Meeting People
Amul Pandya converses with independent, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Creativity is an act of rebellion. Whether they are entrepreneurs, artists, athletes, investors, chefs, or corporate antagonists, Amul's guests all share a common disposition of not just pushing boundaries but re-drawing landscapes.
Meeting People
#23 Rosina Dorelli: Make Education Great Again through Leonardo da Vinci
Rosina Dorelli is Making Education Great Again. Why? Because schools are failing our children by crushing their sense of wonder through standardised testing and mindless clerical work. “Teaching to the exam” won’t cut it in the 21st Century.
As a mother, artist, entrepreneur, and teacher Rosina describes Creativity as a human right. To champion this she is the founder of the Biophilic Education Alliance and creator of a new schools curriculum inspired by Leonardo da Vinci.
In my most important conversation to date, we discussed her take on what’s wrong with the education system, both state and private, as well as the current rollout of her curriculum in schools.
The people who have made the most positive impact on the world in history have been interdisciplinary thinkers not siloed experts (the poem from the 1997 Apple advert summarises this well*).
Whilst year on year exam grades have consistently improved education (with a small “e”) is demonstrably on the operating table. Rosina’s movement will equip the next generation to solve the big problems of our time.
Thank you to Iain McGilchrist for making me aware of Rosina and her work. Here are more details on the Biophilic Education Alliance and the Da Vinci Life Skills curriculum:
https://www.biophiliceducation.com/
https://davincilifeskills.com/
This podcast was produced by Matt Cooper with music composed by Loverman.
*“Here's to the crazy ones. The misfits. The rebels. The troublemakers. The round pegs in the square holes. The ones who see things differently. They're not fond of rules. And they have no respect for the status quo. You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them. About the only thing you can't do is ignore them. Because they change things. They push the human race forward. And while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius. Because the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.”
Hello and welcome to Meeting People with me, Amul Pandya. Meeting People is a podcast where I have long conversations with rebellious, adventurous and sometimes courteous free spirits. Rosina, thank you very much for sparing the time. Welcome to the show. I've been advised by some well-meaning listeners to try and tee up the conversation rather than just diving in.
Amul Pandya:So one of the things that's come up a lot on the on the show a lot is a lack of creativity in in modern, in the modern age, risk-taking, imagination and you know things like standardisation, accreditation, exam taking, learning has come up a lot as part of the cause of that, and you are to education what Mary Berry is to baking, and so I was very excited that you agreed to come on and, just you know, talk to you about what it is you're doing. Um, to the education kind of problem, to to kick us off. Can you highlight the problem as you see it within the lens of your background, just your your early life, you know what, what you started out doing as a painter and artist, and how that sort of the countries you've lived in and how that's led to you being where you are today to tear us off?
Rosina Dorelli:there's a lot of different things in that question um and we can flesh out okay, the preamble to that.
Amul Pandya:But to start us off, yeah, the um how did Rosina get to where she is today?
Rosina Dorelli:In terms of the sort of school experience. I didn't enjoy school very much and I I found well particularly told that I'm not. I learned that I wasn't creative and I learned what I wasn't good at, and I find that this school teaches you a lot about what you can't do. Yeah, I mean, it does teach you what you can do as well, and but, uh, I, I learned that I wasn't creative and I learned that I couldn't draw and all of these and and I, all I wanted to do was, oh, actually what I wanted to do was be a mum, and so I wanted to. I felt that at the time, even though they suggested I should do science, I, um, I wanted to be an artist so I could work at home and be a mum who is they?
Rosina Dorelli:that's, teachers, the teachers and you know they do those kind of tests on you to see what you you're good at, what you, what career you should have. And they were like science is what you should do. But I was like no, I want to be an artist. And they're like, well, you're not very creative, you're not very good at art. And so I was really determined. So I'm like I'm going to try.
Rosina Dorelli:And I dealt with quite a lot of mental illness. I mean I was at boarding school from age 7 to 18, and I enjoy that very much. I always felt quite different and never fitted in, and so I did actually end up going to St Martin's to do my foundation and then was also told you couldn't draw and wasn't very creative. So I sort of steered towards three-dimensional design and so my degree was in 3d design metal work and I ended up having a forge and making wooden furniture right, um, and that was really hard. Doing blacksmithing and wielding angle grinders and and doing making furniture was really hard.
Rosina Dorelli:And also I lived in um in Accra for a little bit in Ghana um, as carving and trying to source sustainable wood bit in Ghana as carving and trying to source sustainable wood there and working in a factory there and it just was. It was really hard to make affordable furniture. I had that William Morris issue of how do you make something beautiful and handmade, which is crafted, but then make it affordable and there's too many imports in the UK in terms of furniture and from other countries, so it wasn't really a viable. It didn't feel like a viable business. So then I started painting and I went and I did yoga teaching because I'd started yoga when I um, when I was pregnant, and so I started. I did the yoga teacher training and went to Canada to the Sivananda Ashram and did their course and I went to Esalen in California and did Michelle Kasu's course called point zero painting, and that was really transformative.
Rosina Dorelli:So that was 10 days of painting and we did five rhythms dance as well and I learned that I was creative and everyone is creative and there is a human right to to be creative and it just blew me away that you could feel creative in movement, you could feel creative in, in, in visual expression, and it just it wasn't about technique and um and and brilliance, if you know what I mean like expertise or kind of talent Exactly exactly, and I had a friend at the time who had been travelling around in Gabon and he'd been making a documentary about the indigenous people in different tribes in Gabon and in the forest and in the jungle there and he was recording music and recording their dance and their expression and what he said was there was a real lack of mental illness, which was interesting because infant mortality was quite high.
Rosina Dorelli:There was lots of, you know, there was things like incest and all sorts of stuff that here would cause like lots of mental illness. But he said that everybody sang and danced and expressed themselves every day, adorned themselves and and it's like it was this human right that I just got. It got so much from that because it's like, it's like it's our mental um. I think dreaming is the way we express ourselves in metaphor and that helps our subconscious mind process things, but I think art and creativity is our awaking way of doing that yeah, your conscious mind allowing your subconscious to sort of bubble up to the surface and you to express it with your hands or your body or whatever it is.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, yeah but it's also a sense of belonging, because dreaming, obviously, is done alone and it's not, and whereas art is done with singing and dancing and adorning is really about community and about your sense of belonging. And that thing in avatar was like I see you, it's. It's about seeing somebody else and about belonging. And I think what was amazing too is one story. He said that he went to one village and there was a girl, teenage girl, who had been suffering from jealousy, and the whole community got together and they had a whole ceremony fire ceremony and in the dance to help her process that emotion.
Rosina Dorelli:And I'm just like well, this is where we've all come from. What's happened? We've taken a wrong path somewhere and there's a lot we can learn from indigenous cultures and we need some of that back, because I think we've basically commoditized creativity and so now it's about a finished product and how much value this we can sell the song for or sell we. Well, you know, once we were able to record sound, then it's no longer everybody sings and everybody's music musician you get these stats like you know.
Amul Pandya:Um, the moment a book crosses 247 pages, the the sales drop off by 30%. So all publishers force their writers to. Therefore all the books start becoming the same length, all the songs, the pitch kind of narrows to a certain range, which is where the algorithm kind of defines the highest scalability across the widest audience and that kills it effectively.
Rosina Dorelli:It's all about a product, and I don't think that's what creativity is about. So when everyone's terrified right now about AI replacing artists and saying, oh, the AI can produce music, ai can produce paintings and write novels and all of this, I don't find that scary to me because that's not what art is about.
Rosina Dorelli:Art is about community and belonging and expressing yourself. I think, and this is what I found, and and I um, I think it's a right that every human has to experience it, and so it's about the process, and ai is not experiencing that. It's not having that, that collaborative process and that sense of belonging that you get from it, and and um sense of identity too and exploring the world. It doesn't have that same meaning. So, hopefully, this new moment of it will take us back to what to really value, what's important about creativity. And so, then, a key moment then after that was we moved down to Devon, cornwall border to set up retreats doing creative expression and so using blending yoga, movement and doing sort of dance, singing we had creative writers as well as doing this point zero painting um in retreats. And while I was living there, I watched ken robinson's ted talk yes, what a great talk.
Amul Pandya:Yeah, yeah, the guy's a comedian almost.
Rosina Dorelli:Oh, my god, it's amazing yeah, that was like 20 years ago now, isn't it, I think yeah, I mean sadly he's no longer with us.
Amul Pandya:It's really sad, it's a big loss, but I think, um you know, watching that for so many people kind of talks god this guy's put to words what I've been thinking, or feeling either about your own school life or your kids school life, or um mindless clerical work, was his phrase, wasn't? It, yes, how do we expect people to be who they can be if all we do is force them into a room and do mindless clerical work? So sorry you watched that. Yeah, no no.
Rosina Dorelli:And also the whole of education is protracted university entrance, and there's just so many quotes in that I literally have them all up in my I still, I'm still obsessed with that talk and it's the most watched, the most shared.
Amul Pandya:By a long way.
Rosina Dorelli:By a long way of all TED Talks, which is amazing. So it shared by a long way, by a long way of all ted talks, which is amazing, so it means it resonates with everybody, and then that's a global resonance. That is that that talk had, and and I mean the title of the talk is does schools kill creativity?
Amul Pandya:yeah, because you're saying it's a human right and it's like yeah we're trampling on it at a pretty young age, um we're stamping it out, um, so sorry, yeah get back to how you saw this ted talk which everyone should watch.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, so it's all about how we express um. You know the, the children, and if you're not afraid to make a mistake, if it's not always about the outcome needing to be perfect, you just need to have a go, and that that's what his main message is is that children need to have an um and everyone needs to have a go. And that's what his main message is is that children need to have, and everyone needs to have the opportunity to just have a go, without this outcome. Like you know, the drawing of God and it's like no one knows what God will look like.
Rosina Dorelli:Well, they will in a minute, because this kid's drawing a picture of God.
