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From the hyper-local to the global, we can build ‘community’ when we try.

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Six LESSONS on how to build COMMUNITY

Maybe it’s taken the shock of Covid-19 for us to realise the importance of human relationships, but what’s changed from such trying times in the past, is that we are able to connect with kith and kin, thanks to advances made with ubiquitous tech platforms that beam us into the homes and new workspaces of our colleagues, friends and family on a daily basis like no time before.

As someone who has always believed in the transformative power of bringing people together, increasingly, I’ve been asked as to how I build communities and networks, so I thought I’d share some thoughts on what’s worked and, importantly, what’s not worked as well as I imagined it would. But before I do, I thought I’d quote what Google suggested what a ‘community’ was, so that we anchor ourselves with the same meaning:

A community is a social unit (a group of living things) with commonality such as norms, religion, values, customs, or identity. Communities may share a sense of place situated in a given geographical area (e.g. a country, village, town, or neighbourhood) or in virtual space through communication platforms.

1. Your motives matter, make them known. Your values and reasons for creating a community need to shine through, be very transparent about these, as it’ll set the tone and the terms of engagement, both of which are critical for success.

Most people won’t have an issue with joining a community if they know what it’s core purpose is. They need to understand not only why they’re being thought of, but also how they stand to benefit, so the more upfront you are about such matters, the greater the chances of them joining and being active.

I created a community of leaders in philanthropy as a way of bringing together peers from across the world together, so we can learn from each other. As a decision maker, I often found myself in situations where I couldn’t share my thoughts with colleagues, so this group served as a forum not only to share various challenges I faced, but also one where I learnt a lot, which made me a better leader. This community continues to thrive thanks to a WhatsApp group that I set up, and is a great example of being transparent about your motives. Had I set it up with an ulterior motive, I’m pretty sure that the effort would have failed.

2. Find common ground. You need to start somewhere, so finding common ground is important to frame what folks can expect from your community. What I’ve seen happen, more so during the pandemic, is that they provide a support network for people who, often, are extremely isolated in one way or another. 

The support system such networks provide include ongoing positive reinforcement as well as constructive feedback. Where there’s common ground, it makes it easier to seek help and input and if the goal is to build strong communities, then this becomes critical to think through.

I’ve also seen people get busier and busier working from home, so the fact that such members of your community can’t attend meetings or formal sessions forces us to put in place some form of online support, where members can go at their own pace. This personalised professional development is key to great communities that are built around learning, especially.

3. Be clear what the rules are, and repeat them often. You’ll avoid so much heart-ache if you’re explicit about what’s acceptable and in the case of bad behaviour what the consequences will be for those who cross the line. 

Despite what many think of Facebook, I recently set up a few community groups for specific purposes, and what I really liked what it did was force administrators to consider what the rules for their groups are. They even provide prompts and language that you can use to create your personalised set of rules. Whether one looks at these when they join such a community is one thing, but as an organiser, I know that I have these as a way of ejecting those who misbehave. 

Having clear admission criteria for your community, as well as exit rules, is critical. As the definition above says, there have to be some commonalities in a community, and should that change, there should be an understanding of what happens next for members. 

4. Build a community with a low ‘jerk’ factor. Whilst they are a huge strength, building diverse communities is really tough. 

Often the difference in cultural norms, language, sport and religious beliefs result in differences of opinion and can trigger bad behaviour. Where I’ve seen these matters resolved effectively, have been when there’s been prompt and decisive action. 

Where there’s been a ‘fudged’ compromise, you can see the issues that arise erode the value of the network and community building becomes much tougher.

The way to build really beneficial communities is to vet those you want to enrol and take your time to get to know them. Positive references from others in the community are also valuable.

Ultimately, most networks will have ‘jerks’, your role is to minimise the number in your community. Be clear what one looks like.

5. Community management is a job. The bind we often find ourselves in is that we inadvertently create communities which deliver exceptional results, experiences, learnings but we fail to recognise that their sustenance and growth require additional investment of time, money and thought. We often bolt on the role of ‘community manager’ to a junior person in marketing or another department, who along with their own workload has to also drive engagement for this new set of people.

I understand this challenge all too well and have seen it fail every time.

Ideally, if you believe in the power of community, make it someone’s job – their focus. 

