Ep 72. Inside one of England’s top-performing non-selective schools with Robert Peal

This transcript was created with speech-to-text software.  It was reviewed before posting but may contain errors. Credit to Canadian Podcasting Productions.

In this episode, Anna Stokke is joined by Robert Peal, joint head teacher of West London Free School, one of England’s highest-performing non-selective schools.  Robert is also the author of Progressively Worse and co-author, with Nick Gibb, of Reforming Lessons:  Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved. Anna visited West London Free School recently and invited Robert to join the podcast to share what makes the school so successful.

They discuss the school’s approach to behaviour, school culture, high expectations, and a knowledge-rich curriculum.  They also talk about England’s school reforms and why ineffective educational fads have continued to resurface throughout history, despite weak evidence. Teachers, school leaders, and policymakers will find practical insights on how structure, high expectations, a knowledge-based curriculum, and effective teaching are the keys to improving student outcomes.

This episode is available in video at www.youtube.com/@chalktalk-stokke 

TIMESTAMPS

[00:00:22] Introduction

[00:03:37] Inside West London Free School

[00:07:21] Why Free Schools were established in England

[00:12:33] Establishing behaviour expectations

[00:17:04] House points and celebrating achievements

[00:18:07] School sanctions

[00:21:06] Silent corridors, and their role in the West London Free School

[00:25:33] Parents’ response

[00:29:10] Breakdown of the ‘House System'

[00:36:59] A knowledge-rich curriculum in practice

[00:41:28] Training teachers on best teaching practices

[00:46:35] Grouping students based on readiness

[00:50:23] Formative assessments and summative assessments

[00:54:53] Is socioeconomic background a good excuse for poor outcomes?

[01:00:07] Final advice

[00:00:22] Anna Stokke: Welcome to Chalk & Talk, a podcast about education and math. I'm Anna Stokke, a math professor and your host. Welcome back to another episode of Chalk & Talk.

Today I'm joined by Robert Peal, joint head teacher of the West London Free School, which is one of the highest performing non-selective schools in England. And I have to say, this is an episode I've been really looking forward to publishing because I actually visited the school in March and I was hugely impressed. The classrooms were calm and focused, the teaching was excellent, and the students were articulate and confident.

I knew I had to have them on the podcast to talk about what's making this school work so well. In this conversation, we talk about what makes the school successful, from behaviour systems and school culture to a knowledge-based curriculum and high expectations. And Rob is also an expert on the history of education and the many failed fads that keep resurfacing.

So, we also dig into why so many approaches in education haven't worked and what some of the proponents of those ideas get wrong. Teachers, school leaders, and policymakers will find a lot to take away from this conversation, especially when it comes to how focusing on behaviour, structure, and high expectations can make a real difference for students. I really enjoyed this conversation, and I hope you do too.

Now, on with the show. I am delighted to be joined today by Robert Peel. Rob is a joint head teacher of the West London Free School, which is a high performing non-selective school in London.

And accolades for that school include being given the title of 2026 Best State Comprehensive School by the Sunday Times and fourth best GCSE results for any comprehensive school in England. That's a national exam that all English pupils take when they are 16. He is co-author of Reforming Lessons, Why English Schools Have Improved Since 2010 and How This Was Achieved, that's written with Nick Gibb, and Progressively Worse, which is a critique of child-centered teaching methods in English schools, as well as several history books.

From 2015 to 2016, he worked at the Department for Education as a speechwriter and policy advisor to Nick Gibb. He studied history at Cambridge before completing a master's in history from the University of Pennsylvania under a Turon scholarship. He has served on various advisory panels at the Department for Education, and in 2024, he was awarded an MBE, that's a member of the Order of the British Empire for Services to Education on the King's Birthday Honours list.

Congratulations on that. So welcome to the podcast.

[00:03:12] Robert Peal: Thank you, Anna. Pleasure to be here.

[00:03:14] Anna Stokke: It's kind of interesting because I actually visited your school in March, and it was a pleasure to visit. It's just an absolutely wonderful school, and we're going to talk a lot about it today. But for listeners who may not be familiar, tell us about West London Free School.

For example, how many students are at the school and what age ranges does it serve?

[00:03:37] Robert Peal: So West London Free School is a secondary school, which is the English equivalent really of a high school, I suppose. Youngest pupils are 11, oldest pupils are 18, so it's seven-year groups. And there's 130 pupils in each year group, roughly.

And in total, we're 930 kids. And we are non-selective, which means that we take pupils from the local area regardless of prior attainment. We are a state school, or I suppose a public school, as you would say in North America, so taxpayer funded.

We have pupils from all different walks of life. And as you'll have seen when you came to visit, it's a very, very diverse school. And one of the things, I've been there now for 12 years, and one of the things that I love about it and attracted me to work there initially and has very much kept me there is it's so reflective of its local area.

It's in an area of London which is quite affluent, but there's also a lot of social housing and pupils from all backgrounds within that mix come to the school.

[00:04:40] Anna Stokke: OK, great. And when I visited your school, you just kind of grabbed two pupils and they weren't prepped or anything. And they took me on a tour and they were very articulate and confident, I have to say.

And, you know, one of the things that really stood out for me when I was there is how calm and focused everything was. So, is that typical or did I just catch you on a good day?

[00:05:06] Robert Peal: Well, I'm obviously going to say it's typical. I would say, yeah, with all honesty, that was an entirely normal school day. We have dozens of visitors every term coming to the school, so we don't have time to prep the pupils or to put on a performance.

If you come and visit the West Hunter Free School and if any of your listeners are in the UK and are interested in doing so, we are always thrilled for people to come and see it. You will see a completely representative version of the school. One of the phrases that I'm joined headteacher there, so my colleague, Ben McLaughlin, is the other headteacher.

And one of the phrases that we always use is everyday excellence. We don't do pushes. We don't have weeks where we're particularly focusing on something.

We don't put on a performance when people come to visit. We just aspire to always have a high bar as our everyday experience at the school.

[00:05:57] Anna Stokke: Yeah. And you're doing great work. OK, so we're going to probably use the phrase progressive education in this podcast.

And so, I want to talk about how you define that, because you actually have this excellent book with a really good title, Progressively Worse, and you can get it for free. Actually, I think I even downloaded it from Amazon for free. I'm going to link to it in the show notes.

But you know an awful lot about the history of education. And this book is really about the perils of progressive education. And in your book, you mention four core themes of progressive education.

