A miner’s daughter from County Durham who advised three US presidents on foreign affairs takes on the future of education.
Fiona Hill’s extraordinary journey from a background of limited opportunities to a stellar international career is set out in her book There Is Nothing For You Here (HarperCollins, 2023). As one of the world’s leading experts on Russia, she has advised three US presidents on foreign affairs.
She served as director for European and Russian affairs on President Trump’s National Security Council, and in senior intelligence roles for both Presidents Bush and Obama. In October and November 2019, Hill testified before Congress in the impeachment inquiry against President Donald Trump.
Now, in the year that she begins her tenure as the chancellor of Durham University, Fiona Hill sets her sights on education, the meaning of ‘levelling up’ and how the UK can adapt to meet future challenges.
Fiona Hill will be in conversation with Fiona Millar
Fiona Hill is author of There Is Nothing For You Here: Finding Opportunity in the 21st Century and co-author with Clifford Gaddy of Mr. Putin: Operative in the Kremlin (Brookings Institution Press). She is a distinguished senior fellow in the Center on the United States and Europe within the Foreign Policy program at Brookings. She holds the position of chancellor at Durham University, and is a Richard von Weizsäcker Fellow at the Robert Bosch Academy in Berlin. Hill’s BBC Reith Lecture on Freedom from Fear was broadcast in December 2022 to an audience of over 200 million. That same month, she was awarded the Insignia of Knight First Class of the Order of the Lion of Finland.
Fiona Millar is a writer, journalist and education campaigner. She trained on the Mirror Groups graduate training scheme and worked on several national newspapers before going to work as a special adviser at 10 Downing Street. In 2003 she started a monthly column for The Guardian about education, and in 2004 she presented Channel four documentary The Best for My Child. Millar’s books include By Faith and Daring. Interviews with Remarkable Woman, co-authored with Glenys Kinnock; The Secret World of the Working Mother, and The Best for My Child. Did the schools market deliver? was published in 2018 to mark the 30th anniversary of the Education Reform Act 1988.
Welcome to the British Library thank you for coming out tonight I’m B rollat of the cultural events team here um the second I got wind of this book it became my mission to bring Fiona Hill to the British Library now listen to this over time I came to understand that
The opportunities from which I was benefiting were time and even generation specific younger generations of Brits and Americans from similar backgrounds could not replicate my success we’re going to be exploring why and we’re also going to be discovering how Fiona Hill has become such a dare I say it cult
Figure even a meme in the US and if you don’t believe me and you think I’m joking just take a look at this I don’t do this for all of my guests I should to [Applause] sorry um for anybody that needs an explainer of the visual gag I’ve just
Revealed my t-shirt which says be like Fiona Hill words to live by sorry I didn’t tell you I was going to do that um before I welcome my speakers I want to make sure that everybody knows about our reading rooms at the British Library which is important because they’re huge
Research areas with every aspect of human knowledge across the planet at your fingertips and the poshes chairs in London and they’re free they’re absolutely free you don’t have to be a professor or doing a PhD anyone can go all you need is two forms of ID so if
You didn’t know that now you do please tell your friends um back to tonight the fact that every single one of you found your way here to the British library and got into this event is ultimately thanks to a teacher the impact that education has in our lives is is it’s almost immeasurable
It’s very hard to to to describe and when you think about that then you have to wonder why don’t we talk about this all the time why isn’t it on the news why aren’t we all obsessed well some of us are looking at Fiona Miller um and
For myself also outside of the British Library I work with the wolston craft Society that’s an education charity working with primary schools and human rights some of my teams in here tonight so you might bump into them later but onwards to tonight and with a special Welcome to our online audience um please
Do add your questions in the Box just underneath the screen um because we’re featuring a specially extended um Q&A tonight and we want to hear from as many people as possible Fiona will also be signing her brilliant book afterwards it’s cash only sadly because we’ve been cyber hacked but that’s frankly boring
Me by now and and then last of all this is I should call this a Fiona squar event because um tonight the event is being chaired by the writer journalist tireless education campaigner Fiona Miller formerly A Downing Street special adviser um she was chair of the family
And parenting Institute and is author of numerous books on education um and she was chair she is chair of the young Canden foundation and a school Governor I’m delighted that she’s governing procedures tonight please join me and a massive Applause for Fiona Miller and Fiona [Applause]
Hill well I do want to start by thanking bee for getting this event together because I’m not I she did refer to their cyber hack but honestly her work has been tireless to make sure that you’re all here listening to the wonderful Fiona Hill and without her I don’t think
It would have probably come together in the way that it has so I’m assuming everybody knows something about Fiona Hill and if you haven’t read her book I’m just going to give you a brief sort of potted history of her life so she grew up in Bishop ockland um in the sort
Of post industrial Northeast of of the UK going to school in the 70s and 80s her dad Al was a minor who went to work as a hospital Porter in the pit chart and her mom was at Dune was a midwife and I think your life was financially