Finding someone who can perform the role is no easy matter. I would say that those who can relate to others, have great social-emotional skills, demonstrate empathy, and are adept at the use of appropriate tech tools would excel in such a role.

Many years ago, I was fortunate to have been invited to join the Forum of Young Global Leaders by the World Economic Forum, and the thing they do well, in relation to other such networks, is to emphasise the importance of network building by having staff who are ‘community managers’ lead their engagement with members of their organisation. This one very simple change in job title, can make the essential difference to the experience of those in the community.

6. Size matters. On Facebook, I created a group that now has, almost, 30,000 members who are interested in education, and, similarly, on my YouTube channel there’s 10,000, and on LinkedIn, there’s another 3,000 of us. I see these, not as communities but as groups of individuals with a loose affiliation that bring everyone together.

Community building requires time, money and energy. The larger your community, the more you have to commit resources to it. Whilst, tech tools make convening large groups, as above, easier,  it’s another thing altogether to moderate conversation and build shared understanding, which are all critical to building community. I would suggest the ideal size for a network is much smaller than you’d think. 

For me the true magic of communities is that they’re personal. 

Whilst I can speak about the many up-sides of building professional communities of teachers and leaders in the education sector, I’ve kept my thinking broad for this piece given the relevance of what’s said above to so many different areas of work.

Covid-19 has turned our lives upside down. Chaos has rained down on us. Many of the cherished beliefs we held have been cast aside as a result of what we’re all going through. The one really great thing that’s happened to many of us is that we’ve also connected with those around us to a far greater extent than we had before. The stand-out success for me has been the creation of a WhatsApp group for my neighbourhood, which has been a joy to see become a community.

This much is clear to me, from the hyper-local to the global, we can build ‘community’ when we try.

So, why not start today?

The Zoom Policy Institute

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Imagine if all the video Zoom conferences concerning education policy in the world were pulled together on one platform, no policy maker could ever say that they hadn’t heard of a development or an innovation that could improve their own ideas and efforts. We’d solve a major problem.

I offer that insight because this week I spoke and participated on a number of panels around the world sat in my dining room at home in London. Here are some takeaways:

In partnership with the World Bank, Brookings, and Senator Bullrich I’ve been bringing system leaders together to learn from former Heads of Government how to frame political narrative. This week, we had the honour of hosting former President of Argentina, Mauricio Macri. One takeaway from our conversation what the need to embrace technology and use social media platforms to help frame narratives. Earlier in the series, the former Italian Prime Minister, Matteo Renzi talked about constructing coalitions of interest as a way of influencing heads of government about education funding.

The dynamic and thoughtful, Daniel Dotse who founded Lead for Ghana invited me to speak to the Fellows of his programme about leadership lessons I had learnt. I spoke about some of the lessons I wrote about here, but was interested in the leadership lessons these young and dynamic leaders who were in classrooms in Ghana were learning. I’d love to revisit that conversation. I mentioned these three books as ones I had recently re-read which I thought were good primers for different aspects of this huge subject: (a) the Bhagvad Geeta (b) Dale Carnegie’s famous ‘How to Win Friends & Influence People‘ and (c) Mad, Bad and Dangerous to know by Ranulph Fiennes.

Mosharraf Zaidi of Tabadlab in Pakistan hosted an edtech panel, which involved a spirited discussion on the lessons learnt from the pandemic viz learning and education. I always find listening to those in contexts like Pakistan to be insightful and the key takeaway from the discussion that kept on coming through was the centrality of teachers to this discussion.

The panel included:

  • Salma Alam who is the founder of Durbeen–which has quickly come to assume a leading role as an organisation that is helping prepare teachers for the classroom of today.
  • Bilal Musharraf from Edmodo, an online learning platform with over 87 million users.  
  • Zainab Qureshi-Siddiqui who leads the Harvard Evidence for Policy Design’s work on learning outcomes through the LEAPS programme.
  • Dr Farrah Asif, who is a LUMS professor, and the founder of Edtech Worx, which was inspired by a passion to alter the learning experience of students.

Vongai Nyahunzvi, Africa Director of Teach for All hosted a panel discussion on the promise of education in Africa, and I really enjoyed, as I always do, of the incredible strides being made on the continent by leaders such as those on my panel, which included:

  • Doreen Kessy, Chief Business Officer of Ubongo – who is an innovator and edtech pioneer in Africa.
  • Chris Bradford, Founder of the Africa Leadership Academy who is always so thoughtful in his remarks.
  • Dzingai Mutumbuka who always bring much needed wisdom based on his decade long experience as Education Minister of Zimbabwe.

