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Colin Diamond discusses lessons learned in urban education leadership and policy from the Trojan Horse affair and shares informed insights into how its exposure made Birmingham’s schools (and the nation’s) better and safer.

Image courtesy of interviewee. May 21, 2024

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This video video outlines the speaker's experiences beginning in 2014, when they were tasked by the UK Department for Education to investigate the "Trojan Horse" affair in Birmingham, which involved allegations of extremist influence in schools. The speaker was to lead a team to assess the situation but ended up remaining in Birmingham for ten years, working with the city council and the University of Birmingham to address the deeper issues that led to the controversy.

Initially focused on the Trojan Horse inquiry, the speaker's work evolved into establishing an educational leadership academy. Through ethnographic research, they studied the dynamics between the British Pakistani community and educational authorities. They worked closely with Muslim educators to understand the situation and gathered evidence regarding governance in schools, examining issues of poor leadership and community relations.

The speaker highlights that governance problems were not new but had existed for decades before the Trojan Horse letter surfaced. The situation escalated into a national media story, prompting a series of inspections due to concerns over school governance and the performance of academy schools in Birmingham.

The speaker emphasizes the need for community engagement and a focus on improving the life chances of students, particularly from working-class backgrounds. They share success stories from various school leaders who implemented positive changes in their institutions, leveraging community engagement and partnerships to enhance educational experiences.

The overarching message is one of optimism, stressing that despite the dark events of the past, progress is being made in Birmingham's educational landscape, with many students from marginalized backgrounds now achieving success in various professional fields, including healthcare. The speaker concludes with a call to recognize and build upon this progress moving forward.

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X-TIMESTAMP-MAP:LOCAL=00:00:00.000,MPEGTS=900000

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In 2014, I was working for the Department

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for Education in London.

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I had responsibility to lead a team

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who were responsible for quality assurance

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in the new academies, the new multi Acade Trust, which

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emerging free schools and so on.

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I was asked to go to Birmingham for about six weeks

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by the Secretary of State, Michael Gold,

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and one of his ministers, Lord Nash, to find out

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what was really going on under this sort

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of national media firestorm

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that everyone knows is Trojan Horse.

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Um, please find, please, please put a team together,

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your best advisors, find out what's going on, report back

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to HQ in White Hall,

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and that will give us an idea of how to

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move forward from here.

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So that's meant to be six weeks, 10 years on.

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Here we are, I'm still in Birmingham.

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Um, I worked for the Department

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of Education initially purely on Trojan Horse.

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That then led to my being invited to work

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for Birmingham City Council to try

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and sort out some of the issues,

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the real deep causal issues that led to it being possible

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for Trojan Wars to occur.

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And then in 2018, I was invited to come to University

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of Birmingham as what's called the Professor of practice.

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I'm not a career academic, to,

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to set up an educational leadership academy,

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which essentially is

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for leaders in Birmingham and the black country.

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Um, so having been pitched into the middle of the horse,

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when I got to university, I had time to draw breath

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and, and, and start to really think things through,

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and assemble evidence as to what, well,

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what had really gone on here, how did we get out of it,

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that that was where it all, that was my motivation

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to make sense of a very fast,

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rapidly occurring chain, chain of events in 2014 and 2015.

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My research, given the nature of the topic,

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which is highly sensitive,

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we are talking about relationships primarily

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between the British Pakistani Me community

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in Birmingham, not exclusively so, but mainly so,

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and the city educational authorities,

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and then ultimately the National Department for Education.

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Um, I needed to take an approach, which first of all,

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gathered evidence from a number of the actors,

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critically including half a dozen Muslim colleagues,

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school leaders, school leaders,

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and academics who were involved.

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It would be wrong for a, a white guy like me to be judge

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and jury about what had happened in, in, in Birmingham.

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Um, secondly,

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my specialism really is in urban leadership research

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in urban education.

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I'm a the boy from tox in Liverpool.

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Uh, my, my my reason

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for coming into the profession was all about

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how we can improve the life chances

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of working class kids in the inner cities.

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So I wanted to know

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what made those conditions possible whereby we could really

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improve, the situation

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that we find ourselves in, in Birmingham.