Challenging but it seemed very rich in other ways from reading the book um and the book there’s nothing for you here finding opportunity in the 21st century comes from something her dad said to her when she was approaching adulthood about you know leaving the Northeast and going somewhere else because there was nothing
For her there and the book is a very sort of personal account of her life story and starting at Bishop barington compens school which is one of the first sort of you call it a nent strugg struggling comprehensive school to St Andrews University where she read Russian and modern history she then
Spent a year in Moscow went to Harvard got an Ma and a PhD went to the John F Kennedy School of government the Eurasia Foundation The Brookings institutional the National Intelligence Council where she worked as a senior intelligence officer on Russia and worked for presidents Bush and Obama before in 2017
Going to work for president Trump as his senior director European and Russian Affairs on the National Security Council and at this was on one of the most turbulent times in sort of modern history now you call your book from the Cole house to the White House um and despite being a formidable Russian
Expert for many many years Fiona came to National Pro prominence when she gave evidence in 2019 to Congressional Hearing in advance of Trump’s first impeachment hearing and you you chose to use that event to talk about your own life story and your family in the opening statement and this I think it
Was a combination of her gender her accent her life story led to an avalanche of public interest in the UK and the US I think the impact was good and bad because some conspiracists decided that you were George a George Soros mole infiltrating the National Security apparatus but it also made you
A very formidable role model um and after the Congressional hearings one British paper called you the improbable Fe in a hill which prompted letters to you and the paper asking the following questions had your background held you back what did your accent say about you if your trajectory was so improbable how
On Earth had you made it from Bishop ockland to work in the White House were you just a fluke um and these are all a variety of questions that been you’ve been asked all through your life which basically go back to the how did you get
Here so I’m going to start by asking you take us back to Bishop ockland and tell us how you got here well as the theme um of uh tonight suggest I got here through education and just exactly as be said it was a number of interventions along the
Way actually going back to Primary School um one person I actually ought to give more of a shout out to than you know I do I kind of mention him passing in the book is the wonderfully named Mr Noble Eddie who was my um the head of my
Primary school and he’s still alive he must be literally a hundred and he’s occasionally seen wandering around downtown with his Cane in uh in Bishop Oakland looking Dapper he was always very Dapper and um we’d mentioned uh and you mentioned that that Bishop Barrington the comprehensive school that
I went to was a nation struggling compreh ensive school but my primary school e l Junior School was actually a feeder school for the old grammar schools and uh Mr Noble Eddie the head Master had basically kept up the academic standard so I actually think when I look back that my primary school
Education was really determinative because I actually went reasonably well prepared to um uh Bishop Barrington it wasn’t all downhill from there but it was a real struggle from that uh that point on but all the way along even though there were no resources I mean Bishop Arington at the time was
Literally a failing school much later on it had an offed intervention and has been turned over time into an academy there’s a new building now new uniforms and the whole thing but it was initially an amalgamation of the old secondary modern and a vocational school so in
Terms of facilities was about like one bunson burner in the chemistry class that kind of made you know the chemistry class um intake a little small we didn’t have a library apart from we had some books nothing like this here um we we had some books that had been bequeathed
To us and they all seem to be poetry anthologies or you know kind of a really strange collection of books sometimes it was quite useful I had know a lot of colage poetry but it wasn’t really helpful for actually trying to find you know the books for your courses so there
Was a lot of just copying things out by hand from the Teacher book and the teachers had to buy a lot of the equipment and books themselves as people still do you know today in some parts of the educational system in some parts of
Uh of the UK so um you know I think part of the the reason that I managed to persist with the education though was from that classic handful of teachers that people always refer to I had a wonderful English teacher at Bishop Barrington School uh Dr Marshall he’
Actually done a PhD at Durham University and decided instead of pursuing um becoming a university lecturer that he would go back into the comprehensive schools particularly in some of the poorest parts of the Northeast he had a calling towards education when I was about 13 or 14 and
I was trying to figure out what to do with my a o levels at the time and that was you know a bit of a random choice because it depended on what subjects you actually could take our local MP came in uh he was just newly elected Derek
Foster who some of the people here might have uh remembered or heard of who was the chief whip of the labor party back in the day um actually under the Blair government and he had um himself had a really hard scrubble very difficult uh childhood and he had found his way
Through education as well and at one point he was the head of education for Sunderland in the northeast of England and then then decided to run for MP but he made education and trying to open up opportunity for children of his constituency a key factor and he came to
The school and told us that education was the key you didn’t have to be basically circumscribed or held back by your circumstances but if you did get an education this was a bit of the kicker here uh it was not just right it was a privilege and you had to do something