My next post will speak in detail about a conference called T4 that I am hosting on Saturday, 30th May.

ARE ALL THESE CHANGES IRREVERSIBLE?

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I’ve become increasingly worried about what happens to the education sector once lockdown is lifted. I don’t just mean returning to school, but that the so-called silver lining that this crisis has shown us will pass us by like so many opportunities in the past. This is mainly for two reasons:

  • With the looming recession, education budgets, like almost everything else, are going to be cut, which is the exact opposite to what is required to build the knowledge economy. The key question for me is how we make the case to protect funding, which is essentially a political decision in most countries. There is no question that the extra economic stimulus that has been injected into our economies will have to be paid for in some way, whether that’s through cut, raising taxes, or finding new sources of revenue. What I am absolutely certain about is that our Heads of Government and Finance Ministers will make the decision on what happens in education, and we really need to pray that they understand that the investments they make today are for the longer term.
  • Many have commented that changes that we are experiencing are irreversible. I’m not too certain about that. The structure of society and how we live and work have a huge impact on how education is also organised. The home-schooling / remote-learning experience of today is not sustainable and the boom we have seen in ed-tech could easily also reverse when we resume normal service and working hours. The big caveat is, of course, unless Ministries of Education the world over decide they want to embrace new learning technologies and make them a core part of how they see the provision of education, and there are great examples now from around the world where progress is being made at pace. What’s required is leadership from the private and public spheres to create a space and investment where subjects that are normally taboo can be explored in depth.

Professor Rose Luckin of the UCL Institute of Education asks for your help in completing this survey which should help us make sure we learn from this experience so that we can better support teachers, learners and the EdTech community post-lockdown.

Last week, we hosted a meeting on Teaching in the pandemic which over 200 teachers and system leaders took part in. A lot of discourse in education happens without teachers being involved and for this reason, Senator Esteban Bullrich and I wanted to bring them to the table and hear not only about their experiences but learn from the solutions they are putting in place.

An infographic shared by Tabadlab

Here are some takeaways:

Empathy and wellbeing have to be at the heart of all that we do for our students, families and communities. To do that, we must empower and support our schools and teachers with the resources they need now more than ever, as Yasodai Selvakumaran from Australia said.

Hard hitting but… Nadia Lopez from New York explained that she’s realised that equity is a choice. Not by those who have been disenfranchised by poverty, but those in positions of power to create policies and allocate funding that would give schools the budgets they require to meet the needs of their students.

We need a greater investment in services that education psychologists provide, Marj Brown from South Africa spoke about the importance and need she has realised in these times on the need to provide psycho-social support to students.

On assessments, Jim Tuscano from the Philippines posed an interesting question asking whether they are fit for purpose in an online learning environment. He also asked a great question on how primary learners can be taught online… still looking for answers, so please contact me if you have thoughts. Jim wrote this blog post after our session which captures what was said.

David Edwards, General Secretary of Education International spoke about collaboration, not competition, across organizations being key when it comes to what tools are available to students and teachers and cited Cameroon, Uruguay, Norway as examples around the world of systems making efforts to align resources, plan effectively at different levels.

Watch the session by clicking the image – David Edwards from EI opened our session

From India, we heard from Akshay Saxena who commented how quickly people have come together through rapid innovation. His organisation managed to pull together open source content from Grade 1-12 in just a few weeks, reaching about 40% of students. Cheap data availability has aided this process. The one thing he would ask the government to do is to provide free data bundles to students.

Jiang Xuequin from China told us because of China’s success in edtech, there are two issues they are now facing – one being how do you build intrinsic vs extrinsic motivation. When you’re not in a class being driven by your peers, what happens?

In Belgium, Koen Timmers told us resources are being pulled together to get laptops and data free for every child. But, how do you use technology well if you do have access to it? He went on to say we need synchronous and asynchronous learning opportunities through tech for guided and independent learning. Different ages and subjects require different approaches as well. Edtech is not just about delivering content.

