Transcript (This is AI assisted, so mistakes are possible)
Ben: Hey everyone, I'm super excited to be speaking to Daisy Christodoulou. Daisy has written three books on education, including The Seven Myths of Education. She keeps the Substack newsletter at no more marking. Her most recent book is about VAR, or video assisted refereeing in football. Daisy, welcome.
Daisy: Hi Ben, thanks for having me.
Ben: What are the best and worst things about being a West Ham football supporter? Ha ha ha
Daisy: ha ha. The best things are The best things are, for me personally, it's, you know, my family support them, my dad supports them. So going with my dad to the matches is really good fun. We're a really historic and famous club.
We play in the Premier League, which is the biggest global sports league in the world. So you get to go and see every week some of the best footballers in the world. Playing, which is, is really amazing. We won a trophy about 18 months ago, first trophy in a long time, which was really good fun. We have some really great players in the team at the moment.
It's great to go along and watch. What are the worst things? I suppose there's lots of ups and downs. We won a trophy 18 months ago. Since then, maybe things haven't been, haven't been too great. We did have a good win in the week. There's a little bit of discontent about our current playing style and Our last home match, we were not our best, shall we say.
So yeah, ups and downs, I guess a lot of football fans would say the same.
Ben: So did you see, I didn't see, but I read the October West Ham versus Manchester United game. And I was reading there was a last minute penalty decision given to West Ham for a foul in the box, which was given by VAR for video assisted refereeing.
So what did you make of the decision?
Daisy: Yeah, I was at that match, and it was quite a controversial decision, I think, at the time and afterwards. I think afterwards, the referee's chief, he came out and said, actually, they were wrong to give that penalty. You know, the original on field decision was correct. It shouldn't have been overturned.
I have to say, watching it in real time, even though it worked for West Ham, and it meant we got a penalty and we won the game, I did think seeing it in real time and then seeing the replays, it felt different. Quite harsh on Manchester United. I think if that had happened to my side team, I would have been a little bit annoyed.
And I think the general approach this year, which I probably would support is referees, they're trying to use VAR less. And I think that's definitely one way to cut down on the controversy. So they're trying to say, look, you only go and review it if there's a really big error, don't just go and look at it on marginal decisions.
And so the issue with this particular decision is it didn't feel like a really big error. So in that case. you know, shouldn't have been overturned, should have stayed with the, the on field decision. Of course, one of the things I, I sort of write about is what is the line between a really big error and not a really big error, just a kind of medium sized error.
And that's not always that easy to, to, to tell.
Ben: So what do you see as the problems of VAR? You know, you've outlined some of them in the book, but do you see two or three as being particularly problematic at the moment?
Daisy: Yeah. So I think one big issue, which covers kind of handball and offside is Once you apply technological scrutiny to things like handball and offside, it kind of changes the way the law is applied.
So what with handball, what's been really interesting is once you start scrutinizing, We're using slow motion replay, using people to go back and look at things. You suddenly start spotting loads more handballs before. And so you suddenly start giving a lot more fouls, a lot more penalties. And people are saying, hang on, really, that's a penalty.
You know, the ball brushed his hand when it was hit against him from two yards and we're giving a penalty for that. So you're suddenly giving penalties and fouls for things that you would never have done beforehand. And the same time with offside, I think offside before VAR, it was just had to be done by human judgment.
There was a presumption of benefit of doubt in favor of the attacker. In reality, you couldn't precisely measure that benefit of the doubt because it was all being done by the human eye. And now you've just applied a really strict kind of application of it and you've got the, the, the, the reviews.
You're getting much stricter applications offside, which again, I think people aren't happy with. So I think what it's shown is you apply a lot of scrutiny to something. You don't always end up with more clarity. You don't always end up with better outcomes. So scrutiny isn't always the solution.
Ben: Yeah, there's an over, over precision.
Daisy: Yeah, absolutely. And then I think the second issue. So I think the handball and offside sort of sit in one category of being, if you like, quite objective decisions that have still caused a lot of problems. And then you've got another problem with. Things like fouls, where you're getting like, like that Manchester United West Ham example where the fouls aren't objective.
They're relatively subjective. So you can have different referees who, you know, have different, will apply the law in a different way and have a different opinion about what is and is not a foul. And I think you've seen that with you've seen that a lot with, with, with the judgment of fouls and with this, the rule in the first few years was clear and obvious.
with the idea that you could, you should only overturn something if it's clear and clear and obvious error. But unfortunately, a clear and obvious error, that's another subjective judgment. VAR, when it comes to overturning files, it hasn't reduced subjectivity, it's kind of just added another layer of subjectivity in.
So you've now, instead of having one, subjective opinion from one human being, you've basically got two subjective opinions from two human beings, and who is to say actually the second one is any more right than the first? And as we saw in that Manchester United match, you then have a third opinion coming out a couple of days later from the referee chief saying actually no, you know, that, that second one was wrong and the first one was right.
So again, has that actually added to our clarity or has that actually increased the confusion?
Ben: And I was reflecting on your book, and like you say, there seem to be two groups of decisions and a kind of spectrum between them, really. You have a decision which is meant to rely on a physical reality. Did the ball cross a line?
And that would be a simple one. And then you have some decisions which really rely on some form of human judgment, and they interact. For instance, handball, under what I presume are the old rules, is yes, it touched the hand, but was it deliberate? So this idea that there's judgment and the intention has to, has to come into that.
And obviously VAR or video or all of that can't, you know, there's just another layer of judgment that, that you say, particularly on, on that one. And I was really interested in, in seeing that deliberation. And it struck me cause I was looking at some of the surveys and before VAR, There was some surveys which suggested people were quite, fans were quite interested in having it, because they thought, oh, it would settle these decisions.
And then in the last few years, it's been much more mixed as a, as a reception, particularly for people actually in the game. The one sitting at home on TV is also maybe a little bit different. And then I was also reflecting that it seems to be really different in some other sports. So in tennis, VAR is seemingly much more accepted.
I think it's a Hawkeye thing. But it seems to be that most of those decisions lean towards that physical reality. Did the ball hit the line or not? And there isn't a kind of deliberate foul element to it. Whereas actually in football, there's more judgment and there's a kind of different set of, of flow.
I was, I was interested in whether those two things are kind of how you would also see it. And you also have some solutions about what you, Might want to do deal with this. So I thought you'd talk about your view on it and whether you think proposed solutions for this challenge.
Daisy: Yeah. So I think you're right.
There's, there's different categories of decisions. There's ones that are objective or more objective, and there's ones that are more subjective. And I think when technology was first introduced to football, it was goal line technology. It was introduced in about 2013 and it was the same Hawkeye technology that's used in tennis and in cricket.
And it was used to tell if the board would cross the line or not. And I think by and large, most football fans would say that works really well. And it does eliminate a problem, it eliminates that problem of the referee just not being able to see what's going on. Just literally cannot see if the ball has crossed the line or not.
Hawkeye is automated, so it will send a message, I think, to the referee's watch. So the referee will instantly know if the ball has crossed the line or not. And then the referee can award a goal or not, as the case may be. And that, as I say, came in 2013, I think works pretty smoothly. And I think people were hoping that VAR would just be the next level.
you could introduce it and it would be as smooth and operate as well as, as, as the goal line technology. And I think it hasn't because a lot of the other decisions in football are not as straightforward or as clear cut as has the one across the line or not. So obviously the fouls are at the other extreme, they're just more subjective.
And you can, you can just debate them. And again, actually having endless debates about it doesn't necessarily help. Like maybe we just need to have someone on the pitch, make the decision and we move on. But I think the decision where I think we're all probably a bit surprised by just how controversial it has been and how it hasn't helped is offside.
Because offside felt like another decision that was very similar to, to the goal line decisions. It, you know, it felt like the kind of binary yes or no answer, which humans find it very difficult to judge. And technology is just tailor made to solve the problem. And so I think all of us, I certainly thought that technology would be a brilliant solution for offside.
And I think the weirdest thing of VAR has been that it's actually ended up potentially being the most controversial aspect of VAR. So that's something I think a lot of us didn't anticipate. So yes, you're right to say there's a kind of a bit of a subjective objective distinction, but even, even the more objective decisions.
have actually ended up causing controversy.
