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Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
Welcome to Bedrock Talks, a podcast from the team at Bedrock Learning that delves deep into the heart of literacy in education. Hosted by the insightful and experienced educator Andy Sammons, this podcast stands as a beacon for anyone passionate about enhancing literacy skills and understanding its pivotal role in education.
Each episode is a journey into the world of literacy education. Andy brings together a diverse array of voices from across the education sector, from seasoned teachers to renowned academics, policy makers to literacy advocates. All of our guests share a common goal: to explore and expand the horizons of literacy education.
We go beyond surface-level conversations. Our discussions are in-depth, nuanced, and filled with insights that only years of experience and expertise can bring. We tackle a wide range of topics, from innovative teaching methods to the latest research in literacy, the impact of technology on reading and writing, to strategies for engaging diverse learners. Our aim is to provide a platform where the complexities of literacy are unpacked and understood in a way that is both accessible and enlightening.
Join Andy and his guests as they illuminate the multifaceted world of literacy. Subscribe to Bedrock Talks and be part of a community that believes in the transformative power of literacy. Together, let's shape a more literate, informed, and connected world.
Bedrock Talks from Bedrock Learning
31. Revolutionising Education: Aaron Leary's Journey from Teacher to Innovator
Aaron Leary's journey - from a student grappling with language to co-founding Bedrock Learning - illustrates the transformative power of literacy in education. This episode explores personal experiences, teaching philosophies, and future aspirations in the PedTech sphere. Literacy, Aaron reveals, is more than just words; it’s a tool that shapes our thoughts and identities, a concept that lies at the heart of Bedrock’s mission.
Tune in as we explore the empowering role of oracy and debate in education. Aaron passionately discusses how these tools have the power to boost confidence and eloquence in students, especially in challenging environments. We also consider the impact of technology on communication skills, sparking a conversation on whether banning smartphones could improve cognitive functions and moods. Such insights are foundational to Bedrock Learning’s innovative approach, addressing the need for engaging and effective educational tools that elevate literacy education to new heights.
Finally, we delve into the crucial role of vocabulary instruction within school curricula. Aaron outlines Bedrock’s pioneering efforts in developing a Tier 2 vocabulary curriculum and integrating technology to simplify educational resources. With a vision of preparing for futures shaped by AI and societal changes, this episode is a testament to the transformative power of education and Bedrock's relentless pursuit of innovation.
Hi everyone. Thank you for continuing to download, subscribe and all the rest of it to the Bedrock Talks podcast. I'm Andy Sammons. I'm privileged to lead, subscribe and all the rest of it to the Bedrock Talks podcast. I'm Andy Sammons. I'm privileged to lead teaching and learning for all of Bedrock's schools. It's lovely to keep getting your feedback about the pod and the guests we've got and the interactions we're getting. It's lovely when you email us. You can always email me, andysammons at bedrocklearningorg. Also education at bedrocklearningorg. We'd love to hear your views and requests for other things to talk about. It's great that we've got a bit of a community going here. It's lovely. Today we have a really special guest, actually Someone who is responsible for this whole Bedrock thing Aaron Leary, the founder of Bedrock. Co-founder of Bedrock.
Speaker 2:Yes, yeah, I would say.
Speaker 1:yes, I was on my own for a couple of years but then Olivia did join and I just think I've been in enough meetings with Aaron now where Aaron has spoken passionately about our mission. I've spoken with a number of people who I think could really benefit from hearing the story of Bedrock, where it's come from, where we are, where we're looking to go. So I've asked him for half an hour of his time to just talk us through, give us some insights, give us a sense of his thinking, from where it's come from, where he's at. So thank you for giving up your time. You must be slammed, particularly this time of year. So thank you for coming on, Aaron.
Speaker 2:It's a pleasure. Thank you very much for inviting me onto this ever-growing podcast. It's really exciting. Thank you.
Speaker 1:So we'll jump straight into it. As many people will know, or at least have a sense of you know, you jumped into starting this project without funding. Um, you, you created it from nothing and you know when I made the decision to to move from teaching into Bedrock. I don't mind sharing that. You, you shared your story with me about moving out of of teaching into into this sector. Um, what led you to do what you've done and take the leap out of what is a fairly in lots of ways not every way it's a fairly secure industry in terms of education and kind of a job and that type of thing. Moving into what you've done, into a high paced, you know, high octane sector? You know what led you to do that? Where did that come from?
