Andy Sprakes:
We’re asking our kids to do work that matters, and work that has purpose. As educators, we have to honor that work, and we have to make sure that it is completed, and that all kids are honored.

Alec Patton:
This is High Tech High Unboxed. I’m Alec Patton, and that was the voice of Andy Sprakes, co-founder and chief academic officer of the XP Trust, in England.
Today, the XP Trust is a group of eight schools, but it started out with one school in Doncaster, in the north of England, in a building that they shared with the Doncaster Rovers football club. Football as in soccer, to be clear.

Among other things, this means they have access to a stadium for events, which is pretty cool, but that’s not why I wanted to talk to Andy. I wanted to talk to him because XP, which he co-founded with Gwyn Ap Harri, is committed to deeper learning to a degree that I’ve rarely if ever seen anywhere else, and they back up their educational vision with a whole bunch of structures and methods that you can adapt to your own school.

In this episode, we’re talking about one of those structures. It’s called Toby’s Law, and if you do projects or expeditions at your school, you should adopt it today. Seriously, today. And you’re listening to the director’s cut of this episode, which means you’re also going to hear about how they use student portfolios at XP, which really inspired me when I went there and saw it.
There’s also a shorter version of this episode on our feed that you can check out if you want to. To tell this story. We’re going back to the first year of the first XP school. Here’s Andy.

Andy Sprakes:
We set up the school in 2014, and that was after a visit, actually, by Gwyn Ap Harri, who’s my friend, and co-conspirator really, who he came over to High Tech High, in San Diego, and he was blown away by what he saw.

I was the head teacher of another school in Doncaster, in England, at that time. I didn’t know he was in America, so I’m in England. I’m in my office, actually, which I didn’t do very much, so he was lucky to catch me.

The phone rang. “Andy, it’s Gwyn.” I said, “All right, Gwyn, how are you doing?” He went, “Andy, you’ve got to come and see this school. It’s not part of the jigsaw. It is the jigsaw.”

I went, “Right, what are you on about, where are you?” And he said, “I’m in San Diego, a school called High Tech High.” Well, right, great. So I’m stuck in Doncaster.

But anyway, cut a long story short, as a result of that phone call, I organized a trip over to see High Tech High myself, and a couple of colleagues came along, and like Gwyn, I was equally blown away by what I saw, and particularly by the eloquence of students, and how they were able to metacognate, and talk about their learning, talk about projects that they’d been involved in, that had made a civic difference, an impact on the community around them.

And they could talk deeply about their learning that they’d done two, three years ago, and connect it to the learning that they were doing currently. This was very, very impressive.

And I got on the plane, and I really enjoyed being the head of my school, and we had a really strong culture, and there were great kids. And there was a nagging thought in the back of my head all the time, on the plane back, as I was halfway over the Atlantic.

If I brought visitors into my school, would my kids be able to talk about their learning in such depth and sophistication, as the kids who we’d seen and met at High Tech High, in San Diego, and the answer was a resounding and disappointing, “No. Really, they wouldn’t be able to do it.” So then I thought, “Why not?”

The answer came to me, after much agony, was that we just weren’t giving our kids the opportunity to do it. It wasn’t that they couldn’t do it. I was 100% sure that our kids would be able to do it, if they were given the right climate, the right environment, the right opportunities, the purpose to do the kind of things that the kids at High Tech High were doing. So thank you for destroying my career in being a head teacher in conventional schools, I suppose, which is a good thing.

As a result of that trip, as well, Larry Rosenstock put us in touch with Ron Berger, of EL Schools, who I think’s been on one of your podcasts as well, the brilliant Ron Berger.

Gwyn e-mailed Ron, and said, “Can we come and speak to you? We want to set a school up. We’re really interested in what High Tech High does, and we’d like to come and see some EL schools.”

And Ron, being the gracious and great man that he is, he said, “Yeah, sure, come along.” We got on a plane again, and we went to Amherst, and we went into Portland, and saw a couple of schools there.

While they didn’t have the same kind of impact visually that High Tech High has on visitors, because it’s like an art gallery, isn’t it? Your place, it’s like walking into a museum.

And while those schools didn’t quite have that grandeur of curation, what they did have was exactly the same depth of learning and articulation in their students, and the same sense of building character and civic pride, in some ways, perhaps more so, in the EL School.