Ben: And do you think that's maybe a reflection of the fact that we might need to re look at the offside law within that? Or do you think it's a problem of technology? And I kind of think it's interesting also you reflect on a couple of elements which I'm going to put under the flow of the game and the spirit of the lore, which I kind of think intersect with all of that in terms of, you'd want technology to help both of those aspects as well as get correct decisions, and you kind of want the rules of your game also to help those, those kind of things in spirit, and they all seem to interact, so I'd be interested in your reflections on that.
Daisy: Yeah, so I think, why hasn't offside worked, take that one first I think Why it hasn't worked is it's again a general issue I think with all technology when you apply all the cases we apply technology to sport is that most of the rules of sport were laid down in a pre technological era. So not just in a pre VAR era, but in an era before you even had video replays at all, or TV.
So a lot of these rules are laid down, the bare bones of them, in the mid 19th century. The off siders rule as we have it, I think, was adapted in 1925 or 26. But, you know, the origins of it are like the 18, 1860s, 1870s. And it kind of is designed as an impressionistic law. It's designed to be yeah, the ref, you know, obviously you know a human being's making that, and you're just trying to get him to make a judgment.
And then, over time, the offside rule has been liberalized. And a lot of people will tell you that the liberalization of the offside rule has probably led to, over the last 30 years in particular, So making the offside more friendlier for the attacker has led to probably more attacking football, more goals, more creative football.
There's probably even some quite subtle second order effects where it's led to play being expanded in the middle of the field. There's a persuasive argument that it's allowed for the development of, of, you know, high quality Guardiola's Barcelona and Spain and Manchester City, because it expands the space available in the middle of the park and it stops Defenders pushing up and, and narrowing, compressing band, you know, 20 or 30 yards either side of the halfway line.
So there's all these very subtle kind of things going on offside. And as I say, it was a purely impressionistic, you know, being, being judged in this very impressionistic human way that couldn't be precise. And so then what you've had is you've had this pre, pre technology rule, and then you've come in and applied a really precise technology to measuring it.
And as I say, it's just up, it's changed the way that law has been interpreted. And it's led to, I think, more offsides being given and offsides that people would never have noticed before, like the tiny kind of toenail or dreadlock offsides. Which would never have been given before. And there actually is an analogy with other sports, where you've applied technology and it's changed the game.
So in cricket, they brought in Hawkeye to judge LBW decisions, and it's led to spinners in particular getting more LBW decisions. But what's interesting there is there haven't been as many complaints, because this is, this moves into your next point you made about the spirit of the law, which is that, Even though in both cases, the technology has had a really big unintended consequences, unintended consequence, which was not the intention of the people bringing it in.
In cricket, people are fine with that because they think it's made the game better. And in football, they're not fine with it because they think it's made the game worse. And so in terms of making the game better or worse, I think there is a sense in cricket and in football, in all sports, you want to see skill rewarded.
And what you're seeing with more leg before wicket decisions being given is you're seeing the skill of the spinner being rewarded in a way that kind of feels fair and consistent. And it's actually stopped some of the sort of ways that batsmen used to really kind of have a little work around to avoid getting out of LBW.
They used to stride down the pitch with their pad and that would mean they couldn't be given out. And that didn't feel very fair. So the technology's kind of supported skill, it's gone with, I think, what most fans want to see, whereas I think with football it's gone the other way, and you're now getting, I think, I quote Roy Hodgson in the book as saying, you're getting very skillful moments that are completely in keeping with the traditions and the spirit of the game, being ruled out for incredibly tiny infringements.
Yeah. And it's already very hard to score a goal in football. And I talk about this in the book. It's maybe one of the factors in the success of football, that it is hard to score a goal. But you don't, you know, we probably got the balance right where we were. You don't necessarily want to be making it hard.
You don't necessarily want to have very skilful moments being ruled out for offside. I think all of those things are the reason why it's been trickier in football. It just hasn't, the unintended consequence has been bad. It's not been what we wanted.
Ben: I think that seems really fair. I, because I was thinking of another example just because of the Olympics it's the only time I watch it, is Taekwondo, where it's actually become a real part of the game, but there's a sense of fairness.
It's they can look at it. Did it hit the head?
Yeah.
Ben: Which is usually a skillful moment. And if it did in the, in the referee missed it, then actually we can reward it and there's limits and things like that. I wasn't aware of the cricket analogy on LBW, but I can see that rewarded for, for, you know, Yeah, for spin.
It's also rewarded in that as favor. But I guess there's that other element you talk about is actually in football. It seems to interfere with the flow of the game, particularly I think if you're watching it in person. Yeah. Whereas I guess cricket's a little bit more episodic anyway. So you've got, you know, you know, you bowl in and you, things like that.
And I guess even in Taekwondo, whether I think there are a little bit of thinking, all does it. Does it offset the rhythm of the game? They have a certain rhythm anyway, and actually the fighters don't mind having a tiny little bit of a break. So it kind of works slightly in their favor on, on the fitness part.
Whereas actually in football, all you're doing is kind of waiting around. And so if you had a movement or there was a certain rhythm to the game, it resets that, which, which probably puts it I guess against the team which has got some sort of momentum anyway, so I'm not sure about that. But it seems that fans don't like it.
Daisy: Yeah, I think it's, I think there's a couple of issues. So I think one fundamental issue, which is kind of hard to overcome, is that football is just fundamentally a very fluid and a very spontaneous game with very few natural breaks. And that makes it very different from cricket and tennis. where you've got these successful examples of being used, and as you say, probably taekwondo and other sports as well.
Certainly very different from American football, where there's lots of frequent breaks. So that's one kind of fundamental factor that I think is always going to make it hard in football, that you just don't have the natural pause. And so you're, you're inserting a pause that isn't natural into the game.
I think there's another issue which is where it has been badly managed and badly implemented, which is the in game experience for fans is not great. And this is partly a little bit of a hangover of other issues to do with football. So football's always a little bit uneasy about showing in grand replays because they're worried that it will just, if you show, show an error, then it flat fans will go crazy and you know, it'll inflame people.
So it, it, it's, that's, that's kind of one prior issue, but I would say I watch a lot of cricket live as well as football. And. When the technology was introduced with Cricket, the actual in game experience for the fam is quite good. They would show it on the big screen, you could turn around, you could see the replay, you could see what the umpire was seeing you could hear the audio, if you, if you, you know, you can have that as well, and and they flash up the little graphic for the LBWs of the three red lights, and you, so you, you really know what's going on.
And of ways it added something to the, to the game, both at home on TV and in the ground. And it added, you know, the sense of there would be that moment you, you did lose the spontaneous moment of celebrating a wicket in the moment, but you kind of gained because you got to see it on the screen and there was a moment where you could all see what happened and you could cheer or what have you.
I think with football, as I say, watching a lot of football live too, the first thing that really hit me was just, I just didn't know what was going on. And again, compared to that example with cricket, it just felt like you were, you were just really confused. So I was at the first match in the Premier League in 2019 where it was used and it was Raheem Sterling was given offside against West Ham so he set up a goal and then they went back and checked it and nobody really knew what was going on.
You know, so things aren't flashed up on the big screen, you don't see the replay, you don't see the deliberations, you don't hear anything. They've chosen now to start releasing some of the audio after the event. But, you know, that's not the same. And they've done something now this season where they release a little typed explanation of why that decision was made about 15 minutes after.
And again, you know, that is not, to give that cricket example, that is not, oh, we've got the three red lights, the third red lights go, we can all cheer. It's nothing like that. There's a lot of confusion. And you get a situation where, you know, there'll be people in the ground who are texting people at home to find out what's going on.
And you're like what is the point? Who is the game for? And this is obviously where you get into bigger issues about modern football. Is the game for fans in the ground or is it for the much, much, much bigger TV audiences watching at home in almost every country in the world? And that's a challenge football grapples with in lots of different ways, not just VAR.
Ben: It sounds like you should become a part time football advisor for this Little period because I think you suggested maybe let's have a pause. Let's have a moratorium Let's gather things and get expert opinion and fan opinion say Where has it improved both the spirit of the game, you know? And I think like you say they probably go back to at the minimum the hawkeye for out of bounds decisions and goal decisions and maybe there can be a little bit more of a debate you're right The interesting thing is is one on the off side and I've seen some of those but where it's so close And you kind of feel like well You know, who could really tell it's only going to be, it's only going to be the computer.
