Q&A with Daisy Christodoulou: How to make learning work for our kids

0:00Amol Rajan: If you're really honest, did you have favourite students? All the students who supported West Ham, they were always my favourites. Hello and welcome to this Monday edition of the Amol Rajan Connection. Remember on Mondays I put your questions to our brilliant super smart guests and today Daisy Christodoulou is answering your questions. She is quite simply one of the most interesting, innovative, influential and important people in British education. She's got a company called No More Marking, which she runs as an assessment company, and she writes a very influential substack. And we're talking about, as we did on Thursday's episode, what education is for, what we're getting right, what we're getting badly wrong, and whether or not there are certain myths percolating through our culture that need to be punctured.

0:45Amol Rajan: And just to say, we had to record these first few episodes just for practical, logistical reasons, slightly earlier than we might have liked. So we couldn't get your questions to put to Daisy. We had to solicit them from some friends of the Amal Rajan Connection. But our aim absolutely on a Monday really is to bring you closer to our guests. So we really do want your questions. I'll do various little kind of shout outs and calls for questions on social media. But the best way to find out who is coming on, who's coming up and to get your questions in is to sign up for our free weekly newsletter.

1:17Amol Rajan: So go to amalrajanconnection.com, hit join the club, put your email address in and life will get so, so much better, I promise. And it's all free. Before we get into this conversation, I do just want to say a heartfelt thanks to our launch partners. They make all of this possible. So thank you to NatWest. Thank you to Waitrose. Thank you to Amazon. And thank you to Google Cloud. We simply could not do this without them.

1:44Amol Rajan: Daisy, thank you for sticking around. You've been very, very generous with your time. We've had a lot of questions from people who really care about education and kids. And this is our first question. And this is from Kate. thank you Kate for sending this in here we go I used to totally love reading it was my favorite thing and now I really struggle to do it and I think for kids who have got so many other distractions it must be even worse so how at school and outside do we encourage them to enjoy reading without just making it feel like another boring chore very nice question Kate thank you the context for this is I think we are still in the national year of reading there is a literacy crisis uh people reading for pleasure the stats show there's been a very sharp decline in america and we think probably in britain as well what can we do i think we need more protective spaces where there aren't screens phones technology that's always interrupting your attention so i think in order to be able to read to read for pleasure you really do need to concentrate and focus and pay attention and get that immersion within a book and that is really hard to do if there's a lot of technology around that's constantly interrupting you.

2:55So I think part of it is schools being places, lots of space and time within schools where they're technology free. It's probably also some things to do with even outside of school, maybe a bit of a reset in kids' attitudes to technology, families' attitudes to technology, maybe more brick phones that are not as distracting and time at home without phones as well.

3:17Amol Rajan: But banned smartphones from schools? I think within schools, absolutely. Most of the schools, you know, all the high performing schools I know, they have some variant of the yonder pouches where you put your phone in the pouch for the day. So definitely within schools. I think the harder policy question is about what you do outside of schools more generally. And I get that it does impinge on things, you know, freedom of speech, whatever. Like how do you manage those kinds of bans? but I think this is something where you can see public opinion just really shifting. You've seen it even just in a couple of years.

3:51So I think we're just going to get to a new kind of settlement, a new kind of equilibrium that I think families and civil society generally would be much happier with.

4:00Amol Rajan: Okay. This is a question from Chels. Thank you, Chels, for sending in this question at short notice. Here we go. Hello, I'm Chelsea and I'm an ex-prime school teacher. I really like the idea behind no more marking. I trialled moving away from written marking in my last school where I was teaching Key Stage 1 it was only introduced to Key Stage 1 at that time I actually found verbal feedback much more effective because some of the children were too young to really access or understand what I had written and they'd get quite upset because they've tried really hard and produced this wonderful piece of work and I'd written on it and they'd get upset by that rightly so but I'm curious about how this works with older children so particularly key stage two year six if we move away from marking how do we make sure that we still have the regular routine going back through children's work and checking in on them I found that once we stopped marking it was surprisingly easy to lose that routine so how do you make sure that the quieter children or those who aren't sharing obvious misconceptions don't fall through the cracks.