One, that education should be child centered. We hear that a lot. Two, that knowledge is not central to education.

Three, that strict discipline and moral education are oppressive. And four, that socioeconomic background dictates success. And you give evidence in your book that progressive education hasn't been effective and has likely done real harm in education.

So, we're going to use that phrase a fair bet. So first, if you can just explain to listeners, what is a free school in England and how is it different from other schools in England?

[00:07:21] Robert Peal: So, the school that I'm head teacher of is a free school. And that was a term that was created in 2010. There was a change of government in 2010 after an election and we had a coalition, the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party.

And education reform was one of their top priorities. And part of their diagnosis of what had gone wrong in the UK was that progressive education had become entrenched, had become an orthodoxy. And they believed, and at the time there was no way of knowing that this would be right, but they thought that in order to challenge the orthodoxy of progressive education, which is what teacher training faculties at universities would promote.

It's what the Department for Education was wedded to. It is what all of the different parts of the education establishment, government quangos, teaching unions, all of them seem to share this consensus that progressive education, i.e. child-centred teaching methods, skills-based curricula, permissive approaches to behaviour, was the right way to run a school. And the government thought the only way that we are going to challenge these ideas is to give teachers the freedom to establish new schools with no predecessor organisation, which can innovate and do things differently.

And they would call these schools free schools because these schools were free from local authority control. So, at the time, it's different now, but at the time, most schools were under the oversight of local government, that these free schools, they would still be taxpayer funded, they would still be state schools, but they would have the autonomy to do things differently. And as new organisations, they wouldn't have any of the baggage, the sort of inherited practices of an existing school.

And we were one of the first free schools. There are now over 600 of them, and we were one of the first 24 to be set up in 2011. And we very much did what the government were hoping.

We pioneered a knowledge-based curriculum. We quickly gained a reputation for being one of the strictest schools in the country. Whether that was deserved or not is debatable, but we are strict, but we're very warm as well.

It's not a shouty, nasty, unpleasant atmosphere, as you saw when you visited. And we trained our staff in teacher-led direct instruction approaches. And 14 years later, 15 years later, after its establishment, we're the fourth best school in the country for pupil outcomes at 16.

So, in many ways, we have fulfilled the hope of that reform and many other schools like us. Actually, if you look at the top four schools in the country for GCSE results at 16, three of free schools have been established in the last 15 years. So this ability to challenge progressive ideas by establishing new institutions.

Well, I would say this because I work in the sector, but I would say it's one of the most successful government policies in the UK in the last 15 years.

[00:10:25] Anna Stokke: OK, that's incredible. So, you said four of the top ones are schools are free schools. So, what's the one that's not?

[00:10:34] Robert Peal: The third school is one in a sort of suburban area just outside of London. And it is just always been a very, very successful school, well-known school. Quite a few of our staff go and visit it.

It's an established school. But if you go there, it's not doing things that are wildly different to what it also has, knowledge-based curriculum, pretty teacher-led lessons.

[00:10:55] Anna Stokke: Yeah, that would have been my guess. OK, so the creation of these free schools allowed some schools to move away from progressive education. And the way I understand it is because they weren't so controlled by some of the local school authorities, like you could hire your own teachers and this sort of thing, right?

[00:11:19] Robert Peal: Correct, yeah.

[00:11:21] Anna Stokke: OK, got it. Let's talk about behaviour and school culture, which is something I actually haven't talked a lot about on the podcast because, you know, I'm not a classroom teacher, right?

That's something that would be difficult for me to really give any input on. But you're here and you run this absolutely wonderful school. And, you know, I think that the behaviour piece is really important and it seems to be something that's very important for how your school runs, you know, so that children are able to be attentive.

I'll start with the assembly. I observed an assembly when I first got there. Students were all lined up outside.

I was actually quite surprised. They were very attentive. They just lined up.

There was a teacher talking at the front and the kids were actually listening. They weren't poking each other or anything like that. The teacher was talking about various things like what the weather would be like the next day and how you should dress for that and other things related to the school day.

So, is this a daily occurrence, these assemblies? And is that actually common in English schools? And why do you do that at your school?

[00:12:33] Robert Peal: Yeah, it's a twice daily occurrence. In fact, pupils will have that three times a day. And we call it line up.

And if you can picture it, we do it in the front of the school for the first three year groups. There are five forms in each year group. So at the front of the school, in the playground, you have 15 lines all lined up.

And in front of each of those lines or walking up and down them is the teacher who's about to teach the class and stood up on some tables that we have at the front of the playground will be a senior member of staff, their head of year, giving them a short pep talk, we tend to call it. And we do this at 8.30 at the start of school day. We do it at 11.15 at break time and we do it at two o'clock after lunch. And the whole, I'd say there are three core things we're able to do due to that. The first one is it's quite pragmatic. We're a very small school.

We're in inner London. If all of the pupils try and leave the playground and go to their lessons at once, it's very unpleasant, particularly for the younger kids. It's a bit of a scrum.

The corridors aren't wide enough. So, it allows us to stagger entry into the building. Fine.

Pragmatic. Far more important though, secondly, is that it gives us an opportunity to reinforce culture. And we talk about culture at the school the whole time.

If you want to have fantastic pupil behaviour at a school, you need to develop mechanisms that allow you to embed a really, really strong school culture. And these lineups are exactly that. Whilst we're doing that lineup, we talk to them, we celebrate pupils who've really impressed us that day.

We have rewards that we give to pupils throughout the school day, and we make sure that before you do a lineup, if you're going to be doing it, you get an automated email that tells you some of the pupils who received these awards. We call them house points. So you're able to look at that.

You're able to think, oh, my goodness, there you go. Jonathan or Elia, they've done something brilliant. And we'll talk to the whole year group about that.

Or we'll do notices, whatever it might be. And it also gives us an opportunity. We have quite a smart school uniform at the school.

And at break time and at lunchtime, we will slightly loosen our expectations. Kids will be running around playing football. They'll be sort of chasing each other about a bit.

Their uniform ends up looking less tidy. And lineup is our opportunity to say, right, let's get ready for learning. Let's make sure they're all looking perfectly smart before we go back in the building.

And it's fundamental to our running of the school. In terms of whether it's normal, I would say increasingly so, particularly of schools of our philosophy. That has not always been the case.