Special education needs leader from the UK, Vijita Patel, reminded us that the process of learning in virtual schools is anchored in relationships. Especially for students with unique needs, these relationships are critical. Vijita also fleshed out these three priorities: (a) formative assessment: families as co-constructors; (b) agility of curriculum: do students understand this new normal? This is the most significant learning opportunity; (c) teacher well-being – the pressure to give students what they need.

Armand Doucet from Canada concluded our call and built on his advocacy for the profession given the challenges being faced today.

Also, very thankful to music teacher Jimmy Rotherham for ending our call with a song. Watch this to the very end. We shall overcome with a little help from our friends.

Interesting articles & reports of the week:

Education hit hardest by Covid19 in the UK – says it how it is!

How Covid19 will change the Conservative Party– we need to understand how to present the case for education taking this into consideration

Why India has such few deaths: written by a friend but sharing because it’s a question my family asked just last week.

Alex Beard has been commissioned by the BBC to produce a three part radio series called The Learning Revolution which looks at the future of education, featuring the leading thinkers and most radical practices in teaching, technology, and more. Part I is on Knowing. Alex wrote a great book a couple of years ago called ‘Natural Born Learners’.

Mosharraf Zaidi from leading Pakistani think tank: Tabadlab drafted this report on the impact of Covid-19 on education there, which I am grateful for.

Music shares of the week:

How amazing was the Andrea Bocelli performance in support of Covid19 victims last week? I was so honoured to have hosted him a couple of years ago for the Global Teacher Prize ceremony. Watch my interview with him below.

I really enjoyed watching parts of the One World Together At Home concert on Saturday eve. It was great seeing the diverse acts from all over the world come together. I really enjoyed the Rolling Stones set (the one with the air drumming:)

Three weeks into lockdown…

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Three weeks into lockdown and contrary to what you’re expecting me to say, isn’t it whizzing by?! I thought I’d have more free time! This is what’s occupied much of my time this week:

Senator Esteban Bullrich and I continue to bring friends together from across the world to delve into different aspects of the closure of schools. Next week on Tuesday, 14th April at 12pm UK time, we’re bringing together a larger group to learn, share and interact with some prolific teachers to listen to them and help solve for the issues they identify as impediments to do their jobs. 

We’ve had one prep session and I’m stunned with what I heard! Hear from yourself next Tuesday.

If you wish to join us, please join this dedicated LinkedIn group: Education & Our World, where details of the call are posted. 

I’m really delighted that these calls are proving to be useful. In the past two weeks, we’ve had presentations / launches of these reports:

  • Andreas Schleicher contributed insights from PISA 2018 on how well students and schools were prepared for school closures.
  • Fernando Reimers & Andreas Scheicher created a framework to guide an education response to the Covid-19 pandemic. 
  • Armand Doucet co-authored a guidance note for UNESCO and EI on how teachers need to think about pedagogy as schools move online as a result of this pandemic.

On our next call, David Edwards, General Secretary of Education International –  the global federation of teacher unions will preview the findings of their global survey for the first time.

WhatsApp Image 2020-04-07 at 16.45.27

GREAT SHARES ON OUR LINKEDIN GROUP

  • Richard King of the Education Development Trust wrote about the implications for policymakers. Read here.
  • Lucia Dellagnelo shared the results of a huge survey in Brazil of 3,000 school districts where they summarise different models of remote learning that are being implemented by school districts and includes live and recorded classes to be broadcasted from local TV, from YouTube or other online platforms. 
  • Alex Crossman who is a UK School Principal wrote about what they learnt from going into lockdown. Read here.
  • Marwa Soudi, a STEM expert from Egypt shared this post on why before new ideas to implement in schools are shared, we consider the wellbeing of teachers.
  • Professor Reimers published a new book , which is available for free online. In it he explains how to reform education systems so they educate all students as global citizens, with the necessary competencies to achieve the UN SDGs. Today, more necessary than ever!.

You can join the LinkedIn group, which in one week has gone from 0 to 500 members! 

I SPOKE TO NIGERIAN TEACHERS & INNOVATORS

In so many ways, the world will miss achieving SDG4 on quality education if Nigeria fails to do more. To understand the local context, I visited Lagos in February as part of my responsibilities on the Africa Advisory Board for Teach for All and I was blown away with the work that Teach for Nigeria is doing. 

