WEBVTT - This file was automatically generated by VIMEO. Please email info@talestoolkit.com to report problems. Very excited to have the real David Cameron here today. Um, he's an inspirational voice in education and he inspires teachers to want to make changes for the better. Um, he's a speaker, a trainer, a mentor, a coach, um, an advisor in both the UK and abroard. Um, and we've had lots of our Tales Toolkit teachers that have approached us and said that we need to get David Cameron in to chat to. So we're really keen for him to come and we're very excited. He is here today. Um, he's had a big involvement in national reviews and development in Scotland, and some, I say some 'cause there's a lot of other stuff that David has done. Um, some of his past roles has included director of children's services, head of education, curriculum advisor, and he's been involved with a whole range of national groups. Um, but however, a lot of his work is still actually on the ground talking directly with teachers. Um, he has a big interest and passion for creativity, which really resonates with our work here at Tales Toolkit. And he's been involved in developing Scotland's creative learning plan and his TED Talks are well worth listening to. So if you haven't done that, you need check them out. Um, and I want to kick off with something David wrote on his website. Um, he said, I want to ensure young people have an education that brings richness to their lives. I want them to think for themselves and be committed to building a better world than the one that they're inheriting. So a little bit less of me talking. I know you are keen to hear David speak, so I'll I'll pass over to you now, David. Okay. Thanks Kate. And, and I always feel the need when I get an introduction like that, which is so fulsome and so generous to offer the antidote. So there's a young guy called Chris Kilkenny who's looked after young man. His mom was a heroin addict. He grew up in care. Um, he was in rehab units and although he's never touched drugs, and, uh, I worked with Chris in Edinburh and then he, he kinda disappeared and I didn't see him for about four months, and I went into a conference in Dundee and there he was, and I went anyway. He goes, oh, how you de how you doing, man? You right. And I was, yeah, I'm great Chris, what about you? And he goes, oh, I'm good now. I'm working part-time with Who Cares. And, and I love it. And you know what David? He said, I, he said, I know now what I'm gonna do with the rest of my life. And I went first, that's brilliant what you're going do. And he just looked at me and he said, David, I'm going to do the same as you. I'm gonna talk sh*** for money. So there's relative version of, of my inspirational and delivery style and Chris Kenney just a bit nailed it. Um, and I also need to apologize because folk that, um, folk that think they want to hear me speak, um, have often kinda heard me before. And this might well for them be a bit of a greatest hit set. Um, there'll be some stuff in here they've had before and I apologize for that. But, you know, I'm like an old guy and I canee keep coming up with new stuff all the time. So you'll just have to take what you get really. And the wonderful thing about this is that anybody that's watching it will be watching it and record. And I wouldn't know if they've switched off. So even if I'm completely crap, my ego will remain undamaged by that. So if that is all Okay, Kate, um, what I'll do is I'm gonna share my screen and I'm gonna attempt a bit of a presentation, if that's all right. Is that okay? I might turn my camera so people can see you better. So, right. Excellent. Um, and somewhere on here, um, is this the Untitled keynote? Yep. Yep. You got it up. Here we go. So start with a bit of music here, but anybody not familiar with it, it's the legend that Michael, A song that I'd always believe. Tell me a story that I can Read. And that's my first title. Um, but one title's not enough. And, and I hope that people watching it are recognizing the technological miracle of music and dancing letters, letters, dancing in time to the music. I mean, that's got to be three bullet points and a boring PowerPoint. Um, but because it's till's toolkit, I'm bringing back another title and a good old slide, and this time modeling Because I really do think this is what we need to do right there. Stand up, right? Stand up, stand up right up. Stand up And let's not moving. There we go. And there's a right, there's a right. Children deserve and need a childhood. And I think that's a really, really important point to make because I think in many ways right now, and I'll come back to this, children are being deprived of that. Um, I'll mention it later on, but we've now got early years, um, documents in England, which are written entirely in the rear view mirror. Um, the, the driving force in the documentation is about having children school ready. It's not about starting from the child, it's not about building from the child. It's about getting the child ready to fit. And I think we need to recognize that it's much more important that children get that childhood they deserve because children do have rights. And included in that, I think beyond all the U N C R C stuff. And in Scotland we've adopted that as the baseline for all sorts of legislation and activity. But I think it also includes a right to curiosity, a right to discovery and a right to play because it's only through curiosity that we're going to challenge so much of the world that we live in today. And I'm gonna talk about challenges by all means, but we need people who question. Um, when I was driving back from a bike ride this morning, I was listening to a program in Radio four called Disaster Trolls. And it was looking at the guy who denied that there ever was a sandy hoot shooting and dismissed it all as, as a a, a conspiracy with crisis actors. There are so many people now putting out information which is inaccurate. People do not any longer know what truth is. We have lost sight of standards, and unless we have curiosity, we lose the capacity to question and to challenge that. And that's so important. And curiosity stems from discovery and it stems from play. And I think also alongside that, children have a right to identity. And again, I'll come back to this as I go through the presentation, but we are so quick to classify children by age and stage and whatever other characteristic we choose to lay upon them. But they have a right to find an identity, to have their own identity, to have a place to stand from which they can see the world. And that will give them that second right about independence. They have a right to be able to stand on their own feet, to learn for themselves, to be guided, to be supported by all means to be taught. But they have that right. I think. And finally for this slide, they have a right to resilience and resourcefulness because right now we do all desperately need resilience, but we need that resourcefulness. And I, I I get really fed up, um, with a lot of the cliches that we band around in education. And one of my least favorites is we need to educate children for jobs that don't exist yet. So how the flip do you do that? I mean, what's a job that doesn't exist yet? You know, fixing Dr. Ru sonic screwdriver, you know, riding Huskies in the Grand National, I have no idea about jobs that don't exist yet. I would quite like a plumber. I'd quite like somebody to pick my fruit. I'd quite like people doing jobs that do exist and we don't have anybody to do. But I think we need to open up these kind of cliches because the reality is there will be jobs that will arise, but we can't teach children how to do them. What we can do is we can help children to become ready to adapt. We can help them to be ready to meet challenges and we can help them to be resourceful. And that's why I think they have a right to that. And we're addressing these challenges, aren't we? We're addressing that challenge of ACEs children who've had adverse experiences in childhood, whether that's to do with, you know, breakdown in the home, whether it's to do with poverty, whatever. It's to do with we've got children who are coming and suffering, and the potential is children aren't supported through these experiences. That creates a damage, which my good colleague Suzanne Zedi would talk about that enters into their biology and becomes long term and serious adverse childhood experiences aren't a death sentence and children often overcome them, but they overcome the myth. They are supported if they're allowed to build resilience, and they're given the capacity to do that. Otherwise we're talking about things that become long-term inbuilt and damaging. And we've also got ours, you know, I know we've all got them. Our c e s that's ration childhood experiences because some kids just don't get out anymore. Um, I was out on Sunday, um, and I had a puncture. I was in a tiny, tiny single track back road and I had a puncture and I was doing my best to try and phone for help. And this we kid, tiny kid psycho, passed me on his bike and he just goes, you need any help? And I went, well, I, I don't think I'm, I'm, I'm gonna get somebody to come and pick me up. But in reality, I was actually so surprised that here is this little kid on his own, on his bike on the back road. And not only that is speaking to a stranger that in so many instances just wouldn't happen because children are so protected. So Ed and so encased. And we have built a culture of fear around children rather than a culture of encouragement. A a culture of managed risk, a culture of safety. Mm-hmm. By enabling children to deal sensibly with risk. So we've got, um, pardon anyone that's picked up phrase up wrong, we've also got VCs, uh, virtual childhood experiences. We've got some kids who are only allowed to access the world through their phones or their iPads, and they seem to get them earlier and earlier. 