Spinning Plates with Sophie Ellis-Bextor - Episode 47: Kate Robinson

Episode Date: November 1, 2021

Kate Robinson is a writer, a speaker and a mother. She’s making it her mission to continue her father’s legacy and finish the book he was writing. It’s a promise she made to him just before his untimely death last year. Kate’s beloved Dad was Sir Ken Robinson, whose TED Talk about education remains the most watched TED Talk nearly 2 decades after he delivered it. Probably because he is so charismatic, funny and wise. And because education touches us all, whether we have children or not. If you haven’t watched it, here’s the link - it’s worth it! Kate and I talked about her own bumpy road through school and how her parents ‘unschooled’ her at the age of 16. She also shared her hopes and fears as she puts her own 3 year old daughter Adeline onto the first rung of the education system.  Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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C'est facile à utiliser et vous obtenez vos remises par PayPal ou par chèque. L'idée est simple. Les magasins paient Rakuten pour leur envoyer des gens magasinés. Et Rakuten partage l'argent avec vous sous forme de remise. Téléchargez l'application gratuite Rakuten et ne manquez jamais un bon deal. Ou allez sur rakuten.ca pour en avoir plus pour votre argent. C'est R-A-K-U-T-E-N. Hey, my darlings. ambitions. I want to be a bit nosy and see how other people balance everything. Welcome to Spinning Plates. Hey, my darlings. You find me on a very wet and windy Halloween morning. So it's October 31st. It's nearly 10 o'clock in the morning. I have been up for hours, but I'll get to that in a minute.

But I'm looking out over international spooky day and uh it's I'm in London and it's raining and it's windy and it doesn't I suppose it does look a bit foreboding but really more in a kind of I don't really want to go trick-or-treating in that kind of a way and I've got a mixture of trick-or-treaters some more enthusiastic than others I think they would all be very enthusiastic if all the costumes had arrived that were ordered. I'm usually completely cool with making stuff. And we've also got a sack full of old Halloween costumes. But, and I don't know if this has happened in your house,

but my children's Halloween inspiration has taken a new turn because we have several children who wanted to be Squid Game characters so even my fiver I wanted to be from Squid Game when I first asked him what he wanted to be for Halloween he said the robot girl from Red Light Green Light which I actually thought was genius and if you've seen the program you'll know what I'm talking about but then he quickly changed it to wanting to be a guard but his suit and ray who wanted to be one of the squid game participants one of the players i believe he wanted to be number 457 um his outfit hasn't turned up either so i've got two kids without their costumes so they are going to be ghouls and goblins and vampires and all the usual

stuff but yeah a little bit of halloween tears this morning because the costumes aren't here and if you haven't seen squid game which i suspect you probably have because i feel like everybody's seen it but if you haven't maybe you still know a little bit about the show and it's a korean show that has been number one in netflix both sides of the Atlantic. It's absolutely huge. And it is not for children at all. And I want to reassure you that all three of my youngest have not seen the Squid Game. But I think a lot of it has just trickled down to kids anyway. And because the show features the characters playing childhood games, even in the playground,

they're playing Red Light, Green Light light which i guess in the uk we would call grandmother's footsteps or what's the time mr wolf that's kind of what we grew up with isn't it anyway so i've got yeah some reluctant vampires they wanted to be squid game people but hey ho that's what happened this year and our house is not spooky at all because we've been away we only got back yesterday been away for the whole week of half term, which we don't normally do this October break, actually. But I think we had such a, well, we had a very short summer holiday, less than a week.

So we thought, well, let's add a bit on. And I've come home from a few days away, absolutely exhausted. I've got some children that squabbled a lot. That was a bit tiring. We also had some really fun times of course it was mostly great but yeah a little bit of sibling fighting going on and we also had my two-year-old Mickey who's adorable and really lovely but he seems to sort of want to kill me

by using the slow method of sleep deprivation so he's just not letting me sleep through the night at the moment and it is wow so draining so even though it's 10 o'clock now I've actually been up since about half four having gone to bed at midnight which I don't recommend guys I feel like four and a half hours sleep is not long enough I just don't feel like I'm really super peppy but I'll get in there I'll get in that mood I'll be fine the day will happen and it's only Sunday no pressure on today really the only thing I needed to do and had to do and wanted to do was speak to you so there you go that's all happening and I've managed to find a lot of work all in the house to do it what else is happening actually you know what we had a sad thing the other day I'm sitting on the chair where my oldest cat, Kaniki, would normally be.

But very sadly, we had to put him down last week. The new boy in town, Titus, who's five, our cat, he's looking at me thinking, is that what happened to Kaniki? I'm sorry, Titus. Yeah, we took him to the vet and he didn't come home. He was very old. He was not very well. He was very dodgery. I was worried about him getting run over. But still, it really was very, very sad taking him to the vet and, you know, going through with all that. I'm sure any of you who've been to the vet with a loved family pet will understand. It's not easy, especially when, as I was putting Kaniki in his cat basket and getting the kids to say goodbye, one of my children said, Mummy, why are you killing Kaniki?

I didn't kill him. We just decided to end his life more happily than it might have done if we'd left him. And he did have a very happy life. And 17 is a good age for a cat, isn't it? But I do miss him. He was a lovely cat, very lovely cat. Anyway, on to much, much more happy things with our guest this week which is a fantastic woman called kate robinson who i really like and she is someone i got in touch

with because her dad was a chap called sir ken robinson and if his name sounds familiar it might be because you've watched some of his ted talkss. He's done three and he's also written educational manuals and became Sir Ken Robinson for his contribution to education in the arts in the UK. But most notably, he did a TED Talk called Do Schools Kill Creativity? It's just under 20 minutes long and it's absolutely brilliant.'s the most watched ted talk of all time i just had a check on the ted talk website and it's had over 71 million views and i don't know how many it's got on youtube but it's the most watched ted talk and it is brilliant he's he's funny and smart and concise and articulate and really bang on the nose of what I think resonates with me so passionately about how the education

system in this country should be just a bit more broad when it comes to how kids are educated and also the value of the arts you know I've spoken to you about this before I speak to my guests about it sometimes it's very very close to my heart and I think you know it actually came to my attention through one of my kids' teachers who said, you have to watch this TED Talk. And as I watched it, and I've seen it more than once now, but I felt that feeling you get where you feel almost quite emotional

thinking about all those kids out there who aren't lucky enough to have a family that rallies around them and maybe don't come from a creative household and just don't really understand the significance and the value of their creative leaning not only that kids are instinctively creative look how little ones want to get you know the paints out and they want to dance and they want to act and it's so good on so many levels no matter what you do for a day job but the higher up the education system we go the more and more that is devalued in terms of its place on the curriculum anyway I will get into this much more articulately and much more length with Kate apologies for the long and

rambling intro but I uh I missed you actually and I think having conversation with you when I've been mainly uh delegating with Richard about looking after kids and a week away and you know what it's like it's just exhausting and it's like best of times and also most intense and I hope any of you out there with young families would agree with me and don't think I'm being evil for saying so I do love them but I also would really like a 12-hour sleep and a quiet space to just maybe have a day to myself actually just just catching up on some tv shows I did learn one thing on this this summer this half-term break though didn't take a book I'm normally a very optimistic person with a book and this time

I thought there's no point and so yes there was one bit of hand luggage lighter from that oh that's another thing we did when we got to Stansted, managed to leave all of, basically we traveled hand luggage only, which I'm quite proud about when it's a whole family of six. Our oldest didn't come. He stayed behind and had a party with his mates.

But we left two of those bits of hand luggage at Stansted, which meant that my 12-year-old, my nine-year-old landed with no clothes, nothing except for what they're wearing on their backs. That's a really brilliant way to start a family trip. Recommended. See you on the other side. But we first met, oh, a few months back now, didn't we?

So basically the sort of trajectory from my point of view is that I had watched your dad's ted talk yeah and for anyone i think is it still the most watched it is which is pretty phenomenal it is it has been since it came out 2006 so that's what 17 years um it was one of the first ones they put online so they they didn't put them online originally and so this was one of the first fives they'd put on remember when my mum watched it for the first time and dad was like what you think and her only feedback was i wish you'd want a different shirt really um but yeah so the most watched still 17 years later it's amazing which is phenomenal and so i watched it and i was immediately like this guy's incredible his message is strong and clear and smart and inclusive and wise.