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So it, the research methodology in academic language

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is, is ethnographic.

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It's very close to the ground.

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However, we did have one major piece

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of quantitative research.

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We got right into the heart of the, national

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data base.

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And we, colleague of mine, Dr.

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Tom Perry, looked at

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how Birmingham children had done from 2004

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to 2014 when all this broke

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and compare, looked at them via, ethnicity, gender,

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social class, and so forth, how Birmingham did

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with the rest of the country.

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So it was mixed methodology.

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Uh, if I was marking my students on this, I'd say, yes,

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there's qualitative and there's quantitative.

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I did not attempt to work with everybody involved.

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That would've been impossible.

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Somebody asked me the other day, did I work

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with some colleagues

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who are actually barred from governance and teaching?

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No, I did not. I had very good reasons

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not to work with them.

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They have their own voices, they have their own channels,

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and it's people will have to come

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to their own conclusion about these events.

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When November 13, a letter began to circulate

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amongst head teachers

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and governors in a few of the,

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what I call East End downtown schools, those principally

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with Muslim majorities.

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The gist of the letter was that there was a group

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of activists who were successfully

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undermining governance and leadership in the schools.

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They targeted by,

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putting unreasonable demands on her teachers

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by making anonymous complaints to sted by

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jamming up the wor the, the wheels

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of governance in the schools by getting their friends

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to become cliques.

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So there was no balanced governance.

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That was the thrust of it.

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They were saying, look, we're doing this in Birmingham

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and we are about to, move it to Manchester and Bradford.

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So all of that sounds a little bit outlandish.

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And indeed, the letter itself,

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the language is somewhat theatrical.

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The question was, well, is this real? Were

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These things going on?

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What, what had been happening in, in Birmingham?

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So different reactions.

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What I discovered subsequently was that

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activities of that nature

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had been going on quite number 20 years in the city.

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And one question many head teachers asked me,

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many governors asked me in Birmingham,

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many local authority asked, staff asked,

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what took the department for education so long to get here?

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Because you had had warnings about this.

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One of the Birmingham heads back

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around 20 12 13 had been to see the minister,

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Lord Hill himself, and warned about the activities

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of certain people, and the department

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ignored him at that time.

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It was inconvenient.

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So many people say, well, look, the letter was a hoax.

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And indeed it burlesque.

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It was theatrical, it was designed to draw attention to it.

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Um, was the core, were the core facts inaccurate?

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No, because as Ian Kershaw, who was commissioned

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by Birmingham City Council, he was commissioned

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through Northern Education.

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This was the council's own investigation.

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They found this kind

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of activity had been going on in over 20 schools in the area

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for a long time, and sometimes with disastrous consequences

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for school leaders and school governance.

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So there was, there was truth to it.

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So that's, that's what surfaced late 2013,

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became a national media story early in 14 to Michael Gove,

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who has very odd views, shall we say,

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about Islam having published his book Celsius seven seven,

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when he was a journalist, this, as it were,

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drew attention to something he appeared to be scared of.

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Let's call him Islamophobic for this purpose.

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In other words, there was Islamic incursions

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into Birmingham's schools,

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and we'd had a, I sometimes call it

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a dress rehearsal for this.

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There had been a preschool in Darby Al Medina free school

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that had been undermined by its governors earlier in 2013.

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So, my God, it's happened in this one free school now.

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It looks to have been happening, burning for a long time.

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What's happening to my academy's policy,

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my free school's policy, and what do we do about it?

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So his response was to trigger

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21 snap inspections of schools in Birmingham,

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some of which were at the center of this, some

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of which never needed inspection, some of which some

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of the ones that should have inspected weren't inspected,

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but they, they captured the essence of it,

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and they found indeed that, governance was,

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was very poor in some schools.

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Some of these schools leadership was very poor.

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All, all above one of these schools were academies.

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So that raised big questions about academization setting up

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for academy trusts.

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Some of these schools have been asked

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to take over other schools.

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So we had a bit of a national education crisis on our hands.

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I was asked that question when I was in the department

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for education by ministers, by lawyers, by everybody.