I think the first school that I was aware was doing this is a school in East London called Mossbourne Academy. And that was, slightly confusingly, it was before the free school policy was established, but it was a new school set up out of local authority control. At the time, these were being called academies.

And I won't bore you with all of the differences, but fundamentally very similar to our school. Set up in the late 2000s, I think, so 2005, 2006. And they started doing things like lineup.

And at the time, the sector thought this was mad. People would say this place is like a prison camp. They would say really, really inflammatory things about this practice.

And what's remarkable is 20 years later, it's been, I wouldn't quite say normalized because I don't think it's quite the majority of schools in the UK that do it. But amongst high performing schools and amongst schools that share our philosophy, the teachers need to have a degree of authority and that schools need to have clear expectations of pupil behaviour. It's entirely common.

So, you will go and see it happening in schools around the country now. But that's only something of the last 20 years. Before that, when schools started doing it, it was very, very counter-cultural.

[00:16:20] Anna Stokke: Yeah. I think that you wouldn't see that anywhere in Canada, by the way.

[00:16:25] Robert Peal: And England in the sort of 2000s was in the same position as Canada. The progressivist view of education was such an orthodoxy and so overwhelming that you just wouldn't see that happening in a school. But we've been through a real sort of journey of education reform over the last 20 years that has allowed it to become a common and accepted practice.

[00:16:44] Anna Stokke: Okay. And so just backing up a bit, you mentioned that when you have these assemblies that you may celebrate children who've done something really great and that they get these house points. And we'll talk a bit about the house system in a little bit.

What sorts of things would they be celebrated for?

[00:17:04] Robert Peal: We have three school core values, which are kindness, hard work, and high standards, and every time you give a house point, it's in one of those categories. So, the two pupils who toured you around, they did a fantastic job. You gave some lovely feedback to them.

I'd have given them some kindness house points for that. So that could easily be the sort of thing that we would give a shout out to a pupil for in front of their peers. If a pupil is particularly helpful to a friend, if they help a new pupil settle into the year group, we will give kindness house points for that.

High standards would be for doing, for completing work to a really high standard, something which is sort of above and beyond our expectations. And then hard work is just for in lesson. If someone is doing really, really well in lessons, answers some questions really well, has clearly really strived for some homework, does very well in assessment, they'll get a hard workhouse point.

[00:17:54] Anna Stokke: So, on the other side of things, when I talked to you, you said something that I remembered, that sanctions are important and that good sanctions are invisible. So, what do you mean by that?

[00:18:07] Robert Peal: When you walk around the school where sanctions are in place, you often don't see them being implemented. It's a bit like how a metal detector in an airport rarely catches people with a gun. It's because once it is there as a deterrent, it does get rid of almost all of the negative behaviour.

And I say almost all, it doesn't get rid of all of the behaviour. Detention is run every day of the week by a different member of senior staff. I run detentions on Tuesdays.

There are always a number of pupils in there. However, the vast majority of pupils get through the school day, get through a week, get through a year even without ever having a detention, but they are pupils who potentially, if that structure of sanctions weren't in place, could easily be distracting other pupils in lessons, calling out, disrupting classrooms. So, I think that's why I say that they're invisible because most visitors will come to our school and won't see air sanction being handed out, but that doesn't mean that they're not playing an absolutely crucial role in ensuring the school is as it is.

[00:19:12] Anna Stokke: So, detentions, you mentioned detentions. So, what do those look like?

[00:19:17] Robert Peal: It's pretty old fashioned, to be honest. The pupils come for half an hour and they're given an A4 piece of paper and I will write something on the board. It will be something moralising or motivating, maybe even a bit tongue in cheek.

The most recent detention I did, I came in, it was the first week of a new term. So, the line was, this term will be my best term. And they have to write it on two sides of A4, 30 lines on one side, 30 pines on the other.

That takes them about half an hour. And the detention lasts half an hour and then they're free to go and they have to sit there in silence writing lines. And if they fail detention, then there's an escalated sanction that they'll face the following day.

And detentions last half an hour. However, if you have two sanctions over the course of a school day, you can be there for an hour. And if you get a number of detentions over the course of a week, you can have a two-hour detention on a Friday.

So, it sort of escalates to make sure that if pupils fail in one sanction, there is a further consequence.

[00:20:16] Anna Stokke: So, what are the most common reasons for detentions?

[00:20:20] Robert Peal: The most common reason is incomplete homework. The second most common is disruption in lessons. And then there's a number of other things that pupils will be getting detentions for, sort of overly physical contact or a break time if they're sort of getting a bit too rough and tumble, chewing gum, all sorts of things, unpleasant language, all the things that you can imagine.

But the two most common are disrupting lessons and not doing homework.

[00:20:44] Anna Stokke: So, tell me about the silent corridors. I found that really interesting. So, when students are transitioning between classes, they're really not supposed to talk to one another at your schools.

In fact, teaching staff are on duty to make sure that the corridors stay quiet, correct? So why do you do that?

[00:21:06] Robert Peal: I think the best way to show someone why we do silent corridors would be to take them to our school six years ago before we introduced it and allow them to see what it was like before that. Part of the reason is our building. So as I said, we're in the middle of London.

Our building is a bit, resembles really, whereas actually it's an old stately home with a modern bit put on the back. But in terms of the width of the corridors and the size of the rooms, it's a bit more like an office block than a school. It really isn't that well designed for the number of children because the space is so small.

And as a consequence, corridors used to be quite unpleasant. There was pushing, there was shoving, there was raised voices. Particularly for younger children, it could be quite intimidating, and it wasn't a nice point in the school day.

And you would have counter flows as some people's trying to come up a staircase, some people's trying to come down a staircase, blockages. It was really stressful. We have six lessons a day, but they're always in sort of back-to-back periods and then a break time, back-to-back periods.

So effectively three transitions like that over the course of a day. And as a teacher, you'll dread them. And I'm pretty sure that quite a few pupils would dread them as well.

And we'd often try and introduce rules like no raised voices, no pushing, but that is so hard to police. And all of those descriptions are subject to interpretation. When you say quiet corridors, where do you, how do you define quiet?

You just end up in endless negotiations with pupils saying you weren't quiet and they're saying oh “you was.” So, silence has a clarity to it. And we introduced it five years ago.

We paid a bit of a sleight of hand on the pupils when we introduced it. So, we introduced it when all of the pupils were sitting their end of year exams. The GCSEs that pupils take at 16 and the A levels that they take at 18.