For this reason, I was really bowled over when they asked me to be their first guest for a speaker series that includes all their Fellows, Alumni and supporters. My main points were informed by the information that’s been shared on how education systems are reacting to Covid-19, how others are solving for the inequities we see, and the role of teachers in these uncertain times.

These issues stood out from the call and my subsequent interactions with some of the Fellows:

Teachers as first responders should have been integrated into interventions early. 

In some cases, given the dysfunctionality of state run school systems, everyone was left high and dry. The question we kept on returning to was how these teachers convince decision makers to understand and act on the reality school closures could be in place for an extensive period and alternate provision needs to be made.

One of the Fellows (Gideon Ogunfeyemi) shared on Twitter his idea to use religious venues like churches and mosques for dissemination of learning as these buildings often have loudspeakers attached to their external walls so that prayers can be heard by all in a village. Why not also use the same for mathematics? 

At the risk of being overly self promotional, it was also great to receive feedback from those on the call:

HOW DO WE GET EDUCATION FUNDING INCREASED AFTER COVID19?

I also serve on the Global Education Council of BETT, the education conference. The Council convened on Microsoft Teams this time, and in our discussions spoke about several issues and perspectives and I expressed my concern that with the looming post Covid-19 global recession, how do we protect education budgets? 

Such challenging times always reinforce, at least for me, the need to deepen investments in education. I saw some social media announcements from institutions like the Global Partnership for Education (GPE), which funds sector plans in the most fragile countries, and whilst I’m thankful for the $250 million facility which spans 67 countries, we need much much more to be committed and the question is how we impress upon donor countries to increase their funding for facilities like GPE or Education Cannot Wait, which itself announced the immediate release of $23 million for conflict ridden countries for education provision.

The pivot we need to make after schools return, with the longer term in mind, will require political leaders who commit further to education and building the knowledge society that has so often been spoken about. 

How do we make the case? What do we need to do?

MUSIC SHARE

I am addicted to Radiooooo which allows you to listen to radio stations from around the world, and even select the decade which you want to hear music from. Great cultural asset, I think. Try it out.

PHOTO OF THE WEEK

At a risk of making you think I’m obsessed with Magnolia trees, I promise this is the last pic (until next year)…

WhatsApp Image 2020-04-10 at 21.01.54

Tackling the epidemic of cyberbullying needs a coordinated response

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This week, the Anti-Bullying Alliance is running 2018’s Anti-Bullying Week – a timely reminder that, despite our best efforts, bullying remains a serious problem for many schools, children and parents. Bullying is a major factor behind the growing mental health crisis in schools – one in three 13-15 year olds are suffering from a mental health problem according to a recent survey by charity Action for Children. It’s also linked to an increased risk of suicidal thoughts in young people, as well as a higher risk of substance abuse and alcohol problems in later life.

Although government research has found that in-person bullying within schools has lessened over the last decade overall – most likely thanks to increasing awareness of the seriousness of bullying and a no-tolerance policy in schools – bullying is increasingly migrating to online channels, primarily through the social media platforms that have become a central part of young people’s lives. The figures are alarming. In the UK, incidents of cyberbullying have grown 37% year-on-year according to a report from internet safety company Smoothwall, and one recent study by international anti-bullying charity Ditch the Label found that 17% of British children have been victims. Elsewhere in the world, the picture is very similar, with a new Pew Research Center survey finding that 59% of U.S. teens have personally experienced at least one of six types of abusive online behaviours. The US-based Cyberbullying Research Center furthermore says that the number experiencing cyberbullying has doubled since 2007.

While in-person bullying can often be effectively tackled within school premises and primarily involves students, schools and parents, cyberbullying is more pervasive and comes in more forms. Victims can be targeted anywhere, at any time, and can feel like there’s no escape from the abuse. Cyberbullying therefore presents a different challenge to in-person bullying – one that requires coordination from stakeholders across not only education, but also wider society as a whole. Tech giants such Facebook, Instagram and Twitter – whose platforms play host to the majority of cyberbullying – are now central figures in the debate. Just as UK Education Secretary Damian Hinds recently called on large tech companies to do more to drive a technological revolution in education, so to do they need to take more responsibility for the products that they produce for young people and help protect their users.