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Um, the facts are that this kind

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of activity had been going on

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for 20 years beforehand in various ways.

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What happened with a small number of these schools was

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that when they became academies, this gave them license

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to behave more badly.

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That was the phrase that the late great sit in Brickhouse

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used about governors in Birmingham.

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They do behave badly, periodically,

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and it's the local authorities' job to keep them in line.

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It's the nature of it.

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Once they were academies responsible directly

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to the Secretary of State with precious little between them,

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they could more or less do what they wanted

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and did so in a number of cases.

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So Academization was not the root of this.

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However, it did permit behaviors

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and introduced behaviors which went

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much further beyond the pale.

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As one school leader said, who took over three

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of these schools at one time,

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they didn't just pick up the Ballers academies,

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they ran over the hill with it.

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They stole it in the book.

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Part two of the book is written by school leaders

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who were called in by the Department of Education to,

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deliver the improvements that were necessary

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in these schools.

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Um, some particularly stand out

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given your, your, your, your question.

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So for example, in one school that had been underperforming

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for many years, it was known as Golden Hillock.

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Uh, it became part of the Arc Academy chain.

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And Arc introduced a new principle called her Chan.

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She's written her story in the book,

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and I'm allowed to say this.

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She gives, she is, allowed me to say this.

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Her leadership style is a mixture, is based on her own faith

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as a devout Sikh colleague, mixed with the, some

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of my phrasing here, some of the socialist values

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that are part of Sikhism,

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and she is your consummate servant leader.

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She recognized instantly how let down the community felt,

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how stuck it felt.

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And she spent a huge amount of time in the first couple

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of years drinking tea

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and simply listening mainly

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to the mums about what are your hopes?

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What are your fears? What's gone wrong?

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How can we put it right together?

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That to me is harnessing, harnessing social capital.

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She did that brilliantly.

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Another example is how,

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the Star Academy chain led by Hamid Patel,

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they've established a number of schools in the city,

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and they, whilst they weren't running schools at the right,

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at a particular time, Hamid's chapter looks very,

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very carefully at how governance had gone wrong

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and how it had become run

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by some rather narrow single-minded cliques.

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And what Hamid realized was that the schools,

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whether they're faith schools

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or not faith schools in the city, to be truly successful,

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they need to be deeply rooted in the community.

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So the students at these schools, you'll find them.

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An example I often quote is that they, they're,

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they're very good at fundraising for disadvantaged members

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of local communities.

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Whether these are people with no cash, people

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who are homeless, they do a huge amount

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of work in local community.

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Uh, so having recognized that

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to shift things, you need that.

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Another example such will are za, he found himself invited

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to turn around the primary school

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that he'd been to as a boy.

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Well, what an opportunity. It'd never been rated good.

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It bumped along the bottom for a long time.

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What sad said is, look, you know,

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school improvement in Birmingham, it's,

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it's the same core ingredients

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as any school in the country in terms of clarity of vision

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and mission, investing in your staff,

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making sure schools are safe, safe places to learn,

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safe places to teach, improve the resourcing,

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improve the environments.

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Be very clear on your pedagogies, not in an ideological way,

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but in a way that suits your schools.

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One, one feature of Birmingham is there is

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pretty much an ideology free zone when it comes to

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how to teach in schools.

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There's so much disinformation about that around the place.

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So Satch said, look, it's a basic formula, but onto that,

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and this is the essence of being an urban school leader,

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you have to also provide for the students things

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that imagine these children were paying

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for a private education.

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Their families are paying, paying for a private education,

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the opportunities in the arts, the sports that is

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so important for them in terms of building

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their worldly view, their confidence and experience.

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So, another leader, for example, who took over three

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of the schools initially, he got huge emphasis on

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partnerships with arts organizations,

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sporting organizations.

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So you'll find pupils from his school,

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down at Wimbledon.

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Now, that would never have happened in the past.

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Similarly, you'll find his peoples on stage.

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They, they work with the Holocaust Education Trust

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that he was told

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these people very patronizing in the east end of Birmingham,

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they won't be interested in the Holocaust,

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Holocaust survivors and so on.