'cause some of that's safe. And we've also got dcs, um, which have detached childhood experiences. And there are lots of children who don't experience poverty, but their parents are outsourcing childhood. These, these are kids who only get the managed and supervised experience. And lots of children that I dealt with, particularly when I was, uh, a director of children's services, fell into that category. Two parents in work, and god knows it's gonna be worse this winter, desperately chasing money, desperately chasing income to pay for a mortgage that they basically can't afford. And aspirations they could no longer underwrite without sacrificing all sorts of elements of family life. Fairly bleak picture. But you know, we've also, there's something that students have been educated in batches that what we do now in, in Robinson, the champion of it is we, we get kids, we set targets for them. They need to be at a particular age, they need to be a particular stage. And we have become, I think, an education obsessed with pace. And the reality is that for some children, their trajectory of learning involves a long time in the runway and then a sudden soaring flight. And for some kids it's an incline, but it's a very rare child who progresses through learning in a smooth, ramped way. And these are all challenges we need to pick up on because I think what we're encouraged to do in the system a lot of the time is this, that we ask kids to give us a performance. And you know, we're, we're now becoming obsessed with baseline testing. Um, I think in Scotland we're trying to develop a test that can be administered in the womb so that there's absolutely no time wasted between a child popping out and getting into the appropriate program. Um, but but we do that. We give them, we ask them to give us a performance and the basis of that, we decide what their ability is. And too often what we then do is put them into an ability group. And as we all know, the definition of an ability group is, it's a lot easier to get into it than is to get out of it. But sadly, once they're in, we decide on that. We decide on what their potential is, and kids get put in tram lines and it works in the system because we've, we've got our targets as teachers or support staff or whatever. And if we're achieving these targets, everything appears to be fine. But we need at some point to stop and say, are they the right targets? And are we selling children short because we're making the wrong decisions on too limited evidence about what they might be capable of? And of course, in reality, that triangle becomes a vicious circle because if we think that all children have the potential to do is this, that's what we give them to do. And what we need to be asking ourselves, no, sorry, uh, I'll need to skip on there. What we need to be asking ourselves, I think is how often do we give children the opportunity to surprise us so that we reevaluate what that potential is? There's an exercise I use a lot when I'm doing training where I ask people to sit in groups and tell me the answer to the question, what is beauty? And I ask them how they're gonna present it back to me. And I'm continually surprised by the depth and wonder by the, the astonishing concepts, by the, by the amazing ideas that people come up with in that context. And you only get six minutes to do it. And I then give them evidence of what children can do, give 'em the same challenge. And that's what early years is about, isn't it? The early years fundamentally is about creating an opportunity for children to show us what they are capable of and then to plan the next stage in their learning based on that. And that's one of the reasons why I love the whole idea teals toolkit, because that essentially is what you're about, is giving children that stimulus, that opportunity to create something and then to look at that creation and then build on it. And that can go into formal literacy, it can go into formal literacy, but it takes them in through an open gate rather than an narrow shuttered opening. And that's so important to me because these are the big challenges that we're currently in a world which is divided where opinion is fact and it's aggressively defended. You know, I'm shocked sometime I was having a a to and fro with somebody on Twitter, and I had to go back to them and say that my commitment to online courtesy meant I was having to end the conversation. Um, because I I, if I'd continued, I was, I was, I was gonna find out where they live. Um, and you know, abs you could, you can take the boy out to Scotland, but it's very difficult to take the Scotland out the boy. Uh, and I would've, you know, happily gone and seen him. Mm-hmm. And because that, there's just that incredible aggression. You see it constantly. You see it constantly. And this whole idea mentioned earlier that we're in a world where opinion is fact because we no longer apparently know how to deal with narrative, which is another key element I think in Teal's toolkit, is helping children to understand narrative so that not only can they create teals, they can understand Tes and they know what the dynamic of the teal is. And we're in a world where inequality is endemic and continually reinforce. And I get so angry, um, you'll gather that I'm not at all really a tranquil person. Um, but I get so angry about the constant discussion that we have around social mobility as if that was the answer to all or else. But in too often, social mobility is based on the concept of rescue. Let's help some poor working class kid up in the middle class. Let's give them a home and some shares and a sense of ownership. Let's get them to invest in the system and let's get them to leave their communities behind. And that's not how we make change. We don't make change by rescuing some and incorporating them in a wider vision. We make change by moving groups, by moving communities, by addressing wider need. And we do that by giving children a sense of identity with others. And part of how we do that, I think, is through the power of stories. Uh, Daniel Willingham talks about stories as being psychologically privileged. You can rarely tell a story without somehow or other getting into the heads of characters. Mm-hmm. And if we can begin to do that, we can begin to get into this idea of equality and sharing and understanding. And finally, we're faced with a threat of environmental collab. And we need people who can understand that narrative. We need people who can recognize the power that they have to create a world. And I feel that if we can begin to do that, if we can give children a sense of achievement and of control in an imaginative and creative context, then it's going to be much easier to build that sense of creativity and control into how they deal with the wider world. And it's a world that's gonna be characterized by financial hardship and more particularly in the coming winter. And we've got a lot to do with, if you're a teacher, if you're a teaching assistant, if you're working with kids right now, you're probably underpaid. You're probably overworked. And you're probably wondering when the hell midterm was, even though it's just passed. Um, and you're basically asking yourself the question, going to make it till Christmas. And although we've got all that, we can't wait for our world to change before we change children's worlds because of all the things that we've just talked about. And there's no greater sign of insanity ar arrogance and conceit than quoting yourself. And we are in this instance, quoting this David Cameron rather than the potato feast imposter who was once a prime minister. So we need to think about how we are going to change children's worlds. And it's not enough to add value for some kids. You know, for some the concept of potential, it's too close to what's described there as that soft bigotry of low expectations. We need to change the narrative of children's lives, and therefore we need to be able to create narrative together. It's so important because there's another quote, and again, I am shameless, um, it's a quote for me. The future's not something we adapt to. It's something we create. We need to get our heads around that idea and we need to get into the habit of creativity. And there he is again, it's that shameless David Cameron. So there are the capacities and the abilities that children need. They need that capacity to think, to learn and to adapt. That's what it means by preparing for jobs that don't exist yet. And how do we do that? How do we get children to think unless we give them that opportunity? And one of the things I'm really in on Kate, and, and you and I have talked about this before, is that there is too much in our current debate that's either or and there needs to be more either end. So yeah, kids need taught, kids need knowledge, kids need a knowledge rich curriculum. But if that's all they get, then they're confined and imprisoned by what we have chosen to give them. Mm-hmm. And while I appreciate that, that's often successful, that is education that at the very least flirts with indoctrination. Yeah. And we need an education which gives children that knowledge, gives them that give the best that's been thought and taught, whatever that might mean as a concept. But if we're not giving them the opportunity to do things with that knowledge, with that understanding, I mean, classically the debate around