Rosina Dorelli:It's just like. It's just yeah, it's very frustrating. So I was really inspired by that. It's just yeah, it's very frustrating. So I was really inspired by that and I'm like, right, I'm on a mission now. I am going to. I felt like I want to join this guy's army. That's a bit of a military metaphor, but I just felt really militant about it and I kind of always, as a teenager, wanted to. I always romanticized being part of like a movement, an artistic movement and or some kind of revolution, and this felt like the thing you found your mission.
Amul Pandya:I found the mission. Yeah, it's not a religious or military term, but that's. Every start-up, every movement has a mission and you know, I'm still waiting for mine. I'm not jealous, but it's great to hear that it does happen and you get that moment yeah you watch something you don't know when it is, and so you decided to fix the education system basically well, yeah, I still.
Rosina Dorelli:I decided to see how you could get creativity into the education system. So that's how it started and I started working then with schools. I worked with um, cornwall college. I did, I did the pgc, the beginnings of the pgc, the. The trouble was is that and sorry for international listeners.
Amul Pandya:The PGCE is what you do to become a teacher.
Rosina Dorelli:It's a post-grad in um education, so it's, it's a, yeah, a year's course to become a teacher. But I, I was, I actually it sparked depression because I was just like, whoa, okay, and it was ridiculous the stuff that they were getting teachers to do. And I'm just like but, and I just kept arguing with the teacher all the time and he was like, yes, I know it doesn't make sense and I know it's pointless to do this, but you have to do this. And I'm like, it's like being back at school again.
Rosina Dorelli:I was just like he's serious and he's like, yes, you've got to do this. And I'm like that's not logical. And he's like, yes, but that's what we all have to do. And it made me so angry. I was like I want to join the teaching union now. I want to. Just teachers can't be being treated like this, because it's just treating teachers like kids and like they don't have any common sense and it just takes all the passion out of it. And he said you've got to change the way you teach or you need to leave the course. And so I was like I think I'd better leave the course.
Rosina Dorelli:So I managed to do it, survive for about a third of it, which got me the petals qualification which so I could teach in the lifelong learning sector at the time. So I was teaching adults for Cornwall College for a while and teaching them how to find their creativity and doing this point zero process. And then I got a grant from um from it was called Kernow Grant, so it's about Cornwall education grant. And we I went around basically teaching um in schools, in primary schools at that stage um, this point zero process and allowing kids to have expression without product, without judgment. So the the key part of this painting process. It's a meditative painting process, but the key part of it is that you don't um have any judgment. No one's allowed to say whether it's good or bad. There's no appraisal at the end of it there's no right answer there's no right answer so they can paint whatever they like.
Rosina Dorelli:And it's amazing seeing that. And I mean remember one kid and the teachers are saying to me oh this kid, she's just really all sorts of problems and she's really difficult. But when she started painting and I could see how she used to go up to the black and she nearly went for the black and then she didn't, and then one day she just went for the black, painted the whole page black and then she painted this big gray square in it and then this little white figure in the doorway and then this, this sign across the top. It was like school. I mean.
Rosina Dorelli:I was.
Amul Pandya:I didn't say anything because you wasn't allowed to make any comments but I mean, I didn't say anything because I wasn't allowed to make any comments, but yeah, so smug smile.
Rosina Dorelli:I was like yeah, I know how you feel. It's like a big gray box which is very kind of you know. So it was a fascinating journey doing that and I really got some insights into seeing what different schools were like. I traveled around teaching in lots of schools and in and taught in some secondaries and then, um, we moved to Cambridge, basically because my daughter came out of when she went into secondary.
Rosina Dorelli:It was a disaster and my oldest daughter and the behavior management, just the state that the school was in. It was a state school in Cornwall and there was no other choice and the bullying was terrible. There was 18-year-olds in there with 11-year-olds and there was a scrum in the corridors at every break. The Year 7s had to hold each other's hands to get through. And it's not that every school is bad, but it was. I was just shocked to see how she changed from this really sweet sure and and state primaries were amazing and she had a lovely time at the primary and going into that secondary is such a massive transition because suddenly you've got 1500 kids and a 16, 18 to 18 year olds as well when you're this little going through what they're going through.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, going through their difficulty and all in this same space, and and she just was not ready for that at all and I, I was, she just changed, she started smashing up the house, like kicking things and like dealing with anger, and I was.
Rosina Dorelli:Eventually I just took her out, I, and I said I'm gonna homeschool you yeah because it's just not okay, you don't seem okay and um, so I that was a big, a big pointer to and seeing where the issues lie and and also understanding that you can do it your own way and do it a different way. And so we did that for a year. But she wanted to go back to school. She did a lot of filmmaking and we did a lot of fun things. Interestingly, that that's what she does now is a lot of the stuff we did in that year. But it gave her that confidence to want to go back to school.
Rosina Dorelli:So we moved to Cambridge to find schools basically and there's a lot of choice here, but it's interesting just how much, how far you can go and to try and find the right thing for for your kids. And the same thing then happened to my younger daughter here, because she's got dyslexia and other SEND needs and she just was. You know, because you don't get the top grade in your sats, they then that then sets you in year six. That then sets you into bottom sets in, yeah, in in um secondary and then your, their aspirations are you. You can get to two grades above your grade. So if you're two, then if you get to four and five, then that's progress.
Rosina Dorelli:So that's that's all you're really, the vision for you is, and they're the top teachers tend to go into the top sets. The best teachers tend to go to top sets. I mean, it's not always the case, but they really focus on making sure that for a school they need to get the grades. The government's put so much pressure and again, I don't want to bash schools or teachers, because I think schools are working really hard in difficult circumstances and I think teachers, um, again working really hard in different. It's tempting to do so, or?
Amul Pandya:like you know, whether it's doctors, nurses, teachers, you know it's, it's the institutional framework that traps them into, you know it, straight jackets them. So even like, let's say, the department of education could have 20 really amazing civil servants who've identified a problem, they want to solve it, but the institutional inertia and friction that they will face internally to try and make change in this big department and will be too much for them and so it's trying to create you can't, you can. This is where, like, there's always a radical tinge to this podcast, because the temptation is you can't really work with the system, because the system is so flawed that you've got to try and either just do something completely different.
Amul Pandya:Start with a blank sheet of paper or kind of really work with the system, because the system is so flawed that you've got to try and either just do something completely different, start with a blank sheet of paper, or kind of just like tear it down. Um, and it's never the fault of the people in there, because I'm sure that, I'm sure there's there's there's bad teachers out there, you know, but it's in creating the system where they can be. What they can be is what I guess you're trying to do to some extent yeah.
Rosina Dorelli:So I mean, I uh, there's the kind of various stages a bit later in terms of actually working within the system and seeing what works and what doesn't, because there's definitely things that work. Um, there was no kind of, you know, somebody with malicious intent designing this. Everybody that designed what we have was trying to do the best thing and trying to make it the best it could be, and it's just that some of those things haven't worked and it's about being able to make that change. But it's really hard to then change, because what do you change it to without knowing that that's then going to cause? You don't always know how things work together down the line and what consequences are going to happen, because you've made that decision.
Amul Pandya:It's an incumbency, bias.
Rosina Dorelli:The devil knows better than the devil, don't yeah, maybe I think that's true, and I think one of the big issues is having education as part of politics, because if you don't have accountability, after four years you have an election and you get a new set of people in, and then everything has to change. So I think that's a massive problem and that you're wanting to have the best results and the best and for it to look good, so you can then sort of gloss over and just have the surface look amazing while you're in your four years and you don't have to worry too much about the consequences of those choices you've made, as long as the statistics look good. But within those statistics are human beings, and I think governments sort of forget the humanity behind the statistics. And so, yes, a-level and GCSE results may have gone up, but mental health statistics have gone massively down, and that's not okay.
Amul Pandya:But also the ability for people to read right functionally to know about history to do their basic mathematics is all at the same time as every government's been juicing the numbers yeah to, kind of so that they can say that it's got better. And this is in other departments too, but we see this sort of reversal trend of the reality versus the numbers in terms of happiness and well-being, as you say confidence.
Amul Pandya:But also, just, you talk to university professors and they say, well, people are turning up to university unable to write or unable to kind of structure or think critically.
Rosina Dorelli:Think independently.
Amul Pandya:Yeah.
Rosina Dorelli:If you've been spoon-fed. I mean the way that we've created this exam, like teaching to the test system with this standardized test system. The test system with this standardized test system. It's like and as um, as ken rumsen says, it's like this protracted university entrance. So it's all about these grades and schools are judged.
Rosina Dorelli:That this, the league tables thing is appalling decision to put schools. It's maybe sounded good like let's pit schools against each other and see who gets the best grade so parents can make an informed decision. But actually what you're doing is is focusing the value on the grade, and this school's value is in its grade. And then you bring in Ofsted that can say, oh, this school's needs improvement. Just on one sentence, which is again a shocking thing to do with the whole group of teachers and student leadership and there's a whole community there of people working I won't't say working their arses off, but I'm not allowed to say that but I mean working really hard and then you can just come along and say, oh, it needs improvement. It's like, how dare you? It's shocking that, and I know that that's one thing.
Amul Pandya:That they're changing. It creates as well. I mean it's the whole good hearts lord. If you're familiar with that, where, if you're familiar with that where you know if you create an out, if you create a reward system, it'll change the behavior.
Amul Pandya:So, like this, famously, this dog, you know, saw a child drowning so it went in and rescued the child and it got loads of sweets and chocolate or, like you know, dog treats, and, uh, it started just hanging around the pond knocking kids in because it would. Therefore, and I don't think people realize how manifest this has happened, how you know strongly this has impacted the education system um, you know our neighbor that their daughter just finished her a-levels, does some babysitting for us and she says she's basically spent the last two years just doing um marks yeah, for the whole year, yeah literally, you know you do.
Amul Pandya:70% of your time is just doing practicing of the a-level exam rather than learning anything, and that's what's being, because that's what the value is.
Rosina Dorelli:The values are just in that grade. So their schools need to do everything they can to get kids that grade and so and then kids are partly because the schools are judged on it. I mean, obviously they're not just doing that because they obviously want to help kids get onto whatever they want to do in the future. But their school is getting its funding and getting its parents in because of those grades. So obviously it doesn't want kids that aren't going to get those grades to sit the exam. It doesn't want those kids that aren't. It wants kids that are going to get those grades for them. So the kids are getting the grades for the school in a way, and and for the government, not for themselves. I mean, it is a bit for themselves if they, you know, because that's how the system works and it's easier for a university to look at an algorithm of grades and just go yeah, we'll have three a stars are we?