And we said to all of the other pupils in the school, look, your peers are taking these really, really important exams, grades that are going to matter to them for the rest of their lives. If you're making noise during these transitions, it could distract them whilst they're trying to take their exams in the big hall on the ground floor. So we're going to be silent during transitions.

Pupils understood the rationale. Then once the exams were over, we said to the pupils, you know what, you were so good at doing that and the school was so much nicer. We're just going to carry on doing that indefinitely.

And there was a bit of pushback. Pupils did not like it, particularly the older pupils. There was some resistance, but that did not last very long.

That perhaps lasted a few weeks, half a term. And ever since then, ever since it's become normalised, it is something that requires a bit of oversight. There's always three members of staff overseeing the silent transitions.

But that's the hundreds of pupils. And for the most part, they are very, very compliant with that rule. And I think that that demonstrates that even though they perhaps wouldn't admit to themselves or to their friends that they really like it, they all understand it.

And they all, I think, are happy to go along with it. And it takes very, very little enforcement these days because I think they all understand why it's there. And it just means that the movement to lessons is so much more pleasant and they arrive ready to learn.

And we're not a silent school. They can talk to their hearts content when they're going down to lunch, when they're going down to break time or at the end of the school day. But they understand that at these specific points, transitions between lessons, when there's lots of flows and counter flows of kids, it makes sense for us to do it in silence.

[00:24:33] Anna Stokke: Yeah, I mean, it does make sense, right? And, you know, you go to a library, you're supposed to be silent. Why can't you be silent in the corridors?

It doesn't seem like a big deal to me. And your rationale for it makes a lot of sense. Maybe some young kids would even get bullied in some of those situations.

[00:24:50] Robert Peal: Exactly. And we saw a lot of pupils who were struggling with long-term absence from school, lots of neurodivergent pupils who really, really struggled with how overwhelming a noisy corridor is. They really started to thrive at the school in a way that we hadn't seen before when we were able to make it that much calmer and that much more pleasant for them.

[00:25:09] Anna Stokke: Oh, that's really good. So, what about parents? I could imagine that if you tried to introduce some of these things in a way, some parents might not like it because, well, you know, we're not used to these kinds of sanctions, like kids getting detention, writing lines, this sort of thing.

So, do parents push back?

[00:25:33] Robert Peal: Well, I say no, they do. Obviously they do, but not in a way that makes it difficult for us to sustain the school culture. So they do push back, particularly when it's their own child who is at the receiving end of the sanctions.

But fundamentally, not in a way that imperils what we're trying to do as a school. And the reason is, we're the most popular school in our borough. There's, I think, 12 secondary schools.

Parents get to the way the secondary schools work, particularly in a place like London in England, is there is lots of overlapping catchments. So there's actually quite a few live in our bit of West London area called Hammersmith. There's quite a few secondary schools that you could potentially go to.

So, you put your preferences on a form for the local council and they assign you to a school. And it's quite a complicated procedure. All of the schools have different admissions policies, but fundamentally there is an element of school choice.

And we are the most popular school in the borough. We have 130 places per year group. We have about 750 parents each year put us down as the school they want their child to go to.

So, it's very sought after to go to our school for obvious reasons. The vast majority of pupils love being at the school. They get fantastic academic results.

There's lots of sport. There's lots of music. It's a great school.

So, if parents push back on the behaviour system, the conversation we have with them tends to be quite easy. We say, do you want your child to be at this school? And they say, yes.

And we say, why do you want your child to be at this school? And they say, well, numerous reasons, but one of them always tends to be the behaviour is really good. And it's a safe and happy environment for my school child to go to.

And we say, how do you think that's achieved? And it's quite hard for them to push back on the fact that it's our structure of sanctions and consequences that allows that to be the case. And it's not only that, it's also the rewards and everything I say about the culture that we foster, but the sanctions are integral.

And if you take them away, that school culture would start to fall apart and our school would cease to be the really, really appealing place that parents want to send their child to. Now, I would add to that, the type of school that we're running is much easier to run in a large city. And the reason is because of that element of school choice, because we can quite feasibly say to a parent, look, you don't like what we're doing.

If you think the silent corridors are oppressive, and if you think that teachers have too much authority, there's a school down the road that does things differently, go there. They probably won't get as good of results. I would argue they wouldn't be as happy, but if you philosophically are not aligned with our school, there is an alternative.

Now, lots of secondary schools in England don't have that luxury because they're one school towns. It's a catchment that is really just served by one school. If you think of small towns, rural villages, those sorts of places, it's harder to have that conversation with parents because there isn't that element of school choice.

But in big cities like London, there is, and you are therefore probably going to find it easier to establish the sort of culture that we do.

[00:28:33] Anna Stokke: Yeah. So, one of the things is that everybody wants their kid in your school. So, and they should.

That gives you a lot of leverage, right? But you're also showing using the behaviour policies are probably like, in a way, the foundation, right? Because you need children to be behaving if you want them to learn.

Otherwise, it's chaotic, right? I think you should tell us about your house system because there might be people listening that might wonder where to start and it would be really good just to hear about this and how that works.

[00:29:10] Robert Peal: Yeah. So house systems are a peculiarly English thing, I think, and they're particularly common historically in English private schools, the sort of, you know, your very established English boarding schools have always had house systems and as a consequence, probably the place where your listeners may be most familiar from it, we are Harry Potter, which is very influenced by that sort of tradition and in effect, Hogwarts is a fictionalized version of an English boarding school. And our school was set up in 2011 at peak Potter mania.

So there probably is a bit of a link as to why we chose to have that house system, but we're not unusual as a state school with a house system. It is something that a lot of state schools have emulated from the private sector in education and the whole idea is just to create within the larger school community, smaller communities to which pupils can feel a sense of loyalty. And we have, for example, lots of sports at the school.

Every term there are sporting house competitions. Peoples will play their house football competition, their house rugby competition. We have a big sports day at the end of term where all of the houses are competing each other in track and field events.

Um, we do a house tug of war in the last week of term, and it allows you to sort of introduce that element of friendly competition, and it also allows you to make the system of rewards and sanctions that we have a bit more meaningful. Because whenever you get the reward, it's a house point and that tallies up to your house's overall total. And every time you get a sanction, one of those detentions, it minuses a house point.

And over the course of the year, we are constantly tallying that up. And we're constantly sharing a lead table with the pupils. And I think the house that's in the lead at the moment is on something like 6,000 house points.