Speaker 2:Well, I think the answer to that question comes in two parts really. There's the educational strand and my experience as an English and drama teacher working for the Harris Federation English and drama teacher, working for the Harris Federation for four and a half years but then there's also just the me as a person and my experience and how those two things have dovetailed together. I think perhaps I shouldn't admit this to the public, but I was actually a bit disruptive at school as a student myself. You know I wasn't terribly naughty, but I was very good at derailing a lesson through low-level behavior and, frankly, I did a lot of that right up to year nine. I did a lot of that right up to year nine and I had this amazing English teacher join the school in year 10. And it was a really difficult time. Sadly, our headmistress was sent to prison for stealing all of the school's money.
Speaker 2:The school was called St John Rugby College and Catholic College and I mean there's no other way of describing the situation other than horrendous. The year group above us had a 5A to C rate of 8%. Wow, it was a really challenging environment to be learning in. And this English teacher who joined in year 10, she did something to me that I can only call an awakening. Really, she, um, she connected, she grounded my brain and she connected my realize that language is extremely powerful, and she taught me how to start to own the inner dialogue within my mind, to connect ideas, thoughts and feelings about the world that we live in, about the person who I was, with what came out on the page, and I found that process incredibly liberating and, frankly, quite cathartic.
Speaker 2:I think the other thing to say is that, from a background perspective, apart from the school being a very challenging environment to work in, I also come from a single parent, disadvantaged background, and, for reasons that I won't go into, I had to leave home in year 10. 10. So it was quite a seminal period in my life where there was instability at home and I had to leave home and move in with my grandmother, which was also not a great situation, and also the school around me was not functioning. And so right at that moment, when I began my GCSEs, I was growing with a backdrop of instability, and I think that in that situation, a young person can decided to swim, and swim hard, and so I think this speaks to the point I said about there's the educational side of my journey, but there's also the sort of personal story and because of all of that I've always been something of a fighter and that runs deep within my veins, really.
Speaker 1:So this teacher. I had a not the same but a similar moment in my education. I got to year 10. I was a bit of a coaster, probably not dissimilar to you, didn't initiate a lot of the naughtiness, but was more than happy when it arrived and probably, you know, was more than happy not to look the other way, yeah, but I had a bit of a similar kind of awakening where I remember the teacher. He was very socratic in his methods and it was almost like he would wind, wind me up with my thinking, and it was. He gave me a literacy in in some sense, and that's kind of what I really want to ask you now is literacy and we probably will get onto this literacy isn't. It goes beyond reading and writing and, as important as those things are, would it be fair to say that this teacher gave you or nurtured your literacy? Is that what that teacher did in terms of? And I just want to, I want to get a sense of that a little bit, a little bit more.
Speaker 2:She plugged my brain into my voice, and that's what I found liberating. She made me realize that I have a voice and that the ideas that I had in my mind were important, and the language is the medium with which I was able to start um conveying what was was in my mind. And you know I that that, for me, is what the liberating element of it is all about is being able to, you know, have a young person understand that what they are feeling and thinking is of importance and that that the language that they use to speak and to write with is a great, great enabler and empowerer, you know, of their ability to take their place in the world. Does she know this? Yes, she's a. Yeah, I'm sure she does. Yes, does she know the impact she's had on you? Does she know have?
Speaker 1:Yeah, I'm sure she does. Yes, Does she know the impact she's had on you? Does she know have?
Speaker 2:you been in?
Speaker 1:contact.
Speaker 2:We haven't been in contact for quite some time, but you know, no, we haven't.
Speaker 1:actually, We'll get her on the pod.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I'll get her on the pod, get her on. I remember I was struggling with one particular Shakespeare module in my A-levels and she was no longer teaching me at that point because I'd gone to Cooper's College and she'd moved on from Zincum Rigby. But you know, I went to her house and she gave me some private tuition and ham sandwiches and you know she was great, she was wonderful, and she was. You know, she was great, she was wonderful, um, and she was. You know, she was just one of those people. That that is. If that's not what a teacher can do for a young person, I don't know what. What is?
