I get our kids. It's Craig Anthony Harp. It's David Andrew Gillespie aka Dag. It's Tiffany and cook a tack. We'll start with the pugilist up in the top left corner on my screen. Anyway, Hello Cookie.
Hello Harper. You're right, always, always fabulous or not always sometimes a bit wingy.
Sometimes sometimes you're a fucking nightmare. And sometimes sometimes you send me text messages and I'm like, all right, all right, I'm going to answer that in four hours or maybe tomorrow. I'm going to respond to that. Either that or you're sending me photos of cat's peg to fucking washing lines or something, or oh look, baby, a tiny miniature hippo. I want one. I'm like, you're probably not going to get one.
How good are animal memes? Though?
Annoying? Uless b We've asked you this before, but you're a kind of a dog person. You have a dog in your family, don't you too.
At the moment, actually, because we're looking after one that my eldest daughter has acquired because she's a teacher, well becoming a teacher, and we'll be going into a country posting next. Y and wants to take a dog with her. So she's while she's out in country postings this year in her prack, she's given us her dog to look after. So now we've got two of them.
Oh wow, and are you? Are you a gushy, cuddly, lie on the floor dog person or are you just a pat on the head tolerate them from afar?
Yeah, that second one's probably closer.
Yeah, I'm shocked. I'm shocked because you're so warm and fuzzy.
I walk them every morning, though, both of them in the bush.
Oh really, do you live in the bush or near the bush.
There's a bush land across the road from us. Yeah, Whi's quite a big lump of bush that the dogs like to walk in.
Are there any snakes there?
Probably, but I've never encounted them. They probably don't want to hang around and find out what dogs are like.
That's that's yeah. I wonder if dogs are scared. I think dogs are scared of snakes, aren't they? Or maybe some are summer anyway, this is not very captivating. People like, fuck, get on with it out there?
So why didn't he cut that bed out?
Yeah? Take that outif I we'll leave it in.
Fuck.
It, so I wanted to have a chat to you. I've had a few conversations lately and with a reoccurring theme, which is education, and I just had one at the gym tonight which I left the gym twenty minutes ago and a friend of mine, Nigel, shout out to Nige and MJ. They owned some childcare centers, kindergarten's, early learning centers, whatever you want to call them. I think they're a
little bit of an amalgamation. But he was talking to me about some of the challenges of getting you know, getting people in the space who are well qualified and good to do the job. How's the state of the Australian education system at the moment in your eyes? I know that you have free free school dot org are you so if you're interested in having a look at that everyone, I've looked for a little bit, but I've been on there quite a few times and it's amazing.
Free school one word, free school dot org dot au, which is an amazing resource that David and a bunch of other people have created at no cost to Australian students. But what's your current what's your hot take on education at the moment?
David, it's never been worse. So the Australian education system on any benchmark, any benchmark, has never ever been worse, and it is not improving and has shown no signs of improving since we've been accurately measuring it since about two thousand. It's been on a continuous do Ownwood trajectory.
So the big question a lot of people ask is why, And the answer is a lot simpler than most people would tell you, which is that we've inserted for profit organizations into the delivery of education in this country and have essentially proven that doing so rex education systems. So what I mean by that is what most Australians call
private schools, which are not private schools. They receive just as much government funding as so called government schools, but they also have the right to charge fees, and inserting those into the education system has wrecked the one thing that makes education systems work, and that's equity. Education is a public good, meaning its purpose beyond the individual purpose. The individual purposes, I guess you've learned stuff, but from a society's perspective, its purpose is to raise all boats.
Societies with where most people are educated do better than societies where most people aren't. It's a pretty obvious thing to say, but for some reason people forget it. And so the education system is not charity, it's not a gift. It's something designed to increase the capability of the population.
So it's a public good. And as soon as you insert into that competitive pressures with private organizations, what tends to happen is that those organizations spend a lot of their money competing with each other and with the public system for the students that they know will do well. Why do they want the students who they know who will do well because it's great for marketing, which is coming back to the start. Why do they want it to be good for their marketing Because they've got to
compete with each other and with the public system. And so you push an education system away from its primary purpose, which is to take all comers and turn them into better or more educated people, and divert massive resources towards internal competition and fighting over the kids who will do well.