And I thought, how can I get involved here? And then I looked your dad up and I saw that very sadly he died last year, a month after I lost my stepdad, as it happens. So I'm really sorry. And I know a little bit of what that feels like in the last 12 months or so, longer now. And also I then found you and I was like because you're basically continuing on from where your dad left I am yeah we worked so my husband and I worked with my dad for I worked for them sort of I left school at 16 and

kind of worked alongside him um but we formally started working with him about 2015 2016 um and when he when we found out he was passing away we didn't have long we had two and a half weeks and um i promised him i'd continue his work so i i am um two and a half weeks i'm so sorry yeah it's very quick no um that's from his diagnosis and he was sick before but his he was supposed to get better so it went from you'll be fine to actually you won't to two and a half weeks um but in that two and a half weeks my husband and I got married and my dad got to be there uh it was the last time he left the house and it was an incredible lesson that you can feel happy even when your heart is completely breaking which um yeah I wish I'd learned that lesson a different way don't get me wrong but it's an amazing lesson to learn that

you can feel these two yeah um actually the only other time I felt two feelings like that is motherhood that feeling that you know that um that feeling it's called ambivalence that you can feel two exactly opposing emotions at the same time like you love your children but you sort of want your old life back at the same time when you've got a newborn um yeah so two and a half weeks that's actually a really interesting you what, I think you've very sort of succinctly put quite a complicated time and probably the kernel of why I wanted to do these conversations in the first place, really. Because, as you say, yes, you can feel, you know, you might have always wanted to be a mum and think this is great. And as you say, love your baby. But also, you're suddenly thrown into this new bit.

And it is quite discombobulating. Oh, it oh it is you can swing between all these things all the time yeah exactly and you know you never want this child out of your sight because you love them so much but you also really just want five minutes to yourself yeah it's um nothing and i i wanted to be a mother my whole life but nothing prepared me for that first year i think um the feeling yeah two things at exactly the same time. But you don't talk about it. No one talks about it. And there is a word, ambivalence,

which in anthropological terms directed to motherhood, because we kind of think of ambivalent as being, you know, you could take it or leave it. But in anthropological terms to do with motherhood, it literally means feeling two opposing feelings at the exact same time. I actually didn't realize that. To me, I suppose I've always thought ambivalence as you say is a sort of slight sort of like a sister of apathy really exactly um yeah not hugely emotional but

the ambivalence that you'd feel in that circumstance is actually incredibly emotional I suppose makes sense doesn't it because even the kind of ambivalence as we think of it is you could take it or leave it so it's sort of yeah but it's not having a strong feeling is it whereas certainly in the ambivalence of motherhood, both feelings are very strong. Every feeling's very strong. But there was a similar thing I actually found when Dad passed away.

It reminded me of childbirth as well, and a totally different... It's just the two ends of the life spectrum are interesting, because you're waiting for somebody else to make a big transition that'll change your life forever, and you have no control over it. You're feeling all these different emotions that are completely out of your control.

Yeah, it's true. And I don't know, I suppose for everybody as well, how that settles and when you feel you can talk about it in a more past tense is very bespoke. That's true. And probably, like a lot of things, big life events, not actually wholly faithful to chronology. You can sometimes feel much more a lot of things big life events not actually wholly faithful to chronology you can sometimes feel much more on top of things and then two seconds later i feel like actually no i haven't

got as good a handle on these things as i thought yeah exactly yeah yeah but i suppose your ability to to feel both those things with your dad um is probably testament to however your relationship had been your whole life yeah because it's extraordinary how every whatever's woven into the thread of the relationship you have with your nearest and dearest and obviously sometimes these things drop hugely complicated things that's when it's really thrown into sharp relief when you're going through those things and actually if you could have this two and a half weeks where it sounded like you managed to have this obviously getting married yeah so that wasn't even something you we would know we knew you're going to one day but we were engaged um yeah my

husband was joking for a while it was a big elaborate plan just to get him to commit but we um it was not we had a date in the diary for the 19th of september and then the pandemic so we moved it and then um ended up getting married on the 15th of augember and then the pandemic so he moved it and then um ended up getting married on the 15th of august so six days before he died wow and um yeah i mean it was i suppose it was a marriage rather than a wedding but he got to be there and he got to give me away and he made a speech what do you mean a marriage whether you mean it was it was like it was just the ceremony um because the panda and there were 15 people in masks. So it wasn't the big white wedding, I think, that we'd planned. But he was there and that's all you can ask for.

I knew that if we didn't do it then, I'd never do it. Because I just couldn't have done it without him being there. My whole life I'd always planned when I got married that Dad would give me away and we'd dance to this song. Because I didn't know who I was going to marry um he was kind of the one staple in all of my plans going through it so he was the he got to be there uh which yeah made it made it very special yeah it does and I'm wondering if you know there's something in you that was already quite good at sort of reacting to the world you found yourself in rather than because I think you know you can

get very hard and faster plans but being able to actually move with reality to where you found yourself in rather than because I think you know you can get very hard and faster plans but being able to actually move with reality to where you found yourself that might be like a little tool you had in yourself already so it's a good tool if it is it is a good tool and actually maybe motherhood as well as you've sort of drawn that parallel there's a lot about I think where you've got to go with the flow a little bit because even when you really want to be a mum you don't know who that person's going to be no exactly exactly and I found I don't know if you found this because you've got five but and so imagine it's different for every single one but I thought when I thought about having kids um you sort of think there's an extension of you and my daughter Adeline could not be you know she's 100% her own person um and so, it's, you're right, they are 100% their own people.

I've totally forgotten what led us up to that bit of the conversation. Well, no, I'm just saying that you can really want to be a mum, but then when they come along, you think, oh, it's you. You don't know who you're going to parent. Exactly, that's right, yeah. And it's funny watching them figure it out. Like, almost at this age, because my daughter's three, you can't get too attached to any particular version of her which must be different with older kids you know

that you kind of see more of who they are kind of to themselves that's very true actually and i do think the kernel of who they are when you look back has sort of been there always been there yeah and it's quite funny yeah because you think oh actually that there's the sort of like the line like joining it all yeah but it's only really a reflection when they're that little that you can see oh yeah you were always like this yeah that was always meant to be yeah yeah yeah um so when you had adeline um were you already working with your dad then yes yeah and is that how you met your husband then i met him through work not through dad but i used to run a finnish education project called hundred which looked at um it was for finland centenary

celebrations uh which i think was 2017 and i used i used to know that by heart because it was you know my kind of elevator pitch and it always makes me laugh i can't remember exactly when it was now but um it was my first job with it was to interview 100 education thought leaders around the world on the future of education which is amazing got to travel and speak to people about it so the first thing i did was went to sing Singapore and to an event called bet that my husband ran okay so we met in the hallway in Singapore on my sort of second day on the job and then this might have been then the clip I saw of you where you're talking at I think it was called that was bet UK yeah okay where I came out with the phrase bet babies I don't know if they guess yeah really wished i hadn't shortly afterwards

well i thought it was a great yeah i love that about events that you um you know the organizers have no idea what's come out of just sort of having certain people in the same yeah room together but yeah bet babies well i guess as well it ties into something your dad spoke about a lot in that ted talk about the power of collaboration yeah and how at school we're taught that if you see what your schoolmates are up to when they're working that's cheating and that's a bad thing but actually when you get into the adult world that's collaboration is key components and so for anyone that hasn't seen the TED talk and obviously I will be encouraging everybody to watch it if they haven't because I've actually watched it twice you know just in the last little while have you yeah I think it's brilliant and it's your dad twice, you know, just in the last little while. Have you? Yeah, I think it's brilliant. And it's, your dad has, you know, there's lots of humour in there,

but he's got a few, not only does he speak a lot of wisdom, there's a lot of stuff, I don't know about you, but it always makes me, actually, of course it'd make you emotional, but I get emotional more in the sort of sense of, I think about, it makes you think about your own education, it makes you think about your kids' education, it makes you think about all those children who don't go home to a family that says,

let's talk about your school day and, hey, we can, you know, give you, I don't know, drama workshops in the summer holidays or, you know, let's nurture you through the school process and then we can really let you out into the big wide world and then you're going to be fine. So I think your dad obviously had such a generosity about him that he just wanted people to feel engaged about making it better for every kid because his own upbringing was stark difference to the sort of things he ends up talking about

yeah it was so he's one of seven he's one of seven um and he's a very working class family up in liverpool his dad worked in the docks. And his dad was paraplegic. He had an accident in the docks that left him completely paralyzed for 19 years. And dad got polio when he was four. So he was, and he was the, I love this bit. He was the only one of seven, in a house of nine people. Well, it wouldn't have been nine at that time because the two youngers wouldn't have been born. But, so a house of seven people.

He was the only person who got polio which is amazing because it was you know like covid it was so um transmissible but they think that he got it because he had a speech impediment and he went to a speech therapist oh and they thought that he got it at the speech therapist um but it's just this amazing trajectory that he couldn't speak so he went to a speech therapist got polio and then ended up speaking to millions. It's just an incredible, no one would have thought it. No, that's incredible. And I didn't realize that about the speech impediment. And so that's obviously like one hurdle as well.