Was also really interested reflecting on it. And I think you, you mentioned this as well at the really high level. One of the reasons I think sports are really interesting and particularly football is it seems to reflect a lot of what goes on around humanity, what humans think, creativity, how modernism goes and things.
And on one level, the reading of your book on VAR argues for these kind of limits. Of rationalism, maybe limits of technology. And I think that's a really interesting backdrop because if you take it out to the wider world, there's a lot of debate on how far we go with utilitarian thinking, how far we go with cost benefit analysis.
And even, I guess, in your kind of other day job world, quantitative marking versus a kind of human judgment element. So I guess bringing it all together, where do you see the limits of, of Rationalism. And is it a limit of rationalism or is it a limit of technology or where human judgment is? And how do we best figure out where we should draw the line or how we should move the line with time?
Daisy: Yeah, absolutely. So there's lots of big issues there. So I think one is when you have a very rational and very, I call it in the book, I talk about the difference in the letter of the law, the spirit of the law. You have a very rational, very precise, very letter of the law kind of system that maybe can be applied by, by computer.
I think the problem with that is it sometimes misses some nuance, it misses, it can be a bit bloodless, it can be, it kind of tramples over some of the, you know, the qualities of something that make it what it is. And again, I think the handball, the handball decisions are a really good example of that.
You've applied this very cut and dried letter of the law approach where you've said, it touches the hand, effectively, it's offside. We're going to take away any human judgment about whether it was deliberate or not. And you just opened up a huge can of worms. And, and caused all kinds of problems and actually, you know, the past five years have been so much backtracking and rewriting of the law and what have you to, to kind of try and deal with what they've, what they've unleashed.
So I think in that sense, it has been a case study in some of the limits of, of rationalism and some of the problems with just trying to apply very hard and fast cut and dried rules. But obviously, You can't live a world without rationalism either. And I talk about the limits of the spirit of the law approach, so a more impressionistic approach, as I say, where you're trying to take into account common sense and have a bit of discretion.
Those systems aren't perfect either. They result in a lot of inconsistency, they can end up with bias, they're very hard to scale up and you can just end up with something that looks very, very different. There's this, you know, as I say, the lack of consistency there. So they both sort of have their tensions, and I think you can see these tensions in lots of fields, and there's lots of fields that have to try and reconcile them in one way or another.
And one of the things I talk about in the book is you're always looking at trade offs. So a big thing I talk about in the book is we have to get away from the search for perfection. So I talk a lot about trade offs in other walks of life. I talk about trade offs in an area a lot about with evolution.
So I quote from an evolutionary scientist who talks about, you know, in evolution we could have the amazing long distance vision of an eagle at the cost of not having very good color vision. You know, everything in life, you're sort of trading off on different metrics. And one of the things I say is, I think what we've gone for with VAR is we've tried to maximize, we've tried to dial, turn the dial right up on accuracy.
And before VAR was introduced, you would hear a lot of fans, managers, players, they would say, we just want more right decisions. We just want more right decisions. You know, VAR became this accuracy maximizing kind of system. And then all of a sudden you realized once VAR came along, actually, we don't just care about accuracy.
You know, just like maybe, you know, with eyesight, actually, we don't just care about long distance. Actually, we care about the color vision too. Actually, can you plug some of that back in? And what we realized with VAR is we don't just care about accuracy. And I quote Rio Ferdinand saying this from the very early days of VAR.
He said, actually, simplicity matters too. You can't get carried away spending five minutes on a decision, because one of the things that people like about football is it is simple to understand. So there's all these other things that suddenly we're realizing, oh, actually, maybe it isn't just about accuracy.
So we need to think of the trade offs and maybe two dials, maybe more than two dials, you know, series of dials. And we've got a series of factors that are going into our optimization curve. And this is where you can have rationality to work out how much rationality you want. Yeah. And I talk about this and some people won't like this either.
Some people say let's just stick with the old way. There'll be errors, there'll be mistakes. It will be inconsistent. It might be biased. Get on with it. And I talk about other ways we can maybe start to think in a more mathematical, rational way with the, but the acceptance that you can't maximize for rationality, if you like, and, and, you know, to think about like an optimization curve.
And I say, one of the problems with VAR is it promised greater accuracy. And it's ended up you haven't really got the greater accuracy and you've lost other important things too. So you've ended up with the worst of both worlds. You know, you haven't maximized on any of your, of your values. And so what you want to try and do is to, is to try and get something where you've got a, you know, some level of consistency.
You've also got some room for discretion to get the best of both worlds. We've ended up, I think, with the worst of both worlds. And the analogy I give there is, is racehorses. So another one from evolution. Races have been bred over time again and again, again for speed. And their bones, essentially, if you read them for speed, their bones, their bone density gets, gets, you know, gets, their bones get lighter and, and then they get faster.
And then obviously, but you're approaching cliff edge, right? And then you get to that cliff edge and their bones are so light, they break. So you can optimize, optimize, optimize, bang, and then you end up with nothing. Right. And I think that's kind of where things have ended up with our, we've ended up with nothing.
So what I'm saying is we need to try to strike the sweet spot between all the values we're interested in. We don't want to get to a position where the game's bones break. Yeah, that's my, that's my analogy.
Ben: And you argue it very well in your book. So if you Given a magic wand and you could change anything about football.
In fact, you can change some of the rules or anything else if you like as well. What, you know, one, two or three things would you change about football today?
Daisy: I would, as I say in the book, I'd like to pause VAR, I'd like to do some trials around different ways of doing it. I would love to just, you know, kind of a lower stakes league or competition.
And actually they are doing this at the minute and I'm really intrigued to see how it works out. I'd love to trial a player challenge system in football. Because one of the things I write about in the book is that player challenge, you've got it in cricket, you've got it in tennis, although tennis, I think now is moving to a fully automated system.
But in cricket, you've got a player challenge system. And again, what's weird about this is player challenge doesn't necessarily really need some more right, lead to more right decisions. So there are lots of examples of players who make challenges that are just wrong. Like players are worse than umpires at making decisions, right?
But again, this comes back to, do we actually want more right decisions? People are happy with it, with the system. Like everyone's yeah, okay, fine. It works. We move on. And so I find it really weird that a system that has probably not really optimized for accuracy has got acceptance. Whereas VAR is more optimized for accuracy, but hasn't.
And so I'd be really intrigued to see, can you make a player challenge system work in football, given the constraint of it being a very fluid game with fewer natural breaks in play? And actually, I found out recently that they are trialing this in a couple of FIFA youth tournaments women's tournaments, I think.
So I'd be really interested to see how that goes.
Ben: Oh, yeah, that would be interesting. It's interesting looking at, A couple of other sports, I'm just thinking back to the Olympics. Taekwondo is quite interesting because it's your coach who makes the challenge, although the player can indicate to the coach.
But
Ben: one of the nice things about that, it just shows the importance of the fact that it's a kind of team, that, you know, the coach is really important within it, and they're having a different view. And I think they are slightly more often right than not, but they're not right all the time. And actually, they use it for different tactics as well.
But then I was also thinking of I remember the the Clay Pigeon Shooter, I can't quite, Skeets I think they call it, and when she saw it, and in fact a lot of people in the audience saw it, but it didn't register but then she was just really sporting, or at least in the interview she said, you know, that sport, it happens, some decisions go with you and some not, and so that kind of felt you know, some uber spirit spirit of all of that.
Maybe that's a good pivot to thinking about rationality and challenges to your other hat you wear, which is within education. And maybe you'll ask the same question within that, although maybe it's a, it's a, it's a bigger one or not. And if you had a magic wand and you wanted to reform, you know, a few things about education, I'll, I'll keep it simple by just saying maybe education in England, although you could tackle the world if you want.
Africa, US or something else. But if you had your magic wand around education you know, what would you do what would you do for that?
Daisy: Yeah. So this is another interesting one. This is another big trade offs one. If you were just giving me a blank sheet of paper to design the perfect kind of, you know, school curriculum and assessment system, I'd have all kinds of crazy ideas.