Anyway, Yes, yes, have there been private schools around though forever haven't.
They There's always been private school Every major education system has private schools, but they have actual private schools So if you look at say an education system like the United States or the United Kingdom, which are close models for US, they have about six percent of their schools are private, and they are truly private. They are not subsidized in any way by government. In the United States, it's prohibited because the government can't get involved in funding
religious institutions. And in the United Kingdom it's just a matter of policy. They did used to be funded by governments or assisted by governments, and they decided they weren't going to do that anymore. And so in both cases about six percent are fully privately funded. So in those systems, what people say is, well, you've got a choice. You can be publicly funded and go to a public school, which is ninety four percent of the schools, or you
can opt out and pay your own freight. And that's pretty much the way it is in most of the world. And that percentage of about six percent, So there are about six percent of the population who say, you know what, I don't want my kid in a public system. I'm prepared to pay for them to be educated privately, so I'm opting out. And they don't expect government money to assist them, and they don't get it. In Australia, it's very,
very different. In Australia, it's about thirty five to thirty seven percent of the system are so called private schools. So why is it so much bigger Because in Australia you can opt out of the government schools and still collect all the money you would have received had your child attended a government school, So you're not really opting out. You're getting the same money as if your child still
attended government school and you're being charged fees. So Australia is unique in the world in that sense in that we contribute huge amounts of public money and the figures here are truly mind blowing. You know, there are many, many billions of dollars of public money to private enterprises to run a schooling system that would be run cheaper and better where it's simply run as a government system
like it is in every other country in the world. Now, the problem with that is that we're wasting billions filling the pockets of for profit organizations. Now people often say to me, oh, yeah, but the local Catholics not a for profit organization, and you know they're not reporting profits from their schools. Well, there's profit and there's profit. There's the profit you get when you have a corporation and you pay dividends, and that's a profit. But there's other
kinds of profit. I mean, I guarantee you the head master at the local Anglican college is being paid probably five, six, seven times as much as the head master at the state school next door to end. So that's a profit. You know. Putting in you know, saunas and Olympic swimming pools and equestrian centers is profit. So none of it improves the outcomes from an education perspective, but it does
improve the marketability of the school. So the problem we've got in Australia is that when we decided to do this, and this is a relatively recent thing that we've done in Australia. So until nineteen sixty two, no Australian pri at school received government money, not a cent, not a single cent. In nineteen sixty two they started giving private schools,
church schools government money. Now why hadn't it been done before that, because one hundred years earlier, at the start of our education system, we'd made a decision collectively not
to give money to church schools. Rather like the United States has today, and every politician since then had decided it was too much of a political risk to risk giving money back to the churches until nineteen sixty two when the Catholics said, we are so broke, we are going under and we are going to flood your school systems with all of our kids, and the government's cave
to it and started handing the money. So that was the start of it, and it took us down a path that no other country in the world had gone down. And at the time people said this is bad news. This will destroy equity in the education system, it will destroy our educational performance. It turns out, though we're right, that was our high point in terms of educational performance. It's been downhill ever since.
Where does Australia rank in the world academically, Tiff, can you look that up? Like? Where do we? I'm sure there's a global academic ranking? Or who are the best students or who get the best?
There are several Probably the most comprehensive one is a test that's done I think it's every two or four years and has been published since two thousand. There's been ones that have been done before that. There was a maths and science one done before that, depending which measure you use, Australia was doing really well in about two thousand, so we were generally coming in about sixth or seventh
in the OECD, which is not bad. And now where we've plummeted, I think it's around twelve thirteenth, fourteenth something like that in the OECD. So it's been a downward trajectory, you know, pretty much since we started measuring things. And if you ask, well, well, who is the best, it's generally in those measures at the moment it's coming in around China, Hong Kong, Singapore, Korea tend to outperform everybody. And not only they outperforming everybody, they're doing better than
even they were in the previous year's tests. So and Australia you could say, oh, well, maybe there's something, you know, some reason for that. Maybe it's the way, maybe it's a cultural thing, maybe it's you know, whatever it is, but it doesn't cut it, because our results are worse when we only compare it to ourselves rather than just
comparing it to everybody else. Like the average fifteen year old in Australia is now a year and a half behind where the average fifteen year old was in the year two thousand.