Speaker 1:but I am. I have cards that I've kept from my time as a teacher that I, every time I go to clear things out, I can't part with them. I can't part with them. They're very dear to me, very special to me, um, and I think we should never, as teachers, lose sight of what we do for our young people. And that kind of brings me on. You're working. You said before you worked in schools, for in in Harris school, um, in the Harris school for a number of years. What was it about your teaching career and what you'd seen in schools that was missing, that led you to create bedrock? What was it that you know was the catalyst? At that point, because I really want to get a sense of the, you know, the inception of the actual organization, really, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:Well, again, I think it's two-pronged. It's about me as an educator, but also I. I have always had this tendency from a young age to really get stuck in and to do something big, and I think that just speaks to the fact that I've had to do quite big things to survive in a backdrop of what's been quite, you know, unstable environment at times. So I was teaching a variety of ability of boys and I just became quite experimental quite early. Obviously, I was fresh out of Goldsmiths College and did my PGCE, but I love trying new things, always trying new things. How can I get these boys to speak more eloquently? How can I get my most unconfident learners, who are quite reticent in the room, to speak with a little bit of authority on a topic? And so I would, um, I would just I would say I was a bit of a you know, a bit of a an experimenter in the classroom. So one of the things that I I found particularly empowering was a lot of my lessons included debate. We would approach texts and the themes and ideas within literature, poetry, plays, novels, even news articles. I would approach that often through debate. I would move the chairs and tables in my room and we would follow through debate. I would move the chairs and tables in my room and we would follow coherent and standardised debating sort of principles. In fact, I won the debating competition for our boys at the school, at the Federation.
Speaker 2:I'm very happy about that. Well, doesn't that surprise me? But there is something quite um powerful about getting a group of young people to um learn how to win an argument around a particular topic, because they have no choice but to find their voice when you ask them to do that. And, of course, it's very competitive because there is a winning element to it. And um, I would, I would do things like that. I would also, um I could see how important speech and oracy was for awakening young people, and I would say more so than the process of writing. To begin with, the very first thing is to get children speaking with passion and authority about the things that we're talking about in the classroom, and the writing comes after that do you know I can speak to this a little bit in a very loose way because we we watched this documentary recently and I'd recommend listeners watch.
Speaker 1:This is the channel four one, about the school that banned smartphones and they basically did this experiment over I think it's three weeks, whatever it was, and all of the young people had to give up their smartphones and their devices at home for three weeks and they monitored their sleeping, their mood, their cognition. Actually, it was head of product Ellie Ashton that put me onto this documentary and it really made us reflect on. I know we're knackered at the end of the day, I know that we just want to eat our meal in peace, but we ban screens at the table in our house. And I thought when I say to my kids, what did you do at school today? Like they're not. You know they look like you've grown a horn. They're not bothered.
Speaker 1:But I started to think in the way that you just said there, about giving them a voice, about the things that they care about. So I said if you could have one superpower, what would it be? You know what's your? What was your favorite moment? Um of christmas? What's your best christmas present ever? Whatever it is. You get them talking about something they care about. I know it's not a debate, but my, my kids are eight and five, but I think it's getting them to think about things and and take a position on something that they can connect to.
Speaker 1:What you said before was quite personal, I think connecting your it was your brain with your voice. Is that right? Yes, correct, and that, I think, is hopefully what we're moving towards with the Oracy Commission and things like that. I think that's what we've got to try and do in this space. So you kind of think about the power of language and that type of thing. What, then, was the catalyst for Bedrock? What happened? Because that's big, a lot of teachers feel and say what you're feeling and saying. They don't go and start an ed tech. That's unusual.
Speaker 2:Yeah, but again, I think that probably speaks to the kind of character that I am, that I've always wanted to do things in a big way. I've never really been somebody to do something piecemeal and I guess some people would call it entrepreneurialism. I mean, thinking back to the school that I went to when the headmistress was sent to prison. You know, I raised three and a half thousand pounds. Thinking back to the school that I went to when the headmistress was sent to prison, I raised three and a half thousand pounds on my own back at the age of 16 to put on the school's first ever prom. So it's kind of in me, I'm a bit like that. But I guess, bringing it back to the context of working at the Harris Federation yes, bringing it back to the context of working at the Harris Federation, our colleagues in the maths department were using MyMaths, an Oxford University Press product, and I could see that the boys were doing their homework with it. It was something that teachers didn't have to really spend much time doing and I looked at what we were using. I'm actually I'm not going to mention some of the products that I've used today because I don't think that would be fair or appropriate, but the tools that we were using in the English department did not seem to be as efficacious as I would like, and one of those particular tools was procured to try to improve children's engagement with reading and, unfortunately, what I observed is that my higher achieving pupils were reading quite happily for the most part and didn't need a process or a system to monitor them because they enjoyed it. And my middle and lower achieving pupils many of them were using a system to try to improve their engagement with reading, but, frankly, I wasn't seeing a demonstrable shift in the enjoyment of that, and for some of my learners I would still. I would, you know I'm not exaggerating. I would see some of my Year 7 learners with Diary of a Wimpy Kid in their school book for three years. Now, I'm not anti-Diary of a Wimpy Kid, I'm just saying it's not progressive reading and therefore it is not going to be the thing that connects their mind to their voice.