5:13Amol Rajan: Hang on a second. Does Chelsea work for you? Is this a sort of conspiracy to put a bit of no more marking propaganda into this show? I love it. So Daisy, for people who don't work in the education establishment, Daisy Crisodoulou is an absolute icon and we've had lots of questions for people who adore what you do. Chelsea, clearly one of them. Amazing. So we've got a couple of great new features in our system at the moment. which make it easier for teachers to give feedback. So we do use AI on our system, but it's not about the teachers not reading the kids' writing. What they do is they can read the kids' writing and they can click on a button and say something about the writing, like give some verbal feedback, and we will use AI to transcribe what they've said and turn it into some written feedback for the student.

6:00And what's lovely about that is it's a win-win because the teacher is still reading the student's work, they're still paying attention to it, still giving it that individual attention, but it is obviously much quicker to say something than to write it. So it is a real saver on workload, but it maintains that personal connection. So that, for me, is where I think the future of feedback on writing needs to go.

6:26Amol Rajan: Every teacher across the country is going to hear that and think, that sounds fantastic, can't they? I mean, if there's a teacher, why would you not do that? Yeah, yeah, yeah, exactly. Oh my goodness, okay. This is not an advert for No More Rock, by the way. If you want to know, I'll give Daisy a hard time. Go and listen back to the main episode from last Thursday. Right, we've had lots of questions. I don't want to rattle through them because there's lots of people care about the future and they want to know what you think about it. This is Davey from Berkshire. Thank you, Davey, for getting in touch.

6:49Amol Rajan: Davey from Berkshire says, the debates about the basic skills have been going on since I was at school in the 1980s and they don't seem to go away. It feels like kids lose out by being political footballs. Is there a middle ground between the three R's and children choosing what they want to do? So look, at some point, definitely, there has to be choice by the individual. I always say, look, it's a spectrum. Obviously, there's five-year-olds who have to learn to read. By the time you're 25, obviously, everybody's choosing different things that they're interested in. So it's a gradual sort of release.

7:25At primary school, I think there is, as you say, like core body, the three R's, there's certain things that all students have to learn. I do think age 14, there should be choice. and there is choice in our system. Like I think there is, people forget that. At age 14, you do get a choice of GCSEs and we're not sort of international outliers on that. I think for me, it's just making sure that when we are doing those basics that every student has to have, that we're doing that in the most effective way and we're giving all students the best possible platform.

7:53Amol Rajan: Davey, thank you very much indeed for that. Sorry, Davey, we've got lots of questions. It's your fault for being interesting. Lots of people sending questions that we've asked for. So this is Roe from North Yorkshire. Roe, thank you for sending this in. As a mum of differently neurodiverse 14-year-old twins, I can't help but feel that what's wrong with their education is the insistence on drilling facts through repetition, through practice into them, which completely robs them of the potential joy of learning. whenever there's been a breakthrough in how my children learn and develop in a subject that they have had difficulty with for example maths it's always been because a teacher has been able to adapt the learning to meet the way that they think and understand therefore is it really a good idea to further impose this one-size-fits-all style of education onto children who are all incredibly different and who do learn through finding their passion and through making discoveries and through developing critical thinking, which whatever field you develop it in, I firmly believe you can take that into other areas of your life.

9:26Amol Rajan: Ro, thank you so much for that question. It's obviously heartfelt from someone who's, I imagine, because of those differently neurodiverse 14-year-old twins, I happen to know that trying to manage the bureaucracy that is involved in that must be absolutely hellish. I think it's worth saying, Daisy, I imagine Ro probably does speak for a lot of people who do feel that that one-size-fits-all form of education is wrong in principle and also devastating in practice when you've got neurodiverse kids. What would you say to those two points? So I think there are ways in which, not just in education but generally, we are all different and we're all unique individuals and we've got our different preferences and different interests.

10:09And then I think there are ways in which, as I've been saying all along, there are things that we share. And I would say there are some aspects of cognitive architecture that we do all share. And I would say that working memory, long-term memory distinction is a good one that holds constant. And that doesn't mean we have to be one size fits all. It does mean there can be kind of flexibility. But I think similarly in the way that you would want a medical treatment to be aware of the aspects of biology that we all share. I think it is important that we ground educational practices in what we know about how human minds work.