But plus, as a result of the polio, he ended up being sent to a special school. He did, yeah. So the fact that he ended up talking in this really inclusive global sense about education when actually he hadn't necessarily even gone to like the just the local he did he passed the 11 plus and then he went on to um to the local i suppose grammar school um but he got actually there's a heartbreaking story he was so desperate to go so a man called charles stafford recognized sort of went to visit the school that he was at the first one and took a liking to him

and took a shining to him and sort of encouraged him with the 11 plus and he passed it and he went on to a grammar school but to get to the grammar school he had to take something like two buses and climb to the top of the stairs for his classroom was and he wore right up until he died he wore an old caliper which um you know like forrest gump like a proper but it looked exactly the same proper with like 10 pounds metal and leather and everything he's worn that his whole life? whole life oh wow and he

yeah so he carried around this extra weight everywhere he went and but he'd get home and he'd be bleeding from the calipers you know chafing on his legs and his brother caught him

he was like don't tell mum don't tell mum because when she did find out she took him you know he couldn't keep going to school because it was just detrimental to his health

and he was devastated about it but he always said that because my family is a big football family, they grew up by Everton Football Stadium and two of my uncles played for Everton professionally. And dad was sort of touted to be the big footballer in the family and then he got polio. And because of the polio, he reckons that's kind of the, that's what set him on course.

Because his dad said, you know, you can't work in the docks, you can't be a footballer, you can't do the physical jobs everybody else is going to do. You have to focus on your education and your mind. And he did. And the kind of great irony is he himself was actually very academic. You know, and so his point isn't that the whole, you know, that no one is or that it doesn't, it's just that not everybody is.

Which is absolutely true. Yeah, and different ways of celebrating encouraging intelligence and original thoughts and creativity exactly so that everybody can get through education equipped with the ability to know where their strengths lie and actually have them celebrated rather than thinking i feel stupid because i didn't i wasn't very good i mean even now no matter what you end up doing after gcse you have to have english and maths now some people objectively might say well those are really important things and of course they are yeah but if you're very dyslexic or

dyscalculic and you find those things really challenging you've just got to get over that you just have to get over it yeah yeah and it's that's really tricky and it's not necessarily an understanding of English language that you're um you know if you basically if you're dyslexic you'll find a way around it until you sit those exams and then you're um you know if you basically if you're dyslexic you'll find a way around it until you sit those exams and then you're just a bit stuck sometimes yeah um and i i realized as well when you're talking that sometimes i'm almost talking about your dad in a sort of present tense and i think it's because when there's so much audio and visual of someone i mean i've mentioned one ted talk we actually did three and and lots and lots of someone i mean i've mentioned one ted talk we actually did three i think and and lots and lots of speak i mean if you go online you can find dreams and i did wonder what that's like for

you because when you lose someone quite often you haven't got any sound of them it's their voice that's missing and i wondered how how it is to still have him sound so alive in his clips? That's a great question, firstly. But on one hand, I feel very lucky because we have all these clips and we have these videos. And on the other hand, we used to joke that... Because he was incredibly authentic, so it was always the same, whether he was on stage or whether he was at the breakfast table.

But he always used to joke that he'd go upstairs and he'd come down and say, it's like Matthew, I'm going to be Sirkin Robinson um like stars in your eyes and he'd come down in a suit with the Armani and get ready to go out and that's the version we've got the videos of um but someone put together a um a tribute to him and they'd kept in some of the b-roll of him kind of just chatting to people before the thing and that's what set me off completely because I was like I actually I don't have much of him you know it's him sort of on stage talking or it's him talking about work and being professional and there wasn't

a huge difference but there was enough of a difference to kind of think I miss that bit of him the bit that wasn't you know didn't didn't know he was being filmed and was sort of making fun of the camera guy or trying to make everybody else in the room feel comfortable but I'm particularly grateful for my kids you know that they've they'll have yeah they'll they'll be able to see him and you know the impact that he had and not everybody gets that no that's very true and it really brings it to life and there's so much humor in there yeah and it sounds actually like maybe he and his siblings were quite high achievers and if you say two of them ended up playing professional football um and obviously in a family where one of your kids finds himself you know the task to go in football

and ends up getting polio and they go okay now it's academia right let's focus on that that's actually an incredibly sort of resilient family yeah so when you're growing up you know having quite a different childhood you and your brother does it put on a different kind of pressure or I mean how does that sort of manifest when you're thinking about the yeah where you the roots I suppose um I was thinking about this just the other day because I was thinking about how you know dad's passed away and I'm carrying on the work and so a lot of the things that we used to do for him we're doing for me now like I've just written a book so we're working on you know book promotion and this picture and that and it's all the things we used to do for him and so there's a kind of um when people said you know he's not gone because you're here which is really lovely

and I kind of get frustrated that there are things that I don't handle as well as he does I've got a much quicker temper than he does and it occurred to me the other day it's because I haven't first of all I'm not him you know which is the big one um that's the first one absolutely not him but also you know even if also, even if I have very similar personality traits to him, I didn't go through what he went through. I've never known hardship the way that he knew hardship. One of the maxims that he lived by was that he'd never walk away from anything that scared him.

And he got that because being a teenager, wearing a leg brace, walking down the street, people used to stare and other kids would laugh and giggle. And he taught himself, he's like, I will never turn around and walk the other way or cross the road. I will head up and walk straight past them. And he kept that with everything.

And I'm lucky enough to have benefited from that advice and try my best to live by it. But it was everything he developed was really hard earned. Whereas there's a sense of a lot of things that I've inherited have been gifted rather than earned. So there's definite differences between it.

But then I feel very lucky to have grown up watching him, you know, the benefit of having learned from him. But I'm acutely aware of the difference. Yeah, but as you said yourself about your own daughter, you know, you feel like they're going to be an extension of you. And then they're just not. Yeah, 100% their own people. Exactly. And that's obviously the same thing from you being someone's daughter as being someone's mother.

And sometimes it's not until you're someone's mother that you think a bit more about how your parents might have felt about you in that way. Well, and also themselves. I don't know. I grew up thinking my parents had everything together. You know, your parents kind of come as a unit and they take care of everything

and they must have figured out the mystery of life. And then you have kids and I hope it's not just me but you kind of realize you're winging it 95 you know you're answering about that's just you yeah is it just me am I the only one making this up actually I'm just I thought you might I thought you might it's just me making it all up as I told you already I tried to take my two-year-old to nursery he doesn't go to nursery today. It's like that story of your mum telling you the condom and grease was a medal. You know, it's a lot of thinking on your feet and trying to put in a brave face. You know, I'm definitely trying to parent.

I don't know if you were grieving around the same time I was. It's not past tense, is it? But, you know, deeply grieving that first kind of shock and everything. Yeah, that first bit. Yeah. And trying to be a parent at the same time. You know, how do you... I remember saying to my best friend in America, I feel like I'm not being a good mum at the moment.

And she said, well, no, you have to focus on being a daughter, which I'd never really... She doesn't have kids, so she... It's kind of the only advice that you can get for somebody who, I guess, is from the outside looking in on it. Yeah. But it's also very valid. You know, I'd forgotten can get for somebody who, I guess, is from the outside looking in on it. Yeah. But it's also very valid. You know, I'd forgotten that I was a daughter, I suppose, because you spend so much time thinking about being a mother.

Yeah, that's very true. That's actually very good advice. And I think that's, yeah, also perspective, as you say, from someone you can say, you need this for you. Plus, I think that, you know, your daughter, she's still little, so she won't't take away she won't even think of it that way you know if you uh you know um very blue in that significant way for the first i don't know six eight weeks or whatever that really intense bit is when you just sort of wander through life in a bit of a yeah days um that's that's a blip isn't it for little ones yeah and i think um for my kids yeah we just did lots of talking about it actually and I said I think for me the big thing I wanted to pass on to them was actually

that it was okay not to feel that sad because I remember when my grandma died when I was um 11 I didn't really cry at the time and at the time I felt like you know 11 was really really grown up and I should have been feeling terrible and I just it just didn't really I mean I loved my grandma but I just didn't really know how to feel it at the time there are also aspects that you develop as you get older like what forever means yeah you don't have at that time aren't they you know you can't quite get and thankfully you can't quite get your head around the concept of what somebody being forever gone means yeah and I think particularly when they've had an illness like that I don't know if you've had this but I used to feel like with John like when when he died like okay that's the cancer but over now he's going to come back and it's exactly that side of the illness and then

that was a whole other that's ludicrous no you're absolutely right and there was a whole other wave then of grief that kind of came around Christmas time of or maybe even later maybe around February I was saying to my husband I'm sort of grieving the fact that I get why the sick one had to go you know I understand that he had to die in that you know I'm grateful for him that he didn't suffer longer than he did but it's now the fact that the healthy one's not going to walk in the room yeah um I remember we got dad a hospital bed that um yeah really lovely it just felt like such a small thing you could do but was to get him a really nice hospital bed for a week he stayed home and I got we made it and I tucked him up and then what my parents lived next door during the pandemic and I walked back home.

And I had to sort of remind myself, you're not tucking him in to get better. You know, it's a really odd... Oh, it's just bizarre. Yeah. And it's such a part of life as well. It is. And culturally, we're still sort of finding

where to place it sometimes. Oh, they do a terrible job, particularly in sort of non-religious Western culture. And part of it, I'm sure, was the pandemic. But we had this two weeks between him dying and the funeral and no one could come. But I've got Irish Catholic family on my mother's side and I went to help my cousin bury her dad

in November before my dad died. He wasn't even sick at that point. But I remember thinking, they've got everything. They know what they're doing. They've got a wake and people bring prayer cards. And then they've got the funeral. And then they've got the month's mind and all these sort of things that they do. We had nothing.