We thought long and hard about it. “Right, we’ve got to do this now.” It became an imperative, really, we were compelled. Once we’d seen what was happening in the States in High Tech High and EL Schools, we thought, “We’ve got to do something about it in the UK.”

So we did, and we set up XP. We took the design principles of High Tech High. We really loved that concept of a school by design. Then we looked at the standards-based curriculum, which fit the UK system.

Alec Patton:
Was that the standards-based curriculum at EL?

Andy Sprakes:
Yes. Yeah, very much so. We were able to say, “Okay, we can construct standards-based learning expeditions that have real high quality, sequenced, progressive learning, but that also have outward facing products, so we connect with the world, and we make a difference to the world around us.”

So we’re really grateful to the work that High Tech High have done, and EL Schools have done, because that’s shaped what we’re doing over here in the UK.

Like the EL Schools, and like High Tech High, we essentially run our curriculum through projects, through merging those standards together across subject disciplines, to broaden and deepen learning and understanding. So that’s what makes us very different.

Conventional schools in the UK will teach subject by subject, certainly. At secondary school. At high school, they will have. An English teacher will teach them English. A maths teacher will teach them math, a geography teacher will teach them geography, a history teacher will teach them history, et cetera. What we’ve done is we’ve taken the model of cross-subject disciplinary learning expeditions to find commonality between standards.

So we’ve done a lot of mapping, and a lot of deep thinking around how we can connect big concepts together, so that it connects the learning, and therefore deepens the learning.

Alec Patton:
You do have English teachers and history teachers and science teachers, like people, if you look at their title, that still exists, right?

Andy Sprakes:
Absolutely does, yeah.

Alec Patton:
Talk me through how what they do is different from an English teacher at another school.

Andy Sprakes:
We split our teachers into two camps, really. We have a Human Team, which is humanities and arts, and then we have a STEAM Team, which is our science, technology, engineering, and maths teachers. So it’s Hum and STEAM, we thought that was quite nice.

Essentially, what we will do is, we’ve organized our curriculum, so that sometimes we will do fully cross-curricular expeditions, where a team of teachers, in a particular year group, so we have year groups in England, rather than grades. So our 11-year-olds are in year seven.

They might have an expedition that’s running, for example, our first expedition that we do is called From the Ground Up, and it’s, “What does the community of Doncaster to the miners,” and that will actually be a merging of English history, social studies, but also science and some maths in there, as well. So that group of teachers will work together as a team. They plan that expedition, and then they deliver it through case studies.

And those case studies might be a science case study, but that will connect to the human case study. So there might be some history, going to look at the Industrial Revolution, but that will then link to the work that’s being done in science around fossils and coal. Why did coal come to our region? Why is it beneath the ground? It’s on the Barnsley seam. So the case studies connect to each other, and that’s where we get the connectivity.

Our Human teachers may well teach aspects of English, as well. We have English specialists who train up all of our human teachers to be able to teach text. We teach text through science, as well.

So we work together. We create a multidisciplinary expedition that has a guiding question, and a product, where the kids have to learn knowledge and skills to be able to, one, answer the guiding question, but two, create a product that has real activism and agency in it, and that does something to make the world a better place, whether that be our local community, or whether it be wider than that.

Alec Patton:
And so, you do expeditions, you don’t do projects?

Andy Sprakes:
That’s right.

Alec Patton:
What’s the difference?

Andy Sprakes:
I suppose we’re getting into the realms of what is project-based learning, the purest view of project-based learning that might be, “We want to fashion a canoe,” because the teacher’s really into canoeing, or the kids are really into canoeing, and they want to build their own canoe.

That, then, drives the learning. So what learning can we fit into the design and making of a canoe? And there’s tons of maths, science, history, English. You name it, you can add subjects to it. I suppose we don’t start with the product first.

I think we start with the standards that we want the kids to learn, and then, we think, “Okay, looking at the standards, what really interesting and engaging case studies can we create?” And then we think about the product.

So how might we express that learning through a particular product, that will have agency beyond the school? I suppose that’s the difference, and that’s why we’re not pure project-based learning. And that’s why we like that concept from EL of the learning expedition, that it’s a journey through learning, which ends with the students creating something of beauty crafting, something that they really have to sweat over, and they really have to work hard at.