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Oh my goodness, they absolutely are.

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So it's about broadening out the agenda whilst digging deep

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social roots in the community. I think that's the

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Formula.

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I hope that by reading part one, they will

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gain a deeper understanding of why these events happened.

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Now, it did. They did happen on Birmingham City Council

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Watch and Birmingham lost grip

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of its education following the departure of sit

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to Timbering house and his amazing team.

15:11.295 --> 15:15.145
So understand the provenance, understand the kind

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of preconditions whereby for many decades,

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these children are talking about these British,

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reporting.

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Pakistani children, our children,

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our Birmingham children were left down

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by the education system, the performance at school.

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Well, the expectations were low. Aspirations were low.

15:33.305 --> 15:36.385
A lot of teachers, I afraid, you know, you,

15:36.385 --> 15:38.105
you may have heard the expression at school,

15:38.415 --> 15:40.065
what can we expect of these kids?

15:40.725 --> 15:45.545
One of the mums in Golden Hill, said, look,

15:45.825 --> 15:48.385
I don't want my daughter to turn out like me.

15:48.965 --> 15:52.065
One of the dads said, all I was offered at careers evening

15:52.605 --> 15:55.065
was be a taxi driver or cookie bats.

15:55.285 --> 15:56.625
And it sounds outrageous

15:56.895 --> 15:58.985
that these things were said, but they were said.

15:59.245 --> 16:01.625
So we have to understand that the future, you know,

16:01.765 --> 16:05.585
we were needed to harness that aspiration, not sit on it,

16:05.725 --> 16:07.825
not squash on it, and squash it.

16:07.825 --> 16:08.985
And that's what's been happening.

16:09.205 --> 16:12.305
And by the way, some of these schools involved here, some

16:12.305 --> 16:13.545
of 'em had very good results.

16:13.565 --> 16:16.865
Indeed. It would be wrong to to to miss that out.

16:16.865 --> 16:20.785
There's just other issues about them. So that's part one.

16:20.815 --> 16:25.005
Part two amazing thing is, you know, Sam,

16:25.395 --> 16:28.165
when I asked these half dozen school leaders,

16:28.165 --> 16:31.405
incredibly successful people to write about their journey,

16:31.455 --> 16:32.525
their story, I said,

16:32.525 --> 16:35.885
imagine we're in the calf in a hub wherever we are.

16:36.395 --> 16:37.765
Just tell me how you did it.

16:37.765 --> 16:39.125
And they said, you are the Colin.

16:39.125 --> 16:41.125
You're the first person to ever ask us to do that.

16:41.605 --> 16:42.725
I thought, well, that's wrong.

16:43.065 --> 16:45.565
We need to capture all the institutional

16:45.565 --> 16:47.125
memory, all of the learnings.

16:47.225 --> 16:48.885
So at the end of each chapter, in the middle,

16:49.055 --> 16:50.605
there are takeaways for school leaders.

16:50.785 --> 16:52.885
If you're walking into their jobs now, this is

16:53.065 --> 16:54.805
how they would pass on their wisdom to you.

16:55.265 --> 16:59.325
And then the third section of the book is a wider review

16:59.585 --> 17:01.405
of education policy.

17:02.235 --> 17:06.765
What really works in urban education situations, the kind

17:06.765 --> 17:08.885
of policy that I feel we need for the future.

17:09.185 --> 17:11.525
And there's some great writers in there as well.

17:12.105 --> 17:14.845
So that's it. And it ends on a very optimistic note.

17:14.845 --> 17:17.445
Basically one of my favorite schools in the city about

17:17.585 --> 17:21.485
how it's a girls school, Muslim school, 99% Muslim.

17:22.075 --> 17:26.005
Just how brilliantly they have captured,

17:26.675 --> 17:27.845
success in that school.

17:28.625 --> 17:31.965
The tremendous sense of value

17:32.705 --> 17:34.005
of love for education.

17:34.265 --> 17:35.485
And these girls who are second,

17:35.485 --> 17:38.925
third generation in Birmingham are now forming the

17:39.085 --> 17:40.245
backbone of the NHS.