That’s not to say they are ignoring the problem. Facebook operates a bullying support hub where users can block people and report content that is then taken down if it violates Facebook’s Community Standards by intentionally degrading or shaming. Both Facebook and Instagram also use artificial intelligence to identify abusive language, and Facebook has also committed to funding anti-bullying training in schools. Nevertheless, the Ditch the Label survey found that 70% of teenagers questioned thought that social media companies do too little to prevent bullying, and both non-profits such as the NSPCC, teachers, parents, even the UK government, believe they can do more.

The issue of cyberbullying isn’t so far removed from the complex debates currently raging around hate speech and free speech, trolling and fake news on the social media sites we use. For example, the Canadian province of Nova Scotia recently introduced an anti-cyberbullying bill after a high-profile teenage suicide, but the law was later removed by the courts for violating free speech, demonstrating the difficulty in using legislation to curb the problem. We’re still grappling with our relationship to the new hyper-connected communication media available to us, and what it means to use these responsibly. This ability to use technology and media in safe, responsible and effective ways – often termed digital citizenship – is a vital competency for the 21st century, though we’re still some way from seeing the topic introduced into national curricula around the world. So far, non-profits are taking up the task. Common Sense Education, for example, offers a free K-12 Digital Citizenship Curriculum that has cyberbullying as one of six core curriculum topics, with over 500,000 teachers now using this resource worldwide. Meanwhile, The DQ Institute, an international think tank that provides solutions and policy recommendations to help nations build ethical digital ecosystems, have created a Digital Intelligence Quotient, or DQ number. Derived from eight core digital citizenship competencies – digital safety and cyberbullying management being one of them – the DQ number aims to set an international standard of digital citizenship, and I believe this level of global integration and awareness is needed if cyberbullying is to be tackled effectively.

Both teachers and parents share the same concerns about online safety. This year, a back-to-school campaign launched by UK non-profit Internet Matters revealed that 73% of Year 7 parents were anxious about their child’s ability to manage online relationships, and 80% were concerned about cyberbullying. But schools and teachers often feel ill-equipped to deal with the problem: the Smoothwall study found that 62% of teachers do not believe they are fully supported to tackle the issue, and 84% believe the government should be doing more to help train them. Tech companies once again shouldered much of the blame; 77% of teachers do not believe that they are doing enough to protect young people.

Clearly, there’s no easy answer to the growing problem of cyberbullying, the responsibility for tackling the problem falls on many shoulders. Certainly, banning social media or certain apps doesn’t work – that would be like trying to put the genie back into the bottle. Besides, social media and the internet offer extraordinary opportunities that young people should feel confident to be able to use at any time without the threat of abuse. Instead, we need a coordinated response from those across education, government and industry. Tech companies should be looking to collectively commit to tackling the problem, agree on industry standards of what constitutes abusive content, as well as provide a single source of information for users on how to address it. We need to advance the digital citizenship agenda so that both adults and children learn the digital skills necessary to navigate internet safely. As part of this,
the government must listen to schools and teachers who call for more training and resources on how to teach students to be more responsible digital citizens, as well as consider introducing more online safety related material into the curriculum.

But for any measures to be effective, different stakeholders mustn’t just point fingers of blame but rather approach the problem of cyberbullying from the same angle. Parents, educators, governments, tech companies, and of course students themselves must reach a common understanding. It’s a challenging project, and the only way forward is to foster communication and cooperation between groups who may not ordinarily find themselves talking to each other. At the Tmrw Institute – a new organisation from Tmrw Digital that curates conversations between the varied stakeholders in the EdTech industry – we have this cooperative outlook at our core. Maybe the growing problem of cyberbullying is where this approach will yield the greatest results.

Vikas Pota is group chief executive of Tmrw Digital

This article appeared on The Educator UK on 21st November 2018

The Rise of the “Teacher-preneur”

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Why educator involvement in edtech isn’t merely a nice idea.

Last week we held our inaugural event in London, where two inspirational edtech entrepreneurs spoke about how they made the leap into starting their own businesses, what drove them to take on the challenge, and how they achieved remarkable results in such short spaces of time. They had one thing in common: both used to be teachers.

The growing trend of the “teacherpreneur” is timely, and a potential solution to the impasse afflicting educational technology – edtech – in its current state. Despite all the hype, it’s fair to say that edtech isn’t living up to its potential.

Addressing the Facts

In the developing world, governments and NGOs have had little impact so far in addressing the shocking fact that over 260 million children and young people are not in school, and that of the 650 million primary school-age children that are, 250 million are not learning the basics.