But we don't work in that world. No one ever works in that world. You always are working with what's gone before. With the reality of the system that you inherit and particularly in the UK at the moment and there's a curriculum assessment review going on in England at the moment. And one of the issues I think with it is is there are big issues at the minute in England with recruitment and retention of teachers, big issues around workload.
There's an SEN crisis. Students being diagnosed with SCN and not the support to, to, to, to help them with that. And so you're in a situation where, let's imagine again, you designed the perfect system on paper, but it was so complicated that even more teachers left, experienced teachers. Is that then the perfect system?
It's obviously it's not, is it? You know, again, you've traded off too much. So my thing at the minute is I think the English system, obviously it's not perfect. No system is perfect, but I would say there probably needs to be a few, some incremental, improvements as opposed to kind of massive wholesale reform, because I think you have to recognize where the system is.
I think one incremental improvement I'd really like to see, and it's part of my day job, is the way that writing is assessed at primary. at age 11. So I think the current system has a lot of issues, a bit like what I talked about with the handball and VAR in that you've got these rules, these very pernickety rules that are applied very precisely and don't really give you the outcome that you're maybe hoping for.
And that's one of the reasons I got interested in thinking about handball because of the day job, the work I do in writing assessment. So I'd love to see a bit of a change there. I think that would be really good. And the technique that I use in my day job, we use a technique for assessing writing called comparative judgment, which I also talk about in my book about VAR, because I think you could use it to measure fouls.
It's essentially a method of using aggregated, combined human judgments. So combining together lots and lots and lots of human judgments to come up with a more robust decision about something. And by having thousands, tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of human judgments, you're able to kind of cancel out the errors and the bias within them.
I'd like to see a bit more of that for writing assessment, and I'd like to see a bit more of that in football. A couple of other kind of smaller things. Again, another thing I talk about in the, the VAR book, which I think is relevant to, to assessment in England I, I am not a huge fan of grades.
So I, I do like assessment and I like kind of scaled scores and robust measures, but grades are essentially they're lines that are drawn on top of a continuous distribution. So a grade, you're just chopping up a continuous distribution of attainment into quite arbitrary chunks. And the problem with that is it's quite distorting.
And I talk about this actually with FAO's and the clear and obvious issues you've had with VAR. About what is a clear and obvious error. It's unfortunate there isn't a hard, a hard and fast dividing line between clear and obvious, not clear and obvious, there isn't a hard and fast dividing line between foul, not foul, there's probably a distribution of fouls, and then we draw an arbitrary line.
slightly messy, fuzzy line and say if you're on the one side of it, it's not a thousand, the other side it is. And that's all a grade is. A grade is a line, a fuzzy line on a, on a continuous distribution. And the problem with this in assessment terms is that you have students who have very, very similar scores and very, very similar attainment profiles, but if the line kind of splits them, they're just either side of it, they get given a different label.
And that actually causes all kinds of real world practical issues. So wherever possible, I would prefer assessment results to be reported as some kind of scout score rather than a grade. And at GCSE, there are nine grades. So the problem isn't quite as acute because nine grades is quite a lot, but at primary there's three grades and three grades is like the worst number and everyone just treats it as bottom, middle, top.
So kids get put into these three categories and they come to kind of, you know, label who they are, bottom, middle, top, and there's just so much imprecision there that causes so many problems. So I'd love to kind of move away from that. I think that would be something that would be a relatively light touch tweak that could have, you know, positive benefits.
Ben: I didn't think about it in that way. That seems really sensible observation. And maybe I've got some reflections on the pros and cons of streaming with that as well. I go back to one of your earlier reflections and try and loop it all together. I think that's really right about, you know, we've been path dependent with the system that we have.
I tell this a lot of people who, so my mom's from Singapore and there's a lot of people say, Oh, we can do it this Singapore way. And I said You can't because Singapore have got this path dependent thing and actually there's a lot of cultural aspects. So in schools, Singapore schools don't have any sort of same problems that we might have with mobile phones.
Because if you're caught using a mobile phone in an inappropriate way in a Singapore school, you will lose your phone, your parents will back it up, and everyone will think you're a real punker for doing it. You don't get that same cultural element. I'm, I just use it as a silly example. And that, and it counts in health all over.
So we think, Oh, let's do the Singapore system. Wow. If you thought like Singapore and you were a city state, maybe you could, but England England is not like that. I think that's a
Daisy: hugely, hugely important point you make. And I think path dependency is a concept that, yeah, needs to be better known.
My favorite example, actually my favorite example of path dependency is English spelling. So English spelling is a complete nightmare. If you were designing English spelling now, you would not design it to be anything like what you have. But it's, if, if we revised it now on a more rational and sensible basis, again, limits of rationality, you would then be in a situation where it would be incredibly hard to read anything written before that year zero.
So you would lose access to all of that kind of, 1, 000, 1, 500 years, whatever, you know, how much, how much writing you would, you would lose. So I mean, maybe less than that, if you look at some modern English, but you would, you would lose touch with a solid few centuries of writing. You would make it much, much harder to access that.
And you would have huge transaction costs switching from one method to the other. It would just be, be crazy. Right? So path dependency is we have to put up with the letters, you've probably seen that funny, funny thing that you can, you can spell the word fish, G H O T I because of the different ways that all those, all those letters can be pronounced.
And so we're stuck with that. You know, unfortunately we're stuck with having to teach students a very irrational code. That you would never have done if you had designed in the first place. And you can see those path dependencies in every part of a nation's policy. And so the corollary to the sort of path dependencies, you can't cherry pick.
So you're absolutely right, I think there's lots of things to admire about the Singaporean education system. I don't think you can just pick out, kind of, certain things that you like and go, right, we'll plonk them into England. Because those things exist within a whole network of history and policy, and often quite unspoken assumptions.
And that's a good example, if you want, about the mobile phone. But there's loads of these, and I say the same as well, people talk a lot about Finland, and Finland having a great education system, we should copy what they do. And a number of issues with that, one is that actually, almost as soon as people started saying this, Finland actually started to slip down the international league tables, that was one issue.
But another issue is that, again, you look at the history of Finland's education and Finland as a country, and it's got an issue where teachers are very highly regarded. It's a very prestigious job. It's a small country. It's a small country where the role of teachers and, and the role of teachers in the winter war against Russia was, it was a really big deal.
The sort of aspects of people identifying their national culture and, you know, one of the key aspects in their modern history, all of these things are kind of bound up with their education system and the role of teachers. How can you possibly kind of import that into, into England? You can't. And there's another issue too with a lot of countries that have good education, it's often quite small.
Yeah.
Daisy: And I think there's something as well about reform processes in smaller countries. There are probably things you can do when you can get all of your secondary heads into a pretty big auditorium. That you can't do when your country is bigger than that. And again, these seem I think to a lot of reformers, I can seem really like I'm just nitpicking here.
But these are big issues. These are really big issues. And yeah, you know, you have to look at a whole system and its whole context. Rather than just trying to pick things out and plonk them in.
Ben: That's absolutely right. Particularly with Singapore, there's things to do with scale, there's things to do with culture, path dependency.
We need a new, some social science, some interdisciplinary social science, which looks at things like path dependency and trade offs, football and education. Some sort of historic things going on. This is, this is the way, this is the way we should do it. So I was thinking back to your book on seven myths of education.
I was interested if the weighting of anything that you wrote then has changed today, because I think it's maybe a decade a while you wrote it. I'm guessing, I'm guessing not. And I'm going to quickly go over some of them. You know, one was about this fact, you know, knowledge based knowledge, rich sort of curriculums, prevention, preventing understanding that on, on skills, teacher led instruction being passive.
The fact that 21st century will say technology changes everything the kind of, you can always look it up, just look up Wikipedia or AI. This thing about too much emphasis on transferable skills, whatever that's meant to be. And we've already alluded to the fact that a lot of these things are much more intersectional than you think.
And that projects being the best way to learn. And then I guess one, which is kind of political or that teaching knowledge is meant to be indoctrination. I particularly, I guess on the first one on this knowledge based or knowledge rich understanding. I think that still definitely seems to be holding up.