17:40.355 --> 17:44.445
Everybody from doctors, dentists, physios, nurses,

17:44.635 --> 17:45.805
everybody,

17:46.185 --> 17:48.565
and many other occupations as well, of course.

17:48.905 --> 17:50.925
So, let's be positive.

17:51.065 --> 17:52.925
Uh, this was a terrible episode

17:52.925 --> 17:54.845
for Birmingham and the country.

17:55.585 --> 17:59.085
Um, but things are now moving forward. It'll take a.

00:00 - In 2014, I was working for the Department for Education in London. I had responsibility to lead a team who were responsible for quality assurance in the new academies, the new multi Acade Trust, which emerging free schools and so on.

00:22 - I was asked to go to Birmingham for about six weeks by the Secretary of State, Michael Gold, and one of his ministers, Lord Nash, to find out what was really going on under this sort of national media firestorm that everyone knows is Trojan Horse. please find, please, please put a team together, your best advisors, find out what's going on, report back to HQ in White Hall, and that will give us an idea of how to

00:53 - move forward from here. So that's meant to be six weeks, 10 years on. Here we are, I'm still in Birmingham. I worked for the Department of Education initially purely on Trojan Horse. That then led to my being invited to work for Birmingham City Council to try and sort out some of the issues, the real deep causal issues that led to it being possible for Trojan Wars to occur.

01:25 - And then in 2018, I was invited to come to University of Birmingham as what's called the Professor of practice. I'm not a career academic, to, to set up an educational leadership academy, which essentially is for leaders in Birmingham and the black country. so having been pitched into the middle of the horse, when I got to university, I had time to draw breath and, and, and start to really think things through, and assemble evidence as to what, well,

02:03 - what had really gone on here, how did we get out of it, that that was where it all, that was my motivation to make sense of a very fast, rapidly occurring chain, chain of events in 2014 and 2015. My research, given the nature of the topic, which is highly sensitive, we are talking about relationships primarily between the British Pakistani Me community in Birmingham, not exclusively so, but mainly so, and the city educational authorities,

02:39 - and then ultimately the National Department for Education. I needed to take an approach, which first of all, gathered evidence from a number of the actors, critically including half a dozen Muslim colleagues, school leaders, school leaders, and academics who were involved. It would be wrong for a, a white guy like me to be judge and jury about what had happened in, in, in Birmingham. secondly, my specialism really is in urban leadership research

03:14 - in urban education. I'm a the boy from tox in Liverpool. my, my my reason for coming into the profession was all about how we can improve the life chances of working class kids in the inner cities. So I wanted to know what made those conditions possible whereby we could really improve, the situation that we find ourselves in, in Birmingham.

03:40 - So it, the research methodology in academic language is, is ethnographic. It's very close to the ground. However, we did have one major piece of quantitative research. We got right into the heart of the, national data base. And we, colleague of mine, Dr. Tom Perry, looked at how Birmingham children had done from 2004

04:06 - to 2014 when all this broke and compare, looked at them via, ethnicity, gender, social class, and so forth, how Birmingham did with the rest of the country. So it was mixed methodology. if I was marking my students on this, I'd say, yes, there's qualitative and there's quantitative. I did not attempt to work with everybody involved. That would've been impossible. Somebody asked me the other day, did I work

04:34 - with some colleagues who are actually barred from governance and teaching? No, I did not. I had very good reasons not to work with them. They have their own voices, they have their own channels, and it's people will have to come to their own conclusion about these events. When November 13, a letter began to circulate amongst head teachers and governors in a few of the,

04:59 - what I call East End downtown schools, those principally with Muslim majorities. The gist of the letter was that there was a group of activists who were successfully undermining governance and leadership in the schools. They targeted by, putting unreasonable demands on her teachers by making anonymous complaints to sted by jamming up the wor the, the wheels of governance in the schools by getting their friends

05:34 - to become cliques. So there was no balanced governance. That was the thrust of it. They were saying, look, we're doing this in Birmingham and we are about to, move it to Manchester and Bradford. So all of that sounds a little bit outlandish. And indeed, the letter itself, the language is somewhat theatrical. The question was, well, is this real? Were These things going on?

