
But yes, these were primary school.
It was intended as a whole school approach.
So the training days that we saw, and there were days when the school wasn't in operation, what are called in-service training days here, and they included all of the staff, including the administrators, all invited to come along, and either one or two of the members of the organisation running the intervention.
Explain what the intervention was, but actually then put them through the examples.
So they were sitting in talking circles.
They were asked to, you know, move to different parts of the room to defend particular events.
Positions, you know, they were given a question and asked to move around, and then whether particular factors changed it.
And there was a lot of enthusiasm there, and the ones we saw, I don't think it was just because we, the evaluators, were present.
I think they made it fun, and the teachers who were there obviously enjoyed it.
I'm not sure it always cashed out into...
You know, ideal conditions in the classroom.
It's very hard sometimes for primary school teachers or any teacher to give up the control and what this one day was trying to do with resources and text and then visits by the team to the schools to see what's going on.
It's not enough in itself, I think, to overcome that desire to control the classroom.
Because you have to trust the children.
You have to let go.
And there were lots of strategies for how to do this.
But, you know, for example, we saw an example, we saw the novel in a, this was actually a Catholic school, where the teacher concerned was a religious studies teacher, and something came up about the existence of heaven and hell, and the teacher would not allow that to be discussed.
They wouldn't countenance somebody suggesting that, say, heaven and hell did not exist.
And that seemed to me to be inattent on the whole basis of the program.
And that's an extreme example, but you did find that The teacher was still being teachery in a way that perhaps you might not want in ideal conditions.
Well, of course, that is a challenge in teaching philosophical inquiry to children, that it may lead them, as Socrates, of course, found in ancient Greece, it may lead them down a path of questioning that people in authority or people who have authority over them, whether it's teachers or parents or priests, may find discomforting, to put it mildly.
But we saw other examples where Teachers quite clearly were not impressed by the action being put forward, but just allow them to be made and to be met by others in the group, which we thought was exactly how it should be.
So the training went well.
I think the teachers in general were enthusiastic.
But many interventions, once they're tried in the school, there's a momentum back to normal classroom practice, concerns about assessments coming up, perhaps at the end of term there are field trips and so on, so that if something is let go, it tends to be the new boy, the new thing that this was.
So it was generally well implemented, but occasionally you saw that it was given lower priority than, you know, for example, things that the government demand by law.
Yes, a daffodil and a bulldozer have come to mind.
So let's talk a little bit about the study that ran relatively recently, because that's the one thing that really caught my attention and I think would be fascinating to the listeners to this show, which is...
The results that came out of that study, to me, were astounding, amazing, fantastic, exciting, thrilling, and should, I think, reach a much wider audience.
So, what was it that you studied, and how did the data play out?
So, we were doing a randomized trial where we had a large number of schools that were randomly allocated to receive either the P4C, philosophy of children intervention, or to wait.
I mean, we used a waiting list design, so all of the schools were eligible.
We think it's unethical, I think, to do it any other way, or to do it most other ways, so that everybody would get it.
But there was about a year and a half where the schools that were selected at the beginning undertook the philosophy intervention, and we took data and measurements and so on from all of the children in both groups at the start, and obviously, again, at the end, and there's some interim measures.
We were primarily interested in, because of the nature of the funding, the people who funded us, they want to see Does it make a difference to attainment?
You and I would obviously think, well, it might make a difference long term, it should make a difference perhaps to the life, to the citizenship chances of these children.
But the funder was primarily interested in, you know, the bread and butter of, does it make a difference to that?
So we looked at attainment.
We also used the cognitive ability test, the CAT test.
And we were looking, therefore, at the gains, the difference in the gain between the two groups.
And what we found was that...
The differences were all positive towards the philosophy for children group.
We did, of course, have a small amount of attrition, that is cases who drop out, but there were reasonably balance between the two groups, and I don't think it's enough to explain the scale of the difference, particularly in attainment.
I don't want to make you less positive, but you can never guarantee that it was directly the impact of P4C. But we know that that was the major variable of difference between the two groups.