Amul Pandya:are we all to some extent to blame, though like? Yeah we yeah we define education as what job will it get us? I mean. Another extreme example a friend of a friend of a friend, you know, chose a nursery for their kids because it had the highest oxbridge acceptance rate from four to 18 and like yeah, um, you know, we want what's the earning potential if we, you know, if we do this, a level versus that a level and what's?
Amul Pandya:the job and we're trying to optimize for employability rather than optimize for, you know, decision making or well-being, whatever it is to be a functioning human.
Rosina Dorelli:That's the sort of parent fear, but the irony is that actually school's not preparing students. There's a massive skills crisis, along with the mental health crisis. There is a skill shortage and it was interesting because I was at a conference the other day and there was a Labour MP talking about how they were going to make the changes. And there's this massive skills crisis and I'm like, well, you don't value skills in school. You're valuing academic memory, you're doing memory tests and I mean that's a skill, okay, but it's just one skill. You're only really looking at this one skill and it's a very narrow set of skills that work towards standardized tests.
Rosina Dorelli:And I kind of look at most kids don't remember after the GCSE. I mean, most adults don't remember all the stuff you learn about photosynthesis and how to label diagrams and it. It's information that we're stressing teenagers out to remember. When that memory? One we live in a digital age where you've got a phone which has got all that information on it anyway. You just Google it. But two surely it's better to expose them to that information. So they've been exposed to it, but we'll actually teach them the skills how to process information. So the skills that you do need in jobs like critical thinking, problem solving, teamwork or collaboration, leadership, um, just having a positive attitude and being confident and it skills. These aren't the skills that I mean. They're being taught in school but they're not focused on, on those you don't mean they're not they're taught as a, as a lesson, not as a yeah as a skill yeah, so I mean that's the main thing that we've done is the.
Rosina Dorelli:the curriculum that that we're building is skills-based, because that's the, that's kind of the future, that's the vision for the future.
Amul Pandya:So let's take a step back. You, we building. So what were you? You watched this, this talk, you moved, moved to Cambridge. You wanted, you did your PGCE or tried to. You got a third way through um. What's the next? What was the next part of that next?
Rosina Dorelli:stage. So when I came to Cambridge I started working doing I was still working in schools and teaching art, doing sort of arts weeks, and I did a lot of after-school clubs. So I realized I could give creativity in after-schools and holiday programs and stuff like that. So I was running that with local schools. And I then went to live in India, so we lived in Bangalore and I started teaching with the Whitefield Rising group that go into government schools and they were helping teach kids.
Rosina Dorelli:So it was a volunteer group and I I they had no arts program at all, any schools. It was literally. It was amazing because the kids were so enthusiastic. That was what's beautiful. The kids like couldn't wait, they're like yay, it's like. And every time I came in it was amazing the reactions like morning, ma it was so nice to, you know to to see the positivity of schools, of kids wanting to be at school and wanting to learn, um, but they hadn't got any arts programs or drama or music or it was languages. It was proper kind of languages maths, maths, maths, languages and, yeah, essentially science and. But so bringing arts to them was amazing and so I started I built a little sort of teacher training program and help support local teachers that were doing this, and I built them a little curriculum for arts and how to bring art into the classroom. And then I, while there I was, I visited Bali and saw green school and friends of mine had their kids in green school and and I was like, wow, these kids are really confident and these are kids from all over the world and, yes, it's an amazing private school in the middle of the jungle it's called the green school, okay, and it's um, it's all built
Rosina Dorelli:out of bamboo in the middle of the jungle. What do you mean by green school? It's called the green school, okay, and it's. It's all built out of bamboo in the jungle. I mean it's green in some ways. It's not not green in the fact that people fly all over from all over the world to go to it and it's quite expensive. But it was amazing to see really confident kids learning about sustainability and independence and doing, you know, projects and they were building companies. These kids aged you know this two sisters aged 10 and 12 had changed the policy in Bali on plastic bags. They'd gone to try and meet with the prime minister and he said and they're like, well, how do we meet with you? And they're like you'd need 10,000 signatures on a thing, I think something like that. And they went and sat in the airport, got all those signatures and then he was like, okay, you have to see that. And then he changed the policy and stopped plastic bags.
Rosina Dorelli:And and then he, and then he changed the policy and and and stopped plastic bags and I'm like that was kids did that. And they then on went on to do ted talks and I'm and I'm just like, wow, okay, this is what you can do in a private school, but some of this surely we could bring into the state sector and spread this, this sort of level of confidence, and I thought maybe we need to build a green school and have a kind of model school in the UK. That was the vision that I got. Then I came back and I did the PGCE again at Cambridge.
Amul Pandya:Second time lucky.
Rosina Dorelli:Second time, lucky, and I literally live next to Hamilton where they have the PGCE course here, and I thought it would be interesting doing it at Cambridge.
Rosina Dorelli:It's quite an academic course and you did a lot of research and so I just interviewed everybody and spoke to everyone and and, um, and you get to. I got to work in lots of local state secondary schools and that was amazing and speaking to all the teachers and it's like what works and what doesn't work, and so it's proper kind of research time and and I was blown away that there are a hundred years worth of at least of of educational research that's not currently going on in schools. That and and that's massively changed too, even like now, it's constantly updating this research, particularly in neuroscience and teenage neuroscience, and it's not really in schools. And like you were talking about, about the carrot and stick thing, about motivation and whether it's not really in schools, and like you were talking about, about the carrot and stick thing, about motivation and whether it's the grade you're motivated by or the learning the intrinsic value the intrinsic value.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, exactly, and, and a lot of that's not implied implemented in schools and there seems to be a massive mismatch between what's going on and what the researchers. There's a massive mismatch between what's going on and what the researchers.
Amul Pandya:There's a big lag effect between schools. From my understanding and you'll correct me if I'm wrong were perhaps cynically created to get kids out of the way whilst the parents went to the factory. And then the factory model was kind of what was copied. So you clock in, you clock out, there's a bell, you sit and you do the factory work or the clerical work, whatever it is and then you're out, and that's still. Obviously there's been some improvement since then but the lag between what you said.
Amul Pandya:A hundred years worth of kind of educational research is still waiting to be sort of filtered through to the day-to-day reality or practices yeah, it's really frustrating to see that.
Rosina Dorelli:And then particularly there was, like this book's about um, even like homework, and whether that's of value, and and the idea that you're meant to take work home and, well, whether you should have time off, particularly as a child, to when, when you're meant to get to play and uh, and learn through play. Yeah, and and also um sarah jane blakemore's research into teenage psych. You know the neuroscience of teenagers and how actually, at that kind of critical of gcse age of 15 16, their main focus is on their social standing and how they fit within a group and that moving away from your parents and and and and that sense of belonging to something new and finding out who you are. And to put huge amounts of of of pressure and stress on on kids at that age to learn and to do all these exams. I mean they're having to sit hours and hours of exams. It's a ridiculous amount of exams because each subject's got about three exams and you're just like, why, why are we doing this?
Rosina Dorelli:and um it's easy to measure, I guess it's easy to measure, and that's the brilliant book that in cambridge they got us to read was um education in the age of measurement by gert biesta, and his main point in that is that we are measuring what's easy to measure, so we're valuing what's easy to measure rather than valuing what's of value, because that's a bit harder. So can we value? Can we test for creativity? It's a little hard. Can we test for teamwork? And how do we put that in a test? And I it's interesting because Ken Baker did create the gcses. I was the first year to do gcses who's ken baker?
Rosina Dorelli:he was the education secretary uh, back in I think it's melbourne thatcher's government, okay, yeah, and he created gcses and his because we used to have o-levels and his vision was that we had, we should have, more coursework and that it shouldn't all be based on an exam and that. So when I went in to do my exams, my GCSEs, I'd already done half of them because I was able to put forward my best essay in the two years. But but what's happened in that time, since the 80s, um, since gcses were invented, they they've decided that coursework was too easy to to fake or that it wasn't secure enough and the teachers were probably gaming helping too much and all of this stuff, and I'm like, yeah, because it's so such a competitive model that you've created.
Rosina Dorelli:The more competitive you make this model, the the less you're going to trust everybody to to to fit it, everyone's going to try to cheat the system. Yeah, so the big issue about coursework is is this this problem with cheating? So we, I think we need to to just change the framework on that concept of cheating, and there's a research done, uh, that that you actually we got taught in at cambridge which was all about, um, it was a vygotsky zone of proximal development and I actually really liked it because it's it's all about what somebody can do in the presence of others with with more advanced people, with more not advanced people, but you know, I mean they're more. What's the word masters? So it's, it's the apprenticeship model, yeah, where, you know, when leonardo was working, he was painting on verrocchio's paintings and actually doing it with he wasn't.
Rosina Dorelli:You know, that's how he learned by doing it with somebody that was better than him, until the point where he got better than verrocchio and he's like I don't want you painting on my paintings anymore because your bits are better than mine. You can go find your own studio um, and I love that model of apprenticeship and I think modeling behavior works really well and and the the research suggests that modeling is how kids learn and and through watching and and trying it, and if you've got someone that's really good doing that with you next to you. So the idea that if to measure somebody, it has to be them sitting alone and what they can do by themselves in a test is there what's of most value is it's a very different idea to what they can do in a group of people and with people that are better than them and as an apprentice this.
Amul Pandya:This happens in nature, doesn't it?
Amul Pandya:If you put a horse with slower horses, it will, its max speed will be kind of tracked to the slow, and if you put it with faster horses, it its max speed kind of goes up. And I mean, I read somewhere that kind of aristocrats had figured this out over hundreds of years. The best way to educate your child is to have a tutor, kind of one-on-one, which is sadly not in reach for most of us or not very scalable, but having you know you can skip through the whole educational stages that have been mapped out by the national curriculum by having someone sort of sit with you and I, similar to you, I struggled with school as well and struggled to listen in the classroom setting, but was intuitively interested in things and would the moment a teacher went look, come on, just come and sit with me, let's go through this and I'll just like you're, just like I would get it, because I can talk through it with them yeah and and they would like oh, that is actually a really interesting b, not that tricky.
