Lucy Crehan

What do you actually do and how did you come to be doing it?

So I call myself, depending on the audience, an international education consultant or an education explorer.

And what that means is I study other education systems, or certainly that's how I got into what I do, spending a fair amount of time in other countries.

But what I mainly do now is work with regional and national governments to support them with policy design, mainly in the areas of curriculum and teacher policy.

But also looking at how systems are or aren't cohesive and how different parts of the system I interact with others.

So that's both what I do when I'm working as a consultant, but also what I do through the work that we're doing with the Centre for Education Systems.

So part of it is a kind of advisory type work and some of it is trying to further the evidence base and make what is out there more accessible for policymakers.

So let's wind back.

You spent, was it three years in the classroom? You were a science teacher in London.

And you then launched yourself into this world by going on this round the world's amazing trip.

Can you say a bit about first of all, what motivated that? And then secondly, what are the mechanics of going from like, I'd quite like to visit some schools in all these different countries to actually being able to do it?

I had become quite frustrated when teaching aspects of the system and how education policy affected what we were doing in schools.

And I'm sure that won't be a surprise to any teacher in any country, to be honest, because there are always frustrations that come about as a result of policy, but particularly in my case, accountability policy and how that drove a lot of the behaviours in school.

So this is back in 2009, 2012.

So things were a bit different.

And because I had grown frustrated by it, it just led me to think about better ways of organizing education systems.

And I could see the impact that education policy had on teachers' work and therefore students' experience of school and student learning.

Particularly, this is when Michael Gove, who I know you've interviewed, was Secretary of State and introduced the white paper, which was talking a lot about accountability and autonomy and drew quite a bit on high-performing education systems as a justification for what was going on.

I was confused personally.

I'm thinking this, what felt like a very high stakes accountability system, albeit combined with autonomy...

It didn't feel like it was working very well in the school where I was, and speaking to peers in other schools, they felt the same.

So I was confused with how that was working in other places, and it just got me to think, what is happening? So I went and studied for a master's and read a lot about these different systems.

I felt that I couldn't really get a sense of what was really going on just through reading academic papers.