Speaker 2:And so I could just see that there wasn't a viable option for the English department to do what the maths department would do with regards to numeracy. Via my maths and um, I wanted to do something about that. The other thing I'd say about this solution that we were using for trying to improve engagement with reading is that I don't believe that we should be setting read your book as our homework because, um, it doesn't feel aspirational enough to me to say, um, please could you read two chapters of your book and there's your homework. That should just be happening anyway. Yeah, so my assessment of the situation was that, um, there was not a coherent and viable solution the english departments could use for homework in the way that the maths department were using. But, on top of that, bringing this away from homework, I did use a variety of solutions to improve our children's literacy Other digital products as well as reading solutions led by our own teachers, of other digital products as well as reading solutions led by our own teachers, sometimes a blend of products that teachers lead within the school and one particular provider who came into the school to provide small, targeted interventions, and all of them had varying levels of of of efficacy.
Speaker 2:But but my my overall sort of analysis was that our higher achieving pupils were doing very well, and they were just going to do well. Um, we didn't have many non-readers in the school. There's only a small, small handful of boys that couldn't read. And yet the things that I was trying, that the marketplace were providing, didn't seem to really be to be pitched at that sort of 60 to 70% of the cohort mark. Things felt like very catch-uppy and what I wanted to do was build something that had a genuine impact for a very large section of the school cohort that didn't end up looking and feeling like teachers saying could you please read a book for your homework. So that's the kind of general epiphany that I had in the classroom and it led me to believe that I could build a solution to address these issues.
Speaker 1:And I think it's interesting because I think I've shared with you before. I remember the first time I heard of Bedrock Learning. I was at a children's party and I was scrolling I'd just become a head of English and I was actually scrolling Twitter and someone mentioned Bedrock as something that would be a useful reading solution across the school.
Speaker 2:That must have been very early on in our journey.
Speaker 1:Very early on, very early on, and I remember thinking, yeah, I like this, because what I had been using up to that point was a little bit too similar to what you described around read this, maybe get your parents to sign something to show you've read it, and then we'll take it from there.
Speaker 1:And I thought, if I'm you know, as a leader at that point, if I'm going to spend a lot of my budget on something, I need value for money, I need value for my children's time, I need value for my teacher's time in terms of the insights.
Speaker 1:And I think, above all, when I speak with schools about this, I say we're trying to achieve something much more profound than just simply giving them something to do for homework. We're giving them something which is culturally enriching, which is targeted, which wraps around them. And one thing you said before really struck me as well, which is that, to a certain extent, the kids that love reading are always going to love reading at the top, and we still have an obligation to provide, you know, stretch and challenge to them um, as a, as a solution. But what about that critical mass of kids in the middle who maybe don't perhaps get the positive reinforcement out of reading as we would like. What structured experiences are schools providing for those? And that's where I think Bedrock really does hit the mark. That's where I sense that you wanted to pitch to.
Speaker 2:I think I just take a pragmatic view on the relationship that many young people have with reading.
Speaker 2:There are numerous data points and numerous studies that show that children who read widely and scale their reading to much better academically.
Speaker 2:But I'm a pragmatist and I know that many children will never read in the way that reading can impact on them. And what I want to do, what I want to do is I want to give as many young people the experience that I had, and I want their minds to be plugged into their voices. And it can be done and the way that we do that. There are many ways we do it, but one of the most profound things that we can do for a young person is to give them the linguistic capability to read confidently, to speak confidently and to write confidently. And I profoundly believe that if we do that for as many of our young people as possible, we will give them a far brighter future. And I believe even more profoundly that if we do that for as many of our young people as possible, we are directly investing into the quality of our society. And I don't believe that just asking or relying on children just reading is going to bring about systemic transformation in the way that I know that systematically improving a child's linguistic capability can.