With it and I remember actually thinking about that okay I’ll have to pick an education that I can do something with but that was really the challenge of figuring out what that would be but I think that that’s really the kind of secret to how I ended up um you know
Here with you today and with everybody else here as well but the path to studying Russian was not an obvious one at all in fact Russian wasn’t on on offer school or maybe at one or two schools in County Durham and that was a bit more tricky but before we get to
That I mean there were some setbacks in your I mean even before you got to secondary school you got a place at another more selective that you couldn’t go to yeah I mean actually because Mr Noble Eddie I mean getting back to primary school was um insistent on um
Having kids take the 11 plus until they actually phased it out so we actually ended up being the last class of kids that took the 11 plus and he because of the connections that he had with the old grammar schools and also some of the um the private schools uh around the area
He took the the kids who had the top um grades in the M1 plus and basically uh tried to um parcel us out to uh various schools and I was offered to players at Durham High girl school but the unfortunate thing was of course it is uh
Without the fees but my parents couldn’t afford the uniform the bus fairs the books you know it Con it went on and and and my father got really worried that I would be the kid who got picked on I was got the kid who got picked on at
Comprehensive school as well by the way but that I would certainly get picked on you know from going to the school if I was you know basically in the secondhand uniforms and didn’t have any of the equipment in any of the books and it
Just became a kind of a a bridge too far and I think that’s part of the lesson that I also wanted to impart in the book that sometimes an opportunity is presented but you don’t actually have the wherewithal to take advantage of it a couple of the other girls from school
Did actually go to Durham High School and I just totally lost track of them after that I I really didn’t know what they ended up doing but then the rest of us all went off to um the local comprehensive schools but there was an effort to try to work with us after that
And Derek Foster’s um constituent office would follow up with the school see if people needed any help with anything and Mr Noble Eddie had written letters to the um the head teacher asking to kind of keep an eye out for us to there was a lot of individuals in your life have
Made a massive difference in a ways individual people popped up all the way through but there were a couple of other things that you highlight in the book one was the school trip you went on to Turan Tu Germany yeah Tu got that wrong I’ll be in trouble for that um so
There’s a story about what happened to you there and that was quite a formative experience wasn’t it for you and then again when you went ultimately you finally decided to try and apply to Oxbridge and you had another little setback at yeah that was um tell us kind
Of embarrassing episodes that I’m sure will relate for a lot of people here in the audience so County Durham um and the local education Authority there really needs a shout out because even in the darkest times when you know the basically the economy in the region had
Literally fallen off a cliff with all the mines and the steel Works closing down they’ maintained their cultural budget and also much of their Educational Funding and so there was opportunities to go on school exchanges and you know this is the kind of height of town twinning in the 19 7s and Durham
Was twinned with tubing in B verberg in Germany but also a place in the nordine vest fairly place called Badin Housen and I looked out by getting selected to go to tub bingan when I actually got that thought i’ died and gone to heaven this is this most beautiful it just
Looks exactly the same I was just there a few months ago actually when I was spending some time in Germany it’s not changed at all because it’s basically a medieval um city so this was an extraordinary beautiful place but it was kids from all the way across County
Durham and some were still at at a dma school or private school as well this was kind of an open um basically Exchange program so there was a handful of us who went on this and in just the first day where they had a conal sort of
Social get together a few girls came up to me and said you know what’s your name and the rest of it and then they started asking these three questions which just still you know kind of give me a bit of dread you know what school did you go to
And I said Bishop barington comprehensive School immediately a kind of slight chill and kind of stepping back slightly because Bishop baring was Notorious at this point for being one of the for schools in County Durham um we’d had all kinds of you know bizarre things happening uh to school set on fire and
All kinds of you know scandals around the school and then they said um you know what does your father do and I was like well he was a coal miner and um then it’s a hospital Porter and it was even more a kind of step back so they
You know where are you from the bishop of Orland this what school did you go to and I was instantly realizing this wasn’t a conversation starter they weren’t looking for something in common they were just trying to kind of categorize me and immediately they just stopped talking to me and it was
Actually that kind of moment you know there’s always this realizations that people have that you realize you’re poor or you’re somewhere in a kind of a different class in a different grouping that was it you know here I was going to an exter in a foreign country and
Suddenly the fact that I came for this particular place and I was the only one person from my school there was one other um guy that didn’t bother to ask him that question I immediately got ostracized and I spent a lot of the time thinking about this that didn’t Happ
With the Germans they were just excited oh where you from you know they just seemed quite excited about it and then the Oxford story is another of these you know kind of humiliating stor so um as the comprehensive school progressed um there was sort of a feeling that um
