PassW0rd – 10th June 2020 (Remotely Engaged)

Speaker A: This program is brought to you by Resonance FM. If you like what you hear, please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.

Speaker B: Hello, I’m Peter Warren, and this is Password on Resonance FM. Today I’m touching up the pros and cons of using internet technology to deliver education. Only a crazy conspiracy theorist in a tinfoil hat would suggest that the coronavirus pandemic has given educational technology, or edtech, the chance it’s been waiting for to turn our state schools into profitable online brands. As you may know, I hardly ever wear a hat, If I do, it’ll be a Panama at this time of year and a tweed cap in the winter. No tinfoil here. And after all, technology-enabled device learning has a long, proud pedigree.

Speaker C: The School of the Air’s classroom studio is at Broken Hill, and its 4 teachers serve nearly 200 children. The youngsters live on 90 station homesteads scattered in the remote outback, some of them 500 miles away. From her empty classroom, Headmistress Mrs Gibb assembles the School of the Air. Good morning, girls and boys. Good morning, parents and supervisors. The Department of Education built this classroom studio for £12,000, and the Royal Flying Doctor Service provides the radio network.

Speaker B: That’s the Alice Springs School of the Air in the Australian outback, celebrating its 69th anniversary this week. Of course, they don’t use two-way radios anymore. They use online platforms. Meanwhile, the Open University, based at Milton Keynes in the UK, has been using TV, radio, and online technology to deliver higher education for 50 years to people who are not on campus. Still, these are exceptions, not the rule. It was a shock to the system when the COVID-19 lockdown meant that all teaching and learning suddenly had to be done by remote control. Parents had to become teachers. Teachers had to contribute to teach the children of key workers and provide online lessons so the rest could be schooled at home and make sure their own children got some education too. Without online platforms, none of this would have been possible, and nor would the ongoing school lockdown. Margaret Allen of Renaissance Learning is a former primary school teacher and an interactive whiteboard evangelist.

Speaker A: Obviously we’re living in slightly strange times at the moment, but I think that technology is an enhancement of good teaching and learning, and if the technology is good enough, it can do that. I don’t think it can stand alone entirely because Children are naturally creative and naturally mischievous, and naturally they’ve got other things on their mind and are quickly— will be turned off by someone just sitting in front of them. They’ll want to go and do something else.

Speaker B: One of the things that becomes very important in teaching is the relationship that teachers build with the pupil. One of the things that can quite often go wrong in that relationship is if a teacher doesn’t like a particular child, or if a child doesn’t like a teacher. Does technology allow you to get round some of those issues that have been, you know, ancestral, I suppose?

Speaker A: I think the way in which technology is able to bridge gaps, if you like, is that it’s starting places. A teacher that is able to read their children is obviously going to be a good teacher. If they’ve got things like technology to offer children who struggle to sit or who haven’t got the same background, they haven’t got the language, they haven’t got the vocabulary. The intervention that technology can show, for example, children sitting an online test— reading is such a difficult subject to assess. Writing and maths, you can see whether a child can or can’t, but with reading, how do you possibly know how much has been understood? How can you possibly— unless you’re going to sit and talk to every single child every time they read a book. And that’s where the assessing, the technology that allows assessment to take place, means that the teacher has immediate insight into the children that can and the children that can’t. And setting up intervention programmes, whether that’s to support them academically or emotionally, becomes very powerful.

Speaker B: That’s a very important point, isn’t it? Because one of the things, and again I know this from my past, If you don’t understand one thing, in a subject like maths for example, if you don’t understand one thing, then you can’t go on to the next stage because you don’t have that building block.

Speaker A: Absolutely. I mean, I think computer adaptive testing was new to me until about 5 years ago, but the example that I use when I’m talking to teachers about computer adaptive testing as opposed to paper testing, and I think paper testing is probably still here for a while to come, but the advantage of computer adaptive, and let’s use maths as an example. If I was asking a child about the properties of a square and I was to say that the perimeter of a square is 20 centimetres, what does each side measure? If the child’s able to give me the answer 5 centimetres, then I don’t need to start talking about multiplication, I don’t need to start really talking about division, and I probably am fairly fairly certain that they understand the properties of a square. Now the advantage of computer adaptive over paper is that a question asked in a computer adaptive environment means that the system will move on to something that leaves that behind, whereas if they were sitting and writing that, I’d have to ask each of those 3 elements of multiplication, division, and properties of a square separately because I can’t predict what that child’s going to answer.

Speaker B: I mean, there is a bit of a feeling, isn’t there, that schools have desks, schools have classrooms, schools have blackboards. What you’re saying is no, actually, that we’re beginning to run very much into a world where schools will have in the future, and probably in the very near future now, a desk and a laptop.

