There are lots of reasons why well-intentioned work, trying to do things differently and shift the way that systems currently operate, often struggle and fail. But one of the reasons that I find most interesting is to look at the "dark matter" or deep codes that are built into our current ways of working. These might be things like the way we do contracts, the way insurance functions, and legal precedents. Or the way that value is defined and accounted for, and the way money functions and flows. Most of the time these things are simply constraints that we are told we just have to deal with in our work. Organisations like Dark Matter Labs are not accepting this status quo and, in fact, are actively trying to work towards redesigning these deep codes. My guests this week, Emily Harris and Martin Lorenz, are taking it one stage further and asking the question: “What does it mean to educate for building the capabilities and sensibilities for this kind of work?”

Collaboration, whether it's between young people in a classroom or between institutions across an educational ecosystem, is often seen as an unquestioned virtue. An assumed aspect of people simply working together on a shared purpose, but without much thought given to how it happens in meaningful and deep ways to generate genuinely expanded possibilities for everyone. Rose A. Dodd and her team at The Education Collaborative have been showing how this is done at a massive scale across Africa, for the last decade. Rose joined me this week to share what she and her network have been learning about how deep radical collaboration can really shift and transform systems across a whole continent.

How do we as educators respond in times of urgency and conflict? Not just in teaching, but also in exploring potentially transformative ideas and practices; in such moments of great challenge but also lots of opportunity. I had the huge privilege this week to talk with 3 amazing young people who doing just that in the context of the on-going conflict after the full-scale invasion of Ukraine just over 4 years ago. Yuliia Naidych, Marie Teich and Anastasia Tarasova have responded to these questions in deeply inspiring way to develop what they are calling Third Floor, The Centre for Transformative Research.

Educational leadership is a tough challenge at the best of times, with many pressures from all sides. But particularly now, with so much shifting, high levels of uncertainty, and polarising issues at play, it’s arguably an even rougher sea to navigate. In such a context, my guest this week, Jennifer D. Klein, has done an amazing job of gathering vital insights from 67 amazing education leaders around the world, herself included, to bring some collective wisdom to bear on the subject in her latest book, ‘Taming the Turbulence in Educational Leadership: Doing Right by Learners without Losing your Job’.

You might have noticed a series of announcements that Anthropic has been partnering with large educational organizations. My inner journalist was keen to find out more! So I chatted with these amazing and thoughtful people…

This week on the podcast we’re time travelling with the fabulous Professor Keri Facer. How we think about the future or futures makes a difference to the decisions we make in schools today, and Keri has been asking critically important questions about educational futures, pasts and presents for the last 20 years, that are still as important today as they were when she published her brilliant 2011 book ‘Learning Futures: Education, Technology and Social Change’.

I've always been fascinated by questions of religion and spirituality and what they have to offer the educational conversation. Clearly on the big questions of life generally, transformation, meaning, values and purpose they have a lot to say, but educationally we can very quickly find ourselves in the territory of indoctrination. And surely indoctrination is the opposite of good education

This week, I was so happy to chat with Shoukei Matsumoto, a secular Buddhist Monk who is doing amazing work bringing insights from Japanese Buddhist teachings and practices into leadership, economy and organisational development.

One of the best things about this job is that I get to find out about and share some of the most exciting new developments in education all over the world, sometimes in the most unexpected places. My guest this week, the writer, human rights activist, turned educational entrepreneur Ben Rawlence and his amazing team are building just that in a small market town called Talgarth in mid-Wales. Black Mountains College is an incredible institution working with young people locally in mid-Wales and from across the UK, set up as an alive and direct response to the climate and ecological emergency to help create a future in which nature and human societies thrive.

There aren't many things that prompt widespread agreement from people on all sides of the various educational debates. But whatever your educational stripes, young people becoming better critical thinkers usually gets unanimous support. And, arguably, it's being recognised as increasingly important in a world full of AI-generated content and chatbots pretending to be your friend! So I was completely fascinated when I discovered the work of my guests this week, who, as professors of Philosophy, are exploring the often overlooked embodied process of what it feels like to engage in critical thinking and how that process gets shaped by our experiences and inspirations.

The following conversation is definitely a wild ride! It's not an argument often made, but I believe that one of the effects of our industrialised education systems is to create the illusion that the world is full of somewhat fixed and ordered things, that don't move or change much. My guest this week has been exploring the depths of these questions for a long time through the lens of movement. As you will hear, Professor Thomas Nail started this line of inquiry researching human migration, and went on to develop an entirely new discipline of the philosophy of movement by pulling at the threads of how far our collective obsession with order and stasis goes!