Bishop bar was trying to set itself up to compete with the what had been the grammar school King James the first school in the town and also the Catholic School um St John’s which was just across the road and they regularly sent um kids to Oxford and K Cambridge or
Help them to apply they have one or two you know a year and of anas is said Bishop bar at this point hadn’t had anybody and um the head teacher uh decided that one of us from that group uh that had gone from otherly L school
Should apply and nobody wanted to do it it was kind of one of these standing in a row and everyone else steps back and they said well Fiona could do it and I thought I don’t know my mom and dad said well why not why not pet it’ll be fine
Well of course we had no preparation for it whatsoever and they got hold of a brochure I think that somebody had sneaked off to King James and snatched a brochure to kind of show you what the exam looked like and I remember looking through it and thinking okay but I
Didn’t know what I should take the exam in and so the head teacher said he would sign me up and he didn’t tell me he’d sign me up for a philosophy exam and I didn’t even know what philosophy was we didn’t have philosophy at Bishop Burrington and one of the questions was
About schopenhauer’s theory of the will and I thought shophow is is he a composer no no that’s shopa or something like that you know so this is kind of you know trying to go through the analy of my mind from the non-existent library about you know what this was and I
Thought okay he sounds German I’ve been taking German lessons and this must be philosophy and then I kept thinking what do I know about the theory of the will and bizarrely i’ I’d um I’d read Warren peace uh from a a 50 pence uh copy of it
Dog eaten from a jumble sale and I remember that toll story was always going on and on about the power of the will and Free Will so I decided just to adapt taken away from tolstoy’s war in peace and write this essay that was clearly not great but there must have been a
Glimmer enough of something in it that I I failed obviously on the on the basis of the exam but they invited me for an interview and and the interview uh was where things get really challenging and and somewhat harrowing because first of all I couldn’t afford to go to the
Interview uh but some of my neighbors had a whip round for the bus fair and then the train fair and then they would put you up in the college it was Hartford College at Oxford for a night so you know fortunately you know the neighbors had the collective uh push for
The um the train and the the the bus far and then I had nothing to wear so my mom said she would make me a dress and my mom had taken a dress making course at the local Technical College and um nobody knew what you should wear for an interview for um
Oxford my mom got this bolt of a second fabric that was whole heraldic and my dad said go and he stand by the wallpaper and try to like blend in so it looked like wall peer and she been like Cy sleeves it was the 80s remember and this you know really
Bizarre skirt and I had a little bit of boots a bit like this and then my granny lent me a cardigan that she got from Marks and Spencers so I must have looked really strange because normally I’d be wearing like Doc Martins and you know jeans and you know a t-shirt or
Something or my school uniform so anyway I I got on all this and I I wore the the dress the way down not to crumple it up on the bus and the train and everything and then when I finally get to the interview I just much confusion and
Getting lost in all kinds of things I find this one of the girls who had been my interlocutor in tubigan sitting on the bench and she and I couldn’t remember her name at all because I blanked out you know from that awful encounter but she’d remembered mine and
She said oh funa Hill what are you doing here and I thought what am I doing here and immediately she started kind of making fun of me and the other girls who I’d never met and I don’t think she knew and and I started trying to chat along
With them and I had a very strong Northeast accent and I could tell her they didn’t know what I was saying and she said don’t worry I’ll translate for you I thought she’s also from the Northeast you know kind of okay and she put on a posh accent she didn’t sound
Quite that Posh when I met her in tubing in and and then as I um I was called forward to go for the interview in the in the office of the lecturer someone’s leg was out now I don’t know whether they put it out it
Was just out but I was so you know basically at this point thrown off my game if I had to have had a game I fell over the the girl’s foot and smacked my nose off the door going in my Granny had stuck a a handkerchief at my the Marks and Spencers
Cardigan and I had to hold it to my nose I’m going it’s like this comedic ridiculous scene you know Billy Elliott you know kind of all on all these things and but the professor apparently the doors I thought at Oxford were pretty thick it turned out not he’d been
Listening uh to this going on outside and he turned out to be a really wonderful person and he said are you okay what happened you knows I said I fell against the door I didn’t rat out the by thought somebody tripped me um sorry very embarrassing uh but it was
Kind of like an icebreak and he started asking me about what I really wanted to do and at this point I’ve been signed up for PPE and I wasn’t really sure what this was you know philosophy politics economics I didn’t do any of these courses so I was sitting thinking this
Isn’t going to go well he said what did I really want to do and I said well I wanted to study Russian because at this point I’d made this decision I wanted to study Russian he said well you know you can’t do it from scratch here where else
Are you thinking of applying and I’d seen this amazing brochure for s Andrew in the six form room there were very few broches most of them were black and white and this is the first year that s Andrews had put a broch out in color and I’ve been flicking through looking at
