This episode is a fantastic conversation with 2 brilliant women who have been whipping up a storm this week with the release of their amazing new book ⁠The Disengaged Teen: Helping Kids Learn Better, Feel Better, and Live Better⁠! Dr Rebecca Winthrop and Jenny Anderson chat with me about the disengagement crisis facing our young people and what we, as parents and educators, can do about it.

It's a strange thing that the concept of school has become almost universal over the last few hundred years. If you ask anyone almost anywhere in the world, they will be able to describe something that looks roughly like a shared concept of school. But maybe it didn't have to be this way. Maybe it could have been different. This week the amazing professor of anthropology Susan Blum Joins me to talk about 'schoolishness' which is her latest fantastic book, based on decades of research into the cultural development of the dominant ideas around formal institutional education.

We're ending this final epsiode of 2024 in a beautiful place with Karima Kadaoui sharing in some co-reflections with me about the trustful and humanising society that she is seeing emerge in Morocco and beyond. It became really clear to me during this conversation with Karima, that the way that we talk about the work we are doing is a really important choice. This is because it sets up frames and expectations that really affect how we do the work. So for that reason, I'm not going to say much about the incredible work that is happening across communities, schools and government ministries across Morocco through the Tamkeen process as Karima describes it much more beautifully than I ever could.

The inspiration for this end-of-year impromptu gathering came from a recent flurry of ‘Collapse'-inspired exchanges in my (un)social media feeds! This was prompted largely by Ginie Servant Miklos’ recently published and brilliant book, Pedagogies of Collapse: A Hopeful Education for The End of The World as We Know It (quoted in the title of the episode) and Will Richardson’s equally provocative and inspiring, Confronting Education In a Time of Complexity, Chaos and Collapse…

Systems change, or in fact any change, in formal education systems is notoriously hard. Research and innovation across the sector has been historically weak. But as the stakes get higher for much-needed change, we have to get better at harnessing the collective intelligence of what we know, from young people to practitioners in classrooms everyday to parents and leaders. This week’s guest has been working at the heart of this issue since the 1990s. Sir Geoff Mulgan is a Professor at University College London (UCL), in the Science, Technology, Engineering and Policy team (STEaPP) in the engineering department.