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Adrian McLean

Adrian McLean

UK educator, former Executive Headteacher and MAT character-education leader, and Ambassador for Character (Jubilee Centre) who speaks and coaches on character, leadership and DEI.

Oct 16, 2026

22:58
Our role models in society, are they that good? They're often letting us down, and at the same time, we've got social media kind of causing a very, very different relationship and a very different way of interacting, and we're being told by politicians now, "Keep politics out of the classroom."
23:17
Yeah.
23:17
And so we don't have to have politics in the classroom to, to teach character.
23:23
I think character is really around teaching specifically...
23:28
Uh, character sits in, in, well, the Aristotelian version of character that, that I follow and, and, and really work with says that character sits in, in four sort of main domains.
23:41
So we have performance virtues, which are the things that w- where we're talking about perseverance, resilience, and like absolute...
23:49
I can't see anybody that doesn't want to develop young people with those traits, right? So we want our young people to be resilient.

28 MINS LATER

52:16
Kinda your experience, have you seen, have you seen AI influencing parental complaints?
1:56
right, cool, let's
1:57
go.
1:57
But yeah, I don't know.
1:59
And then it's about sitting down and going, okay, let's look at the dynamics of this.
2:04
What do you notice? And then they're going to look at each other.
2:07
And then that's where you've got to use your skill to get them to unpick and see the optics that they're not seeing.
2:13
Because probably at that point, they're just seeing it from a friendship point of view.
4:49
Step one is be curious.

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