You're just sort of trying to figure out what's happened. And I did a talk to the IDEC, the International Democratic Education Convention. Trips off the tongue. IDEC, the International Democratic Education Convention trips off the tongue which is an amazing organisation about the democratic schools movement but they asked me to do a talk about

dad and they sent me the invitation in the two weeks after he died when I was invincible I didn't feel anything, I was just sort of sure I'll take on the world, this is fine and then by the time it rolled around a month later I was not fine at all and I nearly cancelled and I didn't and I take on the world. This is fine. And then by the time it rolled around a month later, I was not fine at all. And I nearly cancelled and I didn't.

And I got on the Zoom, thankfully, to 150 people. And I just sobbed for 10 minutes. I couldn't even bring myself. I was mortifying, but I couldn't bring myself to say, you know, I was sort of trying to, and eventually I just stopped. I was like, I would love to hear from you guys about, I guess, you know, what he meant to you,

but also your experiences of grief. And it turned into this hour of people talking about when they lost their dad and someone in India was saying that they scatter sesame seeds and watch them drift away as part of the symbol of letting go and someone else said where she's from

I think she's from Nigeria that they howl and it was when she found out her dad had died she howled and everyone came running out because they knew what the howl meant and just these other kind of cultural things that people do and you make you realize that we are certainly in a non-religious as said western capacity particularly in a global pandemic um it was nothing you know no one wants to talk about it and it's but you're just aware that it's something we'll have to go through either you know obviously our own but also someone that we love and you kind of you learn on the job a bit with them yeah and actually it's

interesting to think about the howling because i was thinking you're so right about the pandemic that that's what i felt was really strange about the entire experience is that no one was able to run around the streets going oh my goodness this is actually really scary and i'm seeing people and what's going on everybody's emotions had to be on mute and then when you aren't out you just see you don't just see the mask no smiles and it's i think that lack of expression is really bizarre it is very counterintuitive for humans really what if there's a benefit to it though um and i hope this lasts and isn't just sort of a post-pandemic phase but certainly a lot of the conversations i've been tuning into have really been about

what makes us human at this point. Yeah, that's true. You know, because we've sort of been robbed of it and certainly recognising that we all got through it based a lot to do with the arts. You know, we were watching things on Netflix and listening to music

and people were taking up hobbies that they'd never done and sort of we went straight to creative pursuits because we had time to do it. But also, yeah, sort of, I guess you're right because all of the humanity was stripped out of it but we all found ways to connect and reconnect and i hope that i hope that stays and that i suppose also completely joins dots to what you've been up to so tell us a little

bit more about the book yeah thank you well done because the creativity is at the heart no you're right yeah it is and, professional podcasting. Very impressive. Own each step with Peloton. From their pop runs to walk and talks, you define what it means to be a runner. Whatever your level, embrace it. Journey starts when you say so. If you've got five minutes or 50,

Peloton Tread has workouts you can work work in or bring your classes with you for outdoor runs walks and hikes led by expert instructors on the peloton app call yourself a runner peloton all access membership separate learn more at onepeloton.ca running um yeah so dad dad was writing a book um i think the original deadline was 2017 so he'd been writing this book for a while okay um and it i think partly why it took him so long to do was probably because he was busy but also because it's intended to be a manifesto of all of his thoughts and it's short and so a distillation is very wow sort of big task to do um but when we found out he'd asked me to help him write it and then obviously when we found out he was dying he asked me to

finish it and so we spent a lot of the last two and a half weeks talking about the book and what would be in it and and everything else um and i've just finished it which is amazing yeah so it's thank you so i'll be out next year in march and um yeah it's a it's been a really um it's been a really big journey to do it but it's it's also been I mean very therapeutic in terms of um he started writing it so I finished it as him you know I'm not writing in my own voice I'm writing as him so it's been kind of getting him into my head and me into his head to finish it but it's it's a real distillation and it's short it's 60 pages um of of all of his messages and the the key themes of it you're absolutely right it's about creativity and imagination um and dad's point was that imagination

is you know our capacities for imagination is what separates us out for the rest of life on earth that other species may imagine um i'm sure they do, but we have the capacity. Then we have creativity, which is the ability to act in our imagination. So dad referred to creativity as applied imagination, that you can spend all day every day being imaginative and nothing would happen. It's a nice way to pass an afternoon, but not productive. But creativity takes imagination

and turns it into something tangible through a medium. And so the book's about imagination and turns it into something tangible through a medium and so the book's about um it how how our powers of creativity brought us to a critical pass you know they've brought things like the arts and these great systems of democracy and you know city structures and everything but they've also brought wars and um the dark side of everything as well in the climate crisis and certainly a lot of these systems that are no longer serving us if they ever served everybody to begin with i'm pretty sure they a lot of them didn't they were designed for the few not the masses um but the point of the

book is that they're human-made systems and by definition therefore we can change them and we've come to a point where we have to um so we're systematically destroying the earth you know robbing it of its natural resources and we're also systematically through systems like our education system but not just our education system robbing ourselves of our own diversity of resources and talents and we need to get a grip

the exact wording isn't in the book but it's the general gist of it and then also but it's not just the kind of concept and then also but it's not just the kind of concept behind it but also some tangible kind of next steps

of how to harness those powers and move forward with it so this is obviously like there's lots of things that are in the book and obviously it's been hard enough to distill

all your dad's thoughts about education into this book that's taken four years 60 pages yes and now I'm trying to get you to go even tighter. But I suppose the thing that I find really powerful

is this idea that the education system as it's set up is not working. And whilst there will be some people, yep, that definitely benefit, the vast majority don't. And you only have to speak to anybody about their own education or about their kids to be trapped in probably quite a long conversation because it goes right to the heart of us, doesn't it? School, all of that stuff is so formative. And takes up so much time.

It does take up so much time. Between 14,000 and 22,000 hours that the average child spends in education. That's informal system. That's not including university. It's between 14,000 and 22,000 hours that the average child spends in education. That's informal system. That's not including university. That's a huge time commitment. You know, it's like the extra raising hand, the extra parent. And it gives you a mirror to yourself of how you should see yourself and where you feel your strengths and weaknesses are

and where you are in the pecking order and what's going to be celebrated. And, you know, this is just so significant and it's so to be celebrated. And, you know, this is just, it's so significant and it's so clearly faulty. So when you're, and obviously your dad and you have bucket loads of optimism and enthusiasm for how to start to evolve this and move things forward. And, you know, you're not alone. There's lots of things out there that are growing

and starting new ways of educating. But the vast majority of sort of state-led mainstream yeah is is not great and certainly from my point of view i feel like my job as a mum is to kind of almost get my kids through it with their morale intact um so that they don't feel like failures at the end of it really yeah um and so um when you're raising your own child and you're about to start so you're because and he just started nursery so you're right at the beginning at the beginning how does it factor into what you are hoping for her because the chances of there being big reform it's gonna this is gonna be incremental i oh yeah yeah and it is incremental as you said there's there's already a huge movement underway of people doing things differently and we're lucky that the school our daughter's in is one of those

um but it it's the i'm probably the opposite of most but it's a thought that's caught that's kept me up at night is how do i put her in a system and the night before she went so she's only been in a week um but the night before she went in i started crying at 5 p.m i don't think i stopped until i picked her up at 12 the next day What was that all about? It felt like a few things, one it felt like the end of babyhood which is a very distinct kind of end of a time period one that at various points in it I've wished was

well behind us but now it's over I'm like, my baby but it's also, it occurred to me it's the last time that she will be totally untouched by the system so even if we decide to take her out, she always be touched by it she'll be it will have made a mark in some capacity on her whether it's a great mark or a bad mark you know this last day that we had with her before she went in was the last day of her just exactly as she was without feeling like she had to be anybody else

and already last night she was telling me that she was excited to go which is great and she said um I promise I won't cry and I was just on the bedtime story but I was like who told you you can't cry um you know if you're sad you cry and if you're happy you smile and you know if you feel nothing then don't do either that's fine too but because we've we found that the school gates you know parents saying things like big boys don't cry first of all they're three yeah so big boys whatever and categorically big boys do cry you can make everybody cry little everybody cries yeah um you know things like that little girl is not crying and um which is amazing because

it's you're a big boy but that girl who's the same age as you as a little girl you know but she's not crying um and already you know a week in she's sort of feeling like she has to do something because she's overheard people being told a certain way and you're right i'll be that mother like you are sort of trying to keep her morale intact and probably i'm trying to undo everything that's done i'm probably teachers worst nightmare um certainly publishing a book on education her first year of school is going to be she's in for a different journey than i was with it if i was your kids teacher i wouldn't want to get the email that says i need a meeting yeah please can we speak um and i should say as well there are lots of teachers actually that feel very restricted by the system they're in.