Would you put the emphasis on any of the others differently or would you call out that? Because I think, you know, I would just look at it from afar. Not everyone, but I think a lot of systems have tilted a little bit back towards a kind of knowledge rich curriculum if they had strayed towards this kind of skills idea, although, although not everywhere.
But I'd be interested in your view. Would you put anything emphasis or would you, would you put something else kind of different in that, in that list today?
Daisy: Yeah. So just for a bit of context, yeah, I wrote the book 10 years ago. I was, I, I was writing about how knowledge was important and how knowledge had been a bit downgraded in education.
And I was making the case for the value of knowledge. And that you can't have a skills based curriculum because of the nature of the relationship between knowledge and skills. I think when I wrote that 10 years ago in England, it was a controversial book. You can see from some of the reviews I had at the time people didn't like it I think 10, 15 years ago, knowledge was a bit of a dirty word.
It was seen as something very passive, very low value, very, you know, something that you had to kind of, if you did anything with it at all, you whisper it very quickly to get onto the higher order skills. And that was the thing I took out in the book, the idea of lower order knowledge and higher order skills.
I think things have changed a bit in England in the last 10 years. So the, the, the, I think you can now have more of a conversation about knowledge. There's more things are known about cognitive psychology and cognitive science, which I write about as, as well. So I think the, the, The debate has moved on a bit.
I would say globally, though. And, and outside of the sort of niche English education policy world, I think there's still a lot of lazy tropes around. I think the one that I would, of the seven chapters in my book, each one's in with a different myth. The one that I just come back to again and again, it feels like banging my head against the wall is I think it's number four.
It's you can always just look it up. So this is something I think that goes beyond education. It's just a, an idea that people have about the world that now we've all got a smartphone in our pocket. We no longer need to know anything. And, and the latest kind of iteration of that is we've all got, we haven't just got Google, we've got chat GPT.
So we, we don't just have to Google it, we can chat GPT it. And what I try to show in the book is this is not actually necessarily a technology issue. There's an issue to do with the limitations of our cognitive architecture, which is that we have a very limited working memory that can only handle certain number of new items at any one time.
So whatever kind of fire hose of information is being thrown at you by Google or chat GPT, however easy that information is to access, you have still got this very narrow pipe that you can get that information into, into your mind. And you still need in order to make sense of it, all of the information you have stored in long term memory.
So there's quite a lot of paradoxes here. It's that in order to make sense of something you see on Google, or indeed in order to construct a decent Google query, you need to have already a lot of information in long term memory to help you do that effectively. And actually Google and Chatterjee are not going to be the most effective ways of acquiring that information in the first place.
So in order to gain knowledge, you kind of need some knowledge to begin with. You can't just set students off on independent inquiries to learn everything for they need from, from, from Google. And I think actually in the last few years, we have started to see more and more people are realizing the problem.
If you just let people go off and do their own research and, and, and where they end up in the rabbit holes, they can end up in. Yeah, I think the point I'm, I'm if I was gonna, you know, maybe I'll, maybe I'll do a second edition of Seven Myths About Education. I, I, I might, might try and update that chapter and, and just try and press home a bit further and update it to include some bits about AI.
I
Ben: mean, it is remarkable as a kind of, again, a far observation about how knowledge from certain domains this is more just kind of in research don't really filter in or the people who can make these kind of comparisons, kind of like you have done with, with football and, and education, it doesn't seem to be prevalent.
So one thing I think, and I think you, you talked about this cause it's very well known in cognitive science is around, you know, spaced repetition, you know, putting things into long term memory.
And as
Ben: far as I know, I don't know, do, do they teach that to teachers or is it like a, a common practice within learning?
Cause it still seems to me niche when I kind of talk about it to people and, you know, there's efforts and things around it, but there definitely seem to be cognitive techniques, which are known within cognitive science, but don't seem to have passed through yet. And maybe we can say this a about education.
Pedagogy as well. And the fact that a lot of these debates kind of within education, you know, listening to your sort of history of education podcast as well, kind of go back maybe hundreds of years, maybe even a couple of thousand years back to the Greeks who had some of these debates as well. Yeah.
So I was interested in your reflection on both, both maybe space repetition and, and how much these arguments have been around for such a long time.
Daisy: Absolutely. So I think on the, yeah, the issue of the space repetition, the cognitive science, this is something I talk about a lot in my book, that we know more now about how the human mind works than ever before.
And perhaps in the last 50 years we've, we've learned so much. And yet a lot of that knowledge isn't necessarily well known in schools or well known by students or even by teachers or in teacher training colleges. I think that is starting to change in England, but I think it's fragmented. I think back in 2014, I was on a government review of initial teacher training.
Which you know, flagged up that there were some issues around kind of, you know, that, that, that evidence being taught in teacher training colleges. I'm not sure how much better things are now. They, they, they, you know, maybe a little bit better, but I think it is patchy. I think across the profession in England, you have got greater awareness of things like retrieval, practice space, repetition, things like that.
Which I think is a good thing. I think there's greater awareness, whether that means everything's being implemented effectively all the time, you know, that's not the same thing as, as greater awareness, but the greater awareness is definitely a start. And there's all kinds of issues as well with, with students and their understanding of, of how they learn.
So I think there's a famous study. What, what do students do to revise their favorite, their favorite revision strategy is rereading and highlighting. And, and, and that's the least effective revision strategy. And I'll always remember seeing students revise and having their binder full of notes and pages that were, there were more words highlighted than weren't.
You think what, what is the value of this? Where is, how is this helping? You're going for it with a nice yellow yellow highlighter. And the most effective strategies are self quizzing, flashcards, spaced repetition. And often students don't know about those. The other thing is they can often be quite hard to set up.
And I think, again, in defense of the students as well, we don't often help them necessarily, not just in terms of what we tell them, but also the structures and the rhythm of a curriculum. So I think that's probably one of the challenges for teachers and students implementing new ideas, is it isn't often as simple as saying, our spaced repetition is amazing, you should all be doing it.
To do spaced repetition properly probably needs completely revamping your curriculum, completely revamping the kind of tests you set, completely revamping how you teach. It's not as simple as saying, I'll do some spaced repetition tonight. So these things, once you, you know, get into them, they're not, they're not always straightforward.
Ben: Yeah, not exactly. If you're doing spaced repetition, you know, really well, you need to come back to an idea maybe two months later or three months later, you know, in short doses. And that's obviously not how curriculums are designed to set up. You know, you do a module and you kind of go on this kind of back and forth and interlinking.
Daisy: And the typical sort of school test, I think typically students want to go away and they want to study for a test in four days time, and they want to cram what they need to know for that test and then, and then forget it. And actually, if you want to remember something for the long term with spaced repetition, you need to be revisiting it on that spaced repetition schedule, potentially over a very long period of time.
So reviewing it more in the early days, but continuing to review it as time goes on. Yeah, if you just cram, if you've got three hours to spend learning something and you cram them into one three hour block, that is not going to be as effective as splitting it into six, just for argument's sake, six 30 minute blocks spread over maybe six months.
Right. So you want to try and try and try and space things out more.
Ben: That makes sense. A couple of perhaps more niche thoughts or questions I had. Cause I thought you'd been expert on this. School buildings. How important is the place where you study? Obviously you need to have you know, a minimum standard, I would imagine.
But then how much, how important it is to go further? And I guess just from far observations, you know, there are these sense of when you think about large public buildings, you know, Not only is there kind of the actual immunity So does the thing work and does it work? But these ideas of civic pride is it a nice place to work in?
Does it make you feel good those things which interestingness of a judgment thing are probably hard to put in in quantitative things And I guess in in in england, but Broadly, there is this debate about how much money we should spend on on buildings and schools and the like. So i'd be interested to see like how important a factor that the kind of building or the place you're working in or teaching in is versus all this other pedagogy and i'm sure they interact but i'd be interested in your view
Daisy: Yeah.
So I think buildings are very important. They obviously are. But I think, as you say, you tease out a little bit there, some of the issues around why we think they're important. So if you have a fantastic school building that makes the students very happy, that makes the teachers very happy, that makes the teachers want to stay and work there and not want to leave, and it helps the students live healthy lives, but it doesn't really improve attainment.