Amul Pandya:I just had to like change the way my, just the delivery. The delivery mechanism had to change um, and we can talk about a. Maybe now's a good time to talk about ai perhaps, but there's. There's supposedly software out there now that can do that kind of tuition element where it can kind of pace the level of increments depending on the responses that the student has given to the. Are you aware of that? Are you suspicious of it?
Rosina Dorelli:I think technology is going to transform education. I'm not worried.
Amul Pandya:Yeah, it's an opportunity.
Rosina Dorelli:I think it's a massive opportunity. It's a brilliant tool I mean every tool that we've had. I think humans are ingenious and I don't hold this sort of constant idea that we need to be afraid all the time of everything. Um, difficult things, yeah, do happen, but we're very ingenious and we come up with all sorts of solutions for stuff and um, and I think that there's all sorts of reasons to be positive about the tools that we're coming up with. And, yes, we need to be aware of dangers, and there are obviously dangers and things that could make things worse. And technology has us all working at home and working everywhere and we have no time off and emails, everything is so easy and communication is so easy. We're just constantly doing it all the time and it's overwhelming and I think a lot of the mental health particularly in young girls even is is around social media. I think making phones addictive is a really, really worrying yeah thing and um.
Rosina Dorelli:But it's not that the phone is a bad piece of technology, it's just the sort of capitalist drive behind and the availability and abundance of it.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, it's it's just frustrating. It's always capitalism in the way that I mean. It's capitalism is good in some senses, but it's just the the drive for profits over humanity and it's a bit of a problem. It's like the drive for statistics over over well-being. Um, we need to just shift that focus if we really want to do well and survive well on this planet, I think. And yeah, so it's about valuing, introducing a different set of values, and so yeah, that's again what we're trying to do model whereby you're spending.
Amul Pandya:you're not spending all day learning to the test, but you're spending all day kind of learning to think and express yourself and learn skills. Be better at solving problems. You'll be better placed to use the technology as a force for good rather than let it use you exactly um so tell you, mentioned da vinci and the fact that he, he honed his craft through um having a master the zone of proximal development yeah, apprenticeships, apprenticeship yeah um.
Amul Pandya:Tell us about da vinci life skills, um yeah actually tell us about da Vinci a bit more. Why did you pick him as the sort of beyond that, beyond that example that you gave? What is it about him that people should know more of um?
Rosina Dorelli:I love da vinci. Luna da vinci was a polymath and I know I love the polymath view of the world. I love the fact that you don't have to stay within one framework, like this choice, whether you be a scientist or an artist. He was a scientist and an artist and a geographer and a mapmaker and a designer he did, and apparently a good chef and a good dancer. And why do we have to define ourselves and narrow ourselves and I think that's another issue with our curriculum is in siloing all the subjects.
Rosina Dorelli:You're keeping them in a very tight boundaries and so we can't just jump between them, yeah and and I what I love about, um, that whole sort of renaissance thinking was that you could be doing scientific research one moment and then drawing and painting the next. And it was about just being interested in the world and being curious. And I think something you can say about Leonardo is he was insatiably curious about the world, and surely we want that for our kids.
Amul Pandya:There's two levels. I mean, I remember reading his notebooks ages ago and one page he's talking about if you prod a frog in this nerve it'll kind of die. But if you prod this frog in that way it can live on. And then the next moment he's talking about how sight changes the older you get. And then it's just such. It's so varied, as you say, he's insatiably curious. And this false dichotomy between art and science, or creativity and science, you know all the science is in itself inherently, inherently, a creative thing.
Amul Pandya:And you need to be able to draw on the humanities or draw on um, the ability to kind of spot adjacencies and spot do this kind of convergent thinking is science has become this very rational, logic, logical thing, whereas previously all the best scientists, 100, 150 years ago, used to be philosophers at the same time exactly, and what, what? Why have we siloed, made science a non-creative thing, and why have we made creativity a non-scientific thing?
Rosina Dorelli:I don't, I don't know you mentioned um Iain Mcgil christ before. Yes, he describes that pretty well in his book and it's, you know, it's just having a left, a left dominant breath. You know, brain in in terms of and I know that that's controversial and he's, you know, pushing boundaries, but there are differences between the hemispheres in our brain and his. His sort of hypothesis is that the right hemisphere needs to be the master and the left hemisphere is the servant, but the servant's taken over and is running things, and what the left hemisphere is very good at doing is has, it's a center for language and it's very good at categorizing and separating and it creates individual things and separate things, whereas the right hemisphere is about big picture thinking and systems thinking and can see, see everything, but it doesn't have that language and you need both, obviously, and. But it's just his sort of vision for the future, which is why he was keen on our project.
Amul Pandya:Yeah, well, it's through his work that I came across you, so thank you, Dr mcgilchrist.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, he's amazing and he was very positive about what we're doing because it's it's this idea of allowing that right hemisphere and that systems thinking and that connectivity to be the main thing, and then, yeah, okay, so it's then really helpful to categorize, it's really helpful to then separate things out and and use one's left hemisphere to look at the bigger you know to to help you identify things within the bigger picture yeah, but you need the insight first before you can then categorize you need, need both.
Amul Pandya:I remember reading James Dyson's autobiography and he's very strongly worded about the education system in the UK. He said you know, you're a bit thick, you do woodwork, you're good at drawing, you've got glasses on so you can do maths. And this desire to just stick people in a box as early as possible and then not let that box talk to the other boxes yeah part of the reason why we don't have any risk taking or imagination.
Amul Pandya:So you've used da vinci as your kind of role model, yeah, to name your um kind of next, next project. So what is, what is, what is da vinci?
Rosina Dorelli:life skills so we, we kind of created two things. We started with da vinci curriculum because when I came back from green school, I was like, okay, I want to set up this green school. And so I'd worked in the state sector for a bit and and I'd done my um, you know, year of training in a school and, again, as I said, I'd done all this research and I'd asked all the kids what would, if you wanted, if you could change the system, what would you change and what would you keep? Because school, as I said, does amazing things. So it's like what's really good and what isn't, and um, so then it was like, okay, maybe I can I apologize to them and said I will leave and I will do the best I can. I promise you I'll do all I can.
Rosina Dorelli:No, pressure yeah to to make this um the system better and um, it was hard to leave actually, because I just really get connected with, with young people, but, um, I what I thought would work best would be to create a kind of lighthouse school and um, so I we built.
Rosina Dorelli:I met with um zach uh, who I'd met in bali and he had a vision.
Rosina Dorelli:He'd worked at green school and he's an english teacher and he had a vision for using role-play games and Dungeons and Dragons to teach the curriculum through and to particularly teach skills through, and he had a whole system of skills-based learning through role-play within gaming, which was amazing and the kids were very engaged and learning a lot about creative writing within that, but a whole load of skills, not just creative writing.
Rosina Dorelli:And I also met with Fahan who, through Learn Life, because he'd been working with Learn Life and we'd looked at maybe setting up a Learn Life Hub and sort of looked at both these kind of franchises of Green School and Learn Life and like maybe we could work with them and there were just various issues of reasons why that neither of that was going to work for us. So we're like why don't we just set it up? Because neither of them had the curriculum and and I just thought, if we're trying to do something in the uk, ofsted's never going to accept us not having a curriculum yeah, so you've got this one straight jacket already somewhat yeah, having to have a standardized yeah approach, but is that good in a way?
Rosina Dorelli:but yes, and I and what we, when speaking to students and teachers within the like in green school, there there was a lot of comment about the lack of curriculum.
Rosina Dorelli:They were doing a lot of project-based learning but the teachers would bring the projects and so each project was amazing but no one had an idea, if you had a new teacher, what they'd done before and what there wasn't a roadmap for learning, so you couldn't build on what had been done before.
Rosina Dorelli:And the great thing about a curriculum is saying, okay, so now we've learned this, we can now learn this, and then you can build, and I, that was what was has been lacking, I think, in a lot of the schools and progressive sort of education and alternative education that we looked at.
Rosina Dorelli:So we did a ton of research and then went and met with professors and we sort of gathered a whole group of experts in this field and said how could we do this better and sort of, and the next iteration, and take on board, board what we've learned from what we're doing now, what's done with Steiner and Montessori and all these other schools, and it's like, well, how can we do the best thing? And so we came up with two things. One, the curriculum which was called the Da Vinci Life Skills Curriculum and a pedagogy which is called biophilic education, and the pedagogy was really a values shift. So pedagogy meaning like sort of the philosophy of how you're teaching, and that was kind of the idea of making a movement, because there's a movement in design called biophilic design in architecture and I was teaching.
Rosina Dorelli:Explain that well, yeah, I've been teaching DT, so DT was my subject in school and an art, so I was teaching design, design technology and art and I'd been teaching architect biophilic architecture. Biophilia means the love of life, and there is a new science which essentially, they've done research into what is the best human habitat and how, what are the places that humans thrive in and how do? Mainly in office spaces, because they're looking at productivity, so that research has been done in office spaces and so it's like how do we get the most out of people? And also in hospitals and schools and things. But they've been looking at what do humans need in a space? Things like daylight, um just being able to have access to the weather and knowing what's going on, um access sorry you have a lot of planes.
Rosina Dorelli:Do you want me to wait? So apparently, we like parts of hulls, segments of hulls. We like symmetry there's, there, are. We like natural elements, we like natural materials. We like to have a sanctuary space like a cave, but we also like to have vistas and a view to see what's coming and there's all these things that human beings you know have a need. Space like a cave, but we also like to have vistas and a view to see what's coming and there's all these things that human beings you know have a need for, an for within a space. And if you design your spaces like that and also somewhere that's exhilarating and exciting, to to be in um the, the productivity actually does change and people's well-being there and cognitive abilities change within those spaces because we like kind of angles, don't?
Amul Pandya:we like multiple. The problem with most walls is it's just four angles right, whereas if you put a hedge in front of it. You've got all these little intricacies that kind of kind of just trap your eyes for a few moments. That kind of captures this kind of a plain euclidean facade, for want of a better term white box is what?