And the last thing that we do the final day of the school year, which is always in sort of mid July. We have all of the pupils go back to their forum rooms. Um, we put all of their classes on Teams and we have one of our members of senior leadership who oversees this whole system will announce the house winner for the year.

And then they all go on their summer holidays. It just allows you to create a bit more of a sense of belonging for the pupils than just to the school. And our houses, because a big part of the school's curriculum is classical education, pupils will learn Latin in their first couple of years at the school, we do study quite a lot about the ancient world, our houses are Greek city states, so it's Spartans, Olympians, Corinthians, and Athenians.

[00:31:45] Anna Stokke: So, you belong to a community, you want to do well for your community. You're part of a group. There's a bit of peer pressure there to get the points and not get the detentions, it makes perfect sense.

So, let's talk about this core theme of progressive education, about behaviour rules being oppressive. So, what do you say to that?

[00:32:06] Robert Peal: Well, I would say that as of you, even though it has been dubbed progressive, it is anything but that. And actually as a consequence, so I wrote Progressively Worse, the book that you very kindly talked about in your introduction. I wrote that in 2014, so 12 years ago now.

And the whole book is a critique of progressive education. When I wrote Reforming Lessons with Nick Gibb, the schools minister, who's very much responsible for overseeing this period of, we would argue, very successful school reform in England, we actually decided not to call it progressive education because everyone's progressive, everyone wants progress in their education system. The whole reason I went into teaching is because I believe in social equality and I want to see all pupils, irrespective of background, being given the same opportunities in life.

And that is fundamentally a progressive outlook. So, it's frustrating really that that term has become associated with all of the teaching practices that I dislike. But, you know, you don't get to choose this language.

It is the term that has been used to describe those ideas really ever since the 1960s when they became popular for the first time, so there we are. We're stuck with the language. But I suppose the point that I'm making is that progressive education, in terms of the impact that it has on pupils' life chances, particularly the most disadvantaged, is anything but.

And it actually entrenches inequality and it limits people's options. And the reason is, I'd say that the fundamental philosophical misconception that progressive educators make is they apply ideas of individualism and freedom to children who aren't yet ready to exercise that responsibility. And as people with a liberal world outlook, living in democracies, we like the language of rights.

We don't like the language of hierarchies. We don't like oppressive authority figures. And in the adult world, that's great.

That's led to all sorts of social advances, and it's created the societies that many of us enjoy living in and thrive in today, but it is a mistake to apply it to children and to apply it to schools. And actually, children need adults to be authority figures. They need adults to guide them.

They need them to help them understand the difference between right and wrong. They need them to guide them through subjects. The whole misconception of progressive education is to refute the concept of adult authority in a school environment.

And that's the case in terms of behaviour, but it's also the case in terms of teaching. It's why progressive educators don't like the teacher led model because it's too hierarchical. It's too disempowering for the pupils.

It's saying that the teacher is the sage on the stage and the pupils are sort of vapid recipients of their knowledge and that is a bad thing. But actually, teachers need to be authority figures, not just morally, but also in terms of curriculum because they know more and they can really help the pupils learn their subjects by guiding them through it in a preconceived sequential way that is going to aid their learning. So, the fundamental mistake of progressive education is to refute the idea of adult authority in a school environment.

[00:35:13] Anna Stokke: That is sort of the core problem, and it applies to everything. I mean, I talk a lot about teaching. In fact, that's mostly all we talk about on this podcast.

And you know, this is a big issue. You're not supposed to be the sage on the stage, et cetera. But yeah, I hadn't thought of it that it's the same thing with behaviour that these sort of all come from the same place and the same idea, which is fundamentally flawed, right?

You wouldn't let a four-year-old decide when they can cross a street. I mean, because they're not ready to do that. Just like you can't allow a 12-year-old to teach themselves math.

They don't know the math. Like someone has to teach it to them. And so the same goes for behaviour.

As an adult, you need to guide the behaviour.

[00:35:58] Robert Peal: Yeah. And the problem is the real sadness of progressive education is the tragedy of good intentions. The people who've pursued these ideas, they're not bad people.

They're doing things from the right place. They think, I want to empower children. I want children to enjoy freedom.

I don't want to be an imposing authority figure on them. So, it's a well-meaning mistake, but it is a mistake because as soon as you reject it and as soon as you embrace the idea that actually teachers need to be authority figures in schools, children thrive. And that's what schools like ours and all of the other really high performing schools in England that have seen huge strides in the last 20 years.

I mean, this is what my book with Nick at Performing Lessons is all about. But every year it's becoming clearer and clearer when you look at the results of secondary schools and primary schools in England. The schools that reject the tenets of progressive education are the ones where children are thriving.

[00:36:49] Anna Stokke: Let's talk about curriculum and teaching. So, you told me that a knowledge-rich curriculum is central. And so, what does that look like in practice?

[00:36:59] Robert Peal: I think the fundamental idea of a knowledge-based curriculum is not that knowledge is the end point of a child's education, but that it is the necessary prerequisite of everything that should follow. So, we want our pupils to be critical thinkers. We want them to be problem solvers.

We want them to be able to work things out for themselves. But that is never the starting point. You don't teach children to think critically by inviting them to think critically from the start.

You teach them to think critically by empowering them with knowledge and understanding of whatever the domain might be of the subject you're teaching. And the final stage of it, the end point of it, will be the ability to think in more complex ways. But the foundation has to be knowledge.

And I think that's the really important distinction that people have been articulating in lots of English schools over the last two decades. And I think that debate has really, really matured in England. And increasingly, people have come to appreciate the flaws in a skills-based or a competency-based curriculum, which is by taking away the knowledge and understanding which is fundamental to be able to think in that way, you achieve nothing.

They don't know much, and they're not very good at thinking critically either. So I would say, ironically, our knowledge-based curriculum makes much better critical thinkers than a skills-based curriculum or a competency-based curriculum.

[00:38:25] Anna Stokke: I would say you're likely right, because you can't think critically with knowledge you don't have. And I would guess that a lot of your kids are going on into careers that require a lot of critical thinking and that they're probably doing very well. Am I right?

[00:38:42] Robert Peal: Yeah, our pupils go, we're a young school. So, I think because we were founded in 2011, our first pupils aged 18 graduated from school in 2019. So probably our oldest alumni are somewhere in their mid to late twenties.