But then, that pride comes through them making that learning public and presenting that, or it going out into the wider world, whether it be a water reserve, or a civic building, or into a bookshop, or an art gallery, or a museum, or whatever it may be, or a national archive.

We’ve got archives, so we’ve got some of our work in the national archives. We’ve got some of our published work in the bodily, and library. That’s the difference, I think.

Alec Patton:
So your first expedition started with the question, “What makes a successful community?”

Andy Sprakes:
Correct. That was 2014, and that was with year seven. So I think, is that your grade six?

Alec Patton:
Yeah.

Andy Sprakes:
So high school in the UK starts, sorry, in England, I should say that, because Scotland sometimes is different, and Wales is slightly different. We start in year seven, so the kids come to us after primary school, at 11 years old.

So we opened our school, as a secondary school as a high school, and we had 50 kids from across the borough who came to us. It was a random selection, our admissions, so anybody could apply who lived in Doncaster. And then, we pressed a button, and a spreadsheet churned out the lucky 50 students who came to us.

We’d done some pre-planning, we’d done some work on expeditions already, again, supported by EL. And we’d worked with a lady called Anna Switzer, who’d come over and done an expedition slice with us and taught us about crew.

We were ready to go. So we put some standards together, that we felt we needed to engage with, and 50 kids came, and we started our expedition. We thought, “We’re opening a new school, and building community is the most important thing.” It’s one of our design principles.

We build community through activism, leadership and equity, sharing our stories as we go. They’re our design principles. Even then, at the very start of the school, we were really keen on this idea of community, of working together, of being crew. So we had the guiding question, “What makes a successful community?” And that was predominantly a human-based activity.

We read seed folks, and our architects was the giver, so we looked at dystopian community, and what is it like, when communities break down? We looked at some science through the animal kingdom. Why do geese fly in a certain formation? Why do penguins huddle together, and then move out, and move in? You know, just how successful communities are at particular aspects.

What the kids did was, they answered the guiding question. They wrote quite a lengthy essay, really, about what made communities successful, people working together, local amenities, culture, infrastructure, all those kinds of things. And they did some rather quaint line drawings, to express what they felt made a successful community.

We’d looked at the London riots, as well, and what people did when things go wrong, and sometimes, why people feel so disenfranchised, that they do rebel.

Then we looked at how that gets put right, and how communities work together to put that right, because that’s invariably where the answer comes from, when things don’t go well. It ends up being back with the community and the community leaders, and schools, and doctors and nurseries and care homes, that actually make up successful communities.
So we got the kids to do line drawings, and then, we took an extract from their essay, and we printed a book. And we were all really pleased with the outcome of our first product.

Alec Patton:
How did you exhibit the nook?

Andy Sprakes:
Right, so our first presentation of learning, so our first exhibition of learning for our kids was, we invited all of our parents to the stadium. The kids had put together a book launch group, who’d made a film about how the book had been made, the guiding question, the standards that we’d covered.

It was really beautiful, and the kids had done it all themselves. We had other kids who were stewards, who were showing people to their seats, so everybody was contributing successfully as a community. So, living the dream, and we got the books.

I think they’d been delivered, they got delivered on the day of the book launch. It was all very tense, and we got the box of books, so opening book looked really great.

The kids starting the book launch, guys were talking away about the product, and what they’d learned, and how proud they were of it. We talked about selling it on our website, and to connect with the wider community, we were sending copies out to civic dignitaries, and all the rest of it. We were really proud of what we’d done.

We gave the books out, and we had cups of tea and biscuits, like we do in England, to celebrate. And it was great. Everybody was really pleased. The kids were looking at their work.

And then, one parent, Mel, who we knew really well, I mean, these were pioneer parents, right? There is no schools like XP in the UK, so they’d taken a bit of a risk, a bit of a chance, these parents.

Anyway, Mel came up to us and said, she came directly up to me and said, “Andy, Toby’s work isn’t in the book.” I said, “No, you’re wrong, Mel. I’m afraid it is. It’s got to be. We’ve checked it, double checked.” “It’s not.” “It’s impossible, it can’t be.”