Pictures of beaches and do old things and thinking wow this is nice I said well I at St Andrews I was you know going to basically put on my list I went through a few other places and he said you can take Russian from scratch there
You know he said maybe you should think about that and then he also said it’s a four-year course and maybe you could do with an extra year I me he wasn’t been condescending or anything the I just don’t know who he was never remember his name but I actually felt like I should
Thank him because he then gave me actually some advice it was clear I wasn’t going to get into to Oxford but I actually felt a little boyed by the experience that this man again was actually behaving like an educator and thinking that this person you know seems like they could make something of
Themselves but they’re not going to do it here he didn’t actually say there’s nothing for you here but he was actually suggesting to me that actually I I I concentrate on St Andrews and gave me lots of really useful advice so I’m very grateful to him whoever he was so you
Got to Andre and you did Russian from scratch I did and well the rest is history away I did history as well one of the things that strikes me about reading the book is that you get these knockbacks quite a lot you know because of your back some of them are comic as
Well some of them are comic but they’re also could be knockbacks that would absolutely flaw somebody else and probably would have flawed a lot of other young people so what is your kind of secret power that means you get knocked back or somebody trips you over
And you know even if you’re wearing a heraldic dress and you still get up and and move forward I can go dress recently we were cleaning my mom’s house out I found the dress she’d wrapped it up in tissue paper in a drawer cuz I’ve never
Worn it again needless to say she was probably going to cut it up for cussions or something at some point got around to it I think he’s actually keeping a sense of humor um my dad and um his father and my sister um actually some of my
Sister’s friends in the audience I will attest to you that they they all had a great sense of humor my sister was I was usually the butt of all of her jokes my father had a kind of sense of humor and it was all always just keep your head up
And keep on laughing you know things will work out I mean he he was of the kind of view that life is full of adversity but you would always you know kind of find a way to uh get around I think it’s I feel it’s more than sense
Of humor I think you’ve got something you’ve got something else in you you’ve got resilience and a drive well I think my family did have that actually a lot of resilience I and I talk about my mom’s mom who was the most resourceful person I’ve ever met actually she could
Make something out of nothing and I also think that growing up in the northeast of England um is is quite character building because also it’s very t communities it’s not just that everything’s Grim up north as people you know tend to to talk about there is that
Sign that just says the north as you kind of move out of uh London and you kind of go up there with trepidation wondering what’s ahead of you right it’s like here there be dragons the nor uh I really think they should change the signs if anybody has an in on there you
Know perhaps be a bit more directional yeah um but you know there is a sort of sense a really strong sense of community that kind of all of in this together and then the fact that people in my street had a whip round for me to have the bus
Fair some of my neighbors who had a car would drive me to places you know that kind of thing you always knew that people would help you and I do tend to think as many people here in the audience really appreciate that you know life is a team sport sometimes it’s an
Individual effort but it’s always in this kind of team context and every single person here um has moved forward because somebody else has helped them one way or another as well you didn’t just you didn’t do everything on your own okay so you get to St Andrews and I
Mean you you you move on to this absolutely flourishing career although I noticed when you got to Harvard you noticed that the PPE crowd had followed you there they did England was still asking you about your accent how did you get here and I said well I came on a
Plane I came the plane like you did I know we’ve got to be I want to give the audience a good chance to answer questions so I just I do want to move on to the broader issues that you raised in the book but there’s something about
Gender as well that comes through class from your book and I I know it’s trivial to talk about but the your cloth the clothes issue comes up again and again and again it’s something that women are judged on Far More the men what they were um so you obviously when you went
To your Oxford interview and then there was a story with President Trump wasn’t there when you there was you arrived at the National Security Council and you were you know senior expert in Russia and you were invited into a meeting that you didn’t expect to be going to and he
Thought I was the secretary yeah yeah because I I wasn’t dressed out like a you know Fox News um remember well actually you’re wearing you were wearing trainers and I was wearing trainers because I’d forgotten my shoes uh actually remembered some shoes today but um you know it’s it’s a very
Most women know your feet hurt you know I my daughter had been um sick the night before thrown a ball over me all night and I’d had to you know kind of I just had no sleep and I I realized I was going to be late for my first day and I
Thought I was going into an orientation um session and I put on my trainers to run to the metro and I left my shoes by the door and I got there I thought oh God I hav got my shoes you know I got quite big feet and I thought well it’ll
Be all right um I mean I’m supposed to be in orientation and I’d be in 5 minutes and I was pulled out and said you need to come and brief the president on the terrorist attack and I said what terrorist attack you know first of all
I’ve been up all night and I’d been on the Metro I didn’t know there’d been a terrorist attack there’d been a terrorist attack on the St Petersburg Metro my first day in the office and they said and I thought what am I goingon to say and then I thought oh