So, we have no one who's yet reached the pinnacle of their career who I can point to as one of our august former students, but they go on to do fantastic things. We had last year, we had our record number of pupils going to Oxford and Cambridge. It was over 10% of the year group.

It was out of 130 pupils. It was 14 children. We have pupils who've got scholarships to NYU, to Columbia, to Sciences Po in France.

So, the best universities nationally and internationally our pupils are going to. And this is a school, which is non-selective pupils from all different walks of life. And yeah, they go on to do amazing things.

And it's not just universities as well. We have apprenticeships of increasingly common in the UK and we've got pupils who've gone to do graduate apprenticeships at big engineering firms, pharmaceutical firms, Amazon, Pinewood studios, where they make the Bond films, you know, amazing things that they go on and do. And I'd say that our curriculum is fundamental to that.

I was just going to say in terms of, I talked a bit about the sort of philosophy of a knowledge-based curriculum, but what that means in practice is that knowledge is always the starting point of teachers planning their lessons and planning their schemes of work. So I'm sure these are things that people on your podcast have talked about a lot before, but we really, really think hard about the resources that pupils are learning from, so be it a textbook, be it a booklet, whatever it might be. That is always the starting point.

The knowledge has to be codified somewhere in a really clear way. And I think that us and lots of other schools like us have become very, very good at thinking about how pupils need to learn but also need to revise. So, knowledge organisers, revision guides are really well geared towards securing those building blocks.

That's all fundamental to our practice as well.

[00:40:41] Anna Stokke: Yeah. Speaking of which, I visited math classrooms when I was there, and you should know I'm really picky about watching math lessons. I can't help it.

And so, I always tell myself, “oh, you have to sort of let some things go,” but I have no complaints. I mean, I was kind of surprised because I visited three and they were all great. So, your teachers are doing a really good job there.

I mean, something to be very proud of. And, you know, I saw really focused teacher led, but interactive instruction. For example, all the teachers were using mini whiteboards, and the teaching was just excellent.

So, is that a deliberate approach? Like, are you providing training for teachers on best teaching practices?

[00:41:28] Robert Peal: Yeah, we are. And I shared your reflections about the math teaching with the department, and they were thrilled to hear that you were so complimentary. So thank you for letting them know.

And we, our school in terms of its intake is very, very reflective of the rest of the UK. But when it comes to GCSEs in England, about 60% of pupils pass their maths GCSE at our school. It's over 90%.

So, the teaching is really, really working. And yeah, all of the things that you would see in our common practices that we train our teachers in within the school. So mini whiteboards, absolutely fundamental.

We introduced them not that long ago, actually about three years ago. And I think we were a bit late because there were other schools that were doing brilliant work with them. And I'd always been a bit reluctant.

I always had a sort of a bit of a unwarranted prejudice against mini whiteboards. But I was one round to it by visiting various other schools and talking to colleagues there. And it's been transformational.

They are just reasons we can discuss, but I'm sure other guests have talked about them at length in your podcast, phenomenal. But also turn and talk, short discussions between pupils about an issue before they return to the class. Lots of no hands up questioning, what Doug Lemov calls cold calling.

It's a type of teaching. I think perhaps the best term to describe is evidence led teaching, which if you go to the right schools in the UK, it's becoming a very, very common picture. So it's not that remarkable.

There are lots of schools around the country that are doing similar things, but it's highly effective. And we, I would say in terms of the prescriptive versus permissive scale of what we make our teachers do, we're somewhere in the middle. There are schools which are more prescriptive than we are.

We give our teachers a fair amount of autonomy in how they choose to teach, but within some very, very clear guidelines, so we still allow teachers to bring their own personality and their own approach to their teaching, but they have to be using mini whiteboards, they have to have a pupil sat in rows, they have to do no hands questioning, and they have to have a really clear idea of what the knowledge or understanding the pupils are going to gain is in each lesson.

[00:43:35] Anna Stokke: It's obviously paying off, right? So I think you've got the right balance there, because if you're overly prescriptive, it won't always work. Like there has to be some sort of, decide at the moment about particular things.

It can't be too prescriptive. But on the other hand, I agree with you, sitting in rows, it's imperative, right? Otherwise the kids are just going to start talking and misbehaving and they should be facing the teacher.

So, you know, in the mini whiteboards that sort of formative assessment is obviously really important. So it was interactive. It wasn't like completely lecturing or something like that.

So yeah, it's working really well.

[00:44:21] Robert Peal: What's it like in Canada? Were I to go to a Canadian high school, would I see rows or is it all islands and group work?

[00:44:27] Anna Stokke: It would depend on the teacher. I think in high schools, you would see more of that sort of thing where there's a little more explicit instruction. I think it's the elementary schools and where you'd see a lot of, like they would be definitely be in groups.

I don't think you'd see a lot of teachers using mini whiteboards though. I think I've definitely heard teachers in Canada that were kind of surprised to hear about that on my podcast. And then they started using them and seeing, you know, really positive results.

[00:45:01] Robert Peal: My aversion to mini whiteboards had always been a very boring administrative one, which was the way that I commonly saw them being used in lessons was the teacher would hand them out along with the whiteboard pens and it'd be so much faff, it would be 10 minutes of, oh, I haven't got one, my pens run out and I just never thought it was worth the effort. But the way that we've made it work at the West Hamlet Free School is every pupil has their own whiteboard. Every pupil has their own whiteboard pen, and it is their responsibility to make sure that their pen's got enough ink in it and their whiteboard is ready for their lessons.

And we've got a stationary shop at the school that every morning, if pupils have lost their mini whiteboard, or if it snapped in half or whatever happens, they can go for a pound and buy a new one. And for 50 pens, they can buy a new mini whiteboard pen. So we buy them at bulk, sell them at cost.

And it gives them no reason not to come to lessons with them. And the ability to say to a whole class of 30 pupils, take your mini whiteboards and your mini whiteboard pens out, let's go. Hey, that's so empowering for a teacher.

And the reason it's so powerful is if you are doing a recap quiz or you're doing some working in maths with the pupils, instead of trying to sample understanding through a few questions in the classroom, and maybe knowing if two or three out of 30 have got it, 30 mini whiteboards all held up simultaneously. And within a few moments, you can scan around the room, and it is the best check for understanding that can exist in a classroom.

[00:46:18] Anna Stokke: I wanted to talk about the structure of your classes because I actually observed three different grade seven math lessons. So, are the students grouped by readiness in some way and how do you determine that?