Speaker 1:Particularly in a world where, you know, we've got screens as so embedded into our lives as they are AI as well. I spoke to Dan Fitzpatrick a few months ago who said you know, let's make no mistake, the gap between the haves and the have-nots is going to remain unless we teach young people to have a voice around their own literacy and what they're thinking. Because, ai, until we achieve singularity with ai, they're going to need to express themselves effectively. They're going to need literacy to do that. And that kind of brings me on to my next question, really around bedrock being in its 10th year. Yeah, what have you seen change over? I've been. I've been a bedrock about 18 months and it's changed. The way schools are interacting and asking questions of us in a really lovely way has changed.
Speaker 2:But what have you seen? And Bedrock's product has changed so much in the last 10 years as well.
Speaker 1:I mean, it's just incredible the scope of everything on both sides. So what have you seen? What have been the trends that you've seen over the past decade?
Speaker 2:I think the first and most salient shift has taken place. I'd say about five and a half to six years ago, when I actually created the first version of bedrock on my own in vietnam. Um, I actually built it myself and, um, when I was, I was calling schools and, you know, getting early adopters to join this, this mission that we have to improve children's linguistic capabilities. I would hear some schools say, no, we're not doing vocabulary as part of our SIP or our initiatives. We are focusing on, we're very heavily focusing on spellings and I thought what do we mean here? How can you focus on spellings but not the vocabulary?
Speaker 2:I spoke to many teachers in the early years of Bedrock and I travelled the left and breadth of the country providing CPD and training. I went to many, many schools and almost no teachers knew what a tier one, a tier two and a tier three word was. I almost never speak to a teacher now who doesn't know what a tier one, a tier two and a tier three word is, as a result of Isabel Beck's work being embedded into the system and Bedrock's work. Well, of course, of course I do believe that Bedrock really pushed that a lot. Our entire curriculum to begin with was a levelled tier two curriculum embedded into a range of fiction and non-fiction. So I feel that schools have become very much more word aware, very much more word aware, but I don't see a great many of them really committing to embedding, uh, research-based approaches to teaching vocabulary in a coherent way across. Why do you think?
Speaker 2:there is why didn't I think time and planning. One of the things that I find frustrating at times it doesn't happen all of the time is when I see conversations with some schools where they say we haven't got time to teach all of the vocabulary because we're we've got so much content to cover. And I always, you know, reflect on the fact that there's that. You know, if you're teaching the word photosynthesis in a way that guarantees and ensures that the children have a deep and secure understanding of that term, you're not just teaching the meaning of a word, you're teaching the science and if that word is embedded, it's going to have a semantic connection to another word. And that is how the web of language is built.
Speaker 2:And I do feel that we have more work to do to get the entire landscape to understand that having a pre-planned linguistic curriculum covering tier two and tier three vocabulary is not just a vocabulary curriculum, it is a knowledge curriculum which provides deep understanding of concepts and ideas. The way I like to think about language is it's not just a word, it's each word is connected to another word, and so the more language that we can have children understanding, the more we are connecting ideas, neurons in their brain. We're building a neural network through aspirational language and I just I think I've worked with some partner schools who really get that and they create time in the curriculum and in the day-to-day lesson sequence to ensure that the linguistic demands of each area are fully understood. But for some schools I still think there's this tension where they think we haven't got the time to do that and therefore we're just going to cover the content. But my argument would be the language of the subject is symbiotic with the content. It is the content.
Speaker 1:And in that 10 years, would you say? I mean you alluded earlier to the fact that Bedrock's solution and the product itself has changed over the last 10 years and what you've striven to kind of offer schools has changed. Has your thinking changed? Was that your thinking 10 years ago and do you feel like your thinking and what you've tried to offer schools has changed in that decade?
Speaker 2:Yeah, massively. Decade yeah, massively. I mean, I was sitting in front of a white screen on a laptop in Vietnam without the ability to write code, not fully knowing how I was going to synthesize down all of my experiences into a product that I would hope would have impact on young people. So my horizon was much closer to me back then and, through a very large amount of research and development, we created a leveled tier two vocabulary curriculum which turns the process of reading fiction and non-fiction into a coherent vocabulary expansion exercise. And, to be honest, without sounding too hubristic, that was a world first. We are the only solution that has turned the process of reading into a systematic, personalized vocabulary expansion exercise, and isn't that why we're asking children to read in the first place?
Speaker 1:Yeah, and I think it speaks as well to the fact that you know I often go back to you know you said yourself about teachers and time.