Amul Pandya:everything? Yeah, white box, which is what school rooms, classrooms look like, hospital rooms look like off. Most office cubicles are cubicles for that kind of four-sided boxes, and so you're you, there's this. Is it like? Where I hate to say more like we're using this thing to juice out 8% more increment from our workers, type thing. But you're not saying that I know. No, we're not saying that, it just enables you to kind of be more well, you know, have greater well-being.
Rosina Dorelli:But the research shows that it increases well-being and cognitive ability. The research shows that it increases well-being and and cognitive ability.
Rosina Dorelli:And I mean, if you want a school, but surely those are good things to have within a school. I mean, it's all as you say, it's organic shapes and actually, apparently moving things make a difference too. But the key for us was the name of biophilia, biophilic design, and I just thought, passionate love of life. That sounds like a really good name for an education system. And why don't we have a biophilic education system where people can thrive and the focus is on what? What does our species need to thrive? And when you do design and so like doing design GCSE, which I was teaching design and technologycse and a level, a big part of that is having a design brief and you go back to a design brief at the beginning and you have to make that as kind of broad as possible to stop design fixation. So if you think about education is like, how do we want to ask, how do we want to educate our species, this species of ape that we are? And, uh, what are the things that we actually want as an outcome from this to be able to create design criteria for this system? So we went right back to the beginning in that concept and so this is why biophilia sounded a really good thing, because it's like, well, the idea that somebody could thrive, definitely, and and what is it that human beings need? And how are we different from robots and ai? And what makes us human? And that was the big part of biophilic education.
Rosina Dorelli:Concept of this pedagogy is like, well, things like belonging and expression, uh, resilience, the ability to get back up after having failed and keep going and to learn from mistakes.
Rosina Dorelli:So much of what isn't AI and isn't a computer, a sense of having a cultural identity, belonging to a place and having that history and having that history.
Rosina Dorelli:And, yeah, you know, and I think a lot of that is community, and AI doesn't necessarily need community and all of these things and imagination or curiosity or these are really human traits.
Rosina Dorelli:And so we say why don't we focus on those and build confidence in those things and this, and then also respond to what the government is lacking, which is, or skills, and then this mental health crisis. So, when the two crises are skills crisis and mental health crisis, what if we could respond to those and meet those needs, needs and introduce project-based learning, which is what's already happening in DT and art anyway, and I found that within school, the DT departments are being shut down in a lot of schools or reduced Another thing that Ken Baker now is working in the House of Lords trying to rectify, because he's like we should be actually focusing on design technology. It surely is an important thing in our world as a subject, and I personally believe it could be the heart of the school rather than this. It's currently the most expensive department in a school because it has wood workshops, sewing workshops.
Amul Pandya:It takes up a lot of space.
Rosina Dorelli:They have cooking, cooking is part of it. So nutrition they have all the. You know the kitchens, um and it's. It's a massive subject because we are looking at materials and um material properties of everything from plastics and wood and metal, but where they're sourced. So you're looking at the geography of where they're sourced and the, the sustainability issues around that and um and the people, um and species within those processes, as and the ethics behind that too, and then you're looking at the manufacturing processes. You're looking it's, it's, it's. This is the noisiest interview you've ever done it's good.
Amul Pandya:It's good uh skills testing for me.
Rosina Dorelli:Keep my train of thought um but, uh sorry, it got noisier and noisier as we as we've been going on, um, but yeah, so DT encompasses so much as well as then just like understanding inclusivity in design and sustainability within design, um, but then also looking at the end of life and circular economies, and it's a huge subject and it can incorporate geography and science and history.
Rosina Dorelli:And when you include food in it too, there's tons of chemistry and biology within the food program and I said, why is this subject not? I think it's a bit lost because it doesn't know where its boundaries are, and I think it could, instead of being this thing that nobody quite knows what to do with and it has a GCSE that hasn't got much value, because nobody in university is looking for this degree in a GCSE or an A-level in DT. And so I would suggest scrapping the design technology a bit controversial, but gcse and instead having some, uh, project-based learning qualifications, which, which are more skills-based, if, if, the d DDT department became the applied learning department within the school and the place where you take all of that academic learning and build things and make things with it and become a place where all the departments can connect and be polymaths and actually bring those bits of knowledge together. So bring some of that geography and that science and art all together and to create things and and to do real world, real world projects. This is a kind of the vision that we had, and so what we created, separate from the pedagogy, so we built a.
Rosina Dorelli:So we have our first company is called Biophilic Education Alliance and that company is basically focusing on teacher training. So it's helping support teachers because again through this journey, we learned that one of the biggest challenges in this is training teachers. And teachers are like I don't need more things to have to learn and change, because they're constantly being told you've got to change and do this. But actually finding teachers that are able to sort of traverse and think like a DT teacher is harder, because they're also trained to do their particular thing and it's hard enough, with the amount of work and the amount of information that they've got to get, to get these kids passing these tests six wives of 108s to get through well it's so much information, so, um, so teach training and also the training in terms of the values shift.
Rosina Dorelli:So it's really kind of cpd, which is continual professional development, kind of enabling teachers to make this move to a slightly different curriculum. So that's one thing, so that's, uh, what um we call it be all. So biophilic education is sort of reduced to b, which kind of is nice because and um, and then we created the da vinci life skills curriculum as our response to how to create a more biophilic education system. So what we are opening to to the world essentially is to say everyone can come up with their idea of how education could be more biophilic and it would be nice that biophilic education would be a movement in and a term that we could, we could coin and use as a, as a movement to change education, and that the da vinci life skills curriculum is just one way of doing that. We're not saying it's the only way, and what we are we've basically built is five pathways of project-based learning.
Rosina Dorelli:We mapped the whole of the uk national curriculum. We kind of decided that there was a huge it's basically a huge compendium of interesting things. There's a lot of cultural capital for living in our society, certainly in the West. Within it it's quite biased, yes, and I mean it's British, so it's like. But there's other things that you can add to it certainly, but we used it as a basic framework.
Rosina Dorelli:Things we've changed we have focused more on global history and ancient civilizations rather than British history and some of the science. We've not focused so much on the knowledge within science, because of the curriculum that we're building is more focused on how to be a scientist rather than can you remember how to label all the bones in a human body and what they're all called type of thing. It's like can you learn draw a cell and label all the parts of the cell? It's like why do we need to remember the parts of a cell? Surely if you get given a page of information about a cell and get given a photograph of a cell and say, can you draw a diagram from the information you've been given is more useful as a skill. Can you source the right, the correct and relevant bits of information and use that to build a simple diagram that's easy to see. So the drawing skills and the you know, critical thinking skills are more valuable.
Rosina Dorelli:So some of the knowledge is is looked at in less depth because we're not trying to get kids to remember the knowledge as much. The idea, and what the research shows, is that kids I mean people learn things better through stories and through doing, and when you do things with your whole body or you apply that that knowledge to something rather than just dry academic knowledge. It's actually one of the hardest skills for a human to do is to memorize things, just dry facts. It's really hard. Um, we love stories, so we all remember stories and we remember things through music and stuff like that.
Amul Pandya:But, um, but if memory is not the key, important thing and it's just amazing listening to you just like how is this still a thing that you have to write?
Amul Pandya:learn, shove things in your short-term memory leading up to a kind of just as the weather starts getting better, you know, and my, my birthday's in may. So I always had exams on my birthday and I also slightly resented that too. But you know, it just all makes complete sense and, um, what's the kind of sorry? Unless it's, I've cut you off there. So if there's anything else, sorry you carry on.
Rosina Dorelli:No, no, that's okay we so our five pathways, just to the what we've. We've sort of boiled it down to, having looked at all of the sort of mapping the curriculum, particularly in secondary, seeing particularly in key stage three, which is aged 11 to like 14, and key stage four, which is the GCSE years, which is 16 sort of 14 to 16. That's the main area that we just felt the problem lies, um, and so our big focus is in that area, because primary is pretty good and in basic things you need to know in primary. One is this should be a bit more play for sure, and and drama should be a big part of it, because learning through play and role play is huge but also lead learning how to read and write and do basic maths and how to get on with other people. It's kind of done. And primary schools are pretty good as a whole. I mean the whole thing. When you get to SATs in year six maybe, and the focus in on English and maths being the only important things, we could shift the balance a little bit. But essentially it's when you get to secondary that the problems I think really lie in terms of what's valued and so so, yeah, our five pathways.
Rosina Dorelli:We have food. So we separated DT out and and made food separate and food now in corp um. We've built these projects. So each project is about 54 hours of learning and the idea is that you you can do these within a semester. So you can do um. How? If, if you split the year into two, for example, and have semester one, semester two and have two 18 week semesters, that you could do two projects in those times? Well, actually, we're doing three projects within those times. But you can take our curriculum and our projects and add it to the normal curriculum. Now, in a subject like dt or you know, you could take out art, you could take out some of the subjects that were currently there and use it as a hybrid model. Right, and we've then been testing it in schools where they're doing it as a full curriculum as well.
Amul Pandya:So because it's being utilized right now. Yes, just before I ask you how, any sneak peek on the responsiveness of those tests. But so the five pathways food.
Rosina Dorelli:So food is one, but food's really essential because it's like growing food is like an essential skill right. So knowing all the biology that's in photosynthesis and understanding soil and testing soil and water, and understanding climate and what you can grow, what can you grow locally, understanding the sustainability and ethics behind food Supply chains, supply chains.
Rosina Dorelli:Everything. It's so much, it's everything. Yeah, exactly that. And then the chemistry of actual even within cooking and understanding chemical changes within heat exchange and and energy exchange and nutrition in the body, and there's just tons of science and and every subject within food design. And then you've got customer service and we do cafe design and we look at fermentation and preservation of food. We look at diets and just so many things that were within that project that you've got so many interesting projects to come out of that. And also actually we've got one on snack design. So looking at the industry of food and and how, sales of food and things like that. And then we have the other side of DT, which is enterprise, which is more product design, interior design. We do biomimicry product design project. We've got a biophilic interior design and architecture project. We've got robotic arms.
