"Becoming Me" or; Children Can Only Aspire to What They Know Exists (pt3): featuring Professor Dr Ger Graus OBE

Welcome to the third and final part of the interview the Xperienceships team hosted with Professor Dr Ger Graus OBE, as part of our World Of Work for Educators series. We were excited to have his thoughts and opinions on the changing face of careers, and to hear about his work with younger people to embed diversity and choice in career education. 

This third and final part Professor Graus highlights how the power of education should be given back to teachers and let them lead the way, because after all, they are the experts. We also touch on how the pandemic has affected young people’s experiential learning and how we all can learn from this experience to provide even better tools for young people in the future.

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

Xperienceships: How do we bring useful career experiences to children during COVID? How has it been done well in this virtual environment? You mentioned half of the KidZania centers are closed. So what's our replacement right now?

Ger Graus: I think that's a very interesting question and a question that concerns me greatly. If I take it from KidZania's position, our online presence is poor. We've got some materials, and we've got some resources, but it's not adventurous. It will be, and actually, it will not be because of COVID. It was always on the agenda. What COVID has done is it's given us nothing new. It's just attached urgency stickers.

In the technology world is that you get all these people who think that online will replace reality, and it ain't going to happen.

I think one of the lessons of COVID is, if you go back 10 years, and you look at what futurists were saying, they were all telling us that we'd be working from home and that we would want to work from home. Wrong, I can't wait to get out. And this is the point I'm trying to make. Online, will not replace ‘real-ity’. 

My 15 year old daughter is sitting upstairs at the moment, being taught online brilliantly by her school. I think teachers are the unmentioned saints of all this. It's not just about the teacher, it's about the technicians, and it's about the teaching assistants and all the other people who make this stuff happen. But she can't wait to get back. Because schools are more than a school. 

“And I'm so happy that you're in Barcelona because “Més que un club”. It has become “Més que una escola”, right? schools have proven themselves to be more than a school. The more disadvantaged the area, the more the school has been more than just the school.“

So I could turn around to that futurist of 10 years ago, and go, “you got that wrong”. So the answer is: whatever we do online now is an emergency. And it's a good thing to have that in place. But when we go back to some form of normality, we need to take the time which in education we are never allowed to do. We need to take the time to sit back and go: which bits were really good? And which bits were really bad?

I would urge all school leaders: when you have your staff training days, if you have five training days a year from September, devote at least three of those days in the next 12 months to looking at what you will look like in September 2022. 

There are some brilliant things about this. My eldest daughter works for Saatchi and Saatchi in London and the company has more or less decided that in the future, they will have their key staff at the office three days a week, and for two days a week they can work from home. So that’s good and they have learned their lesson to become better - effective, efficient, caring.

In schooling, we have to learn our lesson. How we apply technology needs to add value to what we offer to the individual youngster. Because the strength of the technology, if we do it properly, can become that it facilitates personalized learning. Much better than you can do when you've got 25 in the class and you have a naughty one (like I was) in there somewhere. 

So what's KidZania doing? Well, we are clearly working on having alternatives next time around. But we are an example for experience based learning. There are zoos and farms and work experience visits, theatres, ballets and all those places to add into that mix. So we are one piece of the jigsaw.

X: When we go back to school and are able to be physically present with one another again, what's the first change you can make? What's the most crucial and most pressing change that you see is needed?

G: I would not let politicians anywhere near education. There are a number of people who I think of that have done very much the wrong thing by the children. I would award all good teachers more pay and better conditions. 

I think the main thing that I would want to bring about is for teachers to have more dedicated time to think about what it means to be a teacher. And what I mean by that is: if you look at the approaches to raise your children, how can we take some of those approaches, and put them across the education piece, rather than just in the early years? The ‘Reggio’ thinking at all ages is what is needed.

The teacher or the facilitator of experiences? Or can we teach as the manager of a project. The question becomes, who is the teacher? And the answer is, we all are, but we need somebody to lead the way. I think that is where we need to take this, and that is the change that I wouldn’t force, but that I would hope to convince teachers that they would bring about themselves. 

“Because the other big change that is absolutely needed is; we need to declare our trust in the teaching profession. We've got to stop the non experts. You wouldn’t do it in a hospital would you? You wouldn't turn around in the hospital and go “give me that scalpel, I'll do that”. So how dare they do that with the teaching profession? “

But I think those changes need to be seeds that are planted based on evidence. And then you need to trust the teachers to bring the changes about to the children they know, because again, the “one size fits all”, of course doesn't work. 

To conclude this series the Nexgen Careers team would like to give a warm thank you to Professor Ger Graus for offering his time to us to talk about what matters most, the future of our children.

If you have missed any of the parts you can find them linked here, Part 1 and Part 2.

Stay tuned for our next Nexgen Careers WOWed episode where we will be talking all things future of work.