Lucy Crehan - Cleverlands: The Secrets Behind the Success of the Worlds Education Superpowers

Lucy is a qualified teacher, an education explorer and an international education consultant. She taught science and psychology at a secondary school in London for three years before turning her sights to research and policy and gaining a distinction in her masters in Politics, Development and Democratic Education at the University of Cambridge.

Since returning from her groundbreaking trip around the worlds top-performing education systems, she has published a report on teacher career structures for IIEP UNESCO, advised the UK government as part of a working group on teacher workload, and spoken about her work at conferences in the UK, US and Sweden. She now works as part of a team advising foreign governments on education reform at Education Development Trust. Lucy lives in Bath with her fianc, Mark.

Praise for Cleverlands

Lucy Crehans book is a major breakthrough. For the first time we have the human stories and classroom interactions behind the international comparisons of school systems. As an itinerant teacher she has been able to reach deeper than any academic researcher could.

Sir Michael Barber
Author of How to Run a Government ,

Chief Education Advisor to Pearson, Managing Partner of Delivery
Associates and co-author of How the Worlds Best-performing School Systems Come Out on Top

Lucy Crehan has written a remarkable and original book. Part travel memoir, part research review, she describes her experiences of visiting a number of the highest-performing educational systems in the world. Her conversations with parents and teachers bring these, often very different, cultures to life, and she shows how key features of education systems more than is often realised are profoundly influenced by cultural assumptions about the purpose of education and the nature of human potential. This alone would make the book worth reading. But what makes the book a truly important contribution to educational scholarship is the way that these insights are skilfully interleaved with the latest learning and teaching. The result is a book that will be of interest to anyone interested in how to improve education, and should be required reading for anyone studying how we can learn from other education systems.

Dylan Wiliam

Emeritus Professor of Educational Assessment, University College London

I first met Lucy at a Head Teachers conference, where she was presenting. I was instantly impressed by her brilliant talk which was fascinating in so many ways, and now her book, Cleverlands , is even more thought-provoking. The book details Lucys journey across the world to discover the best examples of how education and culture work together effectively. What impressed me most was Lucys ability to bring to life the sometimes meaningless data, by interactions with real-life characters with whom she immersed herself. This is a must-read, not only for teachers, but anyone involved in the education or coaching of young people today.

Director of Sport for Team GB Beijing 2008, Vancouver 2010 and
London 2012 Olympic Games, Director of Sport Apex2100

This edition first published in 2016

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ISBN 978-1-78352-273-6 (trade hbk)

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To all the teachers who welcomed me into their classrooms and all the teachers who would have done if Id asked.

Dear Reader,

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Foreword

At the point of publication of this profoundly insightful book, international comparisons, particularly those heavily informed by the large periodic surveys, had become dominant in the thinking of those wishing to reform their education and training systems. Worryingly, the survey findings had increasingly been appropriated in order to instil domestic fear of falling behind Look at them and look at us; now listen to me

Alongside this kind of misappropriation and misrepresentation, there have been some prominent mistakes, such as the failure to dig deeply enough into the history of educational reform in Finland. International comparisons carry ethical considerations, which too frequently are neglected. They need to be handled with great care. The data are one thing; their interpretation is quite another. Sound transnational analysis is by necessity demanding and complex, requiring an understanding not only of current circumstances but also of complex interactions in society and economy, and of causes and tendencies which arise from things past. Only then can the way things are in specific jurisdictions be understood to any degree.

Lucy Crehan has added a vital qualitative dimension to quantitively focused international comparison. It is an essential read for all those wishing to draw insights from transnational comparisons, and a tonic to cherry picking the irresponsible myopia of the single extracted fact. But she has done something more than just add colour to the surveys. Like all good social and natural scientists, she understands that observation is theory-dependent. It requires theory as its lens, and the things seen allow us to further refine our theory. Lucys text gives far more than colour it penetrates deeply into the way education works in different national settings. This yields extraordinary insights, of value to those looking with curiosity at other cultures and to those wishing to reflect on their own practices. This is a book which should be read cover-to-cover by teachers, parents and policy-makers.