Rosina Dorelli:Looking at engineering and mechanics, we're looking, um, we're teaching actually in my school right now that in september is the future of, um, future of transport. So looking at, uh, the issues around the history of transport and then the current issues around fossil fuels and then the future of what transport might be in terms of, you know, big taxis and flying things, and yeah, so they've just done a project where they all built a company, a social enterprise company, the students, and they did all of the company finance and they did an investor pitch. We did a dragon's den with all the parents, company finance and they did an investor pitch. We did a dragon's den with all the parents and and again. So that's bringing in loads of physics, maths, sort of you know, finance, finance, yeah, and and then we have a production pathway where they students put on an event and that can be all sorts of things.
Rosina Dorelli:So we've got one where they do a stop frame alien animation film, learning about species on this planet and how you might design an alien planet and an alien species. That's authentic. And then we have a documentary on the ceremonies and celebrations and rites of passage around the world and we've got a design museum on the human body using interactive technology, so using plumbing to look at the heart system and using electrics to look at the nervous system and things like that. So learning biology as well as home mechanics.
Amul Pandya:And there's that kind of production or kind of final turning up on the day element captures probably 100 or 150 percent of the benefits of an exam. There is a benefit to having to like wake up in the morning, make sure you've got your calculator, you've got your pencil and it's sharp, and you turn up and you've got to be focused and do your three hours and plan and there's something to that.
Amul Pandya:Yes, and there's something to that that is required in the real world, but actually you're capturing the benefits of that through a more practical, more realistic representation of how the real world works, rather than sitting in a room in silence for three hours.
Rosina Dorelli:Yes, I mean we suggest doing. You might as well do a maths exam, because maths is really easy to test, whether you know it or not in an exam. So things that are worth that you can test like that. Why don't you do an exam? Because then you can keep this. There is a sense of fairness, of understanding. I mean, what we suggested and what we've kind of lobbied for is a more music grade style, and this is what you can use technology for, because if you had a music grade the way you get grade one maths or you get grade one geometry go into a test, have a test center in the online algorithmic test that you can do in a school and say, okay, this month's exams, who's going to sit what? And everyone's, I want to sit this and I want to sit that. If you fail it, it's an instant pass. Or fail like a, like a driving yeah, it's binary and and you pass it or fail it.
Amul Pandya:It's an instant pass or fail like a driving.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, it's binary, and you pass it or fail it. And then, okay, I've got geometry, I've got to level three in geometry. Or I've got arithmetic level five, and in music, level five is Grade five is the same as a GCSE equivalent to, and grade eight is equivalent to an A-level.
Rosina Dorelli:So it seems like a very sensible way of of doing algorithmic testing and and sort of individual knowledge testing, if that's what you want and that's what you value, which might be useful for some things, as you say. But then the rest of the learning could be evidence, which it currently can be done in art and DT through portfolios. And again, when you've got digital ability to do a digital portfolio, you can add film and audio and all sorts to it. So portfolios can evidence creativity and teamwork and they're already doing that. So it's not like this new thing, because I was teaching DT and you do that for the NR and you do that. You build a portfolio in both those things already currently.
Rosina Dorelli:And then there's also exam. Boards have a project qualification, which they're currently offering too, and you're allowed at the moment to do one project qualification which is called an EPQ at A-level it's worth half an A-level, and an HPQ at GCcse, which is worth half a gcse. And then there's an fpq, which is more you can do in foundation. It's called foundation project qualification and that's you can do in key stage three. So when you're a bit younger, and I mean that they already exist all these things. So what we're suggesting is and it's not something so radical.
Rosina Dorelli:It's not radical, it's just like why don't we reduce gcses and that kind of testing and increase project qualifications?
Amul Pandya:so it's being tested right now yes, so we've got schools.
Rosina Dorelli:We've been testing it the last three years and we, well, two years we have school in Bali and a school in Bermuda. It's been easier to test it and it wasn't necessarily that we chose that. It's just that Zach was working in Bali, hawaii next yeah, I know Well interestingly I've got another in.
Rosina Dorelli:Actually there is a school in Hawaii that set up.
Rosina Dorelli:It just happens to be Island States. It's not that I get to go and visit them all, but we've had a lot of global interest and we have had a lot of interest in the UK. Even the Welsh government rang up and said your food programme sounds amazing, because they're very progressive in Wales and more than England, and we've had state schools and private schools interested and we've had state schools and private schools interested and so we've done quite a bit of trialing of all of these different projects and then eventually, two years ago, I set up my own little hub.
Rosina Dorelli:So I have a called a B-Hub and it's a three-day-a-week homemade hub where I'm able to test and get feedback from students when we test these projects and actually have found that there is a huge amount of people. The increase in home education is massive, particularly since COVID. So another thing we're trying to now do is help support people to set up Home Ed Hubs and so if we can provide them with the curriculum and the teacher training, it's kind of creating lifeboats.
Amul Pandya:It's, I mentioned to you before, but my oldest is starting school in two weeks and been talking to various parents you know who, I know don't know very well, you know in the gym or whatever, but wherever it is you chat to people and the amount of people I've sort of in passing, kind of jokingly, said oh do you know what? I'm just so, I'm just so tempted just to sort of find six parents and set up my own thing. Yeah, and though every time I said that then can you tell me if you actually do that?
Rosina Dorelli:and like yeah, not realizing the risk.
Amul Pandya:You know and there shows you there's some latent there's a lot of people doing it right now okay, there's people falling left out of the system, left right, as I mean literally.
Rosina Dorelli:We have so many calls from people that kind of. The kids are just like my kid is just going through complete trauma and they can't cope at all. And I don't know if you watched adolescence I did not because, yeah, I knew it became this sort of lightning rod culturally, which therefore put me off it. But I get, I mean I get the gist of it, yeah well some of the school experiences I certainly recognize and, uh, you know some experiences in and this is certainly not the case in all state schools, secondary schools, but some there's a slight feeling of you know, that feeling that you imagine in prison. I'm very happy that I haven't experienced that, but that feeling you get when you watch prison things, of that feeling of unsafety and it's like how do I get through this without anyone really noticing me too much and survive my way through this?
Amul Pandya:so it's about survival, yeah and so you've got this permanent cortisol level of anxiety.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, flight or flight.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, because you're turning up into the going into the sort of the gauntlet exactly not it's not really a conducive environment to learn exactly both my my children have experienced that and have told me profusely about feeling like that at school, and I've so many of the the kids that I've been teaching now have told me about that experience of school, of just finding an incredibly stressful environment, and neuropsychology will tell you that that's not a good place to learn. You you don't. If you're super stressed, you're not taking stuff in, you're not. I mean, you're taking. You are taking stuff in and spent sense of how to survive and how to get through this, but not necessarily the information that schools will be hoping you're going to take in. And so what we're really driving for is is that schools become places where we focus on well-being more than grades. That's the what I would like, can I?
Amul Pandya:yeah, trying to um. It all resonates with me, but I know that there's a constituency of people who will be saying this all sounds a bit fluffy. Yeah, there's a school, I think it's in southeast London, catherine Burble Singh is that. I mean, this is the again. This is the opposite take of it.
Amul Pandya:Well, actually what we need is not we, we need to return to kind of traditional values of discipline and, you know, order and structure and what the problem with education is that kids have been empowered too much to kind of you know express. You know they don't know what's right for them. I'm putting words into people's mouths here.
Amul Pandya:But, like you know, and actually what we need is a bit of you know, you know, not necessarily a ruler to the back of the hand, but a bit more, like kids crave boundaries and discipline, because it gives them a framework to therefore know what's acceptable, what's not, and then they can kind of learn rather than being kind of given a free-for-all. Has that been a reaction that you've come across, or are you aware of that perspective and is there something in there at least that kind of resonates, or is it complete tosh?
Rosina Dorelli:No, I agree, I don't agree with the Michaela School and quite how they go about it, but I don't agree with silent corridors and all of that sort of the draconian, the carrot and the stick.
Rosina Dorelli:I don't agree with silent corridors and all of that sort of the draconian the carrot and the stick, I don't think necessarily work, um, but I I think I mean, obviously it works to a degree. But the research shows. If you look at Daniel Pink's uh research and he have you seen his when he talks he's got a TED talk talking all about motivation and intrinsic motivation and carrot and stick is, is not it. It works in certain. It doesn't work creatively and if thinking laterally, it works if you've got a specific goal and to do a specific thing, but it's it shuts down creative thinking. Yeah, so this is one of the issues with it, um, but if you've got a very specific linear task to do, like stack those boxes, you can do that more.
Rosina Dorelli:If you've got some and I'll give you, yeah, and you will do it quicker with a gun to your head or if you get £10 or £100 reward for it and I'll pay you more. The more boxes you stack, that's fine. But then if you have to build a rocket ship or to do something creative, all studies have shown that that doesn't work and the more money you pay someone, the less well they do, and the more you know, the more motivational. The more sort of intrinsic, one of the more sort of external carrots or one of this doesn't work bits of research that resonates with that.
Amul Pandya:I listened I had this morning driving up. It was um. They took um, I think, four or five year olds who liked, intrinsically like the idea of drawing and would do it naturally anyway, and they gave them gold, stars or sweets, whatever the more they drew and what they found was that that they were doing it for the reward, not the dopamine release came from the reward rather than from the actual drawing.
Amul Pandya:So the kids who initially liked drawing were doing it ended up not doing it because they, the rewards, had to stack up and get bigger and bigger to kind of drive that behavior, and so it makes complete sense. And mcgill chris talks about that difference between convergent thinking and diversion thinking. Where sort of convergent thinking is, you know, there? Is a there is a right answer, there is a set outcome, and you've got to kind of follow a sequential process to get to that right answer. That is kind of what a computer does yeah, or ai does, which is great yeah and that's one element that we have to incorporate.
Amul Pandya:But divergent thinking is when you're you've got a set of skills and then you've got a problem which doesn't have a definable outcome, or has multiple right answers and you have to spot adjacencies, you have to draw upon multiple fields of discipline to kind of get get to a viable solution.