Hang on a sec it’s Putin’s Hometown St Petersburg there’s not been a terrorist attack in St Petersburg before thank God for general knowledge and I could at least say to the president well this will be personal for Putin um it’s uh it’s his hometown perhaps we should just you know go straight forward
To just a straightforward condolence I thought I’m got shoes and um I asked the woman who was coming over for me what size are your feet uh and they were a size too small and it’s like Cinderella you know sister I was like trying people’s shoes on and then
Eventually MCM MCM who’s the National Security adviser then he said you hav’t got any shoes and he went it’s like but this is a man who’ you know stared down a tank you know regiment in Iraq and beat Candera and all these kind of things he said well worse has happened
You he just SW me and he said just stick your feet under the chair against the desk and you just don’t he he won’t even look at you he said which was true he didn’t even look up so I’ve got my feet stuffed against you know the Resolute
Desk and thinking God I’m in the white house and I’ve got my trainers on and I’m trying to hide them and anyway Trump never looks up and I thought oh I I I delivered my little Spiel he calls Putin says it’s the first terrorist attack you
Know in your hometown I know this would be very personal for you Putin you know makes some mumbling noises and that’s it I thought success it’s great start and then Ian Trump comes in and she sits right next to me and she’s wearing heels that are about this high and she’s
Wearing some diaphanous flowing white dress and she just looks at my trainers looks at me and looks at like Master M Master said let’s go well that wasn’t before that was after you’d been asked to take the notes uh that was the next time so kind of the
Next time I went in I’d been you know kind of properly introduced this time but he thought I was the secretary you take notes as the senior directors in these jobs so you know in many respects you are sort of a glorified secretary and Trump was of the view that everyone
Was the secretary secretary of state secret defense sec in Secretary pool you know so it wasn’t all that um extraordinary but you know I thought I was going to be asked to speak about Putin in the phone call and I’d made all these clever notes about things I was
Going to say and I said he said uh and I just heard him saying well can she do it I thought she who what um aanka was in the um in the Oval Office again I thought it can’t be she and I thought is he talking to me and
They says hey darling are you listening and I was like whoa oh my God it is me and then everyone’s looking at me I mean nobody helped me out and I thought what does he want and I got that deer in the headlights look this was not my best professional
Moment and uh Trump’s saying you know going out and typing the Press um statement I thought typing the Press statement is there a typew wrer you know it’s the whole kind of my brain is worrying thinking what am I doing it’s like second week on the job so I kind of
Get up looking really confused and walk towards the door and then ianka thinks I’m being rude and kind of apparently complains about me that I because I didn’t know what I was doing and again I didn’t realize he was talking to me and then after that it was kind of bit
Disastrous for a week or so but I was actually taken aside by um one of the um other women very senior women who worked there and said look we’ll try to reintroduce you again just don’t wear the same dress because he will never remember you but he’ll remember the
Dress and I actually have to have my husband go into these sales in the evening and find me dresses so that I could have a different dress every time I might potentially be going into the Oval Office so I could just be reintroduced over and over again you
Know as a different person in a different dress so he wouldn’t hold it against me the time before for the sneakers or or being the secretary well I’m sure that didn’t happen to the men utterly absurd no it didn’t no it but it was absurd yeah okay now I’m going to
Move on a bit to the other theme of your book which is about the parallels you found this is a bit more serious than the clothes but I had to raise the clothes but you knew the Community you grew up in Left Behind communities in the states and in Russia and
Particularly through meeting your husband Ken and getting to know his family and your in-laws um so if you could say a little bit about Ken and also just the thing I when I was ticking the corners of the pages while I was reading I kept going back on my notes it
Said transport transport transport geography it is fascinating how much of this story about education social Mobility Etc isn’t only about what schools do it’s about in in your account it’s about residential geography the digital digital divide and transport almost as important as education in your account of your own life no that’s very
True um and I just wonder you know how you feel whether schools can really overcome these things on their own or whether this is really a much broader issue if we’re going to give everybody else the same chances that you did well I think it’s a much broader issue and
You know as I said I mean in the book I I draw these parallels between the kind of D dzing declining you know purses of Russia that I saw really mirroring what I’d seen in the Northeast of England uh and also in the United States and realizing that all of these things were
Intertwined now if you’re in somewhere like Russia and you want to go to opportunity you’re talking thousands and thousands and thousands of miles you know so if we think back to you know the the supposed Norman tbet statement that people should get on their bike and look
For work whether he really said it or not but it certainly stuck to him a few you know thousands of miles out in Siberia you’re not going to get any bike and get anywhere in particular and also it’s the same in the United States and um my husband’s family um his father had
Grown up as the oldest son on a farm in South Dakota and like the nearest town was miles away and his father dropped dead in the field um of a heart attack and um my husband’s father had been the one who was trying to run the farm at
