Telling Children the Truth About the Planet | Professor Emily Shuckburgh CBE on The Soul of Education Podcast

What happens when we stop labelling children by ability and start trusting in their potential? In this episode of The Soul of Education, James Biddulph, CEO of Avanti Schools Trust, is joined by Professor Dame Alison Peacock, Chief Executive of the Chartered College of Teaching. Before leading the professional body for teachers, Alison was Executive Headteacher of The Wroxham School, where her work on Learning Without Limits challenged fixed ideas of ability and showed what schools can becom...

Ask a child to draw nature and most will draw something they are standing outside of. Richard Dunne left headship to found The Harmony Project, convinced that the way we structure learning teaches children a quiet falsehood: that they are separate from the living world rather than part of it. In this episode he tells James Biddulph what prompted that decision, and what a curriculum looks like when it is built around the principles that govern the natural world instead of around subject bounda...

Somewhere between Reception and Sixth Form, the joy goes missing. James Biddulph and Nitesh Gor both describe waking up to the same question: where has all the joy gone? In this opening episode they trace that question through the evidence and into the harder argument underneath it. Edurio's 2025 research found that only 45% of secondary pupils feel physically and mentally well, falling to 31% by the age of 18, with interest in lessons collapsing across the same years. Anthony Seldon puts i...