[00:46:35] Robert Peal: Yes, in maths they are, but that is very unusual. So we group pupils by readiness or by attainment in maths and in foreign languages from year 10 onwards. So that's three years into the school and roughly in science, although they're quite mixed.

It's a sort of two higher, three lower groups in terms of attainment and everything else is mixed ability. So, on that perennial debate in education where people say, do you believe in setting or do you believe in mixed ability? Our answer is always depends on the subject.

And actually, I think there's a very good justification for that, which is the difference between hierarchical and cumulative subjects. Hierarchical subjects are ones where there are real prerequisites of knowledge before you can move on to something else. So, it's really, really difficult to simplify fractions until you have mastered your times tables, for example, because you're not going to spot the ways of doing that.

So, maths is a hierarchical subject for that reason. The subject that I teach, history, is quite cumulative and it's actually much easier, I would say, to have pupils attaining at different levels in that subject and to teach the whole class successfully, because even if a pupil, for example, has not completely understood what might you be doing in history, the reasons for the first crusade to launch in 1095, they can still understand a fair amount about the siege of Jerusalem a few years later. It's not going to completely inhibit their ability to carry on learning. But in maths it will, in languages it will, which is why we set French and Spanish, which are the two languages that we teach at the school, and in science it will, but to a slightly lesser extent.

But history, geography, religious education, English literature, all of those subjects we teach by complete mixed ability.

[00:48:33] Anna Stokke: Yeah, and you've really hit on something that is very important about math, and I say this all the time, that I say it's relentlessly hierarchical, and that is why people end up really struggling in math. You fall behind and it, you know, if the teacher is teaching above your head, it's going to be impossible to get caught up if you don't have the prerequisite skills for what that teacher is teaching. What you've done then, if kids are quite behind, they're in a different class, that's better for them because they're getting the attention that they need, and then the other kids who have already mastered that can move further ahead.

But so, do those kids that are in the group that needs the extra help, do they ever end up moving up? They're not stuck there forever, right?

[00:49:26] Robert Peal: No, no, no, no, not at all. No, no, an English school year has three terms, roughly of sort of three months each, and every term we have set changes. So very, very fluid, and that's great because it means the pupils who really, really work hard, there's a result that they can be aiming for, which will be to change sets to move up.

The other benefit is our average class size is 27, but we overpopulate our higher attaining groups, they'll be 32, 33, and that means that our lower attaining mass groups will have perhaps 15 pupils in them. And it means that we're putting more money behind those classes in terms of the unit cost of a teacher's time, but justifiably so, they get much more personalised attention to help them in their maths. It allows you to target more resource at the pupils who need it most.

[00:50:15] Anna Stokke: Yeah, exactly. So, what about assessments, like quizzes, tests, school-wide assessments? So, what do those look like in your school?

[00:50:23] Robert Peal: In Canada, are people au fait with the language of formative and summative assessments? Is that a distinction that's common? They probably are.

Yeah, so formative assessment, ongoing assessment, we're doing that every lesson, and one of the things that we always tell our teachers is that assessment is not just a means of measuring pupil attainment. It is also a teaching method. If you are doing a recap quiz at the start of a lesson, you're doing retrieval practice, you are embedding that knowledge in pupils' long-term memory.

So, we do quizzing, not just as a way of keeping track of how pupils are doing, but as a really fundamental way of securing that knowledge in their long-term memory. So every single lesson that you go into will have some element of recall or quizzing. So in that way, assessment is just running through the school continually.

In terms of formal assessment, we have it twice a year. So there are, English school year runs from September to July, and we do mid-year exams that are in January, and we do end of year exams, which are in June. And we collapse the school timetable for a week.

Pupils do nothing for a whole week aside from revise or attend assessments. And we give them lots and lots of advice on revision. We actually teach them about how to revise.

And we then, once all of those assessments have been set, we sort of cancel every meeting for the school for two weeks. So teachers can just get through all of the marking, and it is quite arduous. But once it's done, we then do a lot of celebration of pupil outcomes.

We really make sure that whenever we do these assessments in lineup, like you saw, where we're celebrating pupils who've done well, we don't just praise attainment. We also praise progress. The pupils who've made the most progress in previous assessment point, we talk a lot about who's done that, how they've achieved it, why we're so pleased.

And yeah, it means the formal assessment twice a year, fundamental part of the school, and it means that by the time people state their GCSEs, they'll have done nine formal assessment points before they do one, which will actually give them grades that, you know, will stay on their resume for many years to come. So, they're very accustomed to it by the time they do their public exams.

[00:52:36] Anna Stokke: No, that's perfect. And I should just mention that you use the word revise, and I think that's a British term maybe, but we would say study.

[00:52:47] Robert Peal: Right, yeah. So revising is specifically reviewing, studying things that you've already studied, teaching pupils about effective revision is something that we do a lot.

[00:52:29] Anna Stokke: Oh, thank you for doing that. Although I don't think I'll have any of your pupils, but it would be great because actually, you know, I teach at the university level and a lot of students have no idea how to study. It's really surprising.

You know, some do. Those are the ones who are very successful, but they actually tend to have quite poor study skills. Like to the point where they won't even look at their class notes.

They just sit down and try to do problems without looking at their notes at all. And then they don't know what to do.

[00:53:32] Robert Peal: And it's the great tragedy of any sort of unstructured approach to education is some pupils will figure it out themselves. Some pupils with supportive parents, you know, high degrees of their own individual intelligence, they will, through trial and error, strike upon some really strong approaches. But that is so unfair on all of the pupils who don't, particularly when you realise it is so teachable.

It is so easy to inculcate these habits of effective study in pupils. So, to think that they should work it out independently and to think that it's empowering to leave them to do that themselves, it's the opposite of progressive, it's so iniquitous because the pupils who need it most just get left behind.

[00:54:12] Anna Stokke: And speaking of which, we should come back to this fourth of the core themes of progressive education, the idea that socioeconomic background dictates success. So, I think what you're saying, and I have absolutely heard this argument, is that socioeconomic factors are used to excuse poor education outcomes. When in reality, the poor education outcomes are likely caused by the progressive education itself.

So, I'm not sure if I'm getting that right and if I don't want to put words in your mouth, but maybe you can say a bit about that.