And so it looked as though, to us, that giving up curriculum time that would have been teaching the more factual basis of education for this more general discussion-led approach to learning Certainly didn't reduce the attainment in state-sponsored academic tests.
Look to have increased it.
Unlike previous studies, there was less of a difference in the cognitive ability or cognitive attainment scores.
Previous studies have suggested you can improve them, and indeed you can, but although the improvements were there, they were very small, and they were so small that I wouldn't want to go to the wall defending them as being different from zero.
Now, the cognitive tests, would they be in the sphere or in the realm of IQ tests?
Yes, I suppose to some extent they're like a verbal reasoning test, but it has various components.
But unlike an IQ test which is meant to be some kind of defining characteristic of a person, this is meant to be a measure of their ability to reason and to solve problems in a way that's malleable, that can be taught.
But we did sub-analysis for different types, you know, so verbal reasoning, spatial reasoning and so on.
Because the developers wondered if there were particular types of skills that were coming across.
And again, that wasn't particularly fruitful.
Well, I mean, if it's any consolation, my understanding is that the more G-loaded the tests are, and I assume that these are somewhat G-loaded, general intelligence loaded, the more G-loaded the tests are, the harder it is to budge for.
I mean, you know, America just spent $100 billion or something on the Head Start program.
Which wasn't able to budge intelligence tests much at all, certainly a short term a little bit and then it sort of settled back into the norm.
But what is fascinating about this study is not that it moves the baseline of what the brain is capable of, but it just seems to make the brain much more efficient even in tasks unrelated to the direct philosophical questions at hand.
Yes, so we looked at math, you'd call it reading and writing, and because the...
It looks as though because the intervention involved reading, because there was often stimulus material that would start a session, We're going to discuss the interpretation of or the implications of.
There was this increase in the scores for reading over time for the intervention group.
There was also an increase for maths and for the reasons that you've suggested it could be as a kind of logical and confidence element there.
But there wasn't such a noticeable increase for writing.
But there was no writing element in this.
So again, that for me is some indication that it is due to the nature of the intervention.
I should just say, you were saying don't be too disappointed about the G factor in the IQ test.
We as evaluators can't care too much about whether the thing works or not.
Our concern is primarily to discover whether it does and if we know that it doesn't, at least we can say, well, if your objective is to increase attainment or to increase cognitive ability, cognitive attainment, then this is not the way for you.
And it wouldn't have distressed us too much if it had been that way.
Although I have to say, personally, I'm reasonably pleased that it turned out the other way.
Because it looked like it was an intervention I didn't know about, and it did look a really, really interesting and challenging thing for young people.
Yeah, I mean, as far as I know, the only way to increase G is to choose smarter parents.
That seems to be the only thing that is aware.
Yeah, if you want to become taller, just choose taller parents.
But the point is, if we accept that G is very difficult to budge, then what we want to do is help people work better with the cognitive abilities that they have.
And this is where the program, I think, is very interesting, that the children seem to be pretty enthusiastic about it.
And I vividly remember as a little kid having conversations about death and infinity and what happens when the sun burns out and, you know, just the big picture kind of stuff.
And most of my friends were interested in that as well.
And I don't think we were way off the charts as far as a regular life goes.
So, what...
How is the program implemented?
My understanding is there's a story or there's a video that truth or fairness or bullying, other kinds of epistemological or moral questions are sort of raised and then there is a discussion, there is a challenge to create better arguments, there is a stimulus to build a better sequence of statements.
Is that roughly how the program is implemented?
Although the material would be And the teacher would have a role in selecting what video or storybook or other material they would look at or listen to before they start.
The children would be in a discussion circle.
The classroom would look very different to a normal primary school classroom.
And once that's finished, they would split up in small groups of maybe three or four.
There was normally an exercise that involves them running across to chairs in the other parts of the room.
And the primary purpose of that is to mix them up so they're not sitting in friendship groups and ability groups and things like that.
So it's mixing up the classroom.
They then go into these little groups and think of questions that arise from the stimulus material.
And then they pick, say, one or two that was their favourite in that small group, share it with the larger group, and either the teacher or maybe a scribe will put these up on a board or an interactive whiteboard, and there will then be a blind vote.