Speaker A: I think it’s highly unlikely that children will be remotely learning when they’re primary age and the early years is secondary, because children still need to have that face-to-face relationship. They still need to have content that’s presented to them. That’s not to say they can’t use technology to enhance that experience and to embellish the learning that the teacher’s wanting. But I, I know I’m also a governor at a primary school, and I know that the younger children, some of them wanted to put their uniform on even though they weren’t going to school, because they were going to do something that Mrs. X has offered them. So there’s that emotional engagement, but they, they aren’t going to learn very much from sitting in front of a screen. That has to happen from the parents, and that’s where some— it has been challenging because some parents don’t have the understanding, knowledge, wherewithal, or they’re working. And that’s why this has been so challenging for so many people, because The idea that everybody’s sitting at home with their children doing a sort of watch-with-mother type environment just isn’t happening. People have very, very busy lives, and I don’t see the idea of children going to school, certainly up until the age of sort of 12 or 13, going away anytime soon, unless of course it’s enforced in the way that it is at the moment.

Speaker B: I think it’s very touching that they’re putting on their school uniforms. At least they’re not like the adults who are walking around in their underpants.

Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, I think that, I do think that this experience for everybody, teachers and children and parents, this appreciation of what technology can do and how it can be used, I think has been tremendously powerful. And we’ve been absolutely overwhelmed by, we’re running webinars as a way of trying to reach out to schools and help them and support them. Using our materials. And in fact, we made our digital library freely available during this period because we wanted children to have access to it. And I think the webinars that we’ve had have been attended by 200, 250, 130, you know, amazing thirst and hunger for more because people have needed to top up their knowledge and find out what’s out there. You know, some of the forums that I belong to where people are saying, anybody got any ideas for this, ‘And how can I do that?’ And people are leaning— teachers are creative and they’re also very committed. It’s a vocation, it’s something you want to do. And so the fact that teachers were signing up to these webinars and wanting to know more and have more at their fingertips has been really quite heartening, but also a great testament to the fact that these children are still getting a good deal despite the fact that they’re not walking into school, although of course some are now having opened their doors this week.

Speaker B: What’s next in the edtech revolution? A robot teacher? Well, yes, actually. The Paris-based chief sales representative of Oldbaron, Jonathan Buaria, says his company’s child-sized robots called Nao and Pepper are already working as teaching assistants in schools from Birmingham, West Midlands, to Brooklyn, New York City. Jonathan Buaria says they are playing an important role in facilitating distance learning from home.

Speaker D: So what we’re doing to, to try to address that challenge is enable more and more for students to be able to program robots virtually. We’ve actually done a competition, and we’re in the middle of that, where students can actually test and deploy their applications on some robots that we have here, and they can program the robots on their laptops from their homes, and then we test them out, take videos for them, and then send the videos to the schools to determine basically who is the winner of the competition. So that is one way. The second approach that we have is that our robots can be used remotely, but to enable social distancing, right? So you could have only a few students in a classroom programming the robot, but you could also have collaborative projects with students at home that can share their developments, their code with the robot, and then students building projects with the students in the class as well to keep links between the students that are at home and the students that are now starting to go to school physically.

Speaker C: And when the robots are in the school, how do the children interact with them?

Speaker D: There are several things that make this technology quite amazing for, for students. It’s the fact that it’s not judgmental. So when the student is interacting with the robot, the robot doesn’t judge. So it looks like a human being in certain ways, but is not judging the student. And that’s really, really interesting for, for example, primary school teachers. We have students learning languages from primary school with robots in a variety of schools in Europe. And also for special education, when you have children that have Asperger’s syndrome or have a syndrome from the autism spectrum. The fact that the robot is not judgmental is actually critical to ensure that there is a good pedagogical link between the student and the technology.

Speaker A: Of course, a robot is just a thing. Can it really perform the same function as a teacher?

Speaker D: Yes and no. I mean, there are things that the robot can do that are basically linked to communication that a teacher can also do. So for example, explaining things, telling stories, giving examples of some concepts. I mean, the robots are at the end of the day just a media, a channel that the teacher can use to provide information and content and a variety of examples to a class. So we have projects in Germany, for example, where the robot is being used to do repetition about languages and a variety of topics that are not related to technology at all. And that repetition fact, the fact that the robot has students repeat and learn is actually really useful for the teacher because it’s actually fun, it’s engaging, and it’s a different way for children, students, to remember the content of the classroom.

Speaker A: You make it sound really wonderful. Are there ever any problems with robots in schools?

Speaker D: There are always. I mean, it’s a new technology, so the main challenge that we see is that how teachers who, for example, are not experts in programming or don’t know a lot about how to handle a robot, how they can use some complex technology in the class, and that’s really fascinating. What we’re doing is we’re working with partners and companies that build out content, build out education curriculum to enable the teachers to use the robot in the simplest way. We also have, for example, companies that have applications for the robot that make it super easy to use, where the teacher can very quickly set up his quiz on the robot And then the students have cards that they can show to the robot that show an answer, for example. So for example, for a math quiz, they can show the number to the robot and then the robot will say if the answer is correct or not. And that’s, that’s the main challenge that we are in our industry is how we can make a complex technology available to people that are not necessarily experts in technology, both students and teachers.