It's pretty clear from the statistics that there is a huge youth demographic bulge on the continent of Africa. 40% of its population is aged 15 or younger (as of 2021). The population of young people aged 15-24 in Africa is projected to reach 500 million in 2080. But as Prof. Kingsley Moghalu from the African School of Governance said at Harvard University’s African Development Conference in April last year, there is no guarantee that this will lead to positive outcomes for individual young people, countries or the continent as a whole. In order to enable all these amazing possibilities education is going to be a key factor in these emerging possibilities and scenarios. There are few researchers, communicators or advocates of education across Africa more brilliant or well-placed than my guest this week to speak to these questions, Dr. Modupe (Mo) Olateju.

In the current context of ubiquitous digital tech and runaway generative AI, you'd think that a book calling out our collective delusions about digital tools in relation to learning wouldn't make much of a splash! But Jared Cooney Horvath's latest book 'The Digital Delusion: How Classroom Technology Harms Our Kids’ Learning - And How To Help Them Thrive Again' is currently #1 on the Amazon bestseller list in Educational Psychology and has been receiving a lot of love, including from actor and educational activist, Hugh Grant, and author of The Anxious Generation, Jonathan Haidt!

The final years of high school is often the 'business-end' of formal schooling, where we often demand that young people just knuckle down and suffer the "rigours" of high stakes standardised exams and college entrance tests. But these conversations really show you that alternatives to this are not only possible, but happening! In this final mini-series of 2025, you'll hear about some of the most exciting things happening around the world for pathways through the upper end of high school from the voices of the young people involved in them.

On 7th November, the OECD published a very significant statement of intent on Education for Human Flourishing. It is a conceptual framework that they say is helping to shape the international conversation about the future of education, national education policymaking, as well as the development of OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). I was very keen to explore this in more detail with the lead author and convenor of this work, Michael Stevenson.

As we think about systems change, it's all too easy to get caught up the technical design of new institutions and 'system architecture'. But if we are being asked to consider a qualitatively different way governing, convening, educating, distributing resources - all of the fundamentals of society -then perhaps we can start by asking: What has LOVE got to do with any of it?

The idea of rewilding is now a common topic of conversation in response to the depletion of biodiversity and natural habitats for local wildlife and widespread industrialisation and globalisation of food production. What about if we asked the same question in relation to the industrialised and standardised education system? What would it take to rewild education, as my guest this week asks?

For the last 150 years we've gotten used to compulsory standardised schooling being provided at scale by either the state, as public government schools, or by the market, as private fee-paying schools. I'm fascinated by the question of what alternatives there might be to this binary choice. Home-schooling networks, religious and intentional communities are certainly examples, but often still very much at the margins. My guest this week, David Bollier, is a global expert in the the way that communities work together to steward shared resources often known as the Commons, rather than relying on the market or the state.

EXCLUSIVE! It is my huge privilege this week to be able to share this interview with IB Director General, Olli-Pekka Heinonen, about his new book 'Learning as If Life Depended on It' which is released on November 4th. There are a lot of people searching right now, including me, including this podcast, searching for different ways in and through many of the global challenges that we are facing. And as many people will conclude, education and learning are central to these questions of how we find our way! How do we learn together, across generations, in communities in ways that will enable the capacities of our youngest humans to thrive long into their futures? 

One of our main roles as educators is to support and help our young people figure out who they are and how they want to contribute to the world. Given our current context of rapid technological change with social, technological and ecological challenges, questions about decisions for university, training and future options for young people is becoming increasingly challenging. Similarly, for educators and career and college guidance counsellors too, to be able to continuously navigate this rapidly changing terrain.

In 1981, the UN established the International Day of Peace to commemorate and strengthen the ideals of peace. In a time when both the influence of multilateral institutions like the UN is being questioned, and the peace we need is in rapidly shortening supply as violence becomes the norm, my guest this week is doing amazing work with communities to find more peaceful paths through questions of conflict resolution by taking a systemic and complexity-informed approach. How we engage our young people in responding peacefully to the inevitable conflict they experience in their own lives feels like a critical part of what we do as educators, but so is being open to question the way in which violence and harm can also be normalised by the systems in which we live and work.