"Becoming Me" or; Children Aspire to What They Know Exists (pt1): Meet Professor Ger Graus OBE

Team Xperienceships was honoured to have the chance to meet Professor Ger Graus OBE last month, as part of our WOW (World of Work) thought leadership series for educators. We spoke to Prof Graus about his thoughts and opinions on the changing face of 21st -century careers, learning about his work with young people to embed diversity and choice in career education from a very young age. His insights were extensive and highly entertaining - at times, moving and deeply reassuring. We decided therefore to create a three-part series to cover the three thrusts of our conversation.

This first part focuses on his "pockets" of experience - things he collected along the route of his career and mission-passion finding that have stayed with him and influence his work - something, he argues, we all have and we all must take moments to revisit throughout our lives.

You can watch a two minute clip below on our Youtube channel or read on for the full first part of our interview.

Xperienceships: Welcome, Prof. Graus! We wanted to start with something a bit personal, we read somewhere that you had been a naughty boy at school(!), and wondered if you could tell us a little bit about your journey towards figuring out your own career, in your early years. 

Professor Ger Graus: Thank you for having me from Barcelona, my Johan Cruijff city. It's an interesting question. I have a column in a children's magazine called The Week Junior and we call the column Becoming Me. Because I think the journey is more interesting than the destination. 

Your question is very pertinent to that. I think there are no straight lines really, but I think there are points where you can stop and think and then either change direction or carry on. 

I grew up in the Netherlands in the south near Maastricht. I was born at a time when that was a coal mining area. So there was high employment, people were reasonably well paid, because it was a high risk job. There was high employment, but low education and educational value, because you didn't need to do anything really, except stay in the area and earn the money. I suppose that is true of many parts of Europe, where that kind of life exists. 

I was the first one in my family to go to university, I was quite naughty at school. And I think I was naughty at school for a number of reasons, even though I actually don't think there are naughty children really, but circumstances. So I was a little bit bored and I was a little bit insecure. I didn't quite know why I was there. And I think that's still the case for many young people now. 

I was very fortunate because I had a teacher very good at his job. I was generally good at languages, I used to watch television with subtitles, all in the original language. Where I lived, we had Belgian television, either in French or in or Flemish, we had German television, we had English television, and Dutch TV. I also used to go to the record shop on a Saturday and buy the magazines, trying to translate the song lyrics. So there was that natural interest: an understanding that if I did my best in English in school, I'd be better at doing some things that I really enjoy: the purpose of it.

During one of my naughty episodes, I was given a new German teacher, Mr. Beurskens. And at the end of the very first lesson, he was a newly qualified teacher. At the end of the very first lesson, he asked to see me and I thought, here we go again. 

I waited and I went to see him at the end of the lesson, hands in pockets, thinking “what have I done now”? He went into his briefcase and he got out the book entitled The collected short stories of Heinrich B?ll and he said to me, I think you should read. I think you're really good. And I took the book off, read it that night and I went back the next day like Oliver Twist. I still have the book. And I'm still in touch with him. And it is because of him that I became a German teacher. 

He persuaded my parents that I should go to university, rather than to a coal mine. And the coal mines incidentally, not long thereafter, closed, which is also something that happened across Europe, unsettling very established communities and caused a lot of grief, heartache and insecurity. And so I went to university because of him. And so that's the first lesson really, the power of a good teacher.

And I think as humans, we have the capacity to have pockets in our heads and in our hearts. We store things. Like all things in life at times, we have to remember where we've put them so that we can refer back to them.

I went to university and I certainly enjoyed it. I had a chance to study in other countries. So I studied in what was West Germany, and I spent a considerable amount of time in what was known as East Germany. Those experiences were eye opening, but then when I graduated there were no teaching jobs really, because teachers were very well paid so there were was no shortage. 

One day in a library in Maastricht, I stumbled across a job advertised for a teacher of German at Taverham High School Norwich, a brand new school, and I was offered the job. We started with very few children, and built that school with an amazing head teacher, Mrs. Daines, who had hand picked us. One year became two and I got promoted. 

Mrs. Daines said to me on the very first day, just before I started to teach my very first lesson, don't forget to enjoy yourself, and don't forget to make mistakes and learn from them. 