Meanwhile, across the developed world, many edtech products are not yet making the educational impact many had hoped for. For instance, in 2015, an OECD report found that there was no noticeable improvement in PISA results for reading, mathematics or science in countries that had invested heavily in ICT for education. And in the US, only 33 per cent of parents surveyed by the Learning Assembly agreed that their child’s school did an “excellent” job of using technology to tailor instruction. The sector is not yet producing the sort of innovation that will bring about macro-level changes in how education is delivered across the globe to those with fewer resources.

A Key Ingredient

A key ingredient that could make a huge difference to this apparent lack of progress is the involvement of teachers in edtech development – educators are all too often left out of the picture by the current norms of the sector. In all the conferences I have attended around the world, I’m struck by the absence of teachers at edtech roundtables, discussions, and panels – which usually revolve around policymakers, CEOs, tech entrepreneurs and investors. It’s a shame, since the conversations I have with teachers who are on the front line, in my experience, are always the most productive.

Teacher involvement is crucial, in part because one of the main reasons that many edtech initiatives fail is a lack of grounding in the real experience of students and teachers. Designers and developers often miss failings that would be obvious to those on the front line. By contrast, teachers know first-hand what students need, and what they themselves need as educators – a crucial element in the design process. They also understand the distinction between a superficial innovation and one that will actually help pupils, and they know how the education sector works from the inside.

Edtech’s Next Paradigm Shift

Now, trailblazing teachers are taking innovation into their own hands, bringing the knowledge and insight gleaned in the classroom to the world of edtech. This is a profoundly positive step, and there are good reasons to think that the next paradigm shift in edtech will come from teachers who combine their classroom practice with edtech development.

With such a large role to play, people are looking for teachers to enter this debate, and it was therefore heartening, but also no surprise, that last week’s event was oversubscribed, where we listened to Colin Hegarty and Emma Rogers tell their stories (pictured above; Colin middle, and Emma, left).

In 2011, while working as a maths teacher in London, Colin started making YouTube videos explaining important maths concepts for home study and revision, which eventually attracted millions of views from around the world and grew into Hegarty Maths – an online platform that teaches, assesses and tracks everything a child needs to learn in maths from upper primary to IGCSE level. Colin, a Varkey Foundation Global Teacher Prize Finalist, emphasized at the event how important it is for students to not only receive quality instruction, but for teachers to be supported in helping their students develop metacognitive awareness of how they study – which is why Hegarty Maths offers in-depth student tracking and analytics for teachers to use.

Similarly, Emma Rogers was a school Head of Department and a children’s writer and illustrator before founding Little Bridge, which helps children learn key English skills through its immersive digital world containing hundreds of carefully designed activities, stories and characters. Emma noted that too many products solve a problem that students and teachers don’t really have; her advice to attendees was to find an actual, specific problem – and then solve it.

Emma and Colin’s backgrounds were instrumental in how they developed their products, as is the case for Adam Still, a Teach First alumnus who recently founded Ripple Education, a digital lesson-planning tool designed squarely with teachers in mind. Adam observed that lesson planning – crucial for developing high-quality lessons and driving positive student outcomes – is currently a major time sink for teachers who tend to do it by themselves. Ripple’s easy-to-use and comprehensive platform aims to address this problem, freeing up precious time for teachers – who spend over 50% of their time outside the classroom – to let them do what they do best: teach.

A First Step

To encourage and support this growing trend of teachers using their expertise to build the next generation of edtech products, I will be guiding the new Tmrw Institute to help bring the worlds of education and technology together.

Founded by Sunny Varkey, the Institute will aim to increase teacher involvement in edtech, explore the edtech innovations that make the most difference, and tackle the problem of global education capacity using the best ideas from the edtech world.

Last week’s event was just the first step of our journey – hopefully it inspired and informed potential entrepreneurs and helped place teachers at the heart of edtech.

Vikas Pota is group chief executive of Tmrw Digital.

This article appeared on EdTech Digest on 1st October 2018

Stop worrying about grammar schools, teacher recruitment is the real problem

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Those countries with the best education outcomes – from Finland to the Asian education powerhouses of China, South Korea and Singapore – have a deeply ingrained culture of respect for teaching.

