Charles Leadbeater, innovation adviser: ”the purpose of education can make students find a sense of motivation in learning”

Charles Leadbeater has an impressive bio as a thinker and innovator. He works with entrepreneurs, governments, cities and foundations around the world on to promote innovation with purpose. 

Over the past ten years he has published influential reports on the changes needed in education to equip students with the agency needed for a world of rapid transitions. 

Charles was an adviser in Tony Blair’s government Policy Unit on the knowledge driven economy. He is the author of several internationally renowned books and one of the first people in the world to write about social entrepreneurship in his 1997 report The Rise of the Social Entrepreneur.

Accenture, the management consultancy ranked him one of the top management thinkers in the world, and the Financial Times said he was the outstanding innovation expert in the UK. He is a Life Fellow of the Royal Society of the Arts in London.

Charles is one of the speakers at the Dare to Learn conference, an education accelerator and Europe’s largest on-site event dedicated to learning and self-development, as they mention on their website. We got a chance to pick his brain on education, innovation and some of the questions that can make the world shift to a better direction with learning. 

What you can learn from him in this interview: 

• Watching the world evolve around you can make you wanna be part of something more active. This is the reason Charles Leadbeater dropped journalism and reporting on change and became part of creating the change that is being reported on. 
• Opening up a discussion about what’s the purpose of education can make students find a sense of motivation in what they are learning because it makes a difference to their lives.
• The most successful innovators in the field of education do something simple but fundamental, they engage students to become protagonists in their own learning
• AI can work as an enabler for teachers to shift to a more creative, coaching role rather than delivering content. 

 

1. I read on your website about the path that led you to become an innovation and education thinker. What from your own education and journalism career had the most implication in what you are today? What made you flip the switch to becoming who you are?

 

There might be three things. The first is that I did not have a very successful or enjoyable secondary education. I hated school. I was always looking for something more interesting and I always thought that would be outside school. That feeling has stayed with me.

Second, I started my career as a journalist and that is most enjoyable when you are seeing the leading edge of where change is happening.

So early on I went to the Soviet Union when perestoika was coming; I went to Japan to see just in time production; to Silicon Valley in the early 1990s, when it wasn’t yet so widely known. Third I became frustrated with just reporting on change, observing it. I wanted to become more directly involved in creating it.

2. How would you describe innovation in your own words?

Something new, an idea, technology, institutions, systems, at least in the setting or context where it develops (it might be well established elsewhere), which creates additional value for the people who use it (it cannot just be an idea it has to be applied in the world and it has to create value.)

3. What would you say are the best innovation components in the world of education? But for the entrepreneurial world?

Well I would distinguish innovation from within systems, to make them be more effective and innovation to systems, to shift how they work, the principles to which they adhere.

In the first sphere everything I think comes down to more effective learning methods, often with teachers, to meet a given goal: like passing an exam. 

In the second its more about opening up what the purposes of education, so students can find a sense of agency and motivation in what they are learning because it makes a difference to their lives.

4. Your book, Innovation in Education explores the work of 16 pioneers around the world who have developed new, effective approaches to education that work at scale. Can you share with us the most important takeaways from what you learned while researching and writing this book? Something that stuck with you.

 

The most successful innovators in the field of education do something simple but fundamental, they engage students to become protagonists in their own learning. 

 

That means shifting power and purpose to students, building up their capability to learn and act together, to solve complex problems together and to so form new relationships with teachers and one another. The most effective learning creates a profound sense of agency in students.

5. In Learning from the Extremes, you explore how social entrepreneurs are using technology to create new approaches to learning in the poorest parts of the developing world. What can countries that are well developed learn from their poorer counterparts when it comes to innovation in education? How can we do more with less?

In these extreme environments people are trying to create learning which makes a difference, which matters to students in tackling the world they face. And they have to do it without the resources of the rich world.

So you see entrepreneurs developing very engaging approaches to learning, which motivate students intrinsically, and which are very adept at using limited resources to great effect. So the most effective entrepreneurs in these settings turn education on its head and inside out.

They make their lack of resources work for them and they need to deeply engage students in making their own learning.

6. AI is both seen as a challenge and an opportunity for education. How do you think machine learning and this precise technology work for the better of education?

 

It can do, it will offer students and teachers many more different ways to learn. It will augment the intelligence available for learning. It could enable teachers to shift to a more creative, coaching role rather than delivering content. But of course it also comes with the risk that it could become another delivery method for dull, unengaging content.

We could become for it, rather than it being for us. So again I think the idea of agency is critical to this. Do we have agency in relation to AI, can we use it as a creative tool?

7. You also wrote a paper during the pandemic about love and power and their road to a better balance and working in collaboration, as we have seen during the Covid era. Do you think we can find this balance again when there is no crisis threatening the fragile bodies of society? If so, where does innovation stand in this process?

Yes, I think it's not just about Covid. I think the best places to learn, the best sports teams embody this love and power dynamic. The best leaders are good at balancing it. I am a supporter of Arsenal football club and our manager Mikel Arteta is a perfect example of a combination of love and power.

These leaders also balance a sense of intention and purpose with a curiosity and openness to how the world is changing, they are open to emergence.

8. How do you perceive Romania and its path to innovating education, as a future speaker for the Dare to Learn conference?

 

I am really interested in Romania’s path from the 1990s to now and forwards from here. I think it's full of potential. I think the best innovations are a combination of deep context, they understand where they work and its history, but also imagination, to take you beyond that context into another place, another future.

9. If you were to choose an innovation that could be applied to the educational systems from all around the world, could you pick one? What would it be?

 

I would change the assessment system for education, to make it much more formative, much more about problem solving. In fact I think I once wrote in a paper that the school leaving exam should be replaced by a single question:

 

Can you show how you would draw on knowledge from diverse fields, to work collaboratively with fellow students, to address a complex social challenge? That is for me the question we all face.

You can listen to Charles speak on stage at Dare to Learn conference. Details here.