[00:54:53] Robert Peal: Yeah, I think it's the, I put it in my book as the fourth tenet of progressive education because it's not actually to do with adult authority. However, I would say it exists within progressive education as a means of explaining away the failure of the previous three tenets to achieve what they promise. So, when progressive education became very popular in the English speaking world in the 1960s and 1970s, it came with great promise.

They said, if we make these schools places of pupil empowerment, and if we make learning fun, and if we make it engaging, and if we take away all of the oppressive structures that schools have traditionally have, pupils are going to thrive. They didn't. There was no marked improvement in any of the nations that attempted this approach.

In fact, often quite the opposite. So, all of the people who've been promoting these ideas needed a way of explaining why they weren't working and they used sociological reasons. They said, well, what can you expect?

It's not the ideas that it's blame, it's poverty, it's disadvantage. And as with all misguided ideas, there is a kernel of truth. It is undeniable that pupils from more privileged outcomes on aggregates across a nation will do better.

But to take that idea and then say that pupils from poorer backgrounds are somehow destined to do badly, it is a huge misjudgment. And again, it's something that is often dressed up in the language of empathy. Because people are saying, pupils from troubled home lives or from impoverished backgrounds, I am being the sympathetic person by saying, you really, really can't expect them to do well.

And actually what we need to do is solve all of these social problems. We need to solve poverty, we need to solve disadvantage, and then they will do better. But actually, all you're doing is sealing their fate by making that argument that you can't expect anything different.

And that is why free schools have been so important, because a lot of them have been set up in areas which are not socially advantaged and which are not leafy, wealthy suburbs and are doing exceptionally well, and they are year in, year out disproving that thesis. In fact, we're the fourth highest performing high school in England. The highest performing, a place that's famous across the world now, is in the poorest ward in London, Mackayla Community School.

It's a really tough place to set up a school, and they are doing better than all of the wealthy suburban schools around the country, with a very, very, very challenging intake. And it's becoming, because of these beacon schools, it's becoming increasingly difficult for people to sustain that argument. And actually, if you reintroduce a sense of adult authority into schools, and if you take a knowledge-based approach to teaching, and if you teach in a very structured, sequential way, and if you raise your expectations of pupil behaviour and say to them, no, we actually believe that you are capable of more and of better, it is the pupils from the poorest background who have the most to gain from that.

[00:58:00] Anna Stokke: Definitely. It's a big thing to think that you're going to fix poverty, and then somehow better education results are going to follow. An easier thing to do is to fix education and lift people out of poverty.

Right?

[00:58:17] Robert Peal: Exactly. Yeah. You're putting the cardboard before the horse.

It's the wrong way around.

[00:58:21] Anna Stokke: A lot of people think these ideas are new, and they're not, right? They've been around for a really long time, and they just kind of come back, and then they go away, and then they come back, right? And it's always the same argument.

[00:58:35] Robert Peal: Yeah. They'll dress themselves up in different language. In one decade, it'll be discovery learning, and previously it was independent learning, and then they'll call it flipped learning.

But they're always the same ideas, and they're always failing.

[00:58:46] Anna Stokke: And England seems to be sort of ahead in terms of adopting more of these evidence-based, explicit instruction approaches than North America. But we'll get there eventually, right? Because we always sort of follow what happens.

[00:59:03] Robert Peal: When you do, the results will speak for themselves. I mean, progressively worse, I rate in 2014, but Reforming Lessons was published last year. And we opened with graphs about England's improvement in the PISA rankings, and it all speaks for itself.

Mathematics, 2009 to 2022, we went from 26th to 11th in the PISA rankings as England. In reading, we went from 25th to 13th. So, schools have spent two decades challenging these ideas, and the evidence is irrefutable.

[00:59:37] Anna Stokke: We'll close off now. And you've got one of the top performing schools in England, and it's an amazing school, and I want to thank you for letting me visit. I really enjoyed that.

And for school leaders who are listening today, because there are probably some listening, and they might know that behaviours out of control in the school or in their district or knowledge hasn't really been a focus, what's your advice? Where do they start?

[01:00:07] Robert Peal: Goodness me. I'll have a sort of a negative and a positive answer to that. The negative answer is if the governing structures of an education system aren't reformed, it's very difficult to make that start.

There were a number of reforms that have happened in England, which have empowered school leaders to make these changes. And if it weren't for them, it would have been very, very difficult. So, it's a really, really, the reform journey that England has been through is a really interesting combination of top-down changes and grassroots reforms.

The politicians did have to change some laws and free up the sector to allow for innovation, but then that innovation had to come from the bottom up. We have visitors from all over the world. We have visitors from Canada, America, New Zealand, Australia, Sweden, Denmark, Belgium.

Yeah, they're always coming to the school. And frequently they will say, we love what you're doing. We just won't be able to do it in our country until this changes, this changes, this changes.

So that would be my slightly depressing answer. My more positive answer would be nothing wins an argument better than demonstration. You can spend your whole life trying to rationalise why behaviour systems need to have higher expectations of people behaviour or why, give an example, we've completely banned smartphones from the school site.

You're not even allowed to hand them in. You cannot bring them to school. You could spend your life trying to explain in theory why that's important, but actually doing it and allowing people to see the positive impact of those sorts of decision, that's what win arguments.

So really you just have to have the courage of your convictions. You have to go out on a limb. You have to develop that thick skin for all of the pushback, which will inevitably come from parents, pupils, local community.

But if you have the courage of your convictions that you're doing the right thing, the outcomes will speak for themselves.

[01:02:02] Anna Stokke: Give people the data and hopefully that is what will convince them. Yeah, that's fantastic advice. So, it's been a pleasure talking to you today and I really enjoyed visiting your school and I hope people learned a lot from this conversation about what schools can do and what it takes to get good outcomes for students.

Thank you so much for talking to me today.

[01:02:29] Robert Peal: It's a real pleasure. Thank you for inviting me up.

[01:02:32] Anna Stokke: Thank you. Thank you so much for listening. If you enjoy this podcast, please consider showing your support by leaving a five-star rating on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.

Don't forget to subscribe on your favorite podcast app or on YouTube so you never miss an episode. You can stay connected with me on Instagram, Facebook, TikTok, X, BlueSky or LinkedIn. All links are in the show notes.

And check out my website, annastokke.com for more information. This podcast is funded by a grant from La Trobe University and from the Trottier Family Foundation through a grant to the University of Winnipeg to fund the Chalk & Talk podcast.