So hang on, that is so that's in twenty four years, they're a year and a half. So developmentally, you mean.
From the tests, from the test, So these are maths, writing, you know, science tests.
Comprehension, blah blah blah wow.
Because these tests are standardized on fifteen year olds, right, so that they are givenm to a cohort of fifteen year olds every time they do it, and they and it's meant to measure the same things over and over and over again. So so I think it's less interesting to compare ourselves to other countries and more interesting to compare ourselves to ourselves. And that's not good news.
How'd you go, Chiff?
When I put in one?
Now my browsers, Now now you're looking at shot shoes.
And looking and cat memes. Ah, here we go.
I when I plugged in where there's Australian rank in education, it says Australia's education ranking varies depending on the criteria used. According to UNICEF, Australia ranks thirty nine out of forty one, high in middle class income countries achieving quality education. But then it says our world class universities are ranked in the world's best and the country is second in the
OECD for education and educational outcomes. In terms of student performance, Australian fifteen year old's rank ninth in the world for reading and science and tenth for maths.
Yeah, I doubt that ninth and really I don't know.
I mean it depends, it depends what year you're looking at. So it's a moving target. But the consistent message that has been coming through is that it has never gotten better. It's been getting worse and worse and worse. And sure we'll come in off a high base compared to many many other countries. I mean, we had and still do have a high quality education system in world terms. It's
just going backwards very very quickly. The other thing that is worth mentioning about it is that as part of those tests they do something called an equity measure, which is what is your chance if you are in the bottom quartile by inco So sorry, I should say income is the greatest predictor of performance in the Australian education system. The more money your family has, the more likely you are to do well. So if you want to know whether a child's going to do well. All you need
to know really is how wealthy their parents are. And private schools use that as part of their marketing because they flip it and say, well, it's because of us that the wealthy kids are doing well. It's actually the reverse. It's because the wealthy kids go to those schools that those schools look like they're doing well. So wealth it simply gives you more advantage. It gives you more of a head start, it gives you more resources, it gives
you more access to better quality teaching. You would know this from sport. There's a cumulative effect in sport. I forgot. It's got a really fancy name, and I.
Just want it.
The Matthew effect. It's where if you are in the so a lot of sports have a birth date bias, right where if the sport age group starts in January, then kids who are born in January do better than kids who are born in December, because when they're a five year old, that's a year's worth a difference. That's going to make a big difference to a five year old.
And if you're slightly better when you're a five year old, you get a slightly better coach when you're a six year old, and you get a slightly better coach when you're a seven year old, and you get a coach when you're eight year old, etc. And that effect flows all the way through until you start looking at a professional sports team, say like an AFL team, and you start to notice and this is true. The study has been done that the birthdays cluster around the start point
for the age groups in that sport. So if that's a July start date sport, the birthdays are all in July or August. If it's a January start date sport, they're all in January or February, And that's that effect
flowing through. And the same thing happens in education, not so much with age, but if you've got a slight advantage at the start, then you are performing slightly better than your peers, and you might get access to better teaching the next year, and then better teaching than a year after that, and then better teaching the year after that. So that effect accumulates and correlates most closely to income.
So why does this all matter? Well, they have this equity measure, which says, what are your chances in a given education a good education system, that shouldn't matter. In a good education system, it shouldn't matter how rich you are or how good your parents are, because brilliance or genius is not determined by income. It's determined by genetics.
So you know the these They have this measure called an equity measure, which says, if you are in the bottom quartile, so you're the bottom quarter of the population in terms of income, what are your chances of getting to the top quarter of academic performance, so you start at the bottom from an income perspective, what are your chances of getting to the top the high performing education systems in the world, which is you know the ones
I said to you before the agent ones. Mostly your chance of getting to the top is seventy five percent, so you have a seventy five percent chance of getting out of the low income trap that keeps your educational performance that low and getting into the high performance academic outcome.