The same time and he also wanted to have an education and American Education had expanded after World War II with the GI Bill uh for you know servicemen who’d return from the war but also then more broadly for you know it was mostly men younger men and um Kenard then in that
Um you know kind of period of the 1930s he was almost exactly the same age as my dad in fact as a year or so older and in the kind of 1940s and into the 50s wanted to basically get an education and he hitchhiked from the
Farm to the nearest um College which was Wesleyan College in South Dakota you a very small um school back and forth so we could manage the farm at the same time and I just couldn’t get my head around that actually that he was basically hitchhiking and managing the
Farm just these vast distances but he’s got this amazing story that eventually gets um a degree in um sort of food Sciences applied chemistry he ended up with lots of patents and and and help to invent shellac that strange you know kind of greasy stuff he put around
Apples it was kind of a very odd thing so every time I see a slightly wax an apple I think of Mr Keane and his his breakthroughs in shellock for for Farmers but he got his first job off the back of a serial box because he didn’t
Know himself how to go about getting a job after he got his degree and he was sitting literally eating Cheerios and he sees the address of General Mills the company that made Cheerios and decides to write a letter saying that he was a young farmer who got this degree
Hitchhiking backwards and forwards uh to uh college and he wanted to help farmers have additional products more value added to their uh products and he’d been um uh he got a degrees of food chemist would they give him a job they gave him a job he didn’t even go for an interview
They gave him a job I mean it’s one of these American only in America stories and so then they move across the country to all these different plac in General Mills my husband’s one of 12 and all of their kids went to school on pel grants which
Was the expansion of of assistance for people also first generation going to college or people from impoverished backgrounds because you can imagine with 12 kids and Mr Keem wasn’t making an awful lot of money and they all had these great breaks also U through education and I ended up meeting my
Husband who also got a scholarship as I did to go to Harvard and he’s my next door neighbor it took a while for us to kind of grow on each other but he’s literally my next door neighbor in um at Harvard so you brought the same kind of
From the same backgrounds but across the pond and yeah and also one in a very remote agricultural area and I was always kind of struck that they really went nowhere because they couldn’t get anywhere and you couldn’t like Drive the tractor you know down the road to the
Nearest town they didn’t really have a car and you know when you were on the farm you were really stuck and I kept thinking about that and I remember once getting my parents and you know uh my in-laws together and they were kind of swapping these stories it was
Fascinating listening to them because my father had been Limited in how far he could go by how far he could cycle in terms of finding a job after the minds closed Mr Keane had you know eventually got a job and moved all the way you know
Kind of around the country and my dad had ended up um his Mobility was eight miles away from where he’d grown up because it was just that limitation of distance and of course there wasn’t much many jobs you could get from the back of a serial packet in northern England back
In the 1960s yeah but you feel very strongly I mean about about the fact that other people you you feel that you’re still the exception to the rule and I think we have some head teachers and teachers in the audience and they I hope will will say something about their
Own personal experience of this how easy it is for somebody from your sort of background to do the things that you’ve done um and your book is a bit of a rallying cry for change at a time when you say I assume talking about America that anger and hopelessness exists
Amongst you know it’s even amongst graduates now you know we’ve had the leveling up but the disadvantage Gap is still suddenly wide we’ve had covid we’ve had un special reporters coming here and commenting on the poverty in this country yeah what what what what do you feel of the solutions then well look
There there most you put some the end of your book has seven or eight ideas about things well you talk about a sort of maral plan for social Mobility to get people from those communities the same opportunities yeah I mean you’ve got the kind of largest scale issues and then
But you’ve got a lot of things that we ourselves can do um you know I think that the the for me the power of mentoring people just paying for my bus Fair um you know it’s actually something I’m trying to do with the book um the
Money from the book I’m going to you know I already am putting it into hardship funds for students and internships and things that I wasn’t able um to do brilliant so um you know trying to get other people to think that that these are things they can do as
Well I me also some of is peerto peer I mean there are a few of my friends here from St Andrews and elsewhere who you know just actually knew a little bit more about things than I did and actually gave me advice hey you can apply to this did you know about this
Job or did you know about this internship and these are things that you can do give people a bit of career advice uh just give people a chance who come from um a different uh a different background and also we need as I said an
All of a societal approach to this um I I think you know we have to just recognize also that one size doesn’t fit all my dad actually became you know relatively well educated over time I mean he left school at 14 had no qualifications at all didn’t even take
The 11 plus because his parents thought what’s the point you know you’re going to go down the coal mine um I mean you know who knows you know how it might have turned out but they didn’t even give him the chance to do that but he did get the chance through the workers
