Making a Difference, Now and Forever

Talk to the Voices from the East Research Conference (Transformative Advances in FE Research), held at East Coast College, Lowestoft 25.10.24

I was fascinated by the title of this Voices from the East event - Transformative Advances in FE Research. At the event we heard that theme extended in many directions and rightly so - it was all about learning from different perspectives. In fact, isn’t that what research should do? Collaborate, to build a bigger picture? When we see ‘transformative’ and ‘advances’ combined in a sentence - and it’s not an empty slogan when we come together in the context of FE research - I think we can guarantee that change is in the air.

Change is my focus as a researcher; changemaking my practice as a facilitator. In this article, I try to cut through some of the smoke and mirrors surrounding FE research and get to the heart of what matters to all of us - identifying practices that we know are worth experimenting with, to make things better for everyone concerned.

I sincerely believe that practitioner research is one of the most powerful levers of change in the FE system. The problem is that we’re often justifying where we’ve been, when we should be giving more time and attention to designing interventions that will have an affirmative impact on the future.

There’s an old cliché which goes, “If we do what we’ve always done, we’ll get what we’ve always got.” (Thank you Michaela Greaves for reminding me of this). If we want Transformative Advances, if we want to make a difference now and forever, we have to be prepared to try new things and evaluate them. Yes, we can take our inspiration from others - I’m a big fan of theory because we all stand on the shoulders of giants - but we can’t keep swimming round the goldfish bowl. Although practitioner research can be small-scale, it should also be far-reaching. 

I’ll talk to you in a few moments about the live dataset approach to impact innovation we’re using with Green Changemakers in the West Midlands. I’m mentioning it here because that work has brought us into contact with the Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation (we found it just in time, it’s now migrated to The Good Shift), which was part of Griffith University in Queensland, Australia. Their research archive is based on five years of working with big business and public sector organisations around innovating for environmental and social justice. They are trying to change the world, basically. 

There’s fabulous practice out there which helps us move on from existing research paradigms that anchor us to a world that is rapidly changing. Griffith’s work helped us situate our Green Changemaker research in what they call the ‘Long Now’ - researching in a space where we learn from the present and travel towards the future. Environmentally, socially and economically speaking that future is very uncertain, so Griffith caution us to set a direction, not a destination. 

Of course, as this framework shows, we do need to monitor and evaluate where we’ve been; the problem comes when we give all our time and energy to looking back, to the detriment of evaluating the impact we could potentially have - and that’s where we need to be, if we want to make a sustainable difference to how things are, for students, for ourselves, for society and for the planet.

Our current systems are such that we are constantly pulled back by a question that should liberate us: 

What is the impact?

That question hangs over every researcher’s head. If we want to do changemaking work, we have to shift the assumption that we can find causal links between our practice on the ground and our future-reaching direction, our transformative advances, our making a difference, now and forever. Not only is the global landscape too uncertain, we don’t currently have metrics for that, as our data is limited to individual and organisational outcomes - achievement rates, attendance figures. Even at a classroom practice level, we are crossing our fingers and hoping. A few years ago, the Department for Education funded a huge maths mastery programme called CfEM - Centres for Excellence in Maths - which was run as large-scale randomised control research, claimed to be the gold standard of research practice. As you may know, this vast investment generated hundreds of evidence-informed practitioner research projects up and down the country - brilliant practice in many cases which will have had an impact on individual teachers and the students they serve. It began, I think, in 2020. Four years later, the percentage of students achieving grade 4 and above has risen by 1%. We might have hoped for more.

That’s not to say CfEM has failed, or that it won’t continue to generate improvement. But the causal link - if we do this, that will happen - is too deeply entangled in complex problems - teacher recruitment and retention, practice in schools, grade boundaries and qualifications, and social issues such as poverty, racism, misogyny, the impact of COVID, global conflict, mental health and wellbeing, the future of work, the environmental crisis, as well as policy and funding.

It’s time to accept this and stop tying ourselves in knots. And it’s time to develop new metrics where we can. There’s absolutely nothing wrong with accounting for the public money we are given. There’s no need to dump the metrics that we have (though we don’t need to labour over them quite as much as we do). But as leadership expert Simon Sinek famously said, we need additional metrics, ones which are connected to purpose. And we need to know where to situate these in our research, if we want to make a difference, now and forever.

That’s where events like Voices from the East come in. That’s why it’s important that everything we hear at the conference is published in this volume and made available to all. And that’s why the wider FE Research community, represented so notably at the event, is essential to us learning forward into the future we seek to influence. Change happens collectively and our research networks are how we support, inspire and make a difference together. It’s how we keep our energy for changemaking alive, an energy which Green Changemakers call potentia - a joyful, activist power.

Close to practice research is righteous work. We won’t learn forward without it. Our perspectives as practitioners are vital. The Griffith Centre - and others working on systems-wide change - offer some useful reflections, but we will always be figuring out the impact thing as we go along. Opportunities such as Voices from the East and the country-wide LSRN events enable us to come together and ask the difficult questions:

Who is involved in this?

What are we measuring?

Why do we measure it?

When do we measure it?

How do we measure it?

…and how does this contribute to our sector’s directional goal, which - Griffith say - should be both stable and preposterous. How can we affirmatively imagine and move towards new futures?