Speaker A: What about children who don’t like the robots? You find them creepy or scary.

Speaker D: We see that very, very early children, like very young children that are below 2 years, might not really understand what a robot is because it’s like an object that animates and that moves and it shouldn’t. So they see the robot like a toy, but it’s not a toy, it’s autonomous. We have had some situations where Some children actually act with the robot, interact with the robot more like they would with a human being or another kid than a robot, and that is more a challenge than the kid not enjoying interacting with the robot because kids can be very hands-on and kids can be very, very touchy with the robots. And obviously the robot is not necessarily a friend of the kid, right? So that’s more the challenge that we have rather than the kid not enjoying interacting with the robot.

Speaker A: You’re referring to the robot all the time as “it,” but on the website, when I read about the NAO robot, it’s called “he,” and it’s definitely been built to look humanoid. How is that correct and ethical? I know that the European Parliament has passed a directive recommending that people should not be persuaded in any way that they are interacting with anything that’s got human feelings or reasoning or any, any of our kind of normal perceptions of a human being. So are you really deceiving people here? That’s this toy, this very expensive toy, is a real friend?

Speaker D: We’re not saying that the robot is your friend, but the robot has a character, has a certain type of personality that is implemented when we program it. And that’s where, I mean, we’re not saying that the robot is a human being, but it now has a kind of masculine gender-type personality, unlike a small kid. And it’s something we as humans, and kids especially, project a lot, we anthropomorphize a lot relationships. So for example, there’s a lot of people that project humanity and feelings on pets, on cars, on devices. There’s kids that yell at their laptop and things like that. We project because we create connection, right? So we project a connection with everything that is around us. That’s why we’ve designed our robots in a way that this So they look human-ish, but they are not a copy of human beings. They are cute, they are attractive for interaction, but we’re really careful about not breaking the limit between the machine and the human. So our robots, they will always look like what we call humanoid, so resembling humans, but you will always know they are machines. It’s a sweet spot for us because that’s where the robot is the most attractive and exciting to engage with. But we’re not creating any ambiguity between the fact that this is, well, a robot. Although it’s cute and has a masculine and human-like character, it is still, and especially in education, it is still a machine that is programmed. It is a machine that can be programmed by the student and that is here to assist like another technology in the classroom.

Speaker B: Technology for inclusion is the driving force behind Carol Allen’s consultancy, called inclusive. She’s the former ICT Director of Education in Hartlepool, Tyne and Wear.

Speaker E: When I started teaching, we were doing well if we had a tape recorder in our classroom on a Tuesday afternoon, and that’s not a joke. You guarded your own cassette tape and recovered it and recovered it. But technology’s with us and it’s come in and it’s there for everybody and it helps every learner and it helps every adult. I mean, it’s just part of our lives now. But for some of my students, it’s an absolute game changer. So, for example, it provides a voice for the voiceless. People who maybe are paralyzed from the neck down from motor neuron disease can control a computer and their life using just their eyes. So for some people, it is, you know, a real anchor to the world that other people just take for granted. And it makes our lives easier.

Speaker B: It’s interesting you saying that teachers used to guard the technology they had with their very lives almost, because teachers haven’t seemed to absolutely totally embrace technology, have they? Not in the past.

Speaker E: Well, I’m not sure about that. I would say it’s a very mixed bag. Some absolutely have, and for years. I mean, there’s a real range, as there is in life with everything, and there’s huge use of technology in schools, particularly I would say in the last 10 years, it’s really kind of found its place and settled in. There are always one or two people who don’t. There are some schools in some areas where then they don’t have the same facilities as others, particularly when you travel internationally, you see this, what, what is accepted. I could go to a school tomorrow in UK and find one-to-one iPads, for example, but I could go to another school and find not that, much smaller offering. And equally, I could go abroad and find a school that had very little or that had everything. It’s a really mixed bag, but I do think this pandemic has made really all educators consider the role of online learning and what— online learning and teaching and what that could and should look like because, you know, it’s been a situation that they’ve had to respond to.

Speaker B: So what should online learning look like? What have we learned from this pandemic?

Speaker E: I think what I’m hoping people have learned is that you can’t transfer what you do in a classroom directly to the internet, to online teaching and learning. So lots of people have attempted to do exactly what they do in a classroom. In other words, the kind of chalk and talk thing. Here’s my PowerPoint, I’m going to talk through it. Here’s a worksheet, you know, that I’ve emailed to you. I want you to download it, print it out, do this, or I want you to do this essay. It’s been That kind of teaching works, but it’s not very successful, and it’s not very successful for quite a few reasons. The people who are now kind of looking at a more blended learning approach are having far more success. And of course, if you’ve got youngsters with additional needs, then that, if you like, the more traditional approach didn’t work too well in the classroom, and it certainly doesn’t work online. Whereas if you allow people— you probably know the term flipped learning. So flipped learning in pre-pandemic would be that you would send, for example, a video or a piece of writing that you wanted children to consider home, and you want them to look at it before they come to the lesson. And in the lesson, everybody— the assumption is everybody’s read it, everybody’s considered it, so that you actually start your lesson at greater depth. You’re not starting by viewing a video or something like that. And blended learning is going to allow that. Blended learning, the same thing. If you say to somebody, I want you to read this aspect of a textbook or from a novel, I want you to look at this bit of video and think about it, and then we’ll come together and talk about it. It’s allowing more flexibility and that benefits far more students.