Does that mean the buildings don't matter? So I would say no. If, if the buildings are doing all those other nice things. And the Civic Pride that you talked about and their community hubs and, you know, all kinds of features going on. If they do all those lovely things, then I would say that's a good in and of itself.
And you can see it as analogous to having a nice library in the town or having a nice, you know, a nice community center. So I think there's a section of having a nice building, it's just a good in and of itself, and it doesn't necessarily have to be justified beyond that. But I do think there are ways in which buildings can help or hinder learning, and given that we want them to be places of learning, we should probably think about the kind of things that do help learning.
And again, when we have to make the decisions and we have the trade offs, we should go in favour of the things that help learning. To what extent can they sort of help or hinder learning? We can consider examples of students who have learnt difficult things in the most unpropitious and difficult circumstances.
So again, you know, you want to be careful. I don't want you to get the message, if you haven't got a nice school building, you can't possibly learn anything. That's not true. There's one really famous modern British mathematician, statistician, I think Dennis Lindley, who learned a lot of his maths in an air raid shelter in the Blitz.
Right, so people can learn in difficult situations, and I think part of actually what you want to teach students, just as a general character forming thing for life, is you can overcome some hurdles, which is not fair that these hurdles are there, and it's probably not fair that you don't have an amazing building, but, you know, that is something you can, can still overcome.
And I would say even if you have the best design, so I do think buildings can have an impact on learning and can improve learning and make it more likely to happen, but even if you have the best design, best optimized building for learning, kind of what, how much difference will it make? That's an interesting one.
I don't know. And I think it will make some difference, but again, is it, is it, is, is, you know, Is it, is it even necessary or sufficient? I don't know. But then what, you know, what is the ideal building then? What is that? And I would say early in my career, I think I worked in some buildings that weren't ideal.
So I do think it's important to say there is a difference. And I worked in some buildings that I think made learning harder. So some buildings, you know, classrooms without walls. I've been in schools like that. I don't, I don't think they help. I think the noise, I think you need to form long term memories.
I think you need to be able to concentrate. I think silence can help with concentration. I think noise all the time makes it harder to form memories. So I do think there needs to be quiet rooms. There need to be some, some divisions between students who are doing things that are noisy and students who are doing things that are not.
And I think if you don't have walls, it's really hard to have the hat. So a basic, a basic, a basic requirement would be walls. And of course, there are lots of other kind of nice to haves. But again, it is striking, I would say, in modern Britain and kind of throughout history, how a lot of the most innovative and brilliant examples of, of, of learning environments are not necessarily the ones that have always the most brilliant buildings.
So we've got to bear that in mind, in mind too.
Ben: Yeah. There's a very famous building which no longer exists, which was on the MIT campus, and it was a temporary. building, which then lasted for a really long time. Part of it was that they, I mean, this is more askance, but they were able to set it up how they wanted to set it up.
So that's a different thing, but it was the fact that it was actually very cheap and but had the minimum standards that they needed and for them, they could. they could also do that. So it's kind of an interesting interaction. One other perhaps niche one because I was reviewing some of your podcasts on the history of education and I hadn't realized back in history, I guess before you really had much government sponsored education or when it started around these working class thinkers and people who essentially came through a self education route, which had its pros and cons as well in this kind of history of self education.
And then the idea of why governments came in and tried to formalize education as well, which there were different debates. Some was maybe around status quo and kind of controlling your population. And then some was well, not others. But I was interested in your reflection, I guess, particularly with this intersection of, of working class or those who weren't going to be able to enter the system, which I guess is different today and, and how they came up.
out with sort of self education ideas. I guess it doesn't really argue against knowledge base because actually they came with a, with a knowledge, a lot of knowledge in that. And there's these other intersectionalities with working class and the like, but I was be interested in your reflections on that.
Daisy: Yeah. So I think that Yeah, this, this podcast episode you're mentioning, I talk about a kind of, I suppose the formal name for it is working class autodidacticism. So working class men and women who taught themselves in the absence of a really well established formal sort of state provision of education.
And it's been this, this is a little bit of history that's been forgotten about and it's a fascinating history because I've talked about people who, you know, they're doing great things without having many resources and not necessarily having any kind of building to help them. There's a, this fantastic history of working class people doing just this and founding their own institutes, founding their own libraries, finding the time and incredibly busy and physically demanding day jobs, finding the time to, to go and study beyond that time.
And really inspirational stories and people doing it sometimes to better themselves financially, but a lot of the time, just because they wanted to. They wanted to know stuff. You know, it was a personal development. And the book I talk about is a fantastic book by a historian called Jonathan Rose, The Intellectual Lives of the British Working Classes.
And he goes up to 1945, I think, about 1850, 1945, something like that. And it's, as I say, a very inspirational, very inspirational story. It's a bit earlier than 1865. He goes most of the, I think, a lot of the 19th century. You don't get state education in England until 1870. Even then, it's relatively patchy.
It's only up to 11. But it's, but before 1870, there is a lot of education going on still. And, and so it is really important to, to remember that, I think. Obviously, there's real patchiness with this, both in terms of not everybody has access to it, and that's one of the reasons you have the campaign for state education, and also in terms of what is it people are learning if autodidacts, as I said before, can go down rabbit holes.
And I think perhaps when I first read Jonathan Rose's book, it is easy to really romanticize some of this. I think, as I say, perhaps we've, we've seen in the last few years in, in lots of different ways, there can be a darker edge to autodidacticism there are real strengths and weaknesses to learning things slightly outside of formal institutions.
So one real strength of autodidacticism would be, you look at someone like Michael Faraday, I talk about him in the, in the podcast. So Michael Faraday is a real. You know, but kind of, do you, did he invent or discover electricity? I mean, you know, it's a philosophical question that he does a lot of laying the groundwork for the, the, the basic kind of the basic scientific implications of electricity, which found so much of our modern world, you know, he's a real pioneer and he's a very practical scientist.
He's a lot of practical experiments. He often hurts himself doing them. He's a great scientific communicator. He's. really, his early years are kind of almost entirely self taught. So he's a, he's a, he's a, he's a poor working class guy from London and he attends lectures at the City, I think the City Philosophical Institute.
He kind of just, you know, almost entirely teaches himself, makes that, makes contact, makes contact with people at the Royal Institution, a phenomenal story. What's really interesting is he is not influenced by anybody at Cambridge where they're doing. lots of pioneering scientific stuff at that time. And so he doesn't come across a lot of their scientific models.
And in some ways that's maybe quite good for him and quite freeing. So there's that kind of upside that he can think in a slightly different way. One downside is he's mathematics. He never really develops his mathematics and it takes James Clark Maxwell kind of later on to come along and kind of almost apply the maths to a lot of his work and to sort of formalize it in that way.
So that's the kind of ups and downs of it from someone like Faraday. And then I think you can probably see ups and downs in other ways, as I say, in a sort of slightly different way. Dark Age, if you want to it, but to what extent do you, when you're teaching yourself, do you go looking for things that reinforce what you want to hear?
And you know, is that an issue? There's a lot of research now. I think, again, if you'd asked me 10, 15 years ago, I'd have been quite naively optimistic that better education will kind of always lead to enlightenment and better agreement and consensus and choosing the right thing to do. There's a lot of evidence People who know more about a particular issue are actually, can often be more kind of ideologically motivated.
Ben: They get more entrenched in their view.
Daisy: Yeah, and actually, when you're, if you know a lot about a topic and you're presented with evidence that disagrees with your prior information on that, again, you'll have more information to argue back against it. So I think they've done this with climate change. But they've done lots of studies where people you know, people are sort of shown information that and actually the people who are better informed about climate change are often kind of least likely to sort of change their minds.
So these things are really complicated.
Ben: Yeah. There's another, I don't think there's another dimensions there. Which isn't often picked up, which I think it basically is an open mindedness dimension, which actually it overlays on that. And if you don't have that as your dimension, then it doesn't, it doesn't really figure.
And I think that's right. I always think of it as kind of relatively fat tails that actually you, you are perhaps more likely to make these more unusual discoveries and maybe step chain discoveries, but you're also more likely to go off the deep end and go down some craziness, which just ends up not to be true at all.
And so there is a trade off in that.