Speaker 1:I think it's about you know what they're asking young people to do and staff to monitor and all those things. And I think if you've got under one roof something that is driving powerful insights back to teachers, something that's exposing children to a range of fiction and non-fiction and actually they might not love everything they read in Bedrock, they might not love every single topic and every single lesson that they do but that's informing them of their choices and what they love and what they want to read more of. And I think there's something to the breadth that when you are obsessed with content and curricula, you know you miss the breadth and you miss exposing children to such a wide range of and as fantastic as the conversation has now moved on curriculum, there's only so much that we can expose children to in lessons that there's time outside of lessons that is there for them as well. And I mean I did want to just ask you because I know that lots of people are interested in this. Ask you because I know that lots of people are interested in this.
Speaker 1:um, you made a quite a bold decision to develop the reading test in the last, you know, 12, 18 months, and I remember being a bedrock geek, you know, give me anything bedrock in the early days and I would have. You know, I want to. I signed up to sign up for the alert. Sign up, you know, whatever. What's behind that. What's you know, you think you know, we think about where we are now as a, as an organization. What's behind that. What's been you know, you think you know we think about where we are now as a, as an organization. What's behind the reading?
Speaker 2:yeah, well, if I could just go back one step, because before the reading test, um, obviously the solution that schools were most used to using was our tier two vocabulary curriculum, as well as the national curriculum aligned grammar curriculum. But, um, I, we had no tier three content subject, specific knowledge on our platform and, um, I, I, you know, I knew that we needed to have that in our curriculum, in our offering, and so, particularly you know, it's not just me saying this you've got alex quigley, you've got the education endowment foundation recommending that every teacher judiciously chooses the right language to teach in every subject area, that they are, and they are teachers of language too, and I and I, I, I just thought for us to really bring about systemic transformation, we need to go beyond the tier two domain and we need to provide the whole education system with ready-made research-based activities to teach language in a coherent way. So actually I would say that that that project was um very frightening and daunting because, um, I mean this, the tier three curriculum now has over 49 000 words in it. Um, there's over 1.5 million activities in that database. Um, every single word, be it pythagoras or Pyramid or whatever, there's six or seven research-based activities. So to produce an offering of that scale for both primary and secondary was extremely challenging.
Speaker 2:But I'm very proud of the fact that it doesn't matter whether you're teaching in a primary school in scotland or a science lesson in london. You can log on to the classroom hub now and you can have high quality um subject specific knowledge on the whiteboard or powered by deep learning algorithms for the young people and I do really. You know we can see the impact that's having on our young people because of the scale of language that um they're acquiring. But I think you know, moving into the reading test um, we've been crunching reading test data for years. I can't I can't think about the number of schools where we have asked them to share with us the reading test data that they might be using to demonstrate impact, and I just felt that schools needed a solution that enabled them to, on the one hand, have the knowledge to actually improve the linguistic capability and knowledge of the learners, whilst simultaneously and effortlessly being able to assess it and to demonstrate impact at the same time.
Speaker 2:And the reading test really was a complicated task. We had to work with Cambridge University Psychometric Centre and professors Jesse Ricketts and Kate Nation to make sure that we got this right and I'm very pleased that schools are now able to get all of what they need when it comes to demonstrating impact and improving outcomes. You know, in the one login and in the one solution. It's a time saver, it's it's cost effective and and and and it speaks to our vision of you know, one platform, one login, high value, and we don't want schools to have to work with 15 or 12 providers for different things. We don't want that. We want a coherent and simplified synergistic offering, and so the construction of the Tier 2 curriculum, the Tier 3 curriculum, the reading test, the grammar curriculum, all designed to ensure that schools get all of what they need with one provider.
Speaker 1:And I think that kind of brings me on to my final question, really, which is if we do fast forward five or ten years, where do you see this going? Because, as I said before, in the last 18 months things have changed, let alone you know goodness knows what the next five to ten years holds. Where do you see things moving to? We're on the precipice of something huge, aren't we, with AI and societal?
Speaker 2:change. We are and right now we are, our team, are working extremely hard to deliver some quite fascinating functionality to schools in the next 12 months, powered by AI. Functionality that will allow children to write on the platform and for us to diagnose the um, the, the quality of the response, going back to photosynthesis if the gcse question is set within the classroom, being able to effortlessly and automatically grade that, that, that response, and then power the child's learning experience as a result of that um. So there's no there's no denying that there's huge, huge transformative and potential with the proliferation of ai. Over the last two and a half to three years, I um think more broadly, beyond um, just ai on its own.