Speaker B: Right, so oddly and paradoxically, the pandemic is teaching us something about education?

Speaker E: Absolutely. I think, I think it is a huge wasted opportunity if we don’t take this time to reflect on what was working well and perhaps what wasn’t working well. And remember, I’m saying this from an additional needs perspective. So for a lot of my students, they are just delighted to be at home because school school was a nightmare for them. And this isn’t criticism of schools at all. Schools do what they do because they’re held to account by Ofsted, because they’re held to account by data, by league tables. And obviously they, in order to succeed as a school and not kind of get into trouble, they focus on those criteria because that’s what they’re being judged on. There are some schools who stand up for every child in their school and those schools I applaud wholeheartedly and they say, “No, we’re going to do what’s right, we’re going to do the best for everybody,” but sometimes their results aren’t as good. Not always, not always. I can think of examples where they’ve done that and they’re still getting good results, but it’s harder work, it’s much harder work. For some of my students, it’s, you know, or students I’m connected with or families I’m connected with, they will tell me so happily how happy their children are at home not having to face school school again. And in fact, the transition back is going to be— a lot of parents are getting very worried about that.

Speaker B: So this is, in a sense, is challenging conceptions about how we’ve done education up until now. The league tables, the measuring children with exam results, and by actually saying you have a degree, therefore you qualify for this job, it seems to be questioning the very nature of what we were doing with education.

Speaker E: I think it’s about time. I think education has narrowed in focus and it’s narrowed because of the pressures that have been put on schools. I mean, when the National Curriculum was brought in in England, the phrase that went with it was broad and balanced. Well, if you look at a Year 6 class from about January until SATs, there’s no broad and balanced— there are always exceptions to what I’m going to say, okay? So there are some schools who do it very well, but the majority of schools, when I, if I was to visit in that period, are focusing on pressure and getting them ready for SATs because those SATs results determine their data, the data determines Ofsted, and these schools to survive have to work to what they’re being judged on. And nobody’s going in and judging properly judging, and I mean this seriously, properly judging from the starting point that the child comes into the school to the point when they leave, which might not be an age-related expectation.

Speaker B: What would happen if children whose parents will never be able to afford a computer were suddenly able to get online and access learning materials? In an experiment in New Delhi, India, Professor Sugata Mitra now based at Newcastle University, decided to try it and discovered some surprising results. Here’s an extract from his TED Talk on YouTube.

Speaker F: Well, I bumped into this whole thing completely by accident. I used to teach people how to write computer programs in New Delhi 14 years ago, and right next to where I used to work, there was a slum. And I used to think, how, how on earth are those kids ever going to learn to write computer programs, or are they— should they not? At the same time, we also had lots of parents, rich people, who had computers and who used to tell me, you know, my son, I think he’s gifted because, you know, he does wonderful things with computers. And my daughter, oh, surely she is, you know, extra intelligent.

Speaker G: And so on.

Speaker F: So I suddenly figured that how come all the rich people are having these extra extraordinarily gifted children. What did the poor do wrong? I made a hole in the boundary wall of the slum next to my office and stuck a computer inside it just to see what would happen if I gave a computer to children who never would have one, didn’t know any English, didn’t know what the internet was. The children came running in. It was 3 feet off the ground, and they said, what is this? And I said, yeah, you know, I don’t know. So they said, “Why have you put it there?” I said, “Just like that.” And they said, “Can we touch it?” I said, “If you wish to.” And I went away. About 8 hours later, we found them browsing and teaching each other how to browse. So I said, “But that’s impossible because, you know, how is it possible? They don’t know anything.” My colleague said, “No, it’s a simple solution. One of your students must have been passing by.” showed them how to use the mouse. So I said, yeah, that’s possible. So I repeated the experiment. I went 300 miles out of Delhi into a really remote village where the chances of a passing software development engineer was very little. I repeated the experiment there. There was no place to stay, so I stuck my computer in, I went away, came back after a couple of months, found kids playing games on it. And they saw me, they said, “We want a faster processor and a better mouse.” So I said, “How on earth do you know all this?” And they said something very interesting to me. In an irritated voice, they said, “You’ve given us a machine that works only in English, so we had to teach ourselves English in order to use it.” That’s the first time as a teacher that I heard the word teach ourselves, said so casually.