phonics fascinates me because phonics in my mind are undoubtedly effective about teaching, uh, sorry, are undoubtedly effective in teaching children to read, but they will not make children love reading. They will not make children want reading. And what I think we often see in reading is children who are actually literate at the early stages when there is that direct focus who lose that literacy. Because like any other skill, if it's not exercised, it will diminish. Yeah. And what we need to do is we need to combine that commitment to the formal phonics process, synthetic phonics or whatever, but it is not the aim of Christ. And it will not make children reading simply by touching it no matter how much Nick Gibb tells us that. So what we need to recognize is we need that either end combination, and children need that ability to innovate and create. They absolutely need that because they need a sense of control. That's the problem for so many people in the world. I think that they are so disempowered and so insecure that they look for an easy and facile solution and too often find it in some fundamental set of beliefs. Mm-hmm. We've got Taliban in Afghanistan mm-hmm. Who are at war with their own women. Mm-hmm. We've got a rising currently in Iran where women are demanding the right to be fully themselves. Mm-hmm. But we've got Taliban in America and it's called the religious right. And we've got a Taliban in this country, which is equally in to around the values that they absolutely hold and believe that everyone else should, that that hums from a sense of insecurity. I think a sense of being lost in a world of change, people need to get the opportunity to get their heads around that. And the way through it is having that ability to innovate, the ability to create the ability to make something of your own. And of course, around that they not only need to be given knowledge, but they need to be given the skills to access knowledge. And again, for me, that requires motivation. And again, I'll come back to how important things like Tale's toolkit can be in providing that they need the ability to choose and then to use the tools for learning for life and work, you know? So what we want is we want children who are capable of being independent and self regulated, and they need to be able to sustain an inquiry or a task absolutely critical. And alongside that, of course, they need the specific skills for disciplines, but in my view, we can do both. So let's start from getting it right. There's another interpretation. A there it is. We can offer children an awesome childhood experiences that wake them up, that give them something. And the alias for that is play creativity and imagination. And particularly in the early years, we need to maintain that really interesting development in Scotland. The Scottish Nationalist Party have adopted the idea of a later start to formal education and an extended kindergarten stage. And there's lots of evidence around that. That's the best way to get children to read is when they're reading ready, if you like. So again, we need to use these things and we need to do them through these, you know, I don't think that education is entertainment. Um, I really don't, despite the evidence to the contrary. But if there's no fun in learning, what's the point? You know, I read, I read Voraciously, and I read Voraciously because I enjoy it because it, I, it's the fun of discovery. And when I read nonfiction, it's the fun of discovery. It's the fun of learning. It's the sheer joy of knowing something I didn't know before of having ideas playing with them. So we need that and we need what my good friend and colleague Hal Roberts talks about his accidental learning. And he's so shameless, he's written an entire book in that and managed to call it. Oops. And it's a great book because again, not all learning is directed. And as much as we need an education to think about delivery, we also need to think about capture. We need to think about capturing what children have learned. Incidentally, along the way, we need to capture the byproducts of the educational experiences as well as the simple targets. And all that's got to be rooted in resilience, children's capacity to cope. And the next point I think on the slide is really important and very relevant, I think to Tale's toolkit, is that I honestly believe that accomplishment is the most effective way to build confidence. I don't think it's good to say to children who have failed or not managed to cope the task, but you did your best. Because effectively that's probably given them the message. They're never going to be able to do it. And we need to allow children completion of tasks. Tasks cannot always be binary. And again, I think Teals Toolkit is a, a really good example of that because it gives children the stimulus and it gives them the resources to try and build something of their own. And it's a task that's accessible, that it's open-ended and yes, it's competitive. Yes, we can look at how well it's been done, we can look at all of that. But you cannot be wrong with it. No, you can't go wrong. Yeah. And that's something actually we, we put in our training a lot. We talk about that, that whatever the child says, you go with it. Like you just know if it's violent, if it's something that you don't agree with, you just go with it and you might just turn it into a discussion later on. But there's no wrong answers. Whatever happens within that story, there's no wrong answers. And you go with it and you act it out and you see it through. And I think that's really important. And you see children use Intel's toolkit that when they first come in, they're very reserved and won't wanna interact and won't wanna get involved. But when they see that it's a safe space that whatever they say goes, then that's when they start to step up and give you all sorts of wonderful creative things that that, and I think that happens massively and early in and early children are a lot more willing just to throw out all sorts of random ideas and, and not to be judged in that way. And that tends to come, we notice it as children get older, that you'll get to year two, even like when children are sort of like going up, I mean like sort of six, seven, as they get older, that that you'll say to them, what's this? You know, this is a pen. And a child in Earliers would be like, oh, that's Bob Depen who likes to ride in rocket s**t. Whereas someone in year two would be like, well, it's a pen, you're like ideas. But they, they seem to like, I've had that kind of drum down into that right and wrong and, and what's the right answer? That seems to come very quickly in school, doesn't it? Yeah. And, and you know, ultimately it comes down to the experience that I would've as a secondary teacher, is this an exam? Yes, yes. It's kind of why are We doing that? Yes. Yeah. Um, and and I think also, um, one of the, the expressions that you used there, Kate, was, was about judgment. And that ties back to this idea that I've got here about respecting values. Mm-hmm. Um, I mean, one of the things that, that we need to face up to is that, you know, children, even at the younger stages will come in with all sorts of values, many of them that don't sit well with the values that we might have. You know, and again, I I often quote Hal Roberts, um, talking about teaching in Barnsley, and he was teaching secondary age kids and he chose to use Kes with them, Barry Hesberg Kero for an eve, because it, it was about their community. And when he showed them the film case, they could see relatives, you know, that's my nan, you know, she's still got that here. And what that did was that reinforced the value of that community and it reinforced many of the values of that community. Mm-hmm. Also, he used to kill a mockingbird with them because he needed to challenge some of the endemic racism that existed alongside that. And, and that idea of, of having to respect values and start building from them, you cannot simply tell people they're wrong and pretend that that is an argument. That's not an argument, that's a challenge. Is there anything can happen in a story? I think it's an imaginative place where anything can happen. And it doesn't necessarily have to be something that they're like, no, that's wrong or that doesn't happen in real life. That in stories, anything can happen and those things can be explored. Yeah. And, and the critical thing I think all the time, and I'm gonna come back to this as well, all the time, what you're looking for is a springboard. Mm-hmm. The, the story that children write in response to the tail circuit stimulus or whatever else it might be, the story that they write is not an end in itself. The story is not finished until you have the discussion around it. And, and I mean, it's absolutely fascinating because as grownups, you know, we, we have book groups, you know, book groups are sweeping the land apparently. And so that we can sit down and talk about the book. And when we talk about these books, um, we will often go far beyond anything that the author intended or the author may have intended. We don't know that, but we as readers interact with someone else's narrative, and we as educators do that with children. Mm-hmm. So the story is a springboard. And if there are things in the story that we, we may wish to pick up on or develop or whatever, we have the opportunity to do that. The difference is it's a dialogue and not a lecture. And that's another of the power of stories. Yeah. And, and as we do that, you know, there's what I think the underpinning philosophy is that many of the people that, that will eventually listen to this will have