Speaker 2:I've been working with a man called Fergal Roche, who's actually Bedrock's chairman. He was the CEO of an organisation called the Key for Scores and you know the Key own Arbor. I'm sure most teachers will have heard of that, but Fergal's an ex-English teacher as well. He ran the Key for many, many years years and he's now Bedrock's chairman and um he said to me when he started working me two years ago. He said to me you? Um need to understand that you have the opportunity to do something truly transformative at a systemic level for schools and for young people. And so my horizon from those first years in Vietnam has widened and gone further and further out, and I profoundly believe that we are not getting education right for our young people at times.
Speaker 2:I'm not saying in all cases, but what I believe is that the education system hasn't really changed much in the last hundred years. And I have no intention of denigrating the value of a teacher because of the experience that I've shared with you today. That is their power. But what can be done and what we are doing is augmenting the relationship between technology and teacher so that they are as impactful as they can be. And we're building solutions that justify a school switching to a one-to-one device model. Justify a school switching to a one-to-one device model. I mean, from my experience as a teacher, getting the laptops out of the laptop trolley and the wires exploding in your face like a bowl of spaghetti is, you know, is a behavior nightmare. That cannot be what tech looks like in schools. What we're building is solutions where teachers say my lesson is better when we have devices, and this is why the insights are flowing automatically to me. I don't have to mark the children's learning experiences ultra personalized and impactful, and that they know what to do next for maximum impact.
Speaker 1:I mean, we're early doors on this, obviously, and we're still continuing to optimise what Bedrock currently is. But when we work with schools in my teaching and learning team, one thing we're often making sure that we emphasise with schools is we have to think of a way of bringing the classroom hub into lessons. We have to think of ways of making sure that the young people see the reading in Bedrock as part of their literacy development, as part of something that's going to close a loop and the teacher is being empowered and augmented to close that loop and, obviously, optimising the overall. You know the platform that you're looking at the work that Bedrock are doing. I think it's really important that that's a philosophy that's in Bedrock right now. It's about putting teachers at the heart of everything and I make no apologies for saying to schools Bedrock is not just about the kids, bedrock is about the teachers as well, because the teachers are the biggest game changer in the kids' lives.
Speaker 2:And, in all honesty, in terms of our product lifecycle and development, because I built the first version of my own, I only had limited resource, so it was imperative that I built a solution that had the maximum impact on learning for young people.
Speaker 2:But I think at this stage in our development and we are deploying a lot of investment and resources this year into our product but now we are thinking very, very carefully about the classroom experience, and the classroom experience is more than just the children, right, it's the teacher too. One of the things that I've realised by doing this for the last decade now is that I truly do want to bring about systemic transformation, to create an equitable education system where young people feel empowered, and I do not believe that any homework tool can do that, and why it's just homework, and so our solution and our working plan is to evolve and to augment and to support what happens in the classroom, and because we are a technology solution, tech will obviously be a major part of that, and I do believe the future classroom is going to be tech enabled and it's not going to look like the classroom of the last hundred years.
Speaker 1:And do you know something? Nor should it. Nor should it. You know, the world is changing and I think we all need to catch up with that, um, and not be scared of it, and I think it's, it's lovely to hear that we're looking to come alongside schools in that journey, um, which is really important, and that's that's. That's inspirational for for my team, it's inspirational for for for everyone. I think, um, that's been really insightful, it's been, it's been a pleasure. Thank you so much for how you know, for giving us your time.
Speaker 2:I don't get an opportunity very much to to to reflect on what I've been up to this last decade, so, um, I'm just normally busy head down actually doing the work. So it's been enjoyable to talk about our journey.
Speaker 1:Thank you very much um, yeah, and thank you so much and hopefully in the next year or so we'll get you on again and hear more about what's what's been happening um behind the scenes. But that was aaron leary, founder ceo of bedrock. Um, please do send questions my way, our way, I'm sure we can. We can ask further ones um of him as well. Um, please do continue to like and subscribe and things like that on the pod channels. It makes a big difference to kind of you know other people finding us, other people reaching out. We're having people come on actually say, can we come on your pod? We think it's fantastic. So please do continue to do that and share this with educators and with people interested in this space. Thanks everyone, until next time. Bye.
