by Guy Claxton
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About the Authors
I’m Guy. I’m 67, and I don’t have any children of my own. I like most children and enjoy their company, but I worry about whether school is giving them the best possible preparation not just for further study but for life. I went to a primary school in North London. The headmaster (as they invariably were in those days) was a stern man (at least to a 5-year-old) called Mr Giles. I was so worried about making mistakes in my exercise book that I rubbed right through the paper and had to go to the head and be told off. Sewing made me really anxious – my grubby child’s hands sweated so profusely that they turned the cloth into a dirty rag. Mr Giles again. I went back there a couple of years ago to look around. They still had the register from 1953 and there I was! The current head was Mr Herring. He was much nicer. I found they are now using an educational approach my colleagues and I have developed called Building Learning Power (BLP). How things have changed.
When I was 8½ we moved to the West Midlands, and between the ages of 9 and 18 I went to King’s School Worcester. I had the potential to be a chorister, but my mum thought it would interfere with my lessons. She was educationally ambitious for me. Mum was a piano teacher and dad was a clerk in the Midland Bank (now HSBC). I did unexpectedly well at O level (the forerunners of GCSEs), and as a result consciously decided that ‘being bright’ was an option, so I studied harder and got into Cambridge. Before going to university, I taught chemistry for a few months and discovered a bent for explaining tricky things in engaging ways, which has never left me.
But Cambridge chemistry went too fast for me to understand properly so I got dispirited, my results plummeted and I switched (much to mum’s dismay) to psychology, which I took to like a duck to water. I found you could argue and theorise about evidence and not just remember it. I went on to get married and do a doctorate in psychology at Oxford. In August 1973 my marriage broke down and my doctorate was failed. I discovered that my reserves of resilience and resourcefulness were massively unequal to the emotional turmoil I was experiencing. Out of this, with the help of a great counsellor, I evolved a lifelong interest in the personal side of learning, and have spent the rest of my life researching and writing about it. (I eventually gained my doctorate, and got very happily remarried, so all’s well that ends well!) In recent years, with the help of Bill and a host of adventurous colleagues and teachers, I have been designing small, smart, practical things that teachers can do that develop pupils’ confidence, independence and pleasure in wrestling with difficult things – and get better results in the process. That’s what Building Learning Power is.
* * *
And I’m Bill. My dad was a teacher. He became headmaster of a school called King’s School in Gloucester and then an HMI – one of Her Majesty’s Inspectors of Schools. On a day soon after he became an HMI he proudly told my sister and me that he was going to be the eyes and ears of the Queen in schools and help them all to become better. So education has always been a big thing in my family – though a mixed blessing. I remember resolving at the age of 19 that the one career I would have nothing to do with was teaching! Four years later I found myself standing in front of a group of 12-year-olds about to explain the mysteries of English tenses to them – and discovered I loved teaching. I trained as a teacher, taught in some tough schools, and by the late 1980s I was a deputy head teacher in a large secondary school in West London, and Kenneth (now Lord) Baker (remember him?) was set on introducing something called the national curriculum. I decided that I’d take a sideways move and went to Winchester to set up a new charity called Learning through Landscapes, and then came back to London to be chief executive of the Campaign for Learning. In 2008, with Guy, I created the Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester.
I’ve got three children, 10-year-old twins (a boy and a girl) and an older son, who is 23. School didn’t seem to inspire my eldest son as much as he had hoped and consequently I don’t think his school days were the happiest of his life. I think he really found something that stimulated him when on an internship year as part of his university degree. My younger two have their ups and downs but are hungry to learn new things and often do seem to be stimulated by their current school. Things they do out of the classroom – sport, music, church and Cubs – are at least as important to them as lessons. Current passions are birds of prey, singing, rollerblading, ice hockey, piano and loom bands (a craze that may have been forgotten by the time you read this!).
These days, often in collaboration with Guy, I spend my time trying to puzzle out, from the perspective of a parent, researcher and ex-school leader, how we can make schools better places. Oh, I forgot to tell you. I’m 59, so I’ve got nearly a decade to go before I catch up with my co-author!
Copyright
First published by
Crown House Publishing
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and
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© Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas, 2015
The right of Guy Claxton and Bill Lucas to be identified as the authors of this work has been asserted by them in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
First published 2015.
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under current legislation no part of this work may be photocopied, stored in a retrieval system, published, performed in public, adapted, broadcast, transmitted, recorded or reproduced in any form or by any means, without the prior permission of the copyright owners. Enquiries should be addressed to Crown House Publishing.
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British Library of Cataloguing-in-Publication Data
A catalogue entry for this book is available from the British Library.
Print ISBN 978–184590954–3
Mobi ISBN 978–184590970–3
ePub ISBN 978–184590971–0
&nb
sp; ePDF ISBN 978–184590972–7
LCCN 2015935353
Printed and bound in the UK by
Gomer Press, Llandysul, Ceredigion