that, as far as education's concerned, the focus should be on the experience of the learner. That it, it, it's not a mission in terms of passing on some intact series of messages, ideas, facts, or whatever else, that the focus is in the experience of the learners. That it's through the experience that the learner will actually grasp knowledge, will grasp ideas. And of course, you know, another phrase I'm fun to use that all most kids need is a wee bit of structure and a whole lot of love. Mm-hmm. Um, and they've got to, you know, that structure I think needs to be there. It's not a case of either or, but we need to think about the experience of the learner. And I think also we need to be increasingly confident that there are features of quality. We know what works. And again, tale toolkit's a really good example because you now have a burgeoning, uh, volume of evidence about the efficacy of what you do in the approaches that you have. And, and we can recognize and describe that. I mean, we are caught up in Scotland at the moment in a national discussion, and yet there are lots of things that we need to discuss, but there's part of me echoing a well known Billy Cony sketch from years back, you know, with the crowd chanting at the Christians and the rain day, something, day, something, you know, we know enough to take action. We have enough to build on, and we can start making changes in children's lives now by recognizing what we know. And we need to build that quality in and not assure it in. And too much of what we do in education is led by accountability. How to teach the perfect osted lesson. You know, how many boop are there that are based around how one pleases offstead. I've never taught osted, you know, I've taught kids, but I've never taught Oted. So a perfect Ted lesson really isn't an essential thing for me. We need to be starting to work from what we believe in. And, and, and so often the best way to get the right result is to do the right thing. Mm-hmm. When we get success in education, it's often because we transfer energy rather than knowledge is because we stimulate children, it's because we get them engaged and we are more capable of stimulating and engaging children if we are stimulated and engaged in the way that we approach them. And one of the things I love about creative work with children around narrative, around stories or whatever, one of the things I love about it is that that's a stimulus for me when I see something that kids have done. I love that. You know, that's what really motivates me is when I see the light come on in a kids' eyes, when I see them engaged, when I see them respond. And when I see them do more than I asked of them, that's when I come alive. You know? And when I come alive, it's frightening. But, you know, when I come alive, that's when I can help other people to do that. And, and that, you know, that all needs to be around looking at what I do, looking at my performance, doing the join Hattie thing of asking the impact of what I do and basing things and that using the evidence. Mm-hmm. You know, and, and using qualitative as well as quantitative evidence. But I think, you know, again, I'm, I, I'm so repetitive and I really apologize, Dan, but it's forced to listen to me because of that. But, you know, one of the things that I'm fond to saying just now is that we are obsessed with evidence-based practice. And actually we also need to be thinking more about practice-based evidence. That we need to be thinking more about the engagement with our own practice and looking at what evidence is arising from that and analyzing that. Because give me a teacher who can reflect on their practice and I can help 'em to become great. Give me a teacher who's simply there to deliver. And unfortunately, that's the kinda culture we create, isn't it? That you know, you can, you can learn teaching by watching somebody else. And we need to recognize that teachers are thinkers and reflectors. Mm-hmm. And that leads us to a rational process based model. So what we're talking about, I think in terms of creativity, in terms of tale toolkit or whatever, what we're talking about isn't something that's idealistic or romantic. We, we, if it becomes caught up in that process based model where we're reflecting, we're deploying the evidence, we're challenging ourselves in terms of impact. Because when we can get that and we then make that a shared enterprise with colleagues, with other organizations, I mean, one of the things I love about your organization is that apart from anything else, you give teachers a buddy. Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. You know, you give them somebody to work along. And then once we can agree outcomes, we can recognize them together. 'cause that's what we're aiming for. We're aiming this work achievement and success. We're aiming to add value, but we're also in some instances aiming to confound destinies because we can still predict outcomes on the basis of birth weight. And we'll be right more often than we're wrong children's narratives, their stories are still written at birth or before birth. And what we do sometimes is we turn that around completely and people do manage that. People remarkably, Gino has got wonderful quote about how it's amazing what we actually achieve in education, given all the difficulties that we face. But we need to do that by strengthening social cohesion as well. If what we do simply is build individuals, individualism, competitiveness, if all we do is create and reinforce that, then we build a mirror image of the world, which is failing us. Now we need to build a world that works together. We need to emphasize cooperation as much as we emphasize competition. And we need to recognize that individual excellence will not solve us, will not, will not solve us, will not save us, and will not solve our problems. When we make real change, we make it together. And in doing that, we need to empower communities. And that means giving people that sense of control. And if we can do all of these things together, then we can strengthen the economy. If we start off simply with the idea of supporting the economy and strengthening it, we will lose the other elements and we'll get perilously close to that flirtation with indoctrination and self-fulfilling prophecy. So what matters? Well, the Black Eyed Peas will tell you it's the answer to the question in this song. Okay, I'll leave you thinking about that. Here's what matters. And answering that question, where is the loss? And we need to think about how we demonstrate that love and that care. Because in reality, you know, again, come back to, I talk all the time about teacher workload and everything else. And honest to God, the answer to that isn't a wellbeing seminar. You know, we, we need to stop the idea that Pilates can save us all, and that if we would just get a breathing right, we'd, we'd all be fine. The real answer to workload and everything else is job satisfaction. It's given people that sense that they're achieving something. And so what we need to do is we need to say, what is it that gives us job satisfaction? And I've already begun to answer, that's when the light comes on. But I love this quote, you know, early childhood educators, more powerful than simply being good with children. It's the ability to remember what it feels like to be a brand new human, to appreciate the magic and discovery and want to share that with children in a fun, positive, meaningful, and lasting way all at the same moment. And we need to get back to this, you know, again, my other cliche of many, right? Is that we need to stop talking continually about education in the language of accountancy and start talking about it in the language of poetry. Because that genuinely is what the best early childhood educators do. And in doing so, they transform things. And we know there's problems for the new statutory framework. I mentioned them right at the outset. But we need to deal in realities. And within the statutory, statutory framework in England, if we are clear about our ambitions, we can go through that framework and we can find much rhetoric in it that's actually supportive. We can mine that document for encouragement. In Scotland, we have a different document that's called Realizing the Ambition. And it's a wonderful document and people really like it. Users of the document really like it, but whatever the framework is, we need to be clear about what it is we want to achieve and what it is we think we can achieve. And we need to be clear about our responsibilities. And within that we need to use that documentation to make sure that we're going back and we're building these learning pathways for children. And these are the learning pathways that we're trying to take children down. You know, we, we want them to have knowledge, we want them to be able to deal with knowledge. Sorry, I always do this. It just takes on a mind if it's on this slide, we need to give them that knowledge. But alongside that, they need to have understanding. They need to be able to make sense of the knowledge, they need to be able to analyze it, they need to be able to ask questions, they need to be able to put ideas together. And all of these are not simply skills of learning. They're the craft of the author, you know? And they need to be able to apply what they've learned. That's how we know when knowledge has been retained, is when it can be applied in a different context. They need to be able to make judgements, to work things out. How do you learn to do that if you don't exercise that habit? And I've talked about systems thinking there, but that's just about dealing with complexity and