Oh, a huge amount. And want to teach in a different way and can see the potential in the kids. So this is not a kind of blanket thing. I've had some really good relationships come out of my kids' teachers. For me, it is much more about the system at large and how things are pushed. Our teachers, it's a weekend, but they seem genuinely lovely. And as I said, we're lucky the school is really lovely. But you're right.

I also think even on a systemic level, no one wakes up, I hope no one wakes up in the morning and thinks, how can I screw this up for generations of kids today? Teachers don't go into it because it's a great paying gig. They go into it because more often than not, it's a vacation. It also tends to run in families. My mum was a teacher, my grandma was a it goes back and back and back so that's how my parents met my dad was running a teaching workshop and mum was a teacher on it she um and

she said she was a head over heels in love you know 20 minutes into it but um yeah um but you but you're right the you know teachers are i mean there are I mean, there are some who would be better off, I think, serving in prisons, 100% who possibly are not in the right vocation. I've had some of those. Yeah. But for the most part, teachers are desperate to do right by children and to leave their positive mark on it. And it's a system, as you say, that is constricting.

And there's lots of programs like 100, the one that i told you i used to work with you know that offer innovations now now they publish an annual list 100 innovations that are changing the way we educate already and they're kind of um you know little ways that you can get through things you know so if there's a bullying problem there's a thing called the buddy chair buddy bench where it's an empty bench designated in the playground for if a kid's sitting on it all the other kids are told you go over and play with that child because you know they're by themselves or um or ways you can get through you know teaching maths through music and they're wonderful but they are um i call them band-aid solutions or plaster ones you know this

is how this is how you get through exam season this is how you rather than the ones that kind of address yeah um but they're essential and hundreds got an amazing movement and support behind it because teachers are desperate for ways to kind of add a personal touch into the system as it is. And Dad's point often was that there is actually quite a lot of room, wiggle room within the system. There's lots of things that we do that it's not mandated anywhere that we do them. The way the classroom's set up or the day, each lesson being an hour long in between or 45 minutes sometimes even.

You know, his point was if you're in an office environment or a working environment or, you know, you're creating music or writing a book. And if a bell rang every 45 minutes and you had to get up, go to a different room and think about something else, you'd be crazy by the end of the day. You know, but we ask kids to do it. But again, it's not mandated. So it's just there's a lot of this is the way we do things. It's always been done. And certainly a lot of, you know, I got do things. It's always been done. And certainly a lot of, I got through it and look at me, I'm fine.

So now it's your turn. Yeah, I think that's very true, actually. And I think we definitely have that with our growing knowledge of people who learn in different ways. There's a lot of like previous generations just have to sort of buck up, get on with it. And the fact that there's this sort of thing of like,

if we make it a more supportive environment that's not really that important because people sometimes just get through things and then they deal with it but dad's dad used to say that um the more narrow the definition of ability the wider the definition of disability is and my favorite term at the moment is neurodiversity because because it's not about ability or disability it's about the different ways that our brain is neurodiversity because it's not about ability or disability, it's about the different ways that our brain work. And it's amazing that we're finally getting to the point where neurodiversity is something that's being taken into consideration.

It's actually something some businesses kind of actively look at, making sure they've got a good cross-section of people who think in lots of different ways because it's so good for, you know, what they call it, thinking outside the box. Yes. Yeah. The box is sometimes really really little yeah um so what in what way you plugged into the future of education so who your book was is this you know you part of something that speaks to the government and um less so the government um which is kind of i again it's kind of following on from dad's lead

with it but he fell out of love with trying to he did a big report in the 90s for the commission by the labour government in the uk called all our futures which was a um a report for creativity and the arts in education i think is this what led to the knighthood um it's part of it it was partly that and also his work in Northern Ireland. But he, you know, I think they swept it under the rug, basically. And Dad, you know, always said he thought that maybe they were looking for like a creativity hour and a Friday and something that was easy to implement. What they got was this massive book that was, you know,

his how to make systemic change to incorporate it more. But the impact it had on the sector was huge, you know, across teachers and also the cultural sector of the uk in particular um but i think he kind of fell out of love and what he found is that you can make great headway with a politician and then they get moved or promoted or go somewhere else you know move to a different department you're back to square one with the next and politicians come and go and he always said that um which i love that rock and roll wasn't a government-led initiative you know revolutions don't wait for legislature they happen from the ground up um so that was the grassroots movement so that's this book speaks a bit to politicians but it is mostly for it's for

everybody it's for parents and for teachers for school leaders for kids because certainly out of everybody i think the voices we keep down as much as possible in this conversation of the young people you know we we try very hard not to educate children about their rights um but but the generation that's that's coming up now uh more active i think than many before it um when and so yeah the book the book's got a little bit sort of it's certainly the last chapter it's got a little bit about if you are this person if this fits you then this is how you can make a difference and if you're an individual who's got nothing to do with education well firstly everybody does because it affects the society that we live in it affects our businesses it affects everything yeah um but this is how you could also help affect change within it um so yes much more for the

people and less for the okay that's good there are things that actively you can kind of get involved in to help add your yeah your name to it and what we're building at the minute is um a company website that will have lots more resources, because the book, I wanted to be timeless, like a manifesto, so it doesn't mention the pandemic, or I didn't want to mention specific organisations just in case, you know, one day they close

or we're in the era of cancel culture as well, you know, just if anything happened that would date the book and we'd have to redo it. But we'll have a website that'll be constantly evolving and updated with resources because i think um certainly with with the movement that's already inspired by and behind dad you know the there's there's there's two audiences of the people who get it in which case they don't necessarily need to read a book that tells them it again because they get it and then there's so they they want you know okay but what do we do now next and then there's the people who are sort of discovering it for the first time and

um we did when the ted talk had been out for 10 years we did a campaign called 10 years on which does feel like an apt name and then the next year we changed it to 11 years on and 12 years on you can see where we went with this one um but it was asking people the it was one of the first things we did when we started working with Dad officially, was, you know, tell us what impact the TED Talk had on your life. And the responses we got were amazing. And the overwhelming theme was that, you know,

it told me that it wasn't me that was broken, it was the system. You know, it wasn't my son or my daughter or my mother or whatever. It was the system that wasn't designed for every person in it. One mother wrote, I felt heard even though I hadn't spoken which made me cry at the time um because that I mean that's an incredible gift to

give people and that's why you know yeah that might be why I felt feel kind of like this sort of emotional feeling when I start watching it it makes you feel like this sort of bubbly feeling of like validation yeah but also how can I get involved and I mean do you have in your head a sort of more like how a school should be, do you have in your head a sort of more, like how a school should be run? Are there things that you can actually sort of envisage it? Yeah, so that's in there as well. The book draws parallels between things like rewilding

and regenerative agriculture. Because as I said, the two themes in the book are the environmental crisis and the crisis of human resources and diversity of talents. But what I love at the moment about the conversations to do the climate crisis is that you know david attenborough's books and and across the other ones there seems to be this lifeline which is you know we aren't actually just you know there is still hope um so every environmental aspect in education are they

joined because they're holistically just how things link? Well, so there are two reasons. One, dad's favorite thing was holism, this idea that we are all a part of a bigger thing. We're individual. A holons is an individual thing that operates on its own but is also part of a bigger thing. And a complex system is a series of smaller parts that make a bigger part.

So there's definitely an element of that. The other is that they're both human-made issues. And he felt that you can draw parallels between how we treat one with the other. So certainly're both human-made issues um and he felt that you can draw parallels between how we treat one with the other so certainly with rewilding regenerative farming it's a lot less of trying to mass produce and focus on yield um which you know these big industrial systems of agriculture in particular did was you know they got rid of the diversity in crops and grew all the lettuces together and all the cabbages together and then sprayed them with pesticides to keep the insects off which then they killed off the birds and then that

killed off everything else so they grew the animals and these grew the animals raised the animals um in these big indoor factories and you know sprayed them with antibiotics to kind of keep them edible and pump them with things there was a direct relation dad felt with the education systems um people often compare education to an industrial factory and you can see why you know this kind of model of a conveyor belt and you get on it and as a kid and people different teachers are responsible for a little bit of the factory line and at the end there's you know various tests along the way to make sure the products in keeping with all the others and then you get shipped off dad said and he used that

metaphor as well it's you can see why it's caught on, but he felt that there's a big difference in industrial factories and education, and that's children aren't inanimate objects. You know, a screw or a bicycle doesn't care what happens to it necessarily, but kids do. So he felt industrial farming was the right metaphor to use rather than a factory because it's the mass production of living creatures but the way then we're or certainly regenerative farming models and rewilding is sort of undoing those practices and bringing back the nature into it you know so growing different crops together in close proximity so they support each other um and allowing the natural ecosystems that thrive off it to to be a part of it because then that thrives rest of it and you know rewilding is when you sort of just set off various parts of land and take a step back

you watch it but take a step back and let nature do its thing um because life always finds a way so how would that be i don't quite understand how that would be in a school. Exactly. Yes. So in rewilding, you focus on things, the ecosystem. You know, nature always, life always finds a way because it's so dependent on the ecosystem. You know, in order for a tree to grow, the soil has to be right. So dad's thing was you as a teacher, a great farmer knows that they focus

on getting the conditions right. You know, you don't grow a plant as in you don't stick it in the ground and stitch on the petals and, you know, sprinkle it with pollen. You create the conditions for the plant to grow itself. And that's the parallel then with education, that you don't grow a child.