Speaker B: Perhaps because computers are more compelling and more fun than a teacher’s voice, many members of the teaching profession regard them with scepticism and even suspicion. Simon Carter is the marketing director of RM Education. The RM company did a survey of 579 teachers early in 2020 and found that that 84% of them want technology that can make assessment tasks easier and faster. Almost half are not happy with technology in the classroom and express disappointment with its performance. Simon Carter explains that these teachers are not Luddites, just concerned about the quality of the learning experience.

Speaker H: What we’ve seen during the coronavirus, as teachers have engaged with pupils who are at home, they’ve engaged with pupils who are in front of them, the vulnerable children or those of key workers. They’ve had to deliver the lessons in a new way, and I think one thing I would certainly like to say is what a magnificent job our teachers have done to respond to really what was a very sudden scenario. So a lesson now can take many forms. It can be a video lesson, so very much like a video conference, a teacher can beam into a child’s home Not all teachers are yet comfortable with that, and certainly I know a number of schools have had to, to be clear on some of the safeguarding issues in that scenario. So they don’t have to use video, but certainly I think it’s enriching. Alternatively, they can simply set homework or set assignments, deliver that through one of the remote platforms that are available to schools right now. The pupil can then complete that assignment at home and then submit it electronically. The teacher can receive it, they can mark it, and then they can give feedback to the child. They can also engage with the parents of the child if necessary, and there are lots of interesting ways where children can engage with each other through online technology. So whilst they might be used to using computer games like Fortnite or COD or whatever, they can now use that same kind of thinking to work together on on projects and assignments in a way that perhaps, you know, you or I would never have dreamed of several years ago.

Speaker B: It becomes another problem, doesn’t it? Because you’ve either got to supply people with a computer that is actually locked down, because if you are going to go out there, you’ve got the laptop the Department of Education has provided you with, you could go out onto the internet, onto any sites, and get the thing infected. And cause terrible problems.

Speaker H: And I think if it’s, if it’s left to its free devices, you’re absolutely right, Pete. And I think that’s why we are encouraging schools to invest in the, the necessary protections and, and firewalls and, and the necessary virus protection to ensure that those laptops cannot go to the wrong sites. Because clearly, you know, we are talking about young adults and younger still. We don’t want them going to to those websites, to those pages that may give them false information or information we wouldn’t want to access at that age. And that’s why it’s so important that safeguarding and protection is part of the offer that schools provide to their pupils. And that’s where companies like RM Education are working with schools to make sure that those precautions are in place.

Speaker B: But hand in hand with that, you’re also going to have to introduce training sessions where you’re going to have to say to children, it’s very important that you don’t go to this website, cybersecurity is a very, very important thing, etc., etc. Now, with the best will in the world, I was not one of the best students going. I was not particularly obedient, and I was frequently punished at a time when you could be punished in schools. I was once caned 3 times in one day. How are you going to make a disobedient child do what they’re told?

Speaker H: I think there’s a couple of answers to that. Firstly, you would be surprised how quick children are to learn new things, and I think if it’s to their advantage and they can see the benefit, then I absolutely have already seen during this virus the number of children who have very quickly learned how to use these platforms and how to use them safely. But also, I think it’s about the technology itself, technology that is easy to use and is intuitive in the way that it adopts. So many of the firewall products, the safeguarding products that are now available just work and just prevent students being able to access some of the nasty stuff that we wouldn’t want them to do. And that’s where I think that we fill the gap. We do rely on those who want to learn to learn, but then we have the necessary protections to ensure that those who are not quite of that order do not do things that you would not want them to do.

Speaker B: The mark of the cybercriminal is that the moment that they see an opportunity, they try to exploit it. If they see lots and lots of children online, they are actually going to try to find some way of exploiting them, some way of taking advantage of this.

Speaker H: And Pete, you’re absolutely right. And that’s why it’s great that people like you are talking about it. What I would say, and again I’m sure you’ll agree, is that since the mid-’80s the industry has always tried to keep one step ahead of the criminal, and that’s certainly the case here. But you’re absolutely correct, we— none of us can, can sit back and, uh, and be complacent. We have to keep investing, and that’s why, as I said, it’s important that schools recognize that they need help to make sure they’re working with professionals to ensure that they have the necessary precautions in place that these cybercriminals cannot take advantage of.

Speaker B: And also, you mentioned safeguarding. The horror headline for the Department of Education is online abuser contacted child via school computer.

Speaker H: Yes, absolutely. And I think, you know, the department are very aware of the risks they take. And as I said, that’s why in the current scheme, the department work some of the, the largest players in the market, the Microsofts, the Googles, the Keys of this world, to ensure that they absolutely were taking every possible precaution to ensure that they could close down those risks and those gaps that could exist. But that’s why the industry has to work together, and I think that that’s one of the great things that has come out of the last 10 or 11 weeks, is that the industry has worked as one to ensure that firstly children can get access to their education but secondly, they can do it in the safest way possible.