10:53That obviously does still leave a range of things you can do and possibilities. And I think it is important that within that range there will be things that work in different ways for different students and we should look at those but I think it's also still worth bearing in mind the constraints imposed by the human mind and what I'd hope is we are in relatively early days of a lot of this knowledge of cognitive science becoming better known and what I would hope is as this knowledge filters out across the teaching profession and across society that we will get better and better at translating it into

11:36Amol Rajan: appropriate ways for all learners but i feel frankly a little bit ashamed myself that i didn't in our long episode which ran on thursday uh i didn't ask you about send provision special educational needs not just because i've people very close in my family work in that field but there might be huge numbers of people listening to this who are really concerned about educational provision for those who do have special educational needs and they're these things called EHCPs educational health and care plans which um are rising in their um prevalence have we got a problem with send provision i mean is it not good enough what's going on you've worked in schools you talk to these schools is are we in the right place there most people say not no i don't think we are and i think most people would agree they're not in the right place even if they disagree on how to fix it um there's clearly an issue um again i think the thing i always come back to is a lot of the principles I've talked about, especially with the working memory, the long-term memory, these absolutely apply to SEND students as much as anyone.

12:36And often they have even more value for SEND students. So the thing I will often say is, it's often where those principles get neglected, it's the SEND students will be the first to sort of suffer from it. Right? And they might be the first. So they can often be the ones who can benefit for the most, as I say, from a recognition in particular of the limitations of working memory and how getting things into long-term memory can really be the key that can unlock so much understanding. So I really do think these principles I've talked about do hold true. But as I say, I'm absolutely prepared to accept that a lot of these ideas are new, are only just kind of maybe filtering through to parts of the education system.

13:19And, you know, what would be lovely to see is if we could get an you know sem policy uh kind of based on an understanding of how how students learn okay

13:28Amol Rajan: final couple of questions this is from conrad who i think speaks for possibly billions and not just millions of people when he asks how do we teach children to use ai in a positive way it's going to be an ever greater part of life many have been told using ai is bad and are now scared of it how do we get the balance right yeah great question i've got an analogy for you chess so when the first chess computer 1997 1998 IBM's deep blue chess computer beat the world champion Gary Kasparov and it was the first time a world champion had lost to a computer and at the time people said you know it's this landmark moment people said um no one will want to play chess anymore uh because you know computers have completed it and actually what's happened is chess is having a boom we were chatting about it just before uh you know before this episode um and what's actually happened is part of the reason it's had a boom is people are still interested in watching human beings play chess in a game with no technology.

14:28So they will play over-the-board matches with no technology. But then when they're training, they'll go away and they'll use chess engines and they'll use chess websites to help them practice, help them prepare.

14:39Amol Rajan: But nothing means being sat across the board. Right, but this is where the interaction between it, Comrade saying, how do we prepare students? If we have, to take it back to education, If we have a final exam that requires no technology, that actually then incentivises a more sensible and positive use of technology when you're learning in the same way as with chess. So a chess player absolutely will use a chess engine to practice, but they know that they can't use the chess engine to outsource memory. They know they still have to memorise the end games. They know they have to memorise their opening.

15:14So I would say the same in education. We've got to hold on to the final exam being in-person, like an over-the-board match with no technology.

15:21Amol Rajan: Also something really satisfying about being a human being. Whereas being a computer would be like, who cares, it's just a bunch of algorithms. So if we hold on to the exam being in-person, no technology, I then think that incentivises more sensible uses of technology that will promote developing your own memory and your own skills as opposed to just cognitively offloading and letting the machine do everything. So if you know that you've got to sit down and write an essay in the exam, you know you can't get the LLM to do it when you're practising because you know you're going to be sunk when it comes to the exam.

15:57But you might then think, well, I can use the LLM to help critique what I've written, to help give me feedback, to help give me pointers on how I could improve. So as long as we've got baked in that end goal of an exam with no technology, I think that will just exert a positive effect over the rest of the system.