Toby, as well, had been instrumental in putting the book launch together. He’d written this really beautiful piece of work. He was really proud of it. He’d stood upon the stage, talking about how proud he was to be featured in this book. So it was unconscionable that he wouldn’t be in it. He was going to be in it.

I said, “Give me a book, Mel.” So I flicked through the book, and it’s like, “Okay, he’s in here somewhere, Mel. Don’t worry, Toby.” Okay, Toby’s there, ashen faced. “Don’t worry, you’re in here. I’ve checked it, I know.”

I checked through, couldn’t find him. Checked through again. “Gwyn, can you just check this, please?” And the panic set in. It’d been missed out. So everything that we’d done to stop that from happening, it happened, and it was our first product.

It was like, “Oh my God, this is a disaster. What are we going to do?” Because we thought, “If we reprint the book …” We were a startup, so we didn’t have a lot of money, and the outlay had been quite a lot to get a printed book, and we’d printed a lot of copies, because we wanted to distribute it widely. So what are we going to do?

Toby’s really upset, mum’s upset. So I said, “Mel, don’t worry. We’ll sort it. If we have to reprint all the books, we will.”

As soon as I said that, I thought, “I shouldn’t have said that, it’s going to cost us thousands of pounds to do this. We have to recall all the books.”

Anyway, so we were kind of struggling to think what to do, and I was absolutely devastated. It was like, the worst thing that could happen had happened. The first product, we’d missed one of our kids out. You couldn’t make it up, right?

So I got home and I was really upset, and I was talking to my wife, Nicola, about it, and I said, “What are we going to do? We’re going to have to reprint.” I said, “We’ve got to reprint them.” And she said, “Well, why don’t you create a dust cover for the book?” I said, “What do you mean?”

She said, “Well, a cover that you wrap around the book, would that be cheaper than reprinting them all?” I thought, “Hm, what a great idea. That probably would be cheaper.” And it was, considerably. So that’s what we decided to do.

We thought, “Well, we can get around this” I can remember going to see Toby the next day, and I said, “Toby, I’m really sorry.” “Oh, it’s okay.” “No, it’s not okay. It’s quite terrible. But what we’re going to do is, we’re going to create a dust cover, and we’re going to put your work on the cover. Everybody will see your work. It won’t be this a cover like this. It’ll have your artwork on the cover, and we’ll put your work inside, on the leaf inside.”

He was like, “Oh, my God, really? I’m going to be on the cover?” So that’s what we did. The book that you showed had the dust cover, which had Toby’s robin on, which is rather sweet. That then wrapped around the original book.

So we managed to save it, but for me, it was the kind of depth of learning that we had, in that 10 minutes of realizing, that we’d not been thorough enough in checking the work, was really what stuck with us, and resonated with us.

What we did was, we said, me and Gwyn sat down, and went, “Look, this can never happen again. We’ll have to have a law. So we’ll call it Toby’s Law, after Toby, because his was the work that was missed off.”

I went to see Toby, and said, “We’re going to create a law, Toby, which means that what happened to you will never happen to a student ever again.” He went, “What? You’re going to create a law? I’m going to have a law?”

So Toby came out of it really well in the end, and I’m pleased to say he was very successful in his time at XP, as well. He was a great lad, brilliant student. And because we wanted, as well, we thought it was really important, Alex, to show that we were fallible, and that even as adults and educators, sometimes we muck up, and we make really big mistakes.

So we created Toby’s Law, based on that. I’m sure you’ve read this, but inside the cover, we kind of articulate what Toby’s Law is. Shall I read it aloud, just so that …

Alec Patton:
Yeah, please.

Andy Sprakes:
Okay, so this is Toby’s Law, and so this is, it’s on the inside cover of the book.

So, Toby’s Law. “Inexplicably, despite hours and hours spent proofreading the final product, not to mention all the hard work by every student, not just to get the book done, but all the preparations for the celebration of learning. We discovered during the book launch that one of our students’ pages had not been included. That student was Toby.

“To say we were all devastated would be an understatement. Toby was part of the book launch team. How could we fix this? It would cost us thousands to get all the books printed again.

“At XP, we learn through experience. The shared narrative of these experiences is an important part of creating memories, not just remembering facts. Instead of hiding our mistake, we decided to make it part of our narrative, so no one will forget.