Daisy: Exactly. And I suspect again, to come back to trade offs, which is one of our themes is we don't quite like to admit that we want to think again, that we can pick up one end of the stick without the other.
Ben: But there's
Daisy: probably an extent to which a lot of really big, groundbreaking, incredible, amazing advances.
I mean, what's that famous thing, you know, Newton, Newton believed in alchemy, you know, Newton, Newton was, was, was, was trying to turn base metals into gold, you know, that kind of stuff. People who are pushing the edges and pushing the boundaries. are often doing so in some ways that are brilliant, in some ways that might be, might be slightly mad.
Yeah,
Ben: there's a lot of people who debate Elon Musk along those dimensions, right? You just come with all of those things. It would be a, you know, it
Daisy: would be a good modern example, for sure.
Ben: Okay, last one on the education thing, we're sort of wrapping up on some quickfire things. I think about this just on the, on this idea of trade offs, you know, there's some evidence that, In england, if you look at piece of scores that the middle is kind of okay, and it's kind of maybe improved in things But there's some observational evidence maybe or some debate around I guess in the tales So those which we could say of high attainment or them high talent in in many dimensions you know, there's some things feeling that maybe they're a little bit underserved And then on the other side those with sort of learning difficulties Or somehow some other socio economic or lens where they're underperforming You You know, like you said, actually the government spend a lot, successful government spend a lot of money on that and people, again, feeling that it hasn't quite worked out, I guess those are things on, on the tails and there's a trade off between concentrating too much on the tails when you've got the 60 or 70 percent in the middle, which you're, you're trying to give good education towards.
But I was interested in your reflections on that. And maybe if there's anything on the margin you'd do for those either kind of high attainment or those where we struggling with learning disabilities or the like.
Daisy: Yeah, so if you want to think about this in terms of the trade offs and the optimization curves, I think if we're being honest, there probably is, once you get to the extremes, probably a tension between optimizing for high attainment or optimizing for students who are struggling.
However, I don't think we've necessarily kind of reached that point yet because you would only reach that point once you've maxed out the gains that benefit everybody, the improvements that benefit everybody. So to go back to what I was saying earlier about cognitive science based repetition, these are things that benefit every learner from top to bottom.
And there's an element of which, if you do really good teaching, and this is something I often say about, you know, a lot of the things we're talking about, the SEM crisis, there is an element of, not maybe for absolutely everybody, but there's an element of what a lot of SEM pupils need is teaching that's good for everyone, just, just really good.
Right. We do have things about the way we learn that are different. We also have a lot of things we have in common. So again, you can look at this maybe in terms of medicine, but obviously people do react differently to drugs and they do react differently to different dosages and you have to take all those things into account.
Human beings also are human beings and do have some commonalities and they have similarities in terms of, you know, the circulatory system, the digestive system, what have you. And I think there's an interesting way of looking at learning like that, that there are things that all learners have in common.
And there are clearly things that, that are different. But my personal thing would be there are a lot of tactics and strategies that can benefit all learners and we are not maxing out on them nearly enough. And I would say why don't we max out on those because those are low hanging fruit that will move the mean, that will move the entire distribution.
Let's max out on those and be sure we are getting absolute maximum return for things like the things I've mentioned. Greater knowledge of cognitive psychology, greater knowledge of better revision tactics, you know, organizing curriculums to promote space repetition, this kind of stuff. Let's, let's, let's, let's get all the gains we can from them.
Before we then start thinking, okay and how do we now optimize for these, these smaller groups and, and, and try and get the gains there that feels to me the right way to do it. And I think the issue I have sometimes when we want to slice and dice pupils up into ever finer categories and craft a, you know, completely personalized individualized strategy for every individual student is.
You can end up in difficult places there, you can end up in some very un evidenced places. I am slightly worried that their attempt to kind of do that and come up with these personalised strategies. I write about this in my third book, Teachers vs Tech. It leads to a promotion of some ideas that don't have very much evidence behind them, like learning styles.
And you get students saying you know, I don't want to read that book because I'm a visual learner. You know, can't I just watch the film instead? And actually there are all kinds of good reasons why, but you can't. You know, reading is different from watching a film. So my personal thing would be, let's Let's, you know, get these high impact strategies that work for everybody.
Let's try and use them as effectively as possible
Ben: first. That makes sense. We're not maxed out on good things to do. Absolutely. So let's do that. Great. So a couple of fun questions for, for wrapping up. So in Britain, we have a quiz show, University Challenge. And you were a team leader back in the day.
What did you learn from going through? University challenge, anything unexpected or anything you'd share from that experience?
Daisy: Oh gosh, such a long time ago, I'm not sure I remember it. If you get the chance, if anyone's listening to this and wondering about whether to do it or not, I would say give it a go, it's an awful lot of fun.
It's quite nerve wracking. Quite, quite tense, but really exciting and kind of a great opportunity. And it's a, it's a bit of a UK national institution that's been running for many decades now. So it's nice to something that you say you've been a part of.
Ben: I think one of the reflections I had on, you know, watching a little bit of the episode and then your work and the bar book and the education book, and even where there's conversations go, there is something about having a broad base of knowledge.
Which then intersects where you can pull from one domain into another, which is a kind of transfer and it's this kind of thing, I wouldn't even necessarily call it a skill or a knowledge. It's just something where you can draw upon an evidence base, which does seem to go across these things. And actually something like university challenge where you have a lot of a lot across different subjects.
That's something there too. And then I was reading your blog about how fewer people, fewer students are doing, I think, English A level or maybe even English degrees. And actually, this is also maybe in a reflection that people are reading less reading less full stop. Although I think in particular, reading less fiction.
Yeah. Maybe there's arguments that we think somehow STEM, maths, or business want some other type of things. But I was wondering, do you think we should be reading more fiction? Or is this an appropriate trend? And if we are, should be reading more fiction, why should we?
Daisy: Yeah. So I did a degree in English literature.
And I wrote about in this blog, as you say, there's been a real decline in the number of students doing English literature at A level and at degree level. A lot of, a lot of university departments are closing down and, you know, you talk to people involved in teaching and usually it's a bit of a crisis.
It feels quite, quite raw. And it's one of the things I'm keen to state is that it's not just happening in England. This is happening in other countries too. There are some outliers which are interesting, but there is a global trend to this. Why is it happening? I speculate for a few reasons. I think, what are students doing instead of studying English Lit?
In England, they're studying Maths. So I, I've got a graph on my blog where you literally show the two lines, English and maths going in completely different directions. So maths has gone from kind of, you know, about 10th most popular A level to number one. And, and English, English has gone from the first most popular A level, it's dropped out of the top 10.
So it's, it's really it's really extreme and it's happened in sort of 10, 15 years. Very, very rapid. Is it a bad thing? So there's a lot of people who will, I'm kind of hand wringing about this and saying it's terrible, but a lot of people say, is it a bad thing? Is this just life moving on? Actually people, you know, if you go back 100, 150 years, classics, everybody did classics.
A member of parliament in, in the British parliament could, you know, quote something from Virgil or Horace or, or whoever and expect that the rest of the house would understand that. We don't expect that now. Maybe that's just the way the English lit's going to go. Shakespeare was a touchstone and a lodestar of our culture.
Maybe he just won't be. Maybe people are just not thinking like this anymore and, you know, things change. People are studying maths because it's more useful. They can earn more money with it. I don't want to be anti maths. I say this in the article I wrote about it. I think, you know, It's, it's, it's a little bit mean to maths to just say it's all just utility, but maths has a beauty of its own too.
It's, it's got, it's, it's, it's a, it's a triumph of civilisation as much as, as Shakespeare's plays are, I would argue. So it's not about trying to be sort of anti maths. I think there are a couple of interesting questions. One thing talking about to teachers is, have we got students studying maths who are maybe doing it because they think it's the good thing to do but are struggling with it?
Is that a good thing? Can argue it. You know, maybe if they work hard at something and get better at it, it can be good if, if they're working hard and struggling and then, then and, and then they're not cut out for it. That maybe is a challenge. That's one thing. Does it really generate the economic returns we're hoping for?
Again, you can get mixed views on this. There is a suggestion. I think that mass a level is one of the very, very few A levels that you can actually point to a caus a causative link with increased earnings in future. So that's very interesting. But there's another point of view that says if you really want to focus on on economic returns, actually degrees, there's a lot of non vocational degrees where a lot of it is signaling.