You know, you know that as a mother, you don't fill them with information necessarily or kind of stick on different personality traits. You create the conditions for them to turn into the best versions of themselves that they can be. So he felt great teachers know, the way great farmers know,

that in order to help children to flourish and thrive, you focus on creating conditions for them to do it themselves. And the way you do that in a school, and this is a very long-winded answer to your question. No, no, I'm with you, I'm with you. The way you do that in a school is you create the conditions,

so you focus on the ecosystem, you make sure that the teachers are taken care of and that their needs are met, you make sure that the environment is conducive to learning um there's a great initiative called the the lernometer by professor steven heppel um which is this little box that he puts on a table and it reads the light quality and the noise quality the oxygen quality in a room and goes green if it's conducive for learning you know because we don't as he made the point most prisons have got more light than classrooms. So you make sure the environment is conducive for

learning and you focus on the diversity of talents and give children a range of options for, you know, the ways in which they learn. There's a big thing that personalized learning isn't feasible, it's too expensive. And the point is, first of all, that education is personal. There's no getting around it is you know as we said it's a highly you talk to somebody about their education it's a highly personalized system um but secondly there's no choice because all the you know what's more expensive are the kind of alternative education programs that are designed to get kids back into education that ironically focus on things like personalized learning and um quite often the

creative arts and and things like that um so that that's why the environmental thread is through is because he felt that there are there are strong parallels between the two probably put more succinctly and in less words than i've just given you there no no you explained it really really well my 25 000 words all in one go no but speak someone who's just written a book yeah I think no because I can understand and it turns into a 3d idea and also sounds very logical and actually while you were talking I was thinking I wonder how usual it is for you know a parent and then their child to be so on the same page with their with their ideas and their thoughts because I know that you've obviously heard your dad say a lot of these

things but you can tell from how you speak that this is the way you feel too yeah and I mean is it as a family is this something you will talk about so it's something my parents that's you know they fell over they fell over it they fell in love over it um and I you know I'm part I think it's osmosis I grew up my bedroom shared a wall with the bathroom and I could you know, in part I think it's osmosis. I grew up, my bedroom shared a wall with the bathroom and I could always hear them talking while dad was having a shave or, you know, mum was brushing her teeth, they were in there talking about it

or over dinner or on car journeys. It was, you know, it was never a nine to five for them. So there's definitely that element of it but, and certainly it's something my brother cares passionately about but the education system sort of suited him better. Like my dad, he's very academically intelligent and I never was, you know.

So I was that kid who, I was told I was, you know, I was sort of, in not so many words, but in many different words, was told I was stupid quite early on in secondary school in particular. You know, I wasn't academic. I failed all the tests.

I can't sit still. And so my parents made the decision to take me out of school at 16 because we were in America, but they said, you know, if you were in England, you could leave at 16, so what do you want to do? So I did. I think if you gave any 16-year-old that choice.

So I took them up on it. But we put together, we would have called it unschooling now. So there was a whole list of things I couldn't do, like run away with the circus, get pregnant. Well, this is what your parents said to you? Yeah, we made a list of the things that I couldn't do I couldn't spend all day in bed um I had to do something and then a whole list of things I could do so I did I always say it's a it's a hugely privileged story you know not only privileged because my parents had the means to let me do

unpaid internships um you know and sign me up for university courses but also because they got it you know and were supportive so there's two prongs to that privilege um and through all that I realized I'm not stupid you know and um and if I can help one kid not feel like they're stupid the way I felt like I was stupid because you you know I still um labels are hard to shake off you know it's like if you get told you're the funny kid at school you spend your life kind of feeling like you have to make a room laugh if you get told

you're the stupid one you kind of I still back out of debates and things because you know I'm like well you must be smarter than I am and the fear of saying

the wrong thing at school is horrible oh exactly that really stays with you I think I used to be so nervous I used to never ask to go to the bathroom

in school just because people would look at you you know if you put your hand up yeah so no I care about it I used to be so nervous. I used to never ask to go to the bathroom in school just because people would look at, you know, if you put your hand up or... Yeah, so no, I care about it because, you know,

I was it and I benefited from having parents who understood that it wasn't me. Yeah, it's interesting that you had that feeling from school even though you had someone so sort of championing that voice. I used to speak to the faculty every year. Oh, I bet they loved that. Yes. I'm sure they did.

Coming in again. Yeah. So how long did you do this unschooling? So I left school at 16 and probably for two years until 18. I studied child psychology at community college then for a bit. And then I got offered an internship in New York teaching at a school called the Blue School, which is the Blue Man Group.

Oh, yes. They paint themselves blue and bang on drums, come in and paint, and they started a school inspired by Dad. Oh, wow. In New York, a blue school. So I spent a year there, which was incredible. What's that like then?

It's very arty. Yeah, it embodies all the things we've been talking about. Is that from 16 or is that from... No, it's from little. So Adeline, if we're in New York, that's where she'd be. Wow. They're up through eighth grade, so I think it's not secondary school. Okay.

I was getting confused with the grading system. Yeah, exactly. So it's through year nine. Okay. They've got, in the young classes, they've got something called the wonder room, which is like a padded cell, essentially, with various glow-in-the-dark lights and like a big soft play room. And they just let the little ones go in and just go nuts to burn off the energy before they go and have to sit down which is great that's smart i mean i

suppose as well do you think some of the people's hesitancy uh to change the system is because they fear that by encouraging different ways of learning or creative thought they're going to sort of create a kind of army of rebels who just don't actually want to conform with 100 yeah i suppose the skill is to encourage the creativity but keep the engagement yeah in being productive with that yeah well and um dad was never for anarchy he there's a whole point in the book actually about you know you need a culture is a set of permissions things that you know this is the way we do things around here societies depend on them

we need to have laws, we need to have rules but it's about as you say it's about keeping the individuality within a set of it's also about questioning the rules that make sense and the ones that don't and the ones that feel arbitrary

or for a different time we talked about my daughter's uniform and it's really sweet she looks like madeline but um but it's ridiculous you know she's three and she's dressed like she's in the 1950s um so it's about yeah i guess kind of just looking around at the world and reassessing and i think that's true not just of education but a lot of the things that we take for granted yeah and i think probably for a lot of parents we've had our relationship with education really tested because obviously we found ourselves doing what they called home

schooling yes which crisis schooling yeah exactly crisis schooling emergency education yeah it was called home schooling which sounds sort of wholesome and productive and kind of quiet and actually sounds kind of like a choice to be honest with you well that's because there's a whole movement of home schooling which is exactly a choice if you're a homeschool kid you're gonna be able to go yes mine too and they go no no i really really literally homeschool yeah but um but you know one thing that came to light really early and i think i was quite lucky that i saw this article by katlin moran really early on into the pandemic when i was she was homeschooled wasn't she she was and she spoke about when she was at school,

when she came home, I think it was sort of like de-education. It's basically like a process that kids go through when they've come out of the conventional education system and are then going to be homeschooled. And it lasts for a few months. And it basically is kind of like getting out of that way of thinking,

prattling around a bit, getting a bit bored, and finding the things that take you out of boredom, like starting your own projects and this. Because we're terrified of letting our kids be bored. Yeah, we really are. We've actually been taught that boredom is a really awful thing, and that at all moments, that can't be a thing.

I actually think a little bit the same way with food, actually. We've been encouraged to think, oh, you must never be hungry. Here's a snack to tide you over to that bit. Anyway, that's another whole story. Yeah, no, you're right. But she also said, you know know if you're the sort of parents that slagged off um a teacher the way school is chances are your kid is not going to turn to you when you suddenly say okay now we're going to do history and they're going to be like well you're the same person that was

saying my history teacher's rubbish so i thought you know it's interesting that there's been this thing and i would really hope that actually if there's ever a time for everybody to look a little bit more closely that now is a brilliant opportunity really because we're all going back into this and we've all looked under the hood yes we have and seen our teachers and everything as people and you know you just sort of try to hopefully like soften those borders but also thinking hang on a minute what can they actually get out of this and maybe there's some things little roots and shoots that grew in lockdown from their kids when they just took their foot off the pedal for a little bit did you see the um michael rosen article about fronted adverbials that came out the pandemic

i didn't see the whole article but i follow him on twitter so i've seen him do tweets about it yeah exactly but why you know most parents are sitting here in the pandemic trying to figure out what a fronted adverbial is i googled it at least twice yeah i still can't tell you what it is yeah no but your kids probably can you know and then they will forget over time um you're in the pandemic trying to figure out what a fronted adverbial is. I googled it at least twice. I still can't tell you what it is. But your kids probably can and then they will forget over time. You're right, we did a podcast called Learning From Home at the beginning, just before Dad got sick

we did five episodes and then he turned yellow, which at the time we were joking was just a way to get out of doing the podcast. But he did five brilliant episodes and talked to mothers and parents but it just happened to be mothers actually in the first several episodes um about how they were handling the pandemic all around the world so a mother in mexico one in utah um some over here

and you know totally different because what i mean you must have had this this one mother had four children um of all different ages like yours are so you, you know, trying to help one with, you know, the SAT prep because of America and another one, you know, who's so little that couldn't actually read by themselves. So, you know, you can't just say, here's the computer, do your own work. You have to stay with them the whole day.