“We are making a stand for craftsmanship and quality and have pledged never again to allow any product we create to not include all of the work, done by all of our students. This will never happen again. This is called Toby’s Law.”

That has stuck with us for the last 10 years. So we now have a core practice. I still get a little bit emotional when I read that. Because it takes me back to how desperately we felt, that that student had not got their work included in that product, and it made us feel really bad, and it made him feel worse, but we made it public.

So, in our core practices, when you’re looking in our core practices, which is the kind of bible for our staff, we have in here a section on completing expeditions, and it’s Toby’s Law. So all of our staff now ensure that.

I mean, one of the things we do, and we’ve had to get really good at, is completing expeditions. I think that’s the toughest part of the gig, really, is getting things over the line in a timely manner. Because of the way we structure our curriculum, we have at least three expeditions over a year. So there’s one per term, at least.

Sometimes, we split into Human and STEAM separately, so there might be two expeditions going on. So typically, in a year, the kids could do two, three, four, five expeditions, six expeditions across the year, all with products. So you can see that when we come up to the end of a 12-week term, a cycle of expedition, we need to build in the product work to that.

But then, we’ve got to get it over the line. If’s a book, or a publication, or something that needs external attention, it can sometimes create a lag, and then it becomes difficult to finish the … That’s why we’ve got Toby’s Law.

Because it’s also now about not just about checking that every kid’s work is in the product, but it’s also around, is the product completed? Are assessments completed, and in portfolios, so that students can show their learning journey? And is the product curated? So, where are we curating it?

These are big things for educators to grapple with, but really important things. Because if we’re asking our kids to do work that matters, and work that has purpose, as educators, we have to honor that work, and we have to make sure that it is completed, and that all kids are honored in that process of completion, and culmination and curation.

Alec Patton:
As I understand it, there’s two parts to Toby’s law. There’s a sort of checklist that says an expedition is not done until the following have been completed. That’s right. And what are those things? What has to happen for an expedition to qualify as done?

Andy Sprakes:
If you refer to our core practices, they culminate in expeditions, so all expeditions have to culminate with a celebration or a presentation of learning. So the work has to be made public, and the kids have to present their learning, which is something I know is done a lot at High Tech High.

So the kids will stand up, and they’ll either have their product completed, or they might have their portfolio, or whatever. This is the work that they’ve done, and then they will talk to their parents about that, and then they might talk to other adults about that, as well. So they might present it in a formal presentation.

And that isn’t always to parents. That might be to university lecturers, or the Archeological Society, or whoever, but the kids always have to present their work. So an expedition is not done until that’s happened. It won’t be signed off.

You can’t start your next expedition, until you’ve finished. So we include the culmination of that. Portfolios need to be completed, so assessments need to be done. The kids’ work that they’ve done, that’s associated with the product is in there, so all of the assessments need to be done, all of the work needs to be completed.

The expedition has been curated. So either in a digital form, or a physical form, that a review has been carried out, each expedition has to do a review. We sit down formally at the end, and we review it, and we look at iterations for the next time we do the expedition. So that’s another key aspect of Toby’s Law that has to be done, and the product has to be completed.

We’re not fascists, so that it’s like, “It’s Week 12, your product’s not done, you can’t start your next expedition,” but we have to have a timeline of completion.

So if it’s a book, for example, all of the student work should have been compiled and sent to our … We have a comms team, who do a lot of our products, collate our products, and curate our products, who are absolutely brilliant.

It might be that then we say, “Well, in six weeks’ time, we’ll have a presentation of learning, because we can show the learning that we’ve done, and we can do a teaser for the book launch.”

And then, six weeks after that, when the book’s completed, we’ll have a book launch and the kids go back to that learning, then. It works quite well, actually, Alec, because the kids go back to the learning that they’ve done previously, and they say, “Oh yeah, it was really cool when we wrote this book. I can remember doing this. I can remember looking at geology, and rock formation, and that kind of stuff. I remember writing these histories about people who work down the mines, who came to see us, and speak to us about the work that they did.”

So they’re really the core things that we expect people to complete, before we say an expedition is done. “Done” is a sacred word at XP. So really we do strive to ensure that we get work done, like I said, to honor the kids’ work.