Rarely have debates on education electrified party conferences, but yesterday Theresa May won the loudest applause for her promise to “bring back the first grammar schools in fifty years.” Jeremy Corbyn won an equally giddy reception last when he told Labour conference that he would oppose it.

Though this is retro political comfort food for left and right, it is a distraction from the overwhelming education issue that has barely featured in the conference speeches: a crisis in the recruitment and retention of teachers. In the UK, half of schools think that the teacher shortage is affecting GCSE performance; according to a poll last month by the Association of School and College Leaders 80 per cent say the recruitment situation is “worse or significantly worse” than a year ago.

While shortages are damaging in the West, their impact in the developing world is catastrophic. Across Africa, the only region of the world with a growing school-aged population, 70 per cent of countries face critical teacher shortages at primary level, and 90 per cent at secondary. In Pakistan, Cambodia and Ethiopia – where class sizes already average 64 – attrition rates are so high that the total number of teachers is shrinking year on year.

The causes of the crisis are not hard to understand. Throughout the developing world teachers are underpaid, undertrained and under-appreciated. In Kenya, teachers have been in dispute with the government over pay so low that they live a hand-to-mouth existence. Teachers’ wages across Africa are thought to be lower in real terms now than they were several decades ago.

In India the World Bank estimates that up to 40 per cent of teachers are regularly absent from class. One case emerged of a teacher who has been absent for 23 years of her 24 year teaching career. But teacher idleness is not generally the cause of absenteeism. More often, teachers are out of the classroom working in a second job because they can’t rely on their government salary being paid on time.

At the same time, the population explosion in much of the developing world – combined with the (vital) efforts to get every child enrolled in school – is creating a huge additional demand for teachers. Many of those teachers already in the classroom are so badly trained that they cannot teach effectively. Too often they rely on rote learning and dictation from the front of the class, techniques that fail to inspire curiosity or critical thinking. In most countries, a teacher is never tested again or given further training once they have been recruited. In some cases, the problem is not just training but the education levels of the teacher at the front of the class. Just one in five teachers in Uganda meet the minimum proficiency standards in numeracy and literacy.

So how do we recruit and retain the army of well-trained, well-motivated teachers the world desperately needs? Firstly – whether in the UK or in Uganda – we need to raise the status of teachers. Those countries with the best education outcomes – from Finland to the Asian education powerhouses of China, South Korea and Singapore – have a deeply ingrained culture of respect for teaching.

In China, the public likens the status of teachers to that of doctors. According to the Varkey Foundation’s Teacher Status Index, three quarters of Chinese people would encourage their children to become teachers – far higher than elsewhere in the world. On China’s Teachers’ Day pupils send flowers and write them letters to tell them how they are appreciated. The authorities even had to intervene to prevent parents proffering gifts of iPads and expensive perfumes.

Teacher pay has an obvious correlation with teacher status and recruitment rates. Higher salaries attract the best candidates into the profession and give them an incentive to stay. Research by the economist Peter Dolton shows that a 10 per cent increase in teachers’ pay tends to result in a five to 10 per cent improvement in a country’s educational outcomes.

Improving teacher quality has a far greater impact on educational success than other expensive investments such as changing the curriculum or even cutting class sizes. Given the stretched finances of developing world governments, the international community should prioritise helping funding good teachers’ salaries because it simply makes social and financial sense.

Yet international education aid has been falling since 2010 – even as spending on global health has continued to grow. Education once again has fallen down the political agenda. Shamefully, the number of children who are out of school is rising again in the developing world. Of those in school, half the children in South Asia and a third of children in Africa lack basic reading skills after four years of education. At current rates of progress, we will be 50 years late in meeting the Sustainable Development Goal commitment of a good education for every child – when today’s children will be long past retirement age.

But before despair sets in, we should remember that South Korea was, 50 years ago, in the same situation as many developing countries today, with similarly high levels of illiteracy. Now it is among the best education systems in the world. How? It recruited the best young people into teaching, trained them well and then showed them respect. As Education Secretary Justine Greening rightly said in her conference speech: “no other profession has the power to transform futures so much.” Empowering teachers is the most important measure that ministers around the world can take to improve education – even if it isn’t a message that gets standing ovations in the conference hall.

Vikas Pota is Chief Executive of the Varkey Foundation

This article appeared in the Independent newspaper on 6th October 2016