So they're asked to...
This is for the very young children.
They're asked to close their eyes, and then the teacher will read out the questions one after the other and count...
How many vote for each?
And they will be sitting there crossing their fingers hoping that the more interesting questions will be voted on.
And because the children don't know who's voting or necessarily whose question it is, you don't get that kind of favouritism you might otherwise have.
And it normally works out well.
I mean, I did see one or two where you could see the teachers, you know, their heart was sinking that it was that one that was picked.
But normally it works really well.
And then it becomes a general discussion.
There are rules for interaction which ought to be kept.
I mean, it's not terribly structured, but we don't want people calling out.
We don't want people putting their hands up because that kind of suggests subservience.
So there's simply a palm out gesture, which means I would like to respond.
And the only reason for the teacher to intervene, because if you like, the baton is passed away, From one speaker to the next, using these palm gestures, is if it looks as though one small group is dominating the discussion.
Because on the one hand, you want everyone to speak.
On the other hand, if you're discussing a topic and then someone introduces something completely different, you might lose the argument.
So the skill of the teacher is in allowing maybe one, two, three, four children to interact in discussion for long enough to get to some agreement or to agree or disagree but without allowing one clique to dominate the situation.
Right.
Does that make sense?
Yes, and it seems that's sort of the marketplace of ideas that we all, you know, those of us who want to bring new ideas to the public sphere are constantly jostling with everybody else who has maybe different ideas or opposing ideas and so on.
So it does sound like that's an interesting way of attempting to recreate some of these sort of marketplace of ideas, gaining people's attention through being interesting or whatever it is.
And so that's actually, I think, fairly good preparation for attempting to influence public life for the better.
I think that's a very, very creative way of approaching it.
But I was surprised because the classes here are quite large.
You know, there were 28 children, perhaps maybe sometimes 30 or 31 children.
There were some of them smaller.
And I would have thought it would work better with a smaller number.
But this is the way the intervention was done.
And yet it did look as though a large number were interacting.
Because they were talking in their small groups.
There were often activities at the very end to end up, to end the situation where they could write their own conclusions or maybe have a vote on a particular contentious issue at the end and decide this is what this class believes.
So everyone did play a role.
And the other part of the teacher, of course, is if there was a Particularly diffident child or a child who had language difficulties or something to make sure that they did get their appropriate share of attention.
I'd be interested to see how it worked with say 12 children in the circle.
It might be worse of course, it might be less exciting and less boisterous.
So You know, my particular goal as somebody who's fascinated by philosophy and loves bringing it to the world is to give people access to philosophical thinking that they probably otherwise would not have gotten and certainly would not have gotten through government schools where you can go for 12 years and never get a course on logic.
One of the things that I found particularly exciting about the outcome of this study was the degree to which the disadvantaged children seemed to benefit even more than the other kids.
Yes.
I mean, technically, the effect size for the children from the poorest families was much less.
Was it twice as large or even?
It's important to remember that those children, in a sense, were not randomized.
I mean, they were, but they weren't specifically randomized.
So the trial was of, you know, those who had the intervention and those who didn't.
So it doesn't quite have the force of a randomized trial, but I think it's powerful evidence that If you wanted to reduce the gap in attainment and in thinking between the disadvantage and the others, then this might be, it's certainly one of the things on the menu as the way to go.
Can I just say, since we did this trial, we've now been funded by two more charitable foundations to continue the work So in a sense, we're now taking the schools that were the controlled schools, the ones who didn't do it in the first wave, who are now taking it up, and then comparing them with another set of schools.
But the outcomes here we're interested in are non-cognitive, largely.
So this extent to which...
I mean, one issue is, does it have any impact on creativity?
Not sure whether it would or not.
But I think more coherently with theory, it could be to do with things like self-reliance, self-esteem, communication skills, sociability, working in a team, things like this.
So we've developed an instrument which we did with the Cabinet Office here in government for another very large trial, and we're using that in these projects to try and see A bit more about the wider outcomes of using philosophy in the classroom.