Speaker B: Simon Carter. And I’m Peter Warren with Password on Resonance FM. After this, you can hear DJ Ritu with A World in London. With the rest of the Password team, I’m assessing the performance of technology in schools and universities. So far, it’s not really pass or fail, but in terms of the teachers’ trust in robots and computers, Well, could do better. So we have to ask ourselves why global technology companies with multi-billion dollar budgets are trying to get into our classrooms and turn our university lecture theatres into online hubs. They were doing this long before the coronavirus pandemic. What’s in it for them? On the Skype from Dundee, Here’s Andrew Smith, the media coordinator of the London-based Campaign Against the Arms Trade.

Speaker C: The increasing work being done by private corporations in schools is almost certainly a result of austerity. And as schools are facing cuts in resources across the board, it’s no coincidence that that is when arms companies and other companies are putting more resources in. Schools should never be corporate battlegrounds. They shouldn’t be places of advertising for companies, particularly not ones which have such a devastating impact on the world. And I think as long as these kind of lessons are being provided with glitz and glamour and big production by arms companies, I think that lets government off the hook as well. The solution isn’t just to ban arms companies. Schools, it’s to look at the entire role of private companies in schools, the entire role of big business and what it’s doing and how it’s doing it. But also on top of that, there’s a broader question for government, which is why is it falling to BAE Systems to provide resources which you should be providing? Because ultimately we don’t know what the long-term impact of all of this is. It’s been a fairly recent development and we don’t know what the impact is going to be on education. We don’t know what the impact is going to be on the companies. One thing we can be sure of is that they wouldn’t be doing it if they didn’t think it was in their financial interest to do so.

Speaker A: I know that you’ve been informed of this by some parents who were concerned. What were the concerns of those parents?

Speaker C: Well, where parents have been particularly concerned is that they don’t feel like they’ve been told this is happening, and that when it is happening, they, they find that their children aren’t learning about the negative consequences of this. So when one mother I was speaking to had said that her 12-year-old attended an event which BAE Systems was presenting at, and of course BAE just promoted itself as being a really great fun place to work which was doing all this great fun innovation. But that’s a very partial picture. It doesn’t talk about the people who are living in a village in Yemen which has been bombed using BAE fighter jets. It doesn’t highlight the people who’ve been on the receiving end of terrible repression by police who’ve used BAE vehicles. So it paints a very partial picture and parents feel like the schools haven’t been totally straightforward with it. But parents are also very concerned about the messaging which is reaching their children. Also some of the promotional literature which we’re bringing back home, which will always be very, very patriotic, very positive, and will in no way reflect the horrific atrocities and abuses which these companies have been implicated in through the years.

Speaker A: But isn’t it possible that some of the parents might even be working for weapons-producing companies, or even, for example, in Gloucestershire, it’s quite likely that they’ll be working with the GCHQ spy centre. Surely parents in, in those situations would expect their employers to be going into schools and doing recruiting.

Speaker C: What we have to remember is that while the arms industry is a small employer nationally, it can be a very big employer regionally. I mean, across the country roughly 0.2% of jobs are linked to arms export, but in some parts of the country it will be a huge number. So if we take Glenrothes, for example, which has a major Raytheon factory which employs 600 people, that’s one of the biggest employers in Glenrothes. Now, these will include some incredibly skilled people with incredibly intricate skills, and we want to see their skills being put to good use and positive areas of engineering. I think one thing which we can think about now, particularly with COVID is that where these skills have been used in the production of ventilators, for example, that’s a much better alternative. And with the climate crisis around the corner and the UK needing to do a lot more to address it, exactly the kind of— that’s exactly the kind of challenge which wood skills should be used which those skills should be used for. So regionally, we don’t just want to see arms companies being promoted as the only game in town. We want to see schools reflecting the wider economy as well, but also thinking more positively about the kind of jobs which we want for young people in the future.

Speaker B: Perhaps the likes of BAE Systems and Raytheon want to inspire the next generation of engineers and computer programmers. As Andrew Smith says, the same engineering companies that make fighter planes can also make life-saving ventilators. But at the very least, the mums and dads deserve to have some transparency about exactly who is delivering technological training in schools and why. The role of private tech companies in higher education is a worry for our next guest, Mariah Ivanchenova of the University of Liverpool. Her research in the UK and South Africa examines the effect of the online delivery of university courses. She says it started well with the invention at the University of Manitoba in Canada of MOOCs—massive open online courses. These were freely available and offered higher education degrees to those who could not afford the time or the money to study on campus. Now this idea has transformed into open platform managers.