05:58 - What, what had been happening in, in Birmingham? So different reactions. What I discovered subsequently was that activities of that nature had been going on quite number 20 years in the city. And one question many head teachers asked me, many governors asked me in Birmingham, many local authority asked, staff asked, what took the department for education so long to get here? Because you had had warnings about this.

06:32 - One of the Birmingham heads back around 20 12 13 had been to see the minister, Lord Hill himself, and warned about the activities of certain people, and the department ignored him at that time. It was inconvenient. So many people say, well, look, the letter was a hoax. And indeed it burlesque. It was theatrical, it was designed to draw attention to it. was the core, were the core facts inaccurate?

07:02 - No, because as Ian Kershaw, who was commissioned by Birmingham City Council, he was commissioned through Northern Education. This was the council's own investigation. They found this kind of activity had been going on in over 20 schools in the area for a long time, and sometimes with disastrous consequences for school leaders and school governance. So there was, there was truth to it. So that's, that's what surfaced late 2013,

07:33 - became a national media story early in 14 to Michael Gove, who has very odd views, shall we say, about Islam having published his book Celsius seven seven, when he was a journalist, this, as it were, drew attention to something he appeared to be scared of. Let's call him Islamophobic for this purpose. In other words, there was Islamic incursions into Birmingham's schools, and we'd had a, I sometimes call it a dress rehearsal for this.

08:06 - There had been a preschool in Darby Al Medina free school that had been undermined by its governors earlier in 2013. So, my God, it's happened in this one free school now. It looks to have been happening, burning for a long time. What's happening to my academy's policy, my free school's policy, and what do we do about it? So his response was to trigger 21 snap inspections of schools in Birmingham, some of which were at the center of this, some of which never needed inspection, some of which some

08:41 - of the ones that should have inspected weren't inspected, but they, they captured the essence of it, and they found indeed that, governance was, was very poor in some schools. Some of these schools leadership was very poor. All, all above one of these schools were academies. So that raised big questions about academization setting up for academy trusts. Some of these schools have been asked to take over other schools.

09:06 - So we had a bit of a national education crisis on our hands. I was asked that question when I was in the department for education by ministers, by lawyers, by everybody. the facts are that this kind of activity had been going on for 20 years beforehand in various ways. What happened with a small number of these schools was that when they became academies, this gave them license to behave more badly. That was the phrase that the late great sit in Brickhouse

09:41 - used about governors in Birmingham. They do behave badly, periodically, and it's the local authorities' job to keep them in line. It's the nature of it. Once they were academies responsible directly to the Secretary of State with precious little between them, they could more or less do what they wanted and did so in a number of cases. So Academization was not the root of this. However, it did permit behaviors

10:05 - and introduced behaviors which went much further beyond the pale. As one school leader said, who took over three of these schools at one time, they didn't just pick up the Ballers academies, they ran over the hill with it. They stole it in the book. Part two of the book is written by school leaders who were called in by the Department of Education to, deliver the improvements that were necessary

10:34 - in these schools. some particularly stand out given your, your, your, your question. So for example, in one school that had been underperforming for many years, it was known as Golden Hillock. it became part of the Arc Academy chain. And Arc introduced a new principle called her Chan. She's written her story in the book, and I'm allowed to say this. She gives, she is, allowed me to say this.

11:06 - Her leadership style is a mixture, is based on her own faith as a devout Sikh colleague, mixed with the, some of my phrasing here, some of the socialist values that are part of Sikhism, and she is your consummate servant leader. She recognized instantly how let down the community felt, how stuck it felt. And she spent a huge amount of time in the first couple of years drinking tea and simply listening mainly

11:34 - to the mums about what are your hopes? What are your fears? What's gone wrong? How can we put it right together? That to me is harnessing, harnessing social capital. She did that brilliantly. Another example is how, the Star Academy chain led by Hamid Patel, they've established a number of schools in the city, and they, whilst they weren't running schools at the right, at a particular time, Hamid's chapter looks very,

12:04 - very carefully at how governance had gone wrong and how it had become run by some rather narrow single-minded cliques. And what Hamid realized was that the schools, whether they're faith schools or not faith schools in the city, to be truly successful, they need to be deeply rooted in the community. So the students at these schools, you'll find them. An example I often quote is that they, they're, they're very good at fundraising for disadvantaged members

12:34 - of local communities. Whether these are people with no cash, people who are homeless, they do a huge amount of work in local community. so having recognized that to shift things, you need that. Another example such will are za, he found himself invited to turn around the primary school that he'd been to as a boy. Well, what an opportunity. It'd never been rated good.