Yeah, it's very much like us, yeah. Yeah, exactly. And dad sort of said, you know, have you got them all involved together? You know, are you having the older ones help the younger ones and things like that? And it hadn't crossed her mind and she wrote back a little bit afterwards that she'd tried it

and was sort of blown away and what we found was that actually the families who were not trying to recreate school at home you know who weren't because one of them was like they're not going to listen to me I'm their mum I'm not their teacher so there's a big kind of power struggles happening as well but the ones who didn't try and replicate the school environment but kind of either added things on or took things out and said, you know, okay, so you've got to learn about this

but let's go in the garden and see if we can figure it out out there. It had an easier time of it than the ones, because also everyone else was still working. So it wasn't, the thing with homeschooling as a choice, as an actual valid way to educate your children, is it is a choice, so you'd hope in the majority of cases you've thought through how you're going to balance yourself and if you're still working or if you're not working or if it's you or if it's someone else doing it but we certainly in the lockdowns had parents feeling like they had to be every single role and then

you know it was just sort of unthinkable yeah um um just out of interest as you said you've got like lots of teachers yeah in your in your family so what does your mum think about how our relationship with teaching um in terms of what what it is that you're you're hoping to shift i mean where was she part of quite a conventional school she was but she um she there she loved it but she sort of i think she was a rebel teacher that um got in trouble a lot with her teacher and she said she had a wonderful head teacher

who supported her in it but she was always turning the classroom into things that wasn't supposed to be and you know pushing the desks against the wall and you know she would have been teaching

what the 80s in Liverpool you know in a kind of difficult area of Liverpool but she had all the kids acting out things and it's how

her and dad fell in love you know she said her mom was a teacher and sort of instilled in her the values that and then she'd sort of met a kindred spirit and dad with it because i suppose um by shifting education forward we're going to encourage more kids to also want to be teachers because it's going to look like wow i was so inspired and engaged by that teacher whereas i sort of get the impression sometimes that you know i mean this happens with a lot of jobs, I guess,

but you might want to teach for teaching's sake, but then you've got such an exacting list of how, where the results lie and what, you know, needs to be crossed by what point in the term. Yeah. It doesn't look like a great deal of fun, a lot of teaching. No, it's different in different places. Certainly that's how it is here.

In places like Finland, which you know gets a lot of positive press around their education system although i remember the the finnish consulate telling me in london a few years ago that that was almost an issue that they had you know people think finland's sort of narnia that you'll go and all your problems be solved they also have one of the highest suicide rates um which i think is more to do with the darkness and the weather than it is anything else but you know they um they value their teachers which shouldn't be such a shocking sentence you know but their teachers are kind of educated to almost master's level they're paid properly they've got freedom and autonomy to and trust you know it's um the level

of micromanagement that happens certainly in the british system and across america and other places is um you just wouldn't stand in other other. You know, you just wouldn't be. Yeah, there is. There's also, there's different reasons for one of the things I'm interested in is why we educate, you know, the purpose of education. Because people have different reasons for it, different countries do.

You know, if you look at Finland and Korea and other places there, and Canada in particular, their mission statement is, you know, to help children become well-rounded individuals and citizens and part of a community if you look at the uk and the us their economic reasons to develop children to join the labor force um and certainly depending on what the labor force is you you probably do need kids who you aren't going to question too much and can sit still all day and follow instructions uh it's just that now the labor force has changed so much anyway that most people don't want that out of their employees they do want people who can think

outside the box and um and adapt and keep up and and all of that funnily enough i first got the link to your dad's ted talk from one of my eldest boy's teachers yeah and she's his english teacher and she was really lovely and she was one of those teachers I think you'll always remember and she just said the arts is being so devalued and it's heartbreaking and you should watch this that's amazing so you know there are people out there that have got their heart completely in the right place and can see the individuals in the classroom and can see where the kids have been a bit browbeaten by the experiences they've had and where they're yeah where they're teaching them that the value is and so that doesn't i'm not saying that doesn't happen no of course not i think like you said your job as a mother you feel is to keep morale up you know as your kids

go through i think that's true teachers you know that they have a big job to keep their morale up and to keep showing up every day and doing right by the kids despite the system not because of the system yeah um and i think that's you know that's the big point is about changing it so that we thrive because of a system that we've created rather than in spite of it, which is so often the case. If you look at the people that kind of textbook have done well out of life, more often than not, it is in spite of their education. It's not because of it.

It's so true. And I think you're true. I think very often you get brilliant teachers and there are hundreds of millions of brilliant teachers, but they're great often in spite of the circumstances they're teaching and you know they're a breath of fresh air rather than um than because the system is allowing them to yeah to do what they've gotten the job to do in the first place yeah so i don't think anybody least of all teachers wakes up and thinks how can i ruin a kid's day today and the other thing is there's also a responsibility

um as a teacher i think to help you the children in your class go on to the next stage. You know, we looked at a few different schools for our daughter and one of them in particular was a really lovely small Montessori school. But the director of education there, who had her kids go through it too, she was really candid about it. And she said, you know, we have a great time with them,

but they're totally unprepared for what comes next because they haven't learned how to sit in a room and look at the board. It's true, you know, we have a great time with them, but they're totally unprepared for what comes next because they haven't learned how to sit in a room and look at the board. It's true, you know, school is one aspect, and if you want your kid to go into university, and there's a whole other conversation, which we won't get into now,

but about this kind of need for everybody to go to university, which I don't think everybody does, but they need to be able to fit into the university spec of it, you know, so until everything changes, it's a lot to ask teachers to change the entire system themselves from within a classroom yeah no it's also fascinating really because the university thing is interesting or at least further education in any guise because by giving more value to creativity in the arts that's all very well and good if not everybody finds their thing and

actually with with my kids because richard and i were lucky enough as teenagers to discover that music was the thing i was like i mean i literally sort of made myself kind of disappear from school in the last few years i just didn't i could sort of just start to remove myself i'd never really felt like it was my my place um you know it was fine but I didn't feel like I fit in massively and so I sort of was like oh there's a whole world out there it was massive relief and I'd always spoken a lot to Sonny about that but then I realized halfway through I don't know probably the first year or second year of secondary with him actually I was putting a pressure on him to find his thing and actually not every kid has that yeah so it's about sort of

giving them this space to breathe but also time to grow because you've mentioned you know sort of neurological aspects and you know we now know people are still shifting with their brains till they're you know mid-20s yeah it's a long time um so it's completely understandable to find yourself at 22 even just think still thinking you have no idea yeah what i'm supposed to be doing myself i don't think i realize this is what I wanted to do until I was 25 um and I'm certainly doing it more committedly than ever before because dad passed away and I made him a promise um well when you say what you do what you do what how do you sort of define your your job my job it's my least favorite question people you know we've had it all week with mothers at the gates being like what do you do I'm like

there's no succinct way to tell you what I do because then you get into I'm like the most depressing personal play date because then you get into you know when my dad died and that sort of sets the tone for the rest of the afternoon um I I don't know I don't I have no idea that's the thing there's no job description for it I have no idea. Or the elevator pitches. I suppose you're what?

Well, Dab was an educationalist and a writer. Yes, continuing that legacy. Continuing that legacy, but then you have to get into what the legacy is. Yeah, I don't feel like I've earned my stripes to say I'm an educationalist yet. I can say I'm a writer now that, you know, once the book's out in March. You know, I wanted to I may I may yet do it although it's very similar to this but I wanted to start a um a blog or something I suppose podcasts are the new blogs aren't they but

about called writer speaker mother because that was my twitter bio for ages even though only only one of them was technically true which was mother I'm a Robinson yeah I'm a Robinson but I wanted to do one about this sort of process of how going back to work and the kind of the mother identity, the kind of loss of figuring out who you are. And because you said, you know, your brain doesn't set until you're sort of in your mid-twenties

and then you have a baby, if you have a baby, and your brain tends to mush again for, they say it's another two and a half years, isn't it, before your brain comes fully back. And most people have to go back to work after three or six months. Yeah. And this kind of parallel role

between what you do and what you don't, which is why when people ask me at the school gates what you do, I'm like, I'm not thinking about it right now. Yeah. I'm here with my kid or waiting for my kid and I have no idea how to explain

what it is I do in a way that, because no one really cares either. They sort of want, you know. Yeah, they just want the quick answer. They just want the quick answer. They're making small talk. No one wants to go into the education system standing on the school gates.