big ideas. And finally, they need to be able to use all of that to make and do something that will help us to find a different and better world than knowing we have at the moment. And that is Bloom's taxonomy. Essentially. It's an adaptation of Blooms. So we're going right back to an earlier understanding. These ideas aren't new, but we need to make sure that all of these, including knowledge of equal weight in the way that we think about learning. And so again, it's back to that idea of either end and making sure that we cover all our bases. And if we let children know what they're doing and what they're learning, we give them that. We may not use the word, but we give them that ability to understand, to think about, to analyze and to deal with the knowledge that they have. And there's sort of learning. I think that that means learning needs to be active. And, and that doesn't just mean physically active, it means active in terms of reaching conclusions, making judgements, thinking through it has to involve that quest for meaning. That idea of making sense needs to be varied. You know, again, no matter how good a particular approach to learning it's over exposure to it is likely to kill it. Um, you know, I, when I first started teaching, I, I had a brilliant principal teacher, but he had, he had one way and it worked in that department, it worked in that school. He moved to another school. It was a disaster. And, and so we need to think about variety. We need to think about different approaches. We need motivation. People need to want to learn, and we need to create that desire. And how do you do that without achievement? How do we do that without realization? And of course we need to respect the disciplines of science, of maths, of English, of language or whatever. But we can't be dominated by these disciplines. We need to give children a chance to be at the center of their own learning rather than peripheral visitors to kingdoms already defined in terms of curriculum. And when we assess, we need to assess in terms of breadth and depth and application and not simply recall. And I think all of this takes us back to all these things that we talked about earlier when I used exactly this slide about fun, about accidental learning, about the importance of resilience. So there's a kinda consistency, and it takes us back into these two big questions I touched on earlier. How do we give young people the opportunity to surprise us to think again about who they are, to revise judgments, to reach our paths. And how do we allow ourselves and our colleagues to surprise ourselves in each other? How do we allow imagination and creativity into our practice? And there is mentioned them twice already. There's Hal Roberts, that's Hal with some kids that he and I were teaching three or four years back. We did a project with them. We all went lovely there. They were a nightmare. You know, I made no bones about it, but an absolute nightmare. They were in Scottish money, a primary one class and a primary five class. So that would be like, what would that be? A reception year four maybe in English terms. And particularly the primary one class, the younger group, absolute nightmare. I couldn't get him to do anything. Even Hal, who's the best practitioner I've ever seen, was really struggling with 'em. And we were, when I was teaching them, I was teaching them all the time. I was actively teaching. The kids were coming into class to watch me work. I was the only one doing any work in that classroom at all. They were just sitting there observing, you know, it was like I was in the work experience and they were evaluators. How we got them engaged was we started off getting them to draw their own trees. They created their own trees. And as you can see, there are some really interesting trees there. Um, I don't know which tree that is. It might be the Tree of Luck. Who knows? The literacy skills were appalling, I have to say that. But once we'd done that, I took them to the National Gallery of Scotland and we looked at the impressionist work. We were the only people there that were retired. And we were only people in the gallery. It was during the day who weren't wearing outdoor clothing. For some reason, people were wandering around, you know, in walking boots, strange habit of older people. And these kids were like spilt, mercury people, you know, honestly thought it was a breach. But that's what we got them to do. We got them to paint their own forests and look at that. They'd done that in no time at all. And when they'd done that, that's the earlier the, the earlier stage kids. We also got the older kids. We got them to build their own gallery and look at that, look at that level of engagement. And when they'd done that, I said to both groups, all I want is you to write something for me about your forests. Mm-hmm. And when they came back, I had work I could feed back on. When I came back, they couldn't wait to tell me what they were doing. Look at the commitment, look at the motivation. And I'm not saying as ever that you have to do that all the time. What I'm saying is we have to do that some of the time. And if we're gonna do it, let's do it in a way that's supported, because we've already said that. It's about all of that, bringing together the learning and the learners asking that question and overcoming that static friction and disadvantage. So we're not asking folk to do big new things, we're simply asking them to do more of the things that work. Mm-hmm. And we're asking them to find out what it is that works in their context, in their practice with their kids. And that means helping them to understand that context. And then critically for me, it's about getting people to do what we believe in. And I think when most of us come into education, whatever our role, we believe in potential. We believe in capacity. We believe we have the power to give something back. And we believe that we can help children to become more than they are or more that they might be. And if we're gonna do that, then we need to get together. We need to share and apply. And I think your organization is a powerful tool in terms of that sharing. And it's about having that informed ambition. We're not gonna change the world in one lesson. Um, we're not gonna save the environment in one story. But if we think about what we can do and what we might do and build carefully and cautiously towards that without burning out, if we don't compare ourselves constantly against the best, but make aspirational comparisons that draw more from us, then I think we begin to pull together and we need to do that. Mm-hmm. We need to make sure that we never mind the b******s. And if you're wondering what that is, it's unjustified and aggressive certainty. And there is so much of that. It's where I started around educational debate. So much unjustified and aggressive certainty. So many people who are absolutely sure that they're right, and loads of them suffer from mono literacy. They've only read one book. You know, despite the plethora of books that are out there, they've chosen to only read one of them and they've then decided it's the Bible and, and that's it. You know, that's how it should work. And then you get that, you get L B D, they've read another book and it's now the Bible. So we, we go through this whole thing of we've got one group of educators saying, don't smile till Christmas. Mm-hmm. And we've got another group of educators who are high fing, high fiving kids to death before they even let them in their classroom. You know, they're going through a dance that would do credit to the shy lights and the golden age of Philly soul. And then they let kids in the room to do some learning. And neither of these approaches entirely. Right. You know, we need to make sure that we get away from that. I've just read this. Yeah. And we need to get away from that, you know, at work Uzbekistan and it center pieces status through the roof. So, you know, we better start doing that too. I keep asking people, do you remember Chinese maths not that long ago since Chinese maths was gonna save us all? And teachers were coming in dressed as Aladdin classroom assistants coming in in their chairman ma jackets, people teaching maths for a Chinese accent. They just stopped, you know, when did you last hear about Chinese math? You know, and, and that idea constantly they would get that there is no other way. And all I'm saying along with Father Ted let's down with that sort of thing. Mm-hmm. Right. I think we need to get away from that easy facile and often aggressive certainty and open up the possibility. And I think that early years needs to rediscover that spirit of play, that spirit of a and take advantage of the tools that are there to support them. And may I add the two kids that are to support them, including yours? And in case anybody's wondering how it's been going on, I've been trying to find love in a hopeless place. Um, I've also been the real, I hope I've been on fire some the time and there's all my contact details. If anybody wants to continue the discussion, you can get me in all these, including Twitter. But meanwhile, let's just have a chat and let's see if you and I can help other people to find love in a hopeless place. That was brilliant. That was brilliant, David. That was brilliant. Like, so many wonderful messages in there that would just resonate with a lot of people. And I think, I think like you're talk about community and people supporting each other, and that's what I hope people get a little bit from these webinars is just that message of there's stuff out there and there's people that you can go to and there's other teachers that