In Australia, that percentage is twenty nine percent, so you have a only twenty nine percent chance of escaping your destiny as determined by your income in Australia, which the way, is lower than the OECD average of thirty three percent. So bad education systems don't let you escape your destiny as determined by your income. Good education systems make it irrelevant.
Wow, I am, I was trying to find I saw some some is it Norway? Finland? Is it one where like they've got a phenomenal education system where every teacher is the minimum qualification is a master's degree for all teachers.
And Finland you're talking, you're thinking about right, Yeah, Finland has a system that is entirely, entirely public, So there are no private schools in Finland, and you are sent to your local school, so you don't get a choice about where you go. You go to the school whose geographic area you live in. End of story. So resources are distributed evenly and equitably throughout their education system. And now people bang on about that thing about having a
master's degree. That's really just an artifact of the way their tertiary, their university education system works. The studies on degrees and performance in teaching tell us absolutely clearly that it makes absolutely no difference to the performance of a teacher whether they have a master's or not. So don't judge a school on the basis of whether it's teachers have got master's degrees because it makes no difference. What makes a difference is their experience. So how long have
they been a teacher? And you want that the answer to that to be preferably more than three years because teaching, like every other job, you're learning on the job in the first three years. But if they've been there longer than three years, then their experience matters much more than any master's degree they could do.
So true, so true. Obviously I can't say too much, but I had I had a couple of people work for me early days in my gyms who had PhD, so literally doctors of exercise physiology, and they did not do great because they just couldn't train people. They couldn't they couldn't build connection and rapport, they didn't understand, they didn't have great social or emotional or situational intelligence. You know, one or two were good. But yeah, so that doesn't
surprise me that little fact. What about like China and Singapore and the like, who kind of that above average? Is that because culturally there's a big focus on the importance of education.
That's that's usually the knee jerk answer people go to. I think that's probably more racist than anything else.
Yeah, how was that racist? I'm saying this much.
Everyone's their story about the smart Asian kid in their class.
You know, I would have thought if I had have said they were dumb, that would be racist. I feel like.
A kids Asians, I don't know.
I feel like that's a positive attribute to say they're smart. Yep, go on.
Yeah, but it's also not the explanation. So the explanation is that they have a fundamentally different approach to teaching. And this is really interesting because when you graph the amount of time see Australia, America, the UK have a system that says the best teaching is having a teacher in front of a class all the time. That's where you want to teachers. You want them in front of your classes. And so the average hours in class for a teacher in the UK, the US, Australia are all
about the same. It's about twenty five hours a week. So the average secondary school teacher spends about twenty five hours a week standing in front of a class. The average teacher in Singapore or China or Korea spends about half that time standing in front of a class.
Wow.
And the other interesting thing that you want to put up against that is the average size of the class. So the average size of a classroom in Australia is about twenty to twenty two, so there's about twenty to twenty two kids in a class. Now, this is quite different, by the way, to when Australia was performing really really well, which is in the nineteen sixties, when it was about forty was the average in a class. So twenty two in a class in Australia twenty five hours in front
of it for the teacher. In Asia, it's about thirteen hours in front of the classroom per week, and the average class size is closer to forty. So the two things that we are constantly told matter in our education system don't apparently matter in the systems that are flogging us that.
Which is of counterintuitive. Those two those two bits of information or data, they seem yeah.
So the big question then is why what would what do? They can't just be those two things. There must be something different about what they're doing. And the answer is the teachers are not in front of their class because they're observing someone else in front of their class. So they are running as pairs or more than pairs where it's actually two teachers in a classroom. One of them is teaching, the other one is observing them, and maybe
there's even a third one they're mentoring them. So they are running as a team and that it is a collegiate approach to teaching, whereas in Australia and the United States the United Kingdom, the approach to teaching is it's your class your classroom. We throw you in there, you
teach for an hour, we throw away the key. No one's going to watch you, no one's going to observe you, no one's going to give you any peer instruction, no one's going to give you any mentoring other than the usual to conflict type thing once a year where we say yeah, Bob can still teach. So that's what goes on in Australian English UK classrooms is we tell teachers this is your ship, go run it. In those Asian
classrooms there's nothing of the sort going on. It is a very team based thing where there's constant assessment from your peers, constant mentoring from your peers, and you are also delivering it to your peers. So it's a team sport. In Asia and in Australia. It's very much an individual sport.