And to the extent they offer a graduate premium, it's not necessarily to do with what you're learning. It's to do with the, the prestige of what that, what that piece of paper says about you. So that complicates any factor, any attempt to kind of work out the value, the economic value of some of these non vocational degrees.
And then to go back to, is it a problem if students aren't reading? Is it a problem? And I think, again, you can, you can see it both ways. On the one hand, is there a particular cast of mind that reading gives you? something more thoughtful, more empathic, the ability to get inside someone's head that perhaps you know, in a patronizing way, it makes you a better person.
Is that true? Is it not true? Is that a sort of part of an outdated ideology in an era that didn't have? video and and podcasts and different kinds of technology. These are, these are tricky ones. I obviously feel being an English literature graduate and reading being such an important part of my life that the thing I say in the blog is even if you strip out the kind of moral and beautiful and cultural aspects of the value of reading, it does still feel to me there is a utility to it that is very hard to get away from in that a written sentence is an extremely efficient method of communicating information.
And it can do things that computer code, video, and audio cannot do. And I still think that's probably the thing where it's not going to go quite the same way as classics because there is a virtue, there is a utility to reading and writing that are quite hard to reproduce in other ways. Whether that will save literature, I don't know.
Ben: Yeah, I'm part worried. I don't know whether it's at the English A level level, but I think it is important communication skills, and maybe we'll touch on one last question to do with oracy, communication skills, so that speaking, I think is still really important. Even more perhaps writing or writing and speaking, which are interlinked.
And I feel very strongly, and I think there's some evidence for that. Your writing and your speaking skills are influenced by your reading skills. Cause they are interlinked. So if you lose reading skills, that does impact writing and speaking to some extent or persuasion and communication, which is still really.
important. And so if we lose too much reading, then that goes there. And I would say, particularly for fiction, I think there is something important about being able to think in the world beyond yourself. And I think we sort of alluded this to, you know, where do you just go to your own rabbit hole? And how do you get out of that rabbit hole to be challenged by things which aren't necessarily of your world or of your character?
And fiction is, I think, a really good way of doing that. In some ways. above non fiction in this sense because you don't have to feel too jealous or emotional about this character because you could always say it's fictional yet the the fictional world of those characters and stories can really influence your own world view in some way and therefore having no fiction in your life would impair that and I think that would make us more narrow minded and I think more narrow minded world is both not as good a world but also not as good for society in general.
Daisy: So obviously I'm inclined to agree. As I say, I spent, I spent a large chunk of my life studying literature and I don't want it to, I quite like to carry on. And when I sort of examine these trends, I can get a bit gloomy, but I, what I want to try and do is just, it's really easy, I think, for literature graduates like me to just get in a bit of wishful thinking and say, of course it's brilliant.
We did it. Of course it's amazing. So I do want to try and be the kind of, the rigorous thinker who tests the proposition. Everything you say, I want to instinctively agree with, but let, you know, let's test those propositions. So first of all, the value of fiction, the value of an imaginative world, does it matter if that imaginative world is in text or if it is, if it is video?
Ben: Yeah, I guess so. It could come from movies. Does that
Daisy: matter? Now I'm inclined to say, and I would go along with the, you know, Marshall McLuhan's theory, the medium is the message. I think there is something different. So I don't think the two are completely analogous. I said that before, you can't have kids, you know, when kids say, oh, I don't need to read the book, I need to, I can just watch the film.
Your films are different, they are different media, and there's different ways that they allow you to think, and there's things they can do and there's things they can't do. So I'm inclined to say that they are different media. But if you're, if the thing you're saying is just about but in trying to, you know, the value of a story or a narrative, can, can they tell a story or narrative in the same way?
What is it you're losing? What is it you're gaining from, from, from not reading? I think for me, there is something, as I say, that the difference in the medium, the things that are going on in your mind when you read that is different from listening to something or watching a video, how valuable are those things?
I don't know. I mean, maybe we're about to take part in a giant experiment where we find out.
Ben: And I guess you're right, and the trend is moving away from us, so maybe they will be, maybe. And I think
Daisy: the other thing, where I, again, I feel quite gloomy about all this, is we can kind of pontificate with this all we want, and let's say we sit here and we decide, no, absolutely, there is a qualitative difference between both, the difference between words and video, and the difference between, kind of, reading lots of, inhabiting lots of other people's minds in fiction and not doing so.
Even if we decide that's really important, there may well be cultural trends that we are powerless to change that are just beyond us. And, and then, you know, what do you do? How do you react in, in, in a world like that? Kind of what, what happens? And I think there's an issue here with schools as well, is that I think things that schools can do, and I think they do have a lot of power, and I think the national education system, I think it is funded to the tune of something like 100 billion a year or whatever, and you know, lots of people work in it, and you know, the things that students have to do because of it, so it does have a lot of power, but it also, you know, it still has limits, and I see a lot of people from a lot of walks of life who think if I can just put something on the national curriculum, then bingo, You know, I'll put, I'll put financial awareness on knitting on the national curriculum and then everyone will have a warm jumper and won't get ripped off by a credit card company.
And you're like you know, would that it was would that the national education system was this magic wand that you could wave and it would, it would respond in that way. So there is a lot of power in the education system. There are also bigger, bigger trends in education and society is in society that.
To an extent, it probably has to reflect as much as it can change and shape.
Ben: These are
Daisy: tricky things.
Ben: I always think to what ability can we teach people to love reading, say, if that's what, even if that's what we wanted to do. Or, you know, everyone says, Oh, I love reading. I mean, read it in business blogs.
We want people who are curious. Is that a teachable thing? And what does that even mean within that context? And maybe you can teach it to some extent, but I'm pretty sure in school, every book I was, maybe not every book, but certainly books I was forced to read or rather heavily encouraged to read never had quite the same joy as the book you discover yourself.
So I don't, I don't quite really know how that. How that works out. Great. Last couple of questions then is would you like to highlight any current projects that you're working on now or in the future? Are you going to be writing another book? Projects.
Daisy: Yeah. One of the things we're working on at No More Marketing, we have this really nice comparative judgment system of assessing writing, which we've been running for seven or eight years now.
We've got a really cool new addition to it, which does use artificial intelligence. We are, we've been playing around with lots of different ways of using artificial intelligence. We are very aware of its flaws. We are very wary of just throwing it at a system because we know the errors it can make and we've written about them.
But we think we have managed to come up with An idea that works quite well, and it basically allows teachers to give some verbal comments on a piece of writing as they're judging it, and for all of the verbal comments that many teachers make on that piece of writing, the AI, first of all, the first step it transcribes them all, and then second of all, it combines them all.
All of the teacher comments into a nice polished piece of feedback for the student and the teacher. So that's something that hopefully will save teachers spending lots of time writing out comments. So that's, that's a cool thing we're working on at the moment.
Ben: Yeah, that seems like a good project. Great.
And then last question, do you have any, I guess we'll call it life advice or advice, I guess, to parents or teachers or in your career or observations of the world that you'd want to share?
Daisy: Oh, good question I don't know, is there anything that's sort of generalizable and relevant for everyone?
I don't, you know, we talked about spaced repetition. I, I really love it. I think it's really cool. I think even if you're an adult and you're out of formal learning, it's a lovely way to kind of just remember more of what you read. And the earlier you start, it's like a pension or compound interest.
The earlier you start, the better it is. So there's a, what the app I really like is called Anki. It's, it's a little bit, it's a little bit complex. It's got a lot of features. It's not necessarily sort of ideal for, for young kids. It's a little bit not necessarily the most friendly user interface, but it's a really nice way of building your own personal library of flashcards of your own sort of personal memory store.
And one of the, there's quite a few sort of power users out there. And one of them says the great thing about a Anki is it makes memory a choice. So you can choose, you know, if you want to remember something, if you put it into Anki. There is a very high chance you will remember it. So I would say, yeah, that's a nice life tip.
I use it and it's something I wish I'd started using when I was younger.
Ben: Great. So yeah, spaced repetition. With that thought, Daisy, thank you very much.
Daisy: Brilliant. Thanks Ben.