think in the same way as you. Because like I know we visit a lot of schools early years particularly, and they can vary massively, um, in terms of the way that do they deliver stuff. And we all have this huge belief in belief in play and creativity, but that's hard for a lot of teachers to deliver. Like it's, it's, there's a real top down pressure. There's a real fight that they've got on their hands to deliver something that we know is right. And that makes me really angry, to be honest. So I think the more that they hear that message of creativity and play and community and giving children that kind of sense of control and being able to question and to be able to be curious and getting that balance right. Because we're not saying, like you said, we're not saying no structure, no literacy, like that's equally something that we have to deliver and make sure that children have that time and space. But, but yeah, it's, it's tough. Like practitioners have got a real tough environment right now, so, but yeah. I don't know if there's any advice you have for people out there that are battling for this and believing. Yeah, I mean, I think, I think one of the, the things that I talk about a lot as well is the idea of consonance. Um, and the idea consonance is about, you know, starting from your own ambitions and values and then looking out to see what these external pressures are that you are referring to. Yes. And then seeing how you can bring the two together, how you can fit these two together rather than simply starting from the outside pressures and building forward from that. Because then you never get to your ambitions. Yes. And you simply become that delivery arm. And I think the more we can talk about tools that allow us to find consonance, and we, um, I, I think one of the things that we, we, we need to get better at mm-hmm. Is, is monitoring our own data. Uh, lots of schools that use play in creativity mm-hmm. Actually see a significant upturn in the later stages of primary, but may well get planned because they're not getting national standards or expectations mm-hmm. In reception or year one or whatever. And, and they're, they're bowed down by that. And we're not actually good about gathering the evidence of what we do and defending it, and we're not good at getting in first. I think too often we wait to be criticized rather than identifying and trumpeting our achievements. Um, because I honestly believe that, um, most people in education are well intended, you know, um, even people that might sometimes feel a bit oppressive or whatever, I think they're well intentioned. I think if we can clearly show that we are getting the kind of outcomes that people want. Um, and you talked about, you know, literacy and you talked about have to, and actually we want to do, you know, that that's, that's the key thing. I mean, sure I want kids to imagination, but I want them to have the structure that allow them to do something with it. Um, and discipline is the difference between, you know, just some weird stoner conversation about, you know, about what Wow, man, I'll tell you what you know, and it was this, ah, man, you know, discipline, literacy, these tools and construct are what knocks that into a shape. Yes. Um, and you know, I, I admire, and James Joyce, a classic example as a writer. Mm-hmm. I, I I love Dublin Earth mm-hmm. Which is a concentrated, disciplined collection of short stories, much more than I love the sprawling majesty of Finnegan's Wake. Mm-hmm. Um, and, and for me it's that coming together of the, the ideas, the ability, the creativity and the discipline that fashions something that's truly marvelous. Whereas Finnegan's Week, um, can be much more alienating for people. And there are lots of other examples of that I think that, um, where that, that coming together of creativity and, and restraint, if you like, produce something that's really interesting and, and that's what you do. You know, I, I mean, I think your, your own advice is you pick up on that. You know, I, I think you may not use the same term, but I think you're all about capturing the learning. Yes. Yeah. You know, get them, allow them to tell the story, give 'em the space, give 'em the school, but then come back and tell 'em what they've done. Yes. You know, and, and put down these markers and then build on them. Yeah. That's it. Yeah. 'cause for us, like, we find that schools will say that when they first started creating stories, there'll be like, and then there was a Batman and then there was a Robin, and then they went down the road, and then there was a shop, and then there was a mum. And, and by giving them that structure of character setting problem solution that they can work within, but choosing what they want to do within that, that gives them that kind of balance of structure and creativity and, but something to be able to work within. So, yeah. Yeah. So I, go ahead. Sorry. No, you Go. Yeah. So yeah, it's definitely, I think, I think that's, I see that a lot in education and we work with lots of different schools and what we try to do within our training is that we try to give them that mix of that kind of importance of creativity and resilience and problem solving and talking through things and questioning in the right way for practitioners, but then also that structure and that, how that fits in with phonics and that passion for writing and that passion for learning. So there's, yeah. And we've talked about this before, haven't we? There's the real place for both of those things, and there's got Totally, Totally. And, and you know, it, it's interesting. I think it's the same in any art form. Um, you know, the, the, I mean, people, people don't watch strictly come dancing to see people execute the perfect crip step. Yes. They tune in to watch what they do when they've got the ability to deliver the perfect crip step and add something to it that makes it their own. Um, you know, ballroom dancing, if all it is is about executing the steps couldn't even be a competitive art form. Mm-hmm. And it's the same, you know, if, if you look at street dance and the Hop mm-hmm. There are steps, there's a discipline, there are things that people do within that, but you're not interested in watching thousands and thousands and thousands of people perfectly doing that. You want to see the person who does the new thing and it, you know, was he the perfect ballad dancer? Was Nikko the perfect ballad and was Fontain, or was it the fact that they brought something more an intensity, an adventure or whatever? So we've got that idea in our heads around how we think about art and creativity, and we need to bring some of that back into education. And of course, you know, if I want to listen to a musician, I want 'em to be able to play in tune. Yeah. You know, I want them to be able to show me their skill and their capacity and their knowledge and understanding of their instrument. Yeah. But what do they do to move me? Yes. You know, what is it that they do that makes me go, you know, it's, what is it they do that gives me that? Yeah. And that, you know, I think, I think classic hadn't been taught about it for the ages, but I used to use a clip from the film Pride. Okay. Um, and which anybody that hasn't seen it, about a group of gay activists who go to support minors who are in striking a village in, in Wales. And it's not exactly a marriage made in heaven to begin with. Yeah. Um, but it, it becomes that. Mm-hmm. And at one point they're sitting in the minor swell here and, and a woman begins to sing Bread and Roses. Mm-hmm. And it's the story of, uh, a strike that women were involved in in the early 20th century. Yeah. Um, but they struck for bread. Of course they did. Yeah. But they struck for roses too. And, and that fundamentally for me, is what it's about. You know, it, it's, it, M**k Lynch just now, he, he talks about the quality of life. He talks about values, he talks about understanding, and he talks about Ling, but he talks about all of that together. And that holistic sense of how we see the world is just so important, I think. Yeah. Um, and, and it is that continually, it's not an either or. Yeah. It's not, you know, it's not an either or. It's an either end. Yeah. That's it. Right. I've got a few questions for you, David. Sure. Thank you. Um, so Alex Law has asked what role can stories play in building resilience in our current reality? Well, hopefully, and welcome Alex. Um, I, I, I, someone I really enjoy seeing on Twitter, 'cause she's continually nice to me. Um, so big thanks for that. I mean, stories, I think play all sorts of roles, particularly in our current circumstances. Creating a narrative helps to create a sense of control. Um, what you do when you create a story is you shape the world into reality and a title for this. Um, and what you can do in this story is you can, you can play not only with the narrative, you can play with yourself, and we can encourage children to be in a story that they are telling. And I think all of these, that, that experience and lots of what we do through story is a rehearsal for life. I think in many ways, particularly for younger writers, you know, for older writers, the story's often a reflection in life. Mm-hmm. But for young people, it's a way of finding your way into it. It's a way of exercising possibility. It's a way of asking what if. And these are all, I think, critical questions around resilience. The ability to ask the question, what if and the ability to seek ending. Mm-hmm. You know, key to the story. The ability to seek ending, to understand that, I think help people to get that idea that, that we can do this in life as well, and we can do so much around that. And I think the other thing that helps to build resilience is the understanding of others. You know, that, and, and you were speaking earlier about the way sales toolkit provides structure. You know, it, it gives people, uh, a starting point if you like, a scaffolding for improvisation. Mm-hmm. And again, that builds confidence to view. If you can find your way easily into that, that builds confidence and accomplishment, I think helps to reinforce that sense of resilience. So I think all of these elements come together and work. Yeah. Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah, because the, there's some other thing we found with our stories as well is that obviously there's a real focus we tell sot on the problem solution side of things. Yeah. And you find that come through a lot in most stories. There's something that has to be overcome or some problem that's solved or something that happens. And we took a lot with within our training about having a problem, but having to go in a few different ways at solving it and it might not work. And then you come back and you try again, and you think about some other things that you might do. So it's that whole thing of having a problem and it, you know, you might have a few goes at it, but it's not something that's overcome straight away that you might have to think a little bit outside the box in how you approach that. So Yeah. And I think, I think we, going back to Alex's question. Yes. I think one of the things that we need to do is we need to think a bit of what we ask children to write stories about. Yes. Um, and that, you know, that helps us to, to build that resilience by, by changing the context and changing the ask and the story as well. Mm-hmm. That's great. Um, lovely. Um, I've got a question from Kate Johnston. Um, she said, do you think a statutory kindergarten stage for three to six year olds will be of benefit to the children of Scotland? And if so, what do you believe these benefits will be? Well, I, I, I think Kate's cheating. I don't think Kate should be asking questions that she knows the answer to. Um, Kate's a a major driving force in upstart in Scotland, and I, it's an organization I've supported. Um, I, I, I think that the idea of, of kindergarten, of allowing children to explore their world, of having that opportunity to find themselves before we overly enforce structures on them. I think all of that allows, I think, I think it's helpful. I think, you know, there are all sorts of physical difficulties that children might have in terms of reading, you know, boys and scanning and all sorts of things like that. I think the idea of waiting until the time is right to, to teach, I think is important. I think the kindergarten stage allows more flexibility around that. Yes, I'm a huge believer in, in outdoor ed. Um, I, I led the a a a report on outdoor education in Scotland. I chaired that I was a trustee for a long time of learning through landscapes. Um, so very committed to outdoor learning. And, and you know, as somebody said, I know that you can just sit somebody behind the desk and expect them to learn and save the world. They need to have some engagement and some understanding. We need people to recognize that they're part in nature. We, we need to get that. I think the opportunities that the kindergarten stage give for safe exploration and play, I think in all of these, come together and help to reinforce risk. Um, and if Kate's still struggling for an answer, I think it did a be video at one point for Upstart. She can go back and have another look at that. It'll be Yeah. On a website somewhere. Oh, That's it. Um, how do you think, how do you think, I mean, how is, you probably know more about this, how is Scotland gonna go about getting it right in terms of when they do extend it up? Because I know it's something that's happened in Wales, Wales have extended the early years. Um, but it's quite difficult from people that I speak to there, um, because those practitioners have taught in a certain way for a long time and there's a lot of change coming through. How do you think they're gonna go about getting that right for, for practitioner? Yeah, I mean, I, I, I think a few things. I think, um, I, I I think one of the things that Whales have at least tried to do, um, really well is that they've, they've, they've taken time. Yeah. Um, so, you know, there, there have been schools that have been working in the new e the, the built on people's practice was already close to the practice that the, they wished to establish and so on and so forth. And they built up a kinda bedrock of resources. Now, whether or not they've done enough of it, that's not for me to say, but I think, I think that idea of measure progress is hugely important. I think the other thing, um, which Wills have attempted to do more consistently than Scotland did is that they've, they've committed to aligned change. Okay. So as well as changing approaches, they've looked at curriculum, they've looked at training, they've looked at it, they've looked at a lot of things together. And I think it's where you get aligned change that you're more likely to get successful change in any single aspect in Scotland. Um, we majored on changing the curriculum and we did a bit around training. We had the Donaldson report and training, which was a really good document, and there were good moves made to implement elements and aspects of it. Again, whether enough or not, I'm less sure, but we backed off on the debate about teacher's terms and conditions, and we never really followed that through. Um, and we didn't keep up the continual and consistent engagement. And I think that we're gonna make any major change. We need to do all of these things. So we need to recognize that, you know, you can just do one thing. And, and that's the problem with politicians is that they know they'll love a headline and they love a gesture. Um, so yeah, we are doing, Scotland is, you know, best place in the world to grow up. I mean, honest to God, you know, we just need to get away from government by soundbite. Yeah. Um, you know, Scotland's not the best place in the world to grow up. Some bits of Scotland might be. Yeah. And for a long time, some bits of Scotland might continue to be, and there might be some more bits of Scotland, but honest to goodness, if you go into the setting of young MGO or Shuggy Bean or any of the marvelous books that are written about that working class experience in Scotland, it's not the best place to grow up. And we, we've working hard to make it so, but it needs to be put in context and needs to be aligned change. And again, going way beyond the remit. And of this is takes vet schools to address inequality on their own through raising attainment is a camera. You know, we need to recognize that we actually need investment in communities. We need jobs, we need work, we need all of that. So we need an integrated strategy. We need proper training, we need measured progress, and we need to recognize that what we'll get is fragmented progress. And we need to, I mean, again, you know, one of the things that we need to stop doing is we need to stop redesigning the engine every time there's a hiccup in it. And we need to sometimes just fix the engine. Mm-hmm. Um, so we need to stop these big headlines, systemic changes that people are so fond of, and give practice a chance to catch up with ambition on a much more consistent basis than it does at the moment. And I think that helps to make it work. Yeah. And finally, you know, some mantras, right? Mm-hmm. No philosophy without funding. Yes. Yeah. Yeah. Sure. You need to behind it. Don't, don't gimme the philosophy if you're not giving me the money to make it a reality. Right. And, and I think that's absolutely critical and no values unless your workforces are experiencing them. Um, you know, so the whole idea of, I'm telling you, you need to give these kids a better experience mm-hmm. Encourages people to say, I'm going to give you a better experience. Um, you know, we, we need to make sure that values are consistent, that the workforce is respected. We need to listen to the practitioners. We need to make sure that we move forward in that measured way, and that would give us a fighting chance. Yeah. Brilliant. No, that's a great answer. And I think the other thing that you're talking about, communities, I think, I think that's something that you get in early years when you do a play-based curriculum, is I think you have more opportunities to be able to engage parents and to engage families. So I think, I think that's a really key part of it too. So, so Yeah. Um, but sorry, go on. You go. No, I mean that's, that's, that's one of my huge bug bearers. Yeah. Um, is that we, we don't have enough learning from early years. Mm-hmm. Um, you know, the, the, we, we had a great conversation, which is online, um, couple of weeks back with a guy called Ollie Bri, who's uh, senior figure in, um, education Scotland. And Ollie was talking about play at all levels in education. And critically that's true. That we, you know, that we need to recognize that quest for meaning is important to all stages. And what we're too quick to do is to say that's early years. Yeah. You play, that's early years Excellent. Early years, and equally of course, in early years you get mm-hmm. You know, engagement with parents. Yes, you do. Um, there are factors which change that, you know, that it, it's more likely that people, parents will, will not be in work when their children are, and in early years they might be more inclined to be back and work later. There are all sorts of circumstances around that. But what we don't do enough