And I hope this work will carry on.
Yeah, I mean, if you'll indulge me in the tiny rant, it seems one of these things that's self-evident, and it's always great when data hits your self-evident conclusions, which is that, well, what is the human brain for?
The human brain is for thinking.
It's not for memorizing, because there's many machines, computers can memorize much better.
It's not for useless, repetitive tasks.
Robots can do that much better.
Our brain specifically is designed for...
And so the idea that you introduce something into the educational system that aligns perfectly with what the brain is for and that this helps children, it seems to me entirely in line with what I think the brain is in instruction.
You've got also advocates saying in order to reason, in order to be cultured, to be literate, you must have some knowledge as a basis for it.
It's no good doing that on the basis of ignorance.
So things like the core knowledge curriculum, I think it was started in the US, but there are similar things here.
There are even academics in this country advocating that knowledge is not needed anymore because of the internet age.
We've got others saying, no, knowledge is more important than Because it's about understanding.
So interestingly, we did another trial of a core curriculum, which was trying to get disadvantaged children to learn more about history, geography, basic economics and so on, to see if that helped them to be literate, to be more aware and so on.
So you've got almost a tension between those who want a different kind of curriculum with more information and But of a different kind to that in the current sort of maths science approach.
And those who are saying, no, it's more about reasoning.
And presumably you're saying common sense.
The common sense would be you need a little bit of both.
You need some materials to reason with, but you also need the skills to do the reasoning.
You need the vocabulary that the children picked up.
The kind of words you use in reasoning and in logic and in rebuttal, which was really fascinating to see them start using these words and teachers saying they were using them in other areas as well.
They were using them in their science essays and in their English essays.
But you've got that tension, and presumably it's both.
And I suppose the reason that the advocates of philosophy are correct to push for it is that at the moment maybe the pendulum is swung too far towards knowledge and too little towards reasoning.
Well, and of course, as adults, and I would assume that at least preparing people for adulthood has some purpose of pedagogy, but as adults, we pursue knowledge in order to achieve a particular goal.
I mean, we don't just randomly bounce around and read random bits of random books and then assume that we're becoming wise.
We have a particular goal that we wish to achieve, and therefore we pursue knowledge in order to achieve that goal.
Of course, the problem with the educational system in general is that the goals are all externally imposed and you plot along getting the knowledge in order to fulfill somebody else's goal, somebody else's curriculum, somebody else's agenda.
With this, I would assume that the children say, oh, I can have the goal of understanding something about the world, making better decisions in my life, and maybe even influencing other people to think the way that I do.
That motivates children, I think, to pursue knowledge in order to achieve a particular goal.
I recognize that's way outside the scope of what we're talking about, but it was just something that We'd have to follow them through.
The disadvantage of the ethical design we used where everybody gets the intervention but one group gets it a year or a year and a half earlier is that you have no long-term control.
You can't then wait and see what happens when they're 15, when they're 20, when they're 25 and so on.
But there is a scope for that and there is a mechanism that the government has put in place here to track the children who've had these interventions and compare them more generally With a whole range of outcomes with the children who haven't had such interventions.
Now, it's not like a trial, but I think that longitudinal information could be useful in 10, 20 years' time.
Now, sorry, just to clarify, is that to measure the effects of the intervention when the intervention has been for, say, a year or two, or is it if it continues through their educational progress?
Either or both.
So what the researchers are doing is recording what interventions each child...
So we have what's called a national pupil database.
So each child has a record on it, and it follows them through their...
It's not made generally available, but researchers can have access to at least subsets of it.
And it follows the child through their educational career, and it could be then added to that as an item, which interventions they've had in which years and for how long.
And so you've got about 750,000 children in each cohort.
So for each cohort, you've got that many, and you've got millions of children, obviously, over time, which we can see begin to make judgments about the longer-term impacts of interventions, which the impacts tend to reduce over time, obviously, and the differences get smaller because other things intervene.
Well, I mean, it's like anything.
There's always a plateau.
I mean, if I had continued to get as good at tennis as I did over the first few months, I'd rule the court by now.