Rosina Dorelli:And that type of thinking is what you're saying doesn't manifest itself in a hyper carrot and stick orderly environment yes, I definitely think that's the case and I we really want intrinsic motivation and I think that that's what. When you're teaching stuff, a lot of kids say that school's boring and kids love learning. It's like you're saying kids love drawing, but you start making, punishing them if they don't do it and giving them stars if they do do it. Then all the joy has gone up, because it's all about this star or this punishment and that becomes the focus, not the drawing okay, can I?
Amul Pandya:I had this question I've wanted. This is a perfect time to ask it. Kind of broader question yeah is laziness a thing. So something I'm grappling with at the moment is you know I've been. If you read my school reports it's always, like you know, has potential but very lazy it doesn't apply to you and like I'd want to do the work.
Amul Pandya:I was interested in the stuff but I just couldn't do the homework or I could, the day of like surviving socially and you know, sat in the classroom and were like preparing for exams just was such a I just found it such a tax, even though I wanted to do it because it would impress my parents or whatever, what I would make me feel good if I got a good grade. It wasn't enough, and so there's like then my reaction to that is well, you know the mechanism of delivery is wrong and you know the system is wrong, and actually you know it's not me that's the problem. The laziness is a feature, not a bug.
Amul Pandya:It's your body telling you this isn't right for you. You need to go and find something else that's better for you. But on the flip side, there is something in you know what David Goggins calls the suck doing something that you know. You pointed to resilience earlier like doing something. That's not to learn a skill. There's a bit, you know. Yes, I'm interested in this thing, but there comes a point where you're like god, this is actually quite hard yeah, and I actually do need to stick with it yeah, to actually climb that ladder of competence yeah
Amul Pandya:and and have endurance 100. So at what point is the? Laziness is a thing, but are we? Is it just evolutionarily? Doesn't make sense to me. Human beings, no creature is lazy because you've got to survive. And being lazy means, oh, there's a lion coming, oh, I can't be bothered, you know like, I'll figure it out later, kind of thing. So are those you know? Is laziness a thing? And how do we come about it? How do we teach resilience without, you know, sucking the life out of something?
Rosina Dorelli:I love that that's that's easy for me, because I really love that, because this is where I do agree with what you were talking about about structure, and this is why I do agree with having a curriculum, because laziness does exist and I just that ability to get up off the sofa. You're just like, oh, I can't be bothered, why would I go through the struggle if I don't have to? And the reason you do is because, actually, the reward at the end, the more you struggle in life, it's a really annoying thing, but the more you struggle, the bigger the reward at the end of it. And and to not have, because there's a whole movement in unschooling where they're just like allowing kids to just be completely free and do whatever they like and within the homeschool movement this is quite big and and that may work for some kids and there's an argument there that if you allow kids to do that for long enough, they find their own intrinsic motivation and they will then set themselves goals and and do that. But I think that's really hard and in my experience, not only with my own kids and students, but also just for myself, there's something working for yourself and then having a. There's also this feeling of having to do everything yourself, as a entrepreneur or as a doing startups, or having a boss that just tells you what to do and you don't have the responsibility. There's something really nice in having a boss that tells you what to do sometimes, and then it's really nice to have autonomy at other times, and I think it's the balance of those two things.
Rosina Dorelli:So what we're trying to do with our curriculum is have the framework, the scaffolding, and, as you say, like right here is the thing you've got to do. It might be hard, it might be difficult, but this is the challenge we are setting. You see if you can do it. But what we set within that is is, um, the choice, the student choice to go. And so, for example, if you're doing a stop from alien animation film, what, what's we're going to look at?
Rosina Dorelli:Species on earth, what species do you want to look at? You choose. Do you want to go look at fungi, or do you want to go look at you know, you know anything, yeah, whales or or dogs, or it might be or plants, or strange plants. But you can then do that research, you choose, and then you teach the class what, what about that species? And if we learn as a as a group, the criteria for life on earth.
Rosina Dorelli:So the scientific criteria for life, mrs gren, part of the gcse, biology, then we can make sure that any alien we design or how, if we look at all the species on earth, as many as we can, and we all teach each other what we've found, then it's giving the students that sense of like well, I get to teach this, I get to choose. We've still got the framework, we're still learning the thing, um, and then they're still building and they get to design their own film, write their own script. But they're still having to learn how to do stock frame animation and how to edit a film. And that's hard. Do you know what I mean?
Amul Pandya:I do know exactly there's that kind of sense of you have to do. You know what I mean. I do know exactly. There's that kind of sense of you have to voluntarily take on a challenge. If someone pushes you into the swimming pool, or like someone forces you to do something, um, you might do it if it's gun to head, but if it's not gun to head, then you know it's. Whereas if you get a sense of agency within a structure, yeah okay, I've got to choose fungus or fungi yeah right.
Amul Pandya:So that's on me now I better actually see it through, whereas if the teacher gone, you're going to do fungi yeah you know, wow. You then start thinking well, why do I have to do? You know, and then you kind of just put less into it, whereas exactly but you do need both. You need that structure. It's the balance yeah that makes a lot of sense, because I, you know a lot of. It's just that. It's that intrinsic motivation is it's so important and agency I guess how I chose to do chemistry level?
Amul Pandya:because I really liked my gcse chemistry teacher who I found I enjoyed the lessons and I turned up and I wanted to do the homework and show the teacher that I, you know, got what they were saying and you know like. But then I got to sixth form and I was like, oh, that I've got a different chemistry teacher, who I don't know, already in my mind I don't like this teacher because it's not that one, and then the next two years became a drag because I wasn't.
Amul Pandya:I didn't choose that subject for the right reason. I did it because I'm. Right, so hopefully like stripping away the need almost to have a good teacher. Teachers are important and you know, there's a lot of them there that are frustrating, but if you're doing it for the right reasons, then you're going to endure or be more resilient.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, although a good teacher in any subject will inspire people to do that, so it does make a massive difference.
Rosina Dorelli:The teacher usually, but I mean what we're trying to shift to is is teachers becoming facilitators and learners.
Rosina Dorelli:So the idea within our curriculum is that the teachers yes, you're creating a safe space, so you build the sanctuary, create that sanctuary, safe space where people can come in and explore, but you're exploring with them.
Rosina Dorelli:So I don't necessarily need to know the whole history of transport as I go in to teach the transport, and I don't need to know the future of transport, and I don't necessarily need to know everything about aerodynamics or engines, but by the end of the semester I'll know a whole lot more. But that's because we're going to learn it together and what I will model for the students is how to learn it and in all the teaching resources that I'm building um that we are currently uh, this is what we're building is teaching resources, essentially slide decks that teachers can use and schemes of work um that they can use to as as a sort of platform for how you uh um to to deliver, how you can deliver it, and the idea is everything that we've made is editable so teachers can adapt it to their style, adapt it to their context and um to their country. It needs to be adaptable um learning to your own specific needs and style, but I think um well I think.
Amul Pandya:I think what you'll find actually with what you're doing is the demand will be much greater because of this ai opportunity, but also challenged, because I know what I would have been doing at school if I was given chat, gpt and I was asked to write an essay. I'd be learning lots of creative ways to make it.
Amul Pandya:The teachers think I wrote it and that's a good practice of creativity, but actually what you, what you set out here, is an anti, you know, an antidote, or it's using the technology rather than like being eaten up by it, which? I think, yeah, I think the demand could be quite, quite powerful. So kind of what's next for the, for the project, for um, the biophilic alliance, and you know how? What's the rollout look?
Rosina Dorelli:gonna look like now that's being tested I didn't um tell you the last two pathways actually let me just quickly tell you that, because the the games one is which was inspired by zach's work.
Rosina Dorelli:Um is amazing so that that we have a multiverse games pathway which teaches the importance of learning through play and we teach game design, game mechanics and understanding the skills that that, um, that we need in life. So it's looking at life skills and what life skills we learn and how we develop our brains through playing games and why our ancestors evolved games in the first place, and so that's really interesting. And then looking at addiction and dopamine and the hormone responses to playing games. So the feedback loops and how different game mechanics get you to want to do something again. And I think that's something too that they then can see within learning that if you create little goals and then you meet those goals, it's like this little feedback loop of dopamine or serotonin that you're getting and that keeps you wanting to do it because that thing that was hard, you want to do it. You wanting to do it because that thing that was hard, you, you want to do it.
Rosina Dorelli:And so our multi-first games pathway we we have sort of board game design, but also we do role play, so they build worlds. We do it in historical settings, so they go into ancient greece, for example. They, they learn all they can, they all take on. We basically brainstorm everything that you could learn about ancient greece, for example, like the gods, the, the currency, the philosophy, the uh, schooling, the clothes, the architecture. They all go off and say, okay, I'll research architecture, and then they all present, do a presentation for their, for their part, and then they design characters, authentic characters they designed.
Rosina Dorelli:When we did it. They designed their own island and their own fantasy greek island and learned all about structures and volcanoes and rivers and where settlements might be. And we met, we built terrains, they did map making and then they created their own stories and they became game masters. So they learn how to run a improvised story with a group and so they can form small groups of four or five students and they each have their um, they run these, these games and stories.
Rosina Dorelli:So it's amazing because you can go into any historical context and again, with we've looked at fantasy and been looking at the spice trade in india and you know ancient china, so we've been looking at the spice trade in India and ancient China. So we've got all sorts of different places you can go within the Games pathway and the last one is called PEP, which is Personal Exploration Projects, and that is where the students choose. So we give them the framework of how to build a project, how to evidence all the work and how to do your smart targets, so your specific goals, your measurable goals, and I mean they use that in business itself, setting targets and meeting those and having specific those goals and um and and knowing your strategy for getting to them.
Rosina Dorelli:So we're teaching strategy, we're teaching and and then being able to evaluate whether you've met those targets that you're setting. And they, they get to decide what project they're going, they're going to do and we we with the pet project we give them a year to do that. So they have the semester one they do, they explore as many different things as they're interested in and then they at the end they do a presentation and say this is what I want to do as a project and that's very similar to an hpq and epq that currently exist. That's just so. We've now um got to the point where we mapped basically 40 projects, the vision for eight years, the idea that you do five projects in a year so you can do pep that runs through the year.