12:57 - It bumped along the bottom for a long time. What sad said is, look, you know, school improvement in Birmingham, it's, it's the same core ingredients as any school in the country in terms of clarity of vision and mission, investing in your staff, making sure schools are safe, safe places to learn, safe places to teach, improve the resourcing, improve the environments. Be very clear on your pedagogies, not in an ideological way,

13:26 - but in a way that suits your schools. One, one feature of Birmingham is there is pretty much an ideology free zone when it comes to how to teach in schools. There's so much disinformation about that around the place. So Satch said, look, it's a basic formula, but onto that, and this is the essence of being an urban school leader, you have to also provide for the students things that imagine these children were paying for a private education.

13:54 - Their families are paying, paying for a private education, the opportunities in the arts, the sports that is so important for them in terms of building their worldly view, their confidence and experience. So, another leader, for example, who took over three of the schools initially, he got huge emphasis on partnerships with arts organizations, sporting organizations. So you'll find pupils from his school, down at Wimbledon.

14:24 - Now, that would never have happened in the past. Similarly, you'll find his peoples on stage. They, they work with the Holocaust Education Trust that he was told these people very patronizing in the east end of Birmingham, they won't be interested in the Holocaust, Holocaust survivors and so on. my goodness, they absolutely are. So it's about broadening out the agenda whilst digging deep social roots in the community. I think that's the

14:50 - Formula. I hope that by reading part one, they will gain a deeper understanding of why these events happened. Now, it did. They did happen on Birmingham City Council Watch and Birmingham lost grip of its education following the departure of sit to Timbering house and his amazing team. So understand the provenance, understand the kind of preconditions whereby for many decades, these children are talking about these British,

15:20 - reporting. Pakistani children, our children, our Birmingham children were left down by the education system, the performance at school. Well, the expectations were low. Aspirations were low. A lot of teachers, I afraid, you know, you, you may have heard the expression at school, what can we expect of these kids? One of the mums in Golden Hill, said, look, I don't want my daughter to turn out like me.

15:48 - One of the dads said, all I was offered at careers evening was be a taxi driver or cookie bats. And it sounds outrageous that these things were said, but they were said. So we have to understand that the future, you know, we were needed to harness that aspiration, not sit on it, not squash on it, and squash it. And that's what's been happening. And by the way, some of these schools involved here, some of 'em had very good results.

16:13 - Indeed. It would be wrong to to to miss that out. There's just other issues about them. So that's part one. Part two amazing thing is, you know, Sam, when I asked these half dozen school leaders, incredibly successful people to write about their journey, their story, I said, imagine we're in the calf in a hub wherever we are. Just tell me how you did it. And they said, you are the Colin. You're the first person to ever ask us to do that.

16:41 - I thought, well, that's wrong. We need to capture all the institutional memory, all of the learnings. So at the end of each chapter, in the middle, there are takeaways for school leaders. If you're walking into their jobs now, this is how they would pass on their wisdom to you. And then the third section of the book is a wider review of education policy. What really works in urban education situations, the kind

17:06 - of policy that I feel we need for the future. And there's some great writers in there as well. So that's it. And it ends on a very optimistic note. Basically one of my favorite schools in the city about how it's a girls school, Muslim school, 99% Muslim. Just how brilliantly they have captured, success in that school. The tremendous sense of value of love for education. And these girls who are second,

17:35 - third generation in Birmingham are now forming the backbone of the NHS. Everybody from doctors, dentists, physios, nurses, everybody, and many other occupations as well, of course. So, let's be positive. this was a terrible episode for Birmingham and the country. but things are now moving forward. It'll take a.

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