So there's somebody who's listening to this.
Just now, let me just finish on Sorry, I wanted to finish on the class sized thing. So how do you pay for it? Well, you have twice as many kids in the class?
Yes, yes, yeah, well that makes sense. It's I don't know, I'm surprised, but kind of not when you when you explain it. So somebody's listening to this and they've got to put their kid in a school in the next year or two, whether it's primary school or secondary school. Have you got any advice for people trying to figure out how to do that in a way which is best for the kid.
Yeah, so there's a couple. There's actually quite a long list of things to look for in schools from the outside. So that book that I wrote that the website is based on the Free school The book is called Free
Schools and it came out twenty fourteen. It actually has the whole back half of it is a guide to a parent for a parent on what to look for from the outside because schools are hard to judge from the outside because they all kind of look the same and you've got a lot of marketing, particularly if they're asking you to pay for it, and it's so what I've done there is go through all of that and weed out the stuff that doesn't matter, like you know, class sizes and all that sort of thing, and talk
about the things that do matter. So there are three things that really really matter in a school. The number one most important thing in a school is none of the things anyone would ever say, but which as soon as I say it, you'll say, of course, which is don't have a principal who is a psychopath?
Okay, how do we well? The problem with psychopaths, as you know, is they're often intelligent and charismatic and charming and good at job interviews.
There's often a really, really good way to tell in a school, which is go and visit them in their office. Psychopaths like are really showing. Their office is their castle. Their office is There's awards all over the walls, there's pictures of them meeting the Prime Minister, there's pictures of them accepting awards. There's all sorts of memorabilia all over the place. It's the most glorious office you've ever seen in your life. You go into a principal's office and
it looks like that, turn around and leave. You go into a principal's office where he's got the same desk as everybody else in the school. He's got a stack of papers on it, you know, a third hand, three hundred year old computer sitting on it, and is just you know, getting on with the work. That's the kind of guy you want to be looking at.
Soor girl or girl or girl? Yes, so now you're getting in trouble.
And in all primary schools probably it will be a girl. So, which we do about another day, is why is it the primary schools are dominated by a female workforce? We can do that another day. But anyway, so.
The one is, don't don't have a principal who's a psychopath. Yeah, what's two?
Two is have us a a staff group that are working on ways even though they are restrained by being in a system that tells them they've got to go into their own classroom and ignore everybody else, but are still trying to even though that's the plan. Have some sort of peer mentoring going on in their organization that is more than ticker box stuff, so where they're actually on their own time perhaps or before school or whatever.
It is organizing peer mentoring type meetings where they're talking to each other and their leader about how to do their job better. Wow. So that kind of thing happening in a school is a very very very good sign. And then the very last thing is look at the results.
And I don't mean the results everyone tells you to look at So everyone says, I can go to my school and you can see this school's got all the green high performing results, etc. All that tells you is that the school has got a lot of rich parents. What you want to look for is progress, and if
you have to drill down into it. But on that Naplan website, on the my school website, once you go past all the glitzy front end stuff with all the green things that show that they've got rich parents or not, there is a bit called progress and if you go into that, it produces a beautiful graph that tells you whether the kids in this school do better than kids with the same demographic characteristics. Those are the schools you want.
So if you match these kids with the same with kids with the same demographic characteristics all over the country, which is what that does, it's a powerful database and they come out better. That's a school you want because they are beating the odds. They're getting back to that equity thing that I mentioned at the start, where they're improving your chances of success by giving you performance that outstrips what your economics says you should do.
Such a fucking interesting chat, this chat, I know nothing about all this stuff. I've just been informed and enlightened. We've got to go. But before we go, well done, you just explain to people quickly, if you would be so gracious, you're honor free school dot org dot au. What is that? Just tell people what that is?