Speaker I: I can identify maybe 3 big types. One is startups that have generated initial capital through some kind of innovative idea and have now accumulated significant capital to expand. The other is the Courseras and FutureLearns. These are usually MOOC platforms that are now expanding into a new market. And they are quite typical with the fact that they come from universities. So they were initially offshoot companies of universities, and they usually have quite a good grasp of pedagogy because they have worked quite closely with academics in order to develop their platforms. And then the third type is companies that come from something else and move into education, and that would be, say, Pearson, something like this, whereby they were publishing, like they were actually an industrial company from Yorkshire and they went into publishing and now they are selling all of this and going into edtech and especially online platform management. So they have less experience with pedagogy, but they have more experience with business, marketing, and so forth. I think it is quite important to know that most of their representatives and highly ranked senior managers are coming from very elite education, so they’re not coming from online education themselves. So there has been so much of a push for universities to be going online and to be more entrepreneurial and to be in better connection with businesses and so on and so forth, that universities develop whole teams of people who are so-called outward looking, so they’re looking for connection to industry and they do it in a very, what you’d call in the social sciences, self-orientalizing manner. So they think of universities as backward, you know, really not able to catch up with the good, you know, structure and functioning of a lean, you know, operation of a business. And that’s why you want to invite private companies to to teach you how to do business well. And so, so they’re very willing to go into these partnerships at a very high cost for the universities and very low cost for the company.

Speaker B: As Mariah Ivanceva says, the real-life experience of going to university has become a luxury that few can afford. The technological revolution is creating a new split between the haves and the have-nots. And that’s a serious concern for experts such as Professor Dr. Michael Gebauer of the Martin Luther University in Halle, Germany. He started out as a teacher and has trained hundreds of teachers in his current role.

Speaker J: I think, I can tell you, I can talk about other countries too, but not firsthand, but I talk about Germany. My thesis is that it will make social injustice even worse. Germany is, even though it’s not very obvious, but Germany is one of the countries in the EU with the highest rate of social inequality. And this school system, our school system, which is over the last, let’s say, 100 or so years or even more, it was built on on social justice and dividing people into different schools, types of schools regarding their social background. And I think this will hit the poor and the people who are not well educated much harder than those who have a social background where they have resources, personal resources, material resources, cultural resources somehow to support their children in many ways. For those people who are not well educated, who are poor, who are social, so to say, not on the bright side of life, so to say, it was and it still is and will be, I think, a dramatic experience because those children, they couldn’t and can’t expect much support at home. So for them homeschooling and technological support doesn’t serve very much, I feel.

Speaker A: And how great a challenge is it for the teachers?

Speaker J: Because I was a teacher myself, I’ve been teaching training for something like 25 years now, academic teacher training, and for some reason, maybe it’s because the average age in in our schools is something like 50+. And so this generation of teachers, they are absolutely— I can say this from my own experience, from all those teachers I know personally— they were totally unprepared for this scenario. Unprepared because there is a mental mechanism, I don’t know, there’s a culturally inherent mechanism kind of reject technology. Yeah, we have a strong— I don’t know how— I don’t know about this. I don’t really know where it comes from, but this— only very few schools in the past were ready, did digital learning or use online platforms, and they had to start from zero, from scratch, so to say. And with this inherent mechanism of rejection somehow because they think— in Germany we somehow stick to this idea that the personality of the teacher in the interaction with pupils is creating all the success. And so this might be a reason for this rejection of technological support. This is the one side. And the other side, I will mention this quite briefly, is that I think it’s also a big chance. I experienced it at university myself. We had to create this semester fully online, so had to create platforms for digital learning. We already had that, but not so many people used it. None of my colleagues actually used it. Only a few people, so technical nerds, so to say, would say, I used before the Corona crisis. And now we were pushed into that, so to say. Yeah, and this is a really funny experience. Over the time, it is, I can say it for myself, I got more and more used to it. I was getting more and more used to it. Yeah, in some way I am enjoying it and I also see the benefits. Yeah, it’s much easier to organize meetings on the spot and to just have fluid, so to say, interaction with students and colleagues and so on and so on. So this is really, we are on the brink to a new, I think a new, really a new time of rethink the way we organize our school systems, how we organise academic learning, everything, all those things. And now we also see the chance to really, for a transformation.

Speaker B: It can cost over £1,000 to equip a family with one primary school-aged child and an older one at secondary school. We are indebted to Irish Times reporter Clara O’Brien for helping us to tot up the price of a basic tablet, a laptop, a printer so that the younger child can print worksheets and pictures for colouring in, and a Wi-Fi booster so that the older child has enough bandwidth to download ebooks and use 3D computer-aided design technology. Add in the essential cybersecurity and virtual private network with parental controls, and the grand total is £1,294. Or for those people who wish wish to remain €1,453. Doing those sums might make your eyes water and cause you to worry that your children are missing out. In that case, you’ll be pleased to send them back to state schools, libraries, and after-school homework clubs where all that kit and more is freely available, with librarians and learning mentors on hand to make sure that they can use it to its full potential. But some parents choose to educate their children themselves at home. Technology can play a part. Carol Leake-Dyer is a trustee of the charity Education Otherwise, which advises parents on how to teach their children at home and how to help them pass national exams like GCSEs.

