The Pioneer interview with... Lucy Stephens

Lucy Stephens is pioneering a whole new approach to children’s education at The New School in Croydon.

Many school-teachers feel there might be a better way to go about education, but few choose to challenge the status quo by establishing a completely new style of school…. and then aim to use it to change the whole nation’s approach to education.

Lucy Stephens qualified as a teacher in 2008. Like many others, she left the profession after a few years.

Following time working in different sectors, she began to believe that giving children and young people a whole lot more freedom and control in what they did at school, might be a new and better way create the desire and motivation to learn. If the motivation was in place, performance in all sorts of ways would follow.

She didn’t just have the thought – she decided to establish a school, The New School in Croydon, to prove the point. She felt that unless she could demonstrate the ideas working in practice, creating what we call a great big Moment of Belief, she would never change the assumptions held by the establishment.

She’s four years in, well on the way, but still with much to do to change the world in the ways they aim to. 

Q. What was it about teaching in mainstream schools that you felt could be done better? And what did you learn from spending time outside education that reinforced and built on those beliefs?

There wasn't time to let kids explore their interests. I felt like I was shoehorning kids through SATs papers. Education should be fun, and learning should be interesting. But it's death by worksheet. Even if you planned creative lessons, there wasn’t time to fully run them.

While there are some innovative schools, the ones I worked in weren’t meeting the needs of the children in the class and I really felt that it was at odds with child development and how children learn - through movement, through play, through interaction.

When I left education, I did a number of other things. Working with the Prince’s Trust made me realise that for young people who have been on the outskirts of the education system for so long, it was hard to reintegrate and then to get into finding a job or career interests because they had no idea what they were interested in anymore.

After retraining as a nutritional therapist and gaining a diploma in Psycho Neuroimmunology, I began to understand the interconnections between our nervous system, the immune system and our psyche. And it really hit home to me how similar the medical model is to education. You look at the liver, or the heart, or the brain and how they interconnect. In the same way, you can look at literacy or numeracy and how they interconnect. When you look at them in an interconnected way, you see the root causes of things. This really shaped my way of thinking about child development.

Q. How did the idea of The New School come together – and what was the trigger, your ‘Burningness’, to take the leap, with all the risks and pain that entailed?

Looking at where or how I was going to educate my own children made me deeply reflect on the education system for the first time. I was looking at lots of different schools and thinking: “where do I put my kids? What's developmentally appropriate?”

You can find lots of quite cool early years settings where they have a good understanding of child development, but it drops off a cliff a year later. Suddenly you go from, oh, this is amazing play-based learning to sitting at a desk going through phonic screening.

I spent a couple of years researching lots of different models of education; the Montessori's, Steiner, democratic schools and so on. I thought what do we want for children in the future? I want them to come out of education knowing who they are, having the skills to be able to articulate themselves in a group, to be able to manage conflict, to have that sense of agency to have interests and goals, and all the necessary executive function skills to action those goals.

The democratic school model really spoke to me. All democratic schools look very different, but the two pillars that stood out were young people having much more of a choice and much more of a voice.

Most alternative model education settings are vastly more child development-focused, but they're fee-paying, and I thought about the children in the very first class that I taught; they wouldn't be able to afford this. So, if I believe passionately that this is important for all young people, then how do I make it equitable? How do I make it free? And that is a huge, huge challenge. We are still working on our funding model so we can become more sustainable.

Q. What is the ultimate aim of The New School project?

Our theory of change is for young people to leave us at 16 with a strong sense of personal agency. By that we mean they've got goals and interests, but they've also got all the skills and competencies – social, emotional and academic – to action those goals.

We think of ourselves as an educational charity with a start-up R&D model. You can have passionate and creative head teachers in mainstream schools but you're still bound by structures that prevent you from being able to rip up the rule book or test things or try things.

We've got a lot of research behind us and we want to influence and shift the system, but it’s challenging. We would love for the system to adopt aspects of our model. We would love the system to learn and for us to share practice.

Our school is like an innovation lab; we are making education equitable for all young people, and executive function skills are the levellers. We’d like the tech or corporate world to use it to test ideas. We are working up an AI data methodology that will hopefully give us the outcome of learning to learn. If we can create a methodology that enables us to evaluate which of the young people are learning to learn and then understand what interventions impact that, that's something that's applicable and transferable.

You've got corporates or universities who are thinking: “Do I want a series of nines on a piece of paper, or do I want someone who’s got a really strong ability to learn?”

The future is going to be largely taken by robots. Children are going to have multiple careers. They need to be flexible. They need to be adaptable. They're going to have to shift skill sets into various different kinds of roles. So which student would you take?

I think that leverage from the corporate world and potentially also universities on schools will force practice to change. This is how we’re thinking about what we do and how we spread influence, flipping the challenge on its head.

Q. How is the New School different from other schools?

If you came to our school in the morning, it wouldn't look vastly different from a mainstream school. We're not an unschooling school. In the mornings, the children will be in their Maths lesson or their Literacy lesson. These are timetabled lessons. It's in the afternoon when they’ve got much more freedom to choose – perhaps to do a science project or go to forest school. They might go to bushcraft.

We’re building the skills of choice. While students don’t choose whether or not to do Maths or Literacy, we are building choices in how children learn. Because our classes are mixed ages, we are experimenting with pedagogical flexibility by running four Maths groups at a time with students choosing which group they join. If you need more practice with fractions, you join one group, but if you feel comfortable with that and need to move on to algebra, you join a different group.

We keep it open and fluid. Young people really learn their pitch point. They can move between groups during a lesson. They may think they don’t know fractions, so go with one group, then after a brief refresher, remember, and move on to another group.