So I come from an entrepreneurial background, so I'm used to translating things into numbers.
Let me throw some numbers at you and tell me if this analysis makes any sense.
So, as far as I understand it, the average gain for the kids involved in studying this philosophy of children program was about two months' advantage in particular areas.
So, I looked it up.
The average cost for state schools in the UK hits £22,500 per child in 2013.
And that's for about a 10-month school year, I assume, or something like that.
You know, Christmas and all that, but roughly.
Now, the cost...
Was 16 pounds per pupil per year for a school of 240 pupils, the cost of this philosophy for children program.
Now, the way that I would present this if I had the chance to present the cost efficiency thing is I'd say, okay, well, look, you got a 20% gain, more or less, because you got two months out of 10 months advantage.
You got a 20% gain out of 22,500 pounds.
That's 4,500 pounds of value.
For a total cost of 25 to 30 per pupil with the economy at scale 16 pounds, you're spending 16 pounds to gain 4,500 pounds of economic advantage.
Now, if you went to any investor and said, hey, I can turn your 16 pounds into 4,500 pounds worth of value, you'd have a lineup pretty much going around the planet three times.
And that to me is appalling to me that this would not be rolled out in a wider basis when the gains seem pretty clear.
The harm, other than to people's vanity or egos or insecurities or sense of control over the classroom, the harm is non-existent.
The benefit is clear and the fact that it benefits the least advantage of the most helps to, I think, even make that case stronger because isn't that what public education is supposed to do?
Because actually they're often the hardest to shift the scores for.
And in this country we have a policy, a very good policy, called the pupil premium, where schools get extra funding for the level of disadvantage of the children in the school.
And that money is meant to be spent on precisely this kind of thing that would reduce the gap between them and the remainder of them until it's no longer needed.
Interesting, there was a huge jump in the number of schools registering to use Philosophy for Children when the results of the trial came out.
I mean, not to the extent that you perhaps would want or imagine, but the organisers and developers sent us some graphs, which I thought was interesting to see how this had an impact in terms of the schools doing it.
But I mean, again, I don't want to go too far away from your positive approach, but you could consider, first of all, with any trial like this, you're asking schools to participate and to agree that they're willing to forego the philosophy of the children for a year or so if they're unlucky and have to be under control.
So you're dealing with volunteer schools, and they're schools that are strong enough to say, yes, we'd like to do it, but we're willing to wait for a year or a year and a half to do it.
So the score, the effect size you get with this school wouldn't necessarily translate in exactly the same scale to the less reluctant.
So if the government suddenly said, it is now the law that every Friday you will do philosophy for children, In the most reluctant schools, you would expect the effect size to go down and so on.
And the other thing is the cost is obviously the cost of things like the training once it's scaled out for the number of children in the school, using a whole school approach.
It assumes you have the resources to do it.
So there might be...
Are the costs that you would want to introduce into the scheme to buy a slightly different kind of resource to stimulate the children with and so on, you might discover what's more or less appropriate over time.
So I'm not arguing with what you're saying in general, but it could be that the gains are not as remarkable once they were rolled out into wider practice.
Oh, absolutely.
I understand that.
But even if we were to take an extreme example and say that the gains are only going to be 10% in some places, that's still £450 of value for £16 of spending.
Again, that's not a tough sell.
The problem is, of course, the incentive issue where you may spend £16 to gain £4,500 of value, but the £4,500 of saved value doesn't go into anyone's pocket.
And that, of course, it's this socialist problem of incentives and so on.
But the data is compelling enough that I think all educators of good conscience need to follow this.
Because the children who are disadvantaged appear to thrive under this, then in a sense, for me, that overrides the financial thing.
It looks like it's not going to cost money.
It looks like it's not going to cause any damage to attainment.
Standard attainment targets, you know, school performance figures or anything like that.
So, you know, the most negative thing you can say is it's not going to cost anything and it's not going to cause any damage.
And then there's that promise of reducing the attainment gap.
So I think a lot of schools would be prepared to try it.
Well, it's interesting to me that the degree to which when kids talk about bullying, a lot of bullying has to do with class.