16:18Amol Rajan: It's a way of improving yourself. All right, final, final question. This is anonymous, but a genuine question. And by the way, this is not from me, though when I say it, it might be thought to apply to one of my children. This anonymous question says, and I guess I should address it to Miss... Were you a Miss Christodoulou of Misses? Miss Christodoulou, former teacher. I always feel like my teacher marks me harshly due to my older sibling's reputation from years ago. My handwriting is messy and I'm trying to... Why did everyone in the studio start cracking up at that? Because they recognise it.

16:49Amol Rajan: My handwriting is messy and I'm trying to clean it up, but they just tell me off. I don't feel like I'm getting the same treatment as everyone else in my class. What can I do to help this? A handwriting issue and an older sibling issue. Wow. So this is why I think the value of exams being anonymised, you know, blind marking. I always think that's important. That's something we do at No More Marking. The other thing I love, one of the best technologies to come from the use of AI, is it's now really easy. A student can write their answer, handwrite it, and we have on our system a little button the teacher can press that turns that handwritten original piece into a typed transcription.

17:29So we find that's an amazing way of reducing handwriting bias. So handwriting bias is real. It is a thing. But if you can just press a button and turn it into a typed transcription, that definitely eliminates a lot of it.

17:40Amol Rajan: And it's reliable, totally reliable. Look, it's definitely, we've spent a lot of time working on it. I would say a year ago, there were some real issues that would be thrown up with it. It's gotten better. It's got a lot better. I think it will keep getting better. But even at the States it is now, if it's not 100%, it's really powerful just to be able to see that type of transcription. But do you think, I mean, the implication of what you're saying, because handwriting bias is real. Yeah. The implication of that is that teachers are potentially biased. Teachers have their pets. If you're really honest, did you have a favourite student?

18:22All the students who supported West Ham, they were always the favourite.

18:25Amol Rajan: Teachers can be biased. And by the way, it's a real thing for parents, because you don't want to undermine the teacher's authority. But if you think the teachers, I mean, yeah, if you think teachers are picking on your students, sorry, on your children, it's a horrible thing. and teachers are human and that's the best thing about them but it's potentially also the worst thing about them yeah and i think this is a say look um i think teachers generally speaking professional do their best you know understand that but it is one of the reasons why i think that having working towards again a blind exam that's anonymized and marked by someone who doesn't know you i think it is a really important part of any education system and i think it's Actually, myself as a teacher, I liked it because you could say to students, look, it won't be me marking you at the end.

19:10It's going to be someone who doesn't know you. You can't rely on me. I'm not going to give you a favourable or unfavourable response. It's not up to me. And I think having that in any system is really important.

19:21Amol Rajan: Have you seen teacher bias affect student grades? I mean, there's a ton of evidence that when it comes to, yeah, when it comes to teacher assessed work, there's all kinds of issues globally. like I don't you know I don't overstate it but you know it's yeah it is they all need to get on no more marking don't they I think all of these just things you can build in like you can see a type transcription things are anonymized things are multiple marked by people who don't know you all of these things are really important safeguards to have in place and we do make them very easy for teachers to access so I want to say and people who know me will know this is to be a deeply held opinion i think teachers are the most important people in any society i genuinely believe that i revere knowledge with a capital k um i'm honored to host a quiz that you once came on and i think anyone who cares about our future and our education even if they disagree with you has to kind of go through either for or against daisy christo dooloo's thought because you're in your substat and on this show you're laying out what we need to think about with education and so it's a minor note of thanks i don't know why this anyone would think this was a thanks you get the arc photo which is a picture of me with an enormous enormous head I don't know why my head looks so much bigger than yours but Daisy this is to say thank you for coming on it's orange I don't know if you noticed but orange is quite a big theme of ours I love it and that's to say a huge and heartfelt thanks for coming on the Imol Rajan Connection thank you so much I loved it such a pleasure I've had such a good time have you?

20:47yeah it's been really good fun

20:49Amol Rajan: thank you to Daisy Krista Duluth see I told you she was one of the cleverest people in Britain and yeah if you haven't listened to Thursday's episode you really really must Before we go, thank you again to our launch partners. So thank you to NatWest. Thank you to Waitrose. Thank you to Amazon. And thank you to Google Cloud. They make all of this possible. And so do you. I'll see you next week.