Yeah, although they probably do. I do feel, I think you'd be heart-pushed to find people that haven't got anything to say about education and where they would want change. Although I was on day three of nursery, so day three of the very beginning, you know, it's not even mandatory that she go and the only reason she is going is because she begged to go and you do right by your kid don't you and

she's the most social creature I've ever met in my life and the pandemic was so hard on her and she was so desperate she's got I've got a stepson who's seven um and so she saw him going off to school you know every time we have him so she was desperate to go so that's the only reason she's there because I thought it'll be doing her such a disservice not to put her in, although I would happily have never done it. But anyway, my husband took her in. It was his turn to settle her in. And I stood outside the classroom sort of peering over people's shoulders to make sure she was okay.

And this one parent started talking to me about the secondary school his son's going to and because the university options from that one are this one. And I was like, God, I haven't even thought about secondary school. He's like, well, you should go to this one because then she'd go to this university and I was like, it is day three of nursery. Yeah, but people are so... I haven't thought about dinner tonight, you know?

There's a lot of fear though. Oh, there is. And about doing the right thing. And I mean... Because again, no one wants to screw their kid up. You know, it comes from such a good, you know, if I do that, then he'll go on to do this and I know he's probably going to be financially taken care of and...

Yeah, it's a real eye-opener though and it's also about what you grew up with and the good you know if i do that then he'll go on to do this and i know he's probably going to be financially taken care of and yeah it's a real eye-opener though and it's also about what you grew up with and what the world you know and particularly i mean my sort of similar thing was when i started my first at nursery and then i wanted him he went i didn't i unintentionally sort of put him in it was a lovely nursery i really like the nursery but i didn't realize it was also very very zhuzhi. It was in Notting Hill, and I was totally freaked out by 90% of the mums, and I didn't speak to anybody. I was sort of scuttling in my

duffel bag and chucked my kids in and ran out again. I just felt very fish out of water, really. When he was leaving there, I sent him to this local state school. I actually had parents come up to me and say you're really brave to do that or i wanted to do that but my husband wouldn't let me um and that's a ridiculous

way i mean it's literally just going to i mean i went to a state school i was like well it's lucky enough to have a good state school down there that's what i'm going to do but that was my first introduction to that yeah i'm just like but there's a trajectory here yeah and we did look at this little private school around the corner from, which was actually geographically much closer. And the head was getting all these kids to stand up. They must have been about six or seven. He'd go, you know, can you stand up?

And the little boy would stand up in a blazer and be, yeah, I'm going to go in this secondary and then I'm going to study English at this university. Oh, my goodness. And it is a conveyor belt. Obviously, we all want to do the best thing for our kid. And, you know, if you're lucky enough to be able to send them to a school, it's a fee-paying school, but you think it's the right school.

But I always say to every parent, it's not better because you pay for it, and it's not terrible because it's free. Look at each school on its own merits. And I do passionately believe that everybody should have access to a good free education on their doorstep. It's what? For everybody. I call it the promise of education.

It's what the education system, you know, you shouldn't have to pay for an education. I think they're quite reliant, in fact, on the fact that people, some people can and do. Because it automatically kind of creates this hierarchy it really sticks i mean yeah it does look at how things work out for who goes into positions of power and government i mean you know that little boy in the blazer once standing oh exactly where they're gonna go exactly certainly where we live the um i had our daughters at a little private nursery a private

school um and we looked at every single one in the area. And actually, a lot of the private schools scared me more than the state ones because they're sort of everything that I didn't like about the state ones, but with more pressure on because you're paying for it, so they should be getting these results.

Exactly. So in many sense, what we were looking for was one that can operate just outside the system. It's an international baccalaureate school, the one that she's going to um but as far as i'm concerned she's in nursery and i don't know if she's you know yeah i have no idea because as you know and you do you do write by your kid um at every stage of their life and if it's great for her now and you know we'll take and again i speak from a point of privilege a being able to send her to

a school that is fee-paying, and B, of, I suppose, being willing and in a position to have time to think about, which also, you know, I think a lot of parents don't, you know, think, okay, you're in school, they will take care of you. I have to think about things like keeping a roof over our heads and what we're having for dinner and keeping our lives ticking along.

But we'll see, because I completely agree. It should, you know, know ideally every school should be yeah be able to deliver a decent education and you know happy and happy exactly

if you have to put your children in education which you do then then the school you should you know you should have

be able to have confidence at the school you know that you're not going to spend every day kind of trying to remedy the impact the school's had that the school's

doing what's right for your kid i'm just just sort of ask you lastly i guess but i wouldn't i can see that there's you know the generation is passing this baton on and now you're holding the baton yes of everything that's you know you're passionate about and that's so needed and obviously your daughter's only three so i won't ask you about if you're gonna pass that on to her but if you're what do you think you can sort of put in like the metaphorical backpack of your small person when you're putting them through education if you do have those feelings about where the where the reservations are what are the tools you can give your kids to kind of help them through it I think um a sense of self where possible um which my husband's much better at than i am

um he was bullied for an entire year no one spoke to him for an entire year um and he but he went yeah he went to an all-boys school so then he went over to the girls school and made friends with the girls made friends with the older kids and taught himself the bass guitar and you know figured out who he was and now he literally doesn't care what anyone thinks which i'm astounded by because i'm such a people pleaser that's very liberating but if I get yeah I was very jealous of people I know me too me too um so if I can instill that in her I think that's a huge one a sense of self because then it doesn't matter what kind of I mean no one's going to have an unfiltering sense of self you know but if you've got a core of who it is that you are like you

said I don't think necessarily just about finding your thing but finding who it is you know what it is that makes you you um and then like we talked about right at the very beginning adaptability i think is the biggest yeah is the biggest skill and kindness yeah that's all that's all you want is you want your kid to be the kind one or at least that's all i want i want her you know to be the one with the good heart and i don't care about um any of the rest of it um yeah that's a lovely life skills thank you I really like that

thanks yeah sense of self adaptability and kindness and kindness yeah sounds like a good person I hope so

I'll let you know how it goes see you in yeah 17 years exactly we've already got from the teenage years getting them all out

in the three-nature phase actually oh blimey I don't know if that's foreshadowing or just sort of getting it out the way it's definitely like my two-year-old yeah he can roll his eyes at me he can be like noise at me exactly fine yeah okay mine goes oh

man where have you got that from oh man then you'll catch yourself saying oh yeah it's me it is we um i say it headline started um hitting and she she come up and say, you know, I'm going to punch you. And you're like, who punches? What are you watching? Or where have you picked this up? It's punching. Then we were driving. I realized we'd been playing the yellow car game for so long

that when a yellow car comes around, you punch someone in the arm. I don't know that game. No, neither did I. The yellow car game. If you see a yellow car, you punch someone in the arm. Really? Anyway, we'd been playing this all summer, me and my husband. Okay.

And so I was like, who's teaching you how to punch? And then a yellow car came by and I punched my husband. I was like, it's me. I've taught you about hitting. So now we just shout yellow cars. Yeah. It's a lot of looking in the mirror as a parent. Let's stop playing that.

I've never even heard of that game. It's not worth it. There are so many yellow cars around. They're obviously very in trend. Can you hear that wind? Can you hear it? It's really howling out there now. I quite like it.

I'm still all snuggled up in my sitting room and it's quite nice and cosy. And I hope you enjoyed the chat I had with Kate. I think there's a lot of sense in there isn't there and does it make you think of your own school days and the fact that we had to sit down and learn at our desks and all face the front and I mean some of it's just it's just smart thinking isn't it and about how we've really based our education system on the industrial age which is just not where we're at anymore we're we're in a whole new world and who knows what our kids will be dealing with

or the next generation will be dealing with when it comes to what they'll need to be educated with and about to prepare them for life ahead. So yes, resonated with me and I will keep you up to date with things you can get behind and ways you can campaign because I know I said to Kate

we would get some information about that and I still think it's worthwhile. So watch this space. I'll find a way to communicate that with you on Instagram or in the links for this or something. But yes, thank you so much for lending me your ears. Thank you to Kate for being such a lovely guest this week. Thank you to Richard for editing this.

Thank you to Claire for producing this. Thank you to richard for editing this thank you to claire for producing this thank you to ellen may for the beautiful artwork and as always mainly big thanks for you for your ears and your time you know how much i love you all right i'll see you in a week and yeah we've got three more till the end of this series and please do keep suggestions coming put it in the comment section wherever you've found the podcast or on my insta or on twitter or anything because sometimes you guys have suggested someone that i just haven't thought of and it's really introduced me to some brilliant women and made me think about some brilliant guests so thank you please do continue to do that i really appreciate it all right anyway have a great week and I'll see you soon. Thank you.