Rosina Dorelli:First semester you do um enterprise and production and second semester you'd be continuing your pep and then you'd do multiverse games and food, for example, and that that would fit into the curriculum if you were going to do it as a hybrid in a state school alongside all the other learning. You might do less than that, but essentially we do with about three hours of learning a week. We do it in a day, actually, we do Multiverse Games Day and we have three hours within that day. We also do English lessons and math lessons as well, and other skill up lesson lesson.
Rosina Dorelli:We call it skill up, where you're doing learning skills and specific subjects, because we've discovered that actually it's really nice to learn linearly as well yeah for some things like okay, we're doing art, let's learn how to do you know landscape drawing and learn perspective, for example, so we'll do an art skill up. Or let's learn about maps and do geography skill up or something, and um, so when we do reading out loud and lots of other things, we um. So we've, we mapped all of these projects and we did a kind of overview scheme of work so we could make sure that we're hitting all of the learning objectives in the national well, not all of them, but, as I said, but most of them in the national curriculum. And we've just now finished the first year of projects that are fully packaged and ready to to scale. So we've been testing them, we've been testing them, teaching them, improving them and, um, yeah, and doing the graphics and getting it all looking good to actually be. It's one thing delivering it yourself and delivering it in a small group of schools, but to actually be able to scale that for everybody, it needs something. So we will probably launch that first year. It's worth the projects, the first five projects, one in each pathway, along with our assessment model, which I haven't even gone into yet, but there's so much of it that. So we've already started our teacher training programs. So we have like a level one, level two, level three training, um, and then we. That enables teachers to teach the curriculum but also build their own project-based learning as well, so they don't have to use our curriculum.
Rosina Dorelli:The curriculum works on a subscription basis and I basically created a second company, um, which is called da vinci life skills cic, so it's a community interest, non-profit, so we put the curriculum and the assessment model in there and so that subscription is we. We're trying to do it on a donation basis, right, and and and. So if we can, if student, if schools can't afford it, then where they can talk to us and we can try and provide it. So those that can pay will help provide it to people that can't afford to pay. So we want to get it out there to everybody. We basically put a really cheap value. I mean it's it's very high in value in terms of what we've created, but we just put a cheap price because I want it to get it out to everybody yeah so that's our mission is to make the change and get it to people um it feels like you've done a ton of work.
Amul Pandya:Yeah, just to get to the starting line yes, and now, here we are, here we are to kind of launch yeah um, I mean you have launched, but like it's the next phase, the proof, I mean listening to all of it. It's just, you know, from this one once consumer of school education, you know this is exactly the type of school I would love to have gone to. I don't want to belittle the school. I was very lucky to go where I did and there were excellent teachers. Where I didn't, there were excellent teachers and but for all of those of us who once were children or have children, it does feel like it's the future, so as you
Amul Pandya:know, I like to try and wrap these conversations up with a what I call the long bets. You've got a 10-year time horizon to make a prediction of something you think will happen or something you'd like to happen, or both, and maybe use that as a vehicle as well. If there's anything that you haven't talked about that you want to kind of get off your chest that you know that, um, use that as a vehicle. But like what? What out there do you see happening?
Amul Pandya:We've got a mental health crisis. We've got a skills shortage, as you said, that's playing out right now. We've got a mental health crisis. We've got a skills shortage, as you said, that's playing out right now. We've got these bottlenecks of people with skills, but also people with the ability to actually have the training to talk to people going through anxiety and depression, all these things, and it just feels like the world is in a complete funk. Um, so how do you see that playing out? And either with you, through your the lens of what you're doing and um, or you can talk about fusion technology, as professor robert tombs, history professor at university cambridge, did in a previous episode.
Rosina Dorelli:So whatever you want, it's a blank canvas well, fusion technology would be amazing.
Rosina Dorelli:Um, well, I think the key is assessment, and this is the bit that I didn't get to. But but I think that's where the actual change will lie, because if we can change how we assess things and what we assess and the value we put towards assessment, that will change everything. And it will be universities that will have to make that change too, and employers, and it's a kind of a group change that we'll have to make in terms of what we're valuing. I think employers already want value, skills and, and so if we can have proper skills evaluation, um, the assessments that we've created, we're you know, we've been talking with Pearson and it's a big and Cambridge assessment and um, and we're not trying to get into competition with anybody, we're trying to make that difference, and so we've been also speaking.
Rosina Dorelli:There's a House of Lords committee that's looking at changing assessment. There's an organization called Rethinking Assessment that's working with lots of schools now trying to change assessments, and I think that's where the key to education reform is. And if we can just even reduce GCSEs, some of the top schools Bedales is a big private school that's been doing this for years. They've done it 18 years now have brought GCSEs down to the, but they do about four GCSEs and they do Bedales, assessed courses, which are basically project courses that they've created, which are basically project courses that they've created.
Rosina Dorelli:Now, king Alfred, latimer, there's a whole group of other schools as well, as there's two state schools, but they've not been allowed to reduce the GCSEs because they're state schools. But XP School and School 21 have made this change to project-based learning and it's happening that change and so if we can change the assessment and and have less gcses. So latimer said they're just going to do maths and english gcse and then build their own project courses. So if, if this big private schools are starting to do this, this will be what universities then will look for. So they'll want to see where's your project qualifications.
Amul Pandya:And that will feed its change.
Rosina Dorelli:And then that will drive the change, and so I think what's good about it being started in the private sector is that it's of value. It gives it value Rather than the BTEC or the SEND route. If we start this in the state sector, it would go down. This is the where the most need is, and the most need is in those kids that that are less academic, those kids that have got SEND. You know special educational needs, and that's.
Rosina Dorelli:There's a desperate need for something else that's less academic in the state sector, and so if it starts there, it'll become the b-tech, which is like, oh, that's slightly a bit less good than a gcse, but it shouldn't be that it's. It needs to have equal value. A project qualification needs to have an equal value to a gcse, because this idea that being more academic gets you a better job or better paid job is not necessarily true. A plumber earns more than a history professor, I suspect. Yeah, I mean it's not. It's not necessarily true anymore this idea that vocational learning and and manual, you know skills, and I mean just in terms of being a designer or a filmmaker or whatever it might be. There there are hundreds of jobs that require different skills, academic skills, yeah, every year.
Amul Pandya:I know we had A-level results recently, so every year not everyone's cup of tea, but Jeremy Clarkson puts this sort of tweet out. You know, don't worry those of you getting results, I got two Cs and two fails or whatever, and now I'm doing this.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah.
Amul Pandya:You know, statistically, if you go to harvard, uh university, if you want to maximize your pay, the best thing to do statistically is to drop out. Because harvard dropouts, yeah, I'll generally get more money than those very skewed by mark zuckerberg, let's say, but like still the kind of there's something in that so doesn't elon musk go in and take them, but while they're at university, because he doesn't want them to fit in.
Amul Pandya:Well, that's or even more so, to your point about employers. You know, one thing that I've talked about before in previous episodes is people who get into these elite Ivy League universities, go to Google or whoever, and say look, here's my acceptance letter, I've got in, I've got this, but the value of me going is just this piece of paper it's not actually going and getting saddled with debt. So can I come and work with you instead and that?
Amul Pandya:shows you how um, you know, anachronistic some of these structures that we have on, particularly in the world of ai. So that's the work you're doing is very much, um, an antidote to that. So, thank you, where can people find you? Where can people find your work? And if they want to, in some way you mentioned there's a non-profit element how do they, hey, find you see what, see where you are kind of maybe contribute to that?
Rosina Dorelli:um, we have a website, uh, which we have two actually but davinci life skillscom is the easiest place to find us. Um, we have biophilic education website as well, but for our teacher training. But you can find it all through davinci life skillscom. And, yeah, I, there's what. The one thing I wanted to say to, in terms of a vision of what I'd like to see, is education coming out of a political thing, in terms of you were saying you'd have a vision for the future of what you want. One is assessment and one is education. Not being in politics being run by a cross-party Right. It needs to be cross-party, it needs to not be changed every four years, isn't there?
Amul Pandya:something about the day it needs to be cross-party. It needs to not be changed every four years, isn't there something about the day the Department of Education was created was the sort of the start of the collapse of education. It shouldn't be a political football.
Rosina Dorelli:It just shouldn't be, and it needs to be run by experts and it needs to be accountable and it needs to be long-term the vision, not a four-year vision.
Amul Pandya:It needs to be like. It needs to be long-term the vision, not a four-year vision. It needs to be like if you've made that decision, you've got to stay there and see it through and be based on research. I mean to maybe counter that, rather than the sort of wise department cross-party that's run by experts at a central level, just more choice and experimentation at a local level rather than a top-down body, you know so yeah, I don't this is a very apolitical podcast, but putting taxes on education or increasing the cost of education, to people who want to pay for it does and therefore seeing the shutting down of schools and then the increasing load on the state sector that's come from private schools going out of business because they're now paying VAT.
Amul Pandya:I get it to some extent, but what we want is schools trying things out yeah and, and you know, hubs, you know this hub movement is quite exciting.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, because you could build hubs within schools right, I mean a big state school could have a little hub within it that's doing something different and that has different pathways. You could. You know, schools could become community centres for learning and be much more open, and I think with technology that is possible. So I'm quite excited how technology is going to shift that and how we could have, like you know, growing food at a school, having a cafe, having co-work spaces for parents and having it could become much more of a long life learning center and have shared facilities, which they do. A lot of schools now have sports centers that are shared and, you know, I think it's exciting what's coming very much so.
Amul Pandya:So you're also on linkedin and I am on linkedin I don't do do much social media.
Rosina Dorelli:I struggle, I don't have the time for that. But LinkedIn I'm on. That's all I can cope with. No fair enough.
Amul Pandya:LinkedIn's bad enough. You're doing well, don't change that Well look. Thank you so much. There's a hundred things I still want to talk to you about, but I know you need to get back to doing God's work. So thanks, and keep it up, and let's have you on again soon once the rollout's happened.
Rosina Dorelli:Yeah, thank you very much thanks this has been meeting people.
Amul Pandya:I've been your host, amal Pandya. This is a podcast produced by Mads Cooper with music composed by Loverman.