So that is a library. So I'll give you a slight bit of background. Sorry, I'll go a little bit longer here than just got it.
We've got all the time.
So when I was doing the research for the book Free Schools, it became really really clear that there was a type of teaching that worked really effectively with kids who had access to very few resources, very few education and so poor kids in the United States. And what they figured out was that the average teenage kid, I know this is going to come a shock to you,
but does not have a very long attention span. And they found that putting them in a class and asking them to concentrate on anything for seventy minutes was just not going to happen. They found out that actual new content delivery in the average high school classroom was less than ten minutes, and the rest of it was you know whatever, practice, padding, chatting, whatever, but the actual delivery
was only about ten minutes. And they said, well, why don't we put the ten minutes in an instructional video where we just tell the kids ten minutes worth of what they need to know and then and we get them to watch that before they come to class, and then we spend the seventy minutes in class practicing whatever it is. So that's called flipped classrooms, where you do it that way. You put a video out that the kicker and just watch on their phone or whatever, and
they can then come to class and actually practice it. Now, that's a great idea, except you need the videos to be created, and in Australia they just didn't exist so or they were hard to find. So my kids would come home they hadn't understood the math they were supposed
to be doing that day in school. They'd get on the YouTube and they'd Google up whatever it was, and they'd get some idiot American professor who may or may not be right, teaching them something that may or may not align with the curriculum that they were supposed to
be learning right, But that's what they got. So I decided I'd start a charity that addressed that issue, which is get Australian teachers teaching the things they teach every single day in their classrooms, line up their content with the curriculum, make their videos more no more than ten minutes long, and publish them. Free school dot org to you is eight and a half thousand of those videos
Australian teachers teaching in alignment with the curriculum. So when your kid doesn't know what on earth it was that the teacher that was standing in front of them that day, because they happened to be the pea teacher filling in for a week, doesn't know what on earth they were supposed to learn, they can go home. They can see ten other teachers from Australia teaching exactly the same content in ten minute bytes. That's what free School is. And there's a new thing we've added to it, which is
we've gotten teachers now well, actually they have. This was their idea to go through the external exams for this is for Queensland, for maths, so far, go through all the external exams, the past papers, pull out all the past paper questions, line them up by topic, and teach you how to do those problems and work through them
with you in a short video. So the kick can go to any particular thing they're supposed to be studying, find a teacher or several teachers showing them how to do those problems which are pretty likely to be on the external paper.
It's you never cease to amaze me. Yeah, I don't know how on earth you do all the shit that you do. But it's like I don't know you and I have a love hate relationship, but you do do something. You do do some incredible shit. You are very annoying, but you do do some very good shit. Now you're not. Really that's amazing.
Besides, I try to be annoying.
No you're not. You're not at all. You just remind me how clever i'm not every time I talk to you. But it's good. He school dot org dot au. Is that it? Have you got a last final?
Yeah, you're done that'll do us. That'll do us for today.
All right, we'll say goodbye affair, Tiff. I want you to jump on tonight and start studying.
I was just I was just having a quick squizze at the website. Oh yeah, yeah, there's a photo of David that I never get to see. You know, there's there's four faces behind the organization, and three of them have these incredible professional photos. And someone has obviously dug through david archives and found the best that he was.
Do you know who? Do you know who? Gilespo's analogous to like Who's who is? Like Banksy?
You know, like artist who? You never know who he is? He's a mystery.
Yeah, he's like a fucking enigma and he does all this incredible ship. No one knows what you're like that and if people are thinking, what is Craig talking about? So David's done hundreds of episodes with us. I don't know how many, but probably a hundred, and I've never seen his I think I've seen his face once in a photo, but he has his screen black like like he's some fucking covert operative every time. So he gets to see my hand.
It's so that I can it's said that I can sub in an AI when on board.
Yeah, exactly. The real David's actually out playing golf.
That's right, exactly.
All right, Well say goodbye off heair but for the minute. Thanks mate, appreciate you.
See you later