Speaker G: We’ve got people who are sort of in a panic and saying, but I don’t know what to do, I don’t know where to look, the school haven’t sent me anything. And so they’re coming to us and we’re directing them towards resources, possible resources, all the Facebook pages that are dealing directly with this homeschooling at home as opposed to home education. It’s— there’s a few fundamental differences. And we’ve got a lot of people who are saying, actually, my child is really thriving, they’re happy, They’re actually engaging for a change. I don’t have to tell them to do anything, and I think I might like to do this full-time. And there’s a lot of people who’ve come who are really happy with the situation. They’re seeing happy children, and what most parents want is happy children. And so that’s what we’re seeing. There’s any number of reasons. In the last 5 to 10 years, probably more people have come having been disillusioned with the state school the school system, particularly special needs. They’re finding that their children’s needs are not being catered for. So there’s a definite valve action with the law in England in that if people are not happy with what the state has to offer, they can say, okay, then I’ll do it myself. So we’ve got people doing that, and there are people who wouldn’t send their children to school because they don’t see that that’s a necessary part of the transition from childhood to adulthood, so for philosophical, religious, or ideological reasons. And there’s probably a thousand other reasons. People are using them, you know, the internet educationally, and you’ve got a computer in your hand when you have a smartphone, so you can, if you’re on a contract and you’ve got lots of free minutes, you can do that out and about. People use it for navigation. You can have real-time access to libraries and materials. If you’ve got a smartphone, we use some, you know, you image capture.

Speaker B: So essentially what you’re saying is that schools were a product of a bygone age and that technology is now enabling so much more flexibility and that is putting the power back in the hands of the parents and giving them a range of opportunities that they may not have thought of before.

Speaker G: I think most people, we often have people who ask the question, oh, home education, is it legal? Do you have to be qualified? And so that helps us to understand where their mindset is at the time. They, they don’t know and they haven’t found out. And so what learning is, is the result of its neurological changes in the brain because of experience. That’s what learning is, and everything is, is founded on that. And education is a, it’s a conscious effort to assist with someone’s learning journey, whereas schooling is a a conscious effort to control a learning journey, and it’s usually outside agencies such as governments or the Empire, as it all started out, and external forces trying to control the learning journey. So that’s, that’s what I would define schooling as. And school was simply a building where people sent their children to have their learning journey controlled. And now they’ve got all these other options, they’re thinking, well, Why should someone who’s never met my child, who doesn’t know my child, who wasn’t there when they were born— they won’t be there when they die, they won’t be there during the good times and the bad times— why should they have control and not me and my child? Why should my child not have control? Why can we not be democratic about this? And so I think parents are starting to sort of shift a little bit more away from that autocratic thought pattern of state provides teachers who provide, you know, schools who provide education, because that’s not what education really is. That’s what school is, but not the broader definition of education.

Speaker B: You talk about technology being an enabler. How much has technology helped in this?

Speaker G: It’s certainly helped parents to network. Socially. You can find out about groups that are local to you in your town, in the next big town, in the next county. So it’s certainly, as long as people have transport or can car share or get the bus, I mean, it was going on before, but it was slower because it was snail mail and, you know, generally at a more local level. So it’s far easier now to organize a national event. Obviously not during a pandemic, but you know, you can organize national camps and events and people can tap into these things last minute. So it’s given a flexibility that very much suited the way home educators work anyway, and obviously the online resources and also the other technology, you know, ebooks, because it’s far easier to carry an e-reader than it is to carry a bag of heavy books. And for parents whose children love to read, you know, you would have to drag around bags full of books to keep them happy when you got to the beach or whatever it was that you were doing. So, C-Pens have really helped people with reading and writing problems, voice-to-text, text-to-voice, podcasts, people, it’s quite easy to walk and talk or to just walk and listen to podcasts and I suppose radio programs, you know. I mean, radio has been portable for quite a while now, but with audiobooks, plays, and podcasts, you have far more control. People are using them, you know, the internet educationally, and you’ve got a computer in your hand when you have a smartphone. So you can, if you’re on a contract, and you’ve got lots of free minutes, you can do that out and about. People use it for navigation. You can have real-time access to libraries and materials if you’ve got a smartphone. We use some, you know, you image capture.

Speaker B: Just like the Australian School of the Air, which we heard about earlier, the parents and children who do their learning at home love to meet up for sports days, camping trips, and joint events. But unlike the school of the air, there are no teachers, no classmates, no sports teams, no uniforms, and definitely no hats. Will the corona lockdown prompt a surge of interest in online homeschooling? Well, you’ll have to tune in to the June 2021 edition of Password to find that out. That’s all for this month. Thanks to producer Blue Buffery, and Jane Wyatt, who wrote the script. We’ll be back next month with another edition of Password on Resonance FM. Thanks for listening. Goodbye.

Speaker I: This program has been brought to you by Resonance FM.

Speaker A: If you like what you heard, Please support our work by making a donation at resonancefm.com/donate.