Another thing that’s different is children and teachers coming together to share views and ideas in circles. What the children say can change what the school does. Their voices influence what we do; it isn’t tokenistic.

Q. How has the school and learning approach developed since it opened in 2020?

We're constantly evolving. We look at research and think, for example, how do you embed social and emotional learning? We also look at other models, such as how Montessori thinks about child-led learning or how Summerhill does opt-in.

We had some really challenging children when we first opened and we didn't have a strong enough provision for special educational needs or disabilities. That kind of took us by surprise, actually. You can be as prepared as you like, but until things come up, you don't realise you need a policy for it and some things we tried just didn’t work in our context.

Take break times. We initially thought we didn't need official break times. Our teachers can just be fluid with it – the children can go out for a break, and then they come back in, but teachers need a break. How does this fit in? So, do we all have to break at the same time? How do you get your group back in when they're playing with another group? Just simple things like that.

We’ve tried to be really free, then find we have to make it really rigid, then realise, actually, we don't need it quite that rigid. We're on the more radical side, then find that's not really working, so go a bit more towards what would seem mainstream and think either there's really a valid reason why it is done this way, or no, that really doesn't work. It's fluid, we have conversations and continually try out and learn.

This makes it a very exciting kind of place to work but it takes a certain personality, someone who is comfortable with change and being flexible.

Q. It is still very early days – how do you know whether The New School and the new model of learning is succeeding?

For us, it's being able to show that using this kind of model, we’ve been able to develop a broader skill set; we really understand ‘learning to learn’ – who are the young people who are learning to learn, and shaping that narrative with employers.

We've always been really keen to demonstrate our impact, and we know that being able to demonstrate our impact helps with our funding. We always thought that we were trying to demonstrate it to policymakers and the local authorities, which is true to an extent, but trying to get them to change practice based on it is the trickier thing.

So, we do a lot of research with different universities. We look at our reports and see this is working in the sense that young people have freedom and are building skills. We collect a lot of data internally, and we measure our four key outcomes: self-efficacy, self-esteem, educational engagement, and life satisfaction. This is how we’re quantitatively tracking ‘success’.

And I think anecdotally, it's having a school of children who are really happy to come here. Children who have hated mainstream schools and here, they are just like, oh, this is a relief. Or other children who have come from homeschooling and prefer it. It doesn't work for some young people and so they leave, which is also natural.

I suppose for me, success will be when we're financially sustainable. We've landed the approach with something or someone which has given us the funding to continue doing it. I had always hoped that that was going to be central government or local government but the reality right now is it's going to be something like a tech company or corporate.

Q. We see what you’re doing as pioneering on behalf of the people you, and schools in general, serve – people we refer to as ‘customers’. Who are your customers and what problems do they need to solve, or what outcomes do they each want?

I mean, we've got the standard problems of the education system, haven't we? We've got young people with additional needs not being met and finding school incredibly stressful. We've got plummeting attendance rates.

There are particular demographics that are really struggling in the current system - black boys, white boys, rural areas. We've got incredibly high levels of mental ill health in adolescence. We've got a teacher retention crisis and a recruitment crisis.

When you look at scores of kids with straight nines, and this may be a weird thing to say, but I worry – how do we know that we've got the other half of what they need?

I think there's a myriad of problems in education and I think we've got a rapidly changing world coming upon us, exponentially fast. We're at the advent of AI; are our young people ready for it? I don't know. I think that there are lots of problems for children and young people today.

If we broaden it out from children, we have a huge innovation crisis looming. There is no way with our public services to test and understand innovative solutions and scalability because we’re trying to fit solutions into older clunky systems and double down on old ways of doing things.

So how do we build the new models and understand and learn from them? The problem with any innovation is there are no funding mechanisms at the moment to understand and share this work. So how do we pioneer and change young people's experience when actually there's no way of funding this pioneering unless you take it private, and then you have cut out a huge subsection of your group whose experiences you are trying to change?

Q. What does this idea of pioneering on behalf of customers mean to you? Why do you think organisations find it so hard?

I think it always comes back down to structures. In education, it's the structures within the education system that make it inequitable. It takes a radical overhaul to change some of those things, and I think it's the same in business. You have a business that is structured with KPIs that are usually money-based, profit-driven. It’s a very input-output system. What can we put in here that will get the money out in the end?

For Education it’s what can we put into this child to get out the straight nines at the end? It’s just illogical when you apply it to children because they're not an input-output model. But it's also illogical when you apply it to customers because they're not an input-output model either. If you don't accommodate the nuance of being human in structures, then it makes it incredibly hard to see things through the eyes of the customer.

It shouldn't be radical to turn this around, but turning it on its head can feel a bit intimidating and a bit scary. We grow children through structures, and then we put them into workforces that are structured with everything hierarchical.

It's very hard to find the people who will innovate and flip that on the head. Everyone is always looking upwards for the answers. Unless we train our kids to look within, we're never going to get the workforce that can innovate and say we’re looking at this upside down, there's no point looking at the end profit if we haven't worked out what the customer is experiencing.

Q. Are there any Customer Pioneer organisations or individuals that you particularly admire, in any sector or part of the world?

What is often interesting is that it's the people who are less institutionalized, less drilled and less trained in particular models who are the ones that can think outside the box, who are able to say, “hold on, this isn't right. There must be a different solution. Let's try it and see what happens.”

Within The Foundation’s Mountaineer community, there’s David Magliano, who is brilliant. He thinks quite differently, and Handelsbanken, with Pernille Sahl Taylor, are revolutionising banking so it’s more democratic. Then there’s John and James Timpson, the way Timpson’s think about their model and the freedom that's given to ex-offenders to make decisions and make choices in how they serve the customer.