Having a directional goal which is stable enough to help us navigate uncertainty and preposterous enough to dare to imagine is something which can bring us all together in FE Research. I wonder what yours might be? What ours might be, collectively, as an FE Research community? Griffith offer a process which helps develop a directional goal, but we hadn’t found their work when we launched the Green Changemakers programme a year ago. Ours emerged from a possibility questions session. Juliet Atuguba, one of the original Green Changemakers asked: 

What could FE look like, if every action taken was in the spirit of protecting and serving the environment?

At a workshop recently to explore the Griffith stuff, we reframed this as a directional goal:

Every action taken in FE will protect and serves the environment.

Preposterous, yes? Impossible to monitor, yes! We need to be bold about not pretending we can. There are other things which we can measure, which will make a contribution to the stable and preposterous goal. After the session, Green Changemaker Dawood Sadiq posted in our community WhatsApp group:

“Just been talking to my daughter! She points out that what I’m talking about is idealistic thinking and that is almost a dirty term in modern society - that is where we are going wrong! Idealism isn’t about being unrealistic, it’s about knowing when something is the right thing regardless of the consequences. It can be dangerous - that’s how radicalisation happens - but it’s also necessary if we want to achieve the impossible…”

If what we want is to make a difference - whether that’s to climate justice or the contributing factor of maths mastery - it helps to know where our research is contributing. That’s what Simon Sinek meant, when he talked about purpose-driven metrics. 

Back to the Green Changemakers.There are forty of them, in 18 colleges across the West Midlands. They are teachers and not-teachers, at various levels of the hierarchy, using their changemaker skills to influence the green agenda in their organisation in a slow inching towards the stable and preposterous directional goal. Trying to build “a movement on the ground and a narrative back into the system at the same time”, as Griffith would say. Short of a revolution, change is always found in the minor gestures. 

As changemaker Karen Walrond writes:

Direction not destination. And community is essential, for Green Changemakers to ebb and flow in their changemaking energy, their potentia. It’s a messy landscape, as you might imagine. Two steps forward over here, three steps back over there. Between them, they are probably working on more than a hundred projects, across technical, nature, people and systems thinking. And as with the FE Research landscape, it would be so easy for these projects to resemble confetti, maybe occasionally bumping into each other but with no intentional relationship, no sense of collective endeavour. It’s still a major challenge of FE Research that we haven’t - yet - collectively been able to gather everyone’s research all together, to see what it’s like as a whole. Not confetti but a beautiful ramen, with broth and noodles and dumplings, all the elements a tasty part of the whole. But that’s what we’re trying to do with Green Changemakers.

Our work is a live dataset. We’ve built a research methodology around our WhatsApp group, supplemented with regular online research circles and the occasional interview. The stage we are at is that we harvest everything we remember to tell one another, into a live impact document. What we do and (as far as we can establish) the impact it’s having. Six months in, we are moving from the short- into the medium term. Nobody is funding this, we’ve just set up the community to make it possible. 

But it’s not enough. That causal link is still not there. We can show what we’ve done, we’ve got evidence of systems change but not of the impact of that. So our next step is to slowly unfurl our learning in the direction of the stable but preposterous goal, developing metrics where they are meaningful and possible, building up towards what Griffith call a Challenge and Impact map (with the directional goal at the top). It’s very much a work in progress. But it comes from a tested source and it strikes me that if we can articulate it as a model, we can do similar work in the FE Research community too.

I began by saying how fascinated I was with the title of the event: Transformative Advances in FE Research. I’m humbled by it too. When I first got involved in the FE Research community, going back a decade now, there was a sense that we shouldn’t get too big for our boots. Practitioner research was small-scale, almost by definition action research - absolutely nothing wrong with that, and it’s not ‘less than’ (a randomised control trial, for example). Somehow, there was a feeling that it wasn’t our place to also make connections with the big stuff. But we can and we should. Because if not us, then who? The title of this year’s Voices from the East is ambitious, it’s future-thinking, it’s bold, it is full of potentia. It positions us to make a difference, now and forever. And we should not be scared to link the research we do in our classrooms and workplaces to that preposterous, stable goal, and affirm our intentions to try and change the world. 

Selected References

Burkett, Ingrid; McNeill, Joanne; Frohman, Rena and Price, Athanasia (2023). Challenge Led Innovation: organising for systems innovation at scale. Queensland, Australia. Griffith Centre for Systems Innovation. Available at: https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0033/1881573/GCSI-Challenge-Led-Innovation-Workbook.pdf 

Mycroft, Lou (2024). Why Changemaking in FE is Key to Securing Green Futures. Aoc Think Further Blog 3.10.24 Available at: https://www.aoc.co.uk/news-campaigns-parliament/news-views/aoc-blogs/why-changemaking-is-key-to-thinking-about-a-green-future 

Shribman, Matthew (2023). 15 Green Skills, Clearly Explained. AimHi Earth. Available at: https://www.griffith.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0033/1881573/GCSI-Challenge-Led-Innovation-Workbook.pdf 

Walrond, Karen (2021). The Lightmaker’s Manifesto: how to work for change without losing your joy. Minneapolis. Broadleaf Books.