A lot of bullying has to do with the advantage or the disadvantage, you know, the kids who come to school in cars and the kids who come to school on the bus.
And so if you can close...
The gap in terms of cognitive achievement and attainment, it also closes the gap which is the biggest invitation to certain forms of bullying.
So it would have such a ripple effect on the entire school culture that, again, to me, if I could fund it for every kid on the planet, I would do it tomorrow.
But that seems to me very, very compelling.
I think the reason for doing it must be...
Also intrinsic to the nature of the intervention, because, you know, as I say, as an evaluator, I've seen and I've read evidence for, but I've also tested other interventions that are much less, perhaps intrinsically interesting, that look to me much more patronising.
You know, the kind of phonics-type interventions for poor readers that were very, very Basic and simple and didn't appear to have rich content.
And yet they were producing similar...
I mean, not everything works.
Some things work, some things don't.
But there are now a range of things you could do with the money from the People Premium that would appear to be able to reduce that gap.
So for me, it's almost like it's an a la carte menu.
If we can be, if we can provide good evidence to schools and practitioners, school leaders, to say, these are the kinds of things that work, they then have to choose from that a la carte menu using cost information.
You know, practicalities and so on, which ones that they would like to use.
And you would think, and I guess you would hope, that philosophy for children would come near the top of their wish list, because if it's giving about the same kind of advantage as some of these others, and yet is so radical in some respects in terms of what education is like, it's more like what education should be, perhaps, then you hope that that's one of the ones they would pick.
Right.
Now, when do you start the next research project and when is it aiming to conclude?
We've already started.
There's one funded by the Nuffield Foundation.
And we're coming up to the post-test.
We call it post-test, but it's a range of measures we're going to use, including surveying all the children who took part.
The post-test is this summer.
And then the results will be coming out in the autumn of this year.
But we're doing another study of a similar kind in North Yorkshire, in the north of England, which is starting as soon as that one ends.
So they kind of end on.
Fantastic.
In each case is piggybacking on the control group from the last one.
So if each group has volunteered to take it out but has agreed kindly to wait, So that they'll act as a control group.
Then they become the intervention group for the next round.
So it's no longer, by the third stage, it's no longer a randomized trial.
It's a matched trial.
But it's a relatively cost-efficient way of looking at this, I think, interesting new idea of non-cognitive outcomes.
Right.
Well, it's fantastic work, and I hope that you'll come back on when the results come out in the fall, because there's almost nothing I won't do to help publicize this kind of information, given how beneficial it is, particularly to disadvantaged children.
What if we discovered that it was damaging to non-cognitive outcomes?
Any trial you do, when you press that button with the results, there's a kind of freesome of excitement, because you genuinely don't know What the outcome is going to be?
What if it suggested that children became less sociable?
Would you still want that?
Absolutely.
Listen, I follow the data wherever it goes and I try to be the man sailing with the winds of fact, so to speak.
So, yeah, I absolutely will want to – whatever information comes out of this is information that I really, really want to get out because, you know, as we all know, the education and wisdom of the children is the foundation upon which the future stability of society is built upon.
So, wherever the data leads, that can help with better educational and thinking outcomes for children or what to avoid.
To me, this is all essential information to get out.
Yeah, we also do what we call a process evaluation.
Obviously, we observe the thing in operation.
We talk to the children, the parents, the practitioners, and so on.
So that if it turned out that any of these things didn't appear to be successful, we would begin to have some idea if there were particular barriers or it was implemented badly and things like this.
Yeah.
So we tend to get an idea of which schools are implementing it well, which not so well, and we can use that not in a randomized trial type analysis, but we can use a kind of dosage analysis to, is there evidence that the progress was greater in the schools that did it in our prior judgment better or had more lessons a week of it?
And that's what the evidence showed for attendance.
And we'll do a similar thing with the non-cognitive outcomes.
Fantastic.
Well, I really, really appreciate the work that you're doing.
We'll link to the study below, and I hope you'll consider coming back with the new data in the fall, which I eagerly await to get my hands on.