Nowadays, in England, that commentary is virtually unthinkable at the moment. The education system has become so oppressive because of accountability, the wrong kind of accountability and OFSTED and all those nonsense things. That conversation I had with Mrs. Daines, sadly, I think doesn't happen very often anymore.

At some point, also brilliantly Mrs. Daines told me that I should leave. Because otherwise, I would go stale. And that is also brilliant leadership. You put that in another pocket for your life.

I left that school - with 500 children in a very middle class area - and I moved to a school with 2200 children on what at the time was one of the largest and most deprived estates in the country. I left that after three years. The main reason for leaving was that I learned that this was all wrong. Because the kids needed much more than that, and needed it that much more. We were in a factory of 2200 kids where I didn't know the names of all of my colleagues, and I thought that was fundamentally wrong.

I moved on and became a language advisor in Manchester. I introduced languages into all the primary schools, we linked to all the primary schools with schools abroad, this was unheard of at the time. It was one of the big benefits of what was known as the European Union. ;) They had programs at the time called Lingua and Socrates whereby we could train teachers and we made exchanges happen specifically in areas within the city of Manchester where normally children would not have had the opportunity to do this. You looked at what's wrong, try and do something about it, and that was brilliant. That was great. 

I was approached to become the director of two of the education action zones near Manchester Airport. Education Action Zones was an initiative of the Blair government, about enhancing the education and life chances of children in deprived areas. It was co sponsored by the private sector, in my case, Manchester Airport. That became an amazing thing, because I actually saw how taking those schools and children out of the conventional circumstances and all its bureaucracy, lifting it out of local politics, could speed up progress. 

I don't think we've got any further. But I think we've got there much quicker. And if you think that children only have one go at being educated, getting there quicker is at times incredibly important. Again, we enforced that language center in primary school because it was next to an airport, so we did lots of careers awareness. Because the airport had a vested interest in this -it wanted to recruit its future workforce from its doorstep. 

That's where my mantra came from, because I was talking to lots of children in years 5 and 6, and I used to ask them the question: "tell me the jobs you could do at Manchester Airport". And the answers I got is what they could see. And what you can see amounted to about 35% of all the jobs in the airport. So just by that principle, 65% of the jobs are not on their menu of aspirations, right. And then I used to say to those kids, look, you can fly planes. And I used to get 5,6, 7 year olds telling me, “people from here don't fly planes”. 

So the aspiration issue is not one that children lack aspirations. It's an issue that the adults do that for them, and their communities do that so the children can only aspire to what they know exists. 

I was then some years later approached to become the founding chief executive of a charity called Children's University, which I happily did. This was about the value of out of school learning, particularly focused on young people from disadvantaged areas. And within seven years that became a global phenomenon - it was really amazing. During that time, I met Joel Cadbury, who became a very good friend, and Joel was at the point of acquiring the franchise for KidZania UK. We used to sit in this kitchen and draw on the back of envelopes. About two years later, he said, just come work for us - just make it happen, the education piece. 

About two years after that, I got a call from Mexico City, which is where KidZania’s HQ is. Xavier López Ancona, the genius behind the whole concept, rang me up and said, Can you come and do globally what you're doing in London, and I've never looked back.

I suppose the moral of the story is don't believe in straight lines. But do make sure that you put the good things in pockets, and that you remember where your pockets are when you need them. You could say in another way that I just stumbled from one thing to the next. But I like to think there was slightly more to it. I think the final achievement for me was how do you take this incredibly important thing that is about education rather than schooling - that is, about children learning out of school? How would you get people to take that seriously? So we work with universities: Oxford, Cambridge, Tec de Monterrey, and I was offered a professorship at the National Research University in Moscow, who at their Institute of Education, have a specific unit called the Pinsky Center, which focuses on the value of out of school hours learning, specifically in that sphere of edutainment.

So, it's nearly full circle, but I'm not quite there yet ?

Join us in April for Part Two of Ger’s story: where we talk more about his work at KidZania, issues with the education accountability system as he sees it, and perhaps most crucially, how career stereotypes are set at young ages, what we can do as educators to counter that and offer them the broadest range of options and role models.

You can see more interviews with leading thinkers like Ger on our educator section of the platform at www.xperienceships.com