World-renowned Canadian researcher Michael Fullan is held in high regard by educationalists in England. But the author does not share the same admiration for this country’s education system.

In fact, he hasn’t worked in England for almost half a decade, which he blames partly on the “depressing” state of teachers’ morale in this country. He does not think this has improved since he was working in London on school improvement four years ago.

Recalling the prevailing mood among teachers during that period, he says: “The morale was so depressing that you just didn’t feel like there was the leverage to do something. I just wanted to go where the energy was in the world.”

He hasn’t always felt this way. During Tony Blair’s first term as prime minister, Fullan worked closely with Sir Michael Barber to evaluate New Labour’s numeracy and literacy drive in England.

During that time, Fullan recalls a “buoyancy” as results went up. “The energy in those four to five years was there. It was uplifting,” he says.

Fullan used this experience to inform education policy in Ontario - the Canadian province now renowned for its world-class schools system.

Fullan began working for Dalton McGuinty, the province’s former premier, as his special adviser, in 2003. He is now recognised as a worldwide authority on educational reform and regularly advises policymakers and local leaders around the world.

‘Pioneering work’

In a speech in June 2011, Michael Gove, who was then education secretary, thanked Fullan for carrying out “pioneering work” helping to identify the common features of highperforming systems.

Gove’s speech - on “the moral purpose of school reform” - outlined the ways in which he hoped to learn from and emulate highperforming countries such as Canada, which had generated a “higher level of equity across the school system”. His speech also focused on the success of academies.

Ironically, it was during Gove’s term as education secretary that Fullan was put off working in England. “It was the way in which some people were [investing in] academies and it was a strategy that I did not think would end up with much equity,” he says.

“My question about academies is whether they are too piecemeal.

“Do they add up to a system focus like we had in Hackney or Tower Hamlets?”

Fullan’s work has reached countries across the world. He says: “I get quoted a lot, everywhere. Lots of people will quote me to legitimise something that is not what I am advocating. They are just mostly superficially used.”

It is swift action, rather than empty rhetoric, that Fullan values. This is what he enjoyed about working closely with McGuinty, who became known as “the education premier”.

One week after McGuinty was elected, Fullan showed him a one-page document setting out a five-year plan for education reforms in Ontario. Fullan recalls him saying “This is it. Let’s not ask the field if we should do it. Let’s just do it’”.

“We had an agreement that education would be the priority, come hell or highwater,” Fullan says. “So for eight years, I had such ease and rapport with him and we made decisions so quickly on big things, and it was working.”

During his time as special adviser to McGuinty, Ontario’s school system was held up as one of the best in the English-speaking world and it received glowing reviews in three external studies.

“The excitement and the highlight was being, I am going to say it, the first system that could claim system-wide success and have that claim stand up under scrutiny. That’s the biggest turn-on ever.”

Just last year, Ontario was rated by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development as one of the global top performers for reading in its Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) study. However, Fullan doesn’t attach much weight to Pisa rankings.

“Politicians in Canada don’t over-interpret Pisa. They think it is nice that we are up there but it is not a prominent thing. Whereas for Europe, it has been a problem because the politicians have taken it too literally,” he says.

For someone who thrives on being at the heart of power, and working on major reforms, Fullan exudes an aura of calm.

Sitting in a room on the 38th floor of a hotel in Toronto’s financial district, Fullan is nonplussed when the noise of sirens outside grows louder and louder and he receives a text saying there’s been a nearby explosion. As we wait to find out whether the skyscraper is to be evacuated, wine and chocolate-covered strawberries are proffered, and Fullan makes casual chit-chat about Toronto’s art gallery.

Fullan is still a prominent author and adviser on school reform but his attentions have now shifted to California, where, for the past three years, he has been helping the education system to move away from its focus on testing.

The next book on the horizon is about “deep learning”, which emphasises a move away from traditional approaches in order to develop collaboration, creativity, critical thinking, citizenship, character and communication.

It is an approach that is, in many ways, diametrically opposed to the current education policy climate in England.

However, Fullan defends the strategy as helping to engage pupils turned off by traditional teaching.

“It is especially good for those students [often from low socio-economic backgrounds] who are alienated from traditional schooling, which is too academic and too boring,” he explains.

“If you want to attack inequity, then attack with excellence, and give students deeper and better experiences.”

@Eleanor_Busby