is sit and say why Yes. Why are we getting that? Mm-hmm. And we we're much more open to parents in early years. Mm-hmm. Uh, I'm more inclined to patronize them in the upper school. Mm-hmm. Um, so I, I do think there's a greater need to look at early years of practice and see what lessons are applicable right. Across the curriculum. Um, because, you know, the, the the framework document that I referred to in England earlier is written entirely the other way around. It's what early years needs to learn from the upper stages in order to ensure that kids are ready for that. Yeah. Why are we not asking the question? Is the correct. Ready for the children? Yeah. And interesting, you were talking earlier a little bit about kind of joining those dots up in the, what you have in the early years doesn't necessarily always kind of come out in your year one and two, but then later on when they get kind of higher at the school and secondary, there's a whole lot of gaps and things that haven't been met because of what happened in the early years, or things that happened in the early years really come out later on. Um, and we've had a lot of meetings where we spoke to people that are teaching children in year six or early secondary, and there's things that they're like, well, that creativity or that question asking is really important in terms of what we are teaching. And being able to write and create a story and being able to think outside the box a little bit. Those things are really important. So that play should be happening all the way through, like you said, that should be something that embeds this way right through. We, we, I mean, again, I think we don't, we don't do enough about planning across stages. Um, we, we focus too much in planning within stages. Um, I did a bit of work in, in Wakefield at one time, and one of the things that we did was we banned people, you know, properly. It was properly liberal approach. Uh, we banned people from using the word transition. Mm-hmm. Um, and we insisted that conversations were not about transition, but about progression. Yes. Um, because transition implied moving across a divide. Mm-hmm. Uh, whereas progression was about trying to find a, a consistent approach to progress. And we encourage people to talk about skills development, you know, using that, these learning pathways mm-hmm. And think about that. Um, we were encouraging colleagues in the upper school or colleagues to, in secondary to be asking, well, where is this child in terms of creativity? Yes. As opposed to what's the SAT score? Yes. Um, and I, one of the things I've subsequently tried to do is to devise a just a very simple report form, which goes with the child, which is much broader. You know, it tries to condense information, but it actually says what this child is good at. Yeah. He's good at working stuff out, good at putting ideas together. The good at, so you got a pen portrait of the learner rather than just a score. And you know, again, very obvious thing, Kate, but new kids can get exactly the same score. Mm-hmm. For the sake argument, 50%. Right. One of them might have got their 50% in the first half of the paper, the other one might have got their 50% in the second half. You know, one might have got every odd question. Right. The other one might have got every even question. Right. And yet, when that information goes forward, what we're telling people is they're the same kid. Yeah. Um, so, you know, we need to get around that idea that there is, that progression is the key rather than transition. And that we need to think about planning our across stages as well as within them. And I think that would help with some of these difficulties. Yeah. I think that's good. Yeah. Um, right. I've got a, a question, an anonymous question now. Are there certain stories we should read to children? And I'm not sure if this is entirely relevant, but, um, when I was working in Sterling mm-hmm. I was director and, and one of the schools were thing they were doing for boot week Yeah. Is they were getting people to come in and talk about the boots they were reading. 'cause they wanted children to get the idea of adult reading for pleasure. So the head, the head said to me, you come in and do this. And, and I said, sure. And, and I said, what is it you want me to, to, to talk about? Um, is it a book I like reading my kids and or, or is it the book I'm actually reading? Yeah. And she said, no, it's a boot. You're actually reading. Okay. And at that point I was reading the Girl with the Dragon tu mm-hmm. Um, you know, if people aren't familiar with it, pretty gory, you know, murder, crime, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. I said, that's what I'm reading. And I said, do you, you want me to talk to all the kids about that? She said, yeah, you'll, you'll have the younger ones first and then you'll have the older ones. Okay. And I want to talk to them. And I'm like, how the, um, Like a of, Sorry, I like a bit of go. So I had to think about it. And I went in and what I said to them is, I'm reading a skate boot just now, and it's about a girl and it's about a girl who's got all sorts of challenges. Do you know that sometimes we'll talk about children that, that are in the class for you who've got special needs? Well, she would've had special needs. Yeah. But, and so the whole thing, the whole story became about somebody becoming more than they were. And that's, that's not necessarily what you would normally talk about in terms of the girl with the Dragon to two, but it worked. Yeah. And, and I think thinking about meaning and thinking about communication and thinking about what it is that we want to convey in the context of the children, then I think that will help us. Um, I'm about to try and put something together for a school which wants to help address issues of violence in the community, particularly domestic violence. Mm-hmm. They'll need to think about particular stories around that that they should read too, and with children and, and, but they wouldn't necessarily be the same stories that other people would choose. Yeah. Yeah. No, that's a good message. Um, and then the last one is another one from Alex. Um, and she's asked, what is the role of story in supporting creativity? Well, I think the, the stories kind of various roles in supporting creativity. I mean, I think one of them is that the, they provide a structure. They provide a context. We, you know, we, we, we can approach stories on the basis of having a beginning and a middle and an end. We can analyze 'em as a brilliant book and partly recommends, um, give it a plug, uh, George Saunders and you see that. Yep. We can see it. Um, and it's, uh, his book is Swimming in a Pond in the Rain mm-hmm. Which is all about Russian short stories. And it's brilliant on the mechanics of the short story. Mm-hmm. And so the story can become like the theme in a, a modern jazz piece. Yeah. Um, and you do that, that's what you do with your stories, and then you allow people to add an embroider. And then as they learn to do that, then they can learn to evolve their own structure. Mm-hmm. They can become the composer as well as the improviser. They can become the creator as well as the developer. And I think stories can do that. I think stories can also develop the desire for creativity. Yes. Um, you know, I, I learned to, to write by reading, um, when I was a kid. Um, I would, I would go to to the film. The film. So I'd go to the pictures. Yeah. Uh, every, you know, when I was, we, I'd go every Saturday afternoon and then when I was a bit older, I'd go every Friday night. You could get in for s in these days. And uh, and then, you know, I would be stimulated to write my own stories that were intensely derivative, but they got better. Yes. Um, and so I think stories do that. And I think stories, the offer satisfaction, you know, they offer satisfaction if you can pull it off, if you can get to the end, if you can tie the pieces together. And all of that, I think helps build the confidence and, and, and it's confidence that allows daring. Yes. Um, you know, if you think that you can do something, you'll try. If you don't think you can do something, you won't. And I think stories can be liberating in that sense. I think they can give you that sense of confidence and ability and I think play a key role in, in creativity. Yeah. Brilliant. Lovely. It's been really, it's been wonderful talking to you, David. I really enjoyed it. I've really enjoyed it. And I think there's been so many key messages that have gone out for people to listen to, and I think there's gonna be a lot of inspired people after hearing you speak today. Yeah. Thanks. Yeah. But is there any message you would like to leave people with? I, I mean, the obvious message you want to leave to people is you don't have to listen to me. Right. Um, I, the, you know, I think one of the big messages is that you've, you've got a story to tell. Mm-hmm. And it's as good and as interesting as mine. And, and you can make it more and you can, you can tell it better and you can, you can grow within your own experience and your own narrative. And that, you know, the answers come from the choir. They don't come from the soloists. Yeah. Um, but maybe if I've hit a note, um, then just turn it into your chord and once you've turned it into a chord mm-hmm. Turn it, it tune mm-hmm. And sing it so everyone hears because we all sing it. Yeah. We change the world. Yeah. Yeah. That's the truth. So yeah. Brilliant. Mass. Massive. Thank you David. No, I've really, I've really enjoyed it and thank you for giving your time and spending time doing this with me. I really appreciate it. Thanks for.