Education Association and the Durham miners Association you had to basically get education as he went on and you know by the time he was an older adult he was actually pretty well read and you know reasonably you know well informed you know I I mentioned my mother taking this
Dress making course at the um the local Technical College but she was trained as a nurse and you know um there was kind of opportunities you know for her at age 16 to she was one of the first cohorts of midwives in the NHS and you know that
Was kind of a way of uh of pushing forward but if you think about the societal benefit of Education I think we need to rethink and not just to see it as an individual um benefit or kind of something that really is only for individuals to sort out for themselves
In the United States there’s been um quite a bit of research recently by uh Angus ston is originally from uh the uh from Scotland and an Cas at Princeton University they won the Nobel Prize for the work that they did on the deaths of Despair and they’ve recently shown uh
Basically how much uh mortality rates are linked to education and life expectancy and there’s at least a tenure difference between or the life expectance of people have a two or four year college education in the United States and some um I think parallels here in the United Kingdom and uh those
Um who do not and it’s widening all the time so it’s kind of a scissors um moving out outwards now there’s a diff there’s a series of different theories about this they actually think that it’s not just the the college education but the fact that and then how people might
Think about their health and their well-being all the various things that they should do but it’s also because we’ve got into this knowledge economy where the Sorting for getting a job is really about whether you’ve got a degree or not or some kind of qualification just like my dad experienced you know
Back in the day so they’re also advocating that we start to think about different forms of Education lifelong learning adult education the further education colleges and also giving people the opportunity to um be educated and go to college uh Technical College vocational school and University but also get work experience so they’ve only
Just started in this inquiry themselves now and I think that we need to have a national debate and I know that um Joe Johnson is somewhere in the audience because I saw him in the way in and we were part of um a discussion at ditchley
Uh Park out in Oxfordshire a year or a couple of years ago where he made a comment about education being a UK superpower that kind of struck with me because if you actually look at the UK and the United States we were were together uh basically the Pioneers in
Education the United States set up even during the Civil War in the 1860s through into the 1890s these public land grant universities that’s Michigan Ohio you know Wisconsin the big state universities and their goal was to have mass education as well as specialized education in engineering and in um
Agriculture so that was a kind of a mini version of one of these that my father-in-law went to and they Remain the most affordable education and uh for uh people in the United States and they do a lot of full-on Grants and uh subsidization for first generation
Students you know I spent six months in Germany and in Germany and education’s free uh and I mean that really makes a huge difference because the thing that worries me the most is how much getting into debt puts people off I would absolutely not have gone to University
If I’d gone into debt we had a great grandfather who died in a deta prison in Durham and everybody would talk about oh great-grandfather Henning who died in debt is prison and so you know could not possibly go into debt and you know that kind of barrier and that kind of thought
About you know what might happen would really put a lot of people off and in Germany and China and all kinds of other countries Canada people invest in education because they see it as being of societal benefit it’s not to say that you wouldn’t have you know some kind of
Modification to this we need to have a serious discussion about it but we clearly in the United States and the United Kingdom now lagging behind where we could have been and think about all of the elites of the world world that are educated here in the UK and the
United States was a recent report 50% of the world’s Elite has passed through either a UK or University or a US University and many of them are paid for by their governments I mean when I was at Harvard and I was getting a major scholarship uh the government of
Kazakhstan the government of China many other European governments were paying for you know some of their best students uh to study the and big private institutions like Harvard actually can give everybody um uh a b free education so for many people here in the audience you know who are advising some of their
Um students to think about University think about applying to Harvard that for undergraduate I if if people get admitted they will get a full ride and that’s an irony right I mean it might be easier for people to go to Harvard then it might be easier to go to UCL for
Example well I think that’s a very good note to open out to the audience who’ve been um asked for their views just now I can’t really quite see any of you because of this light but um yeah I know we’ve ‘ got some heads here and I think
You Sarah yes I’ve had some communication with you Sarah please ask the first question say please say where you’re from and what you do hi I’m Sarah bone I’m the um ascal rep for Yorkshire and humba as well as being the head teacher at Headland School in
Bridlington um so first question from me um within our context Coastal and Northern um the socio economic challenges being faced by our community are rapidly increasing for example 110 people are living intense not by choice um between January and March of this year that compares to 25 in the whole
Region in the same period in 2021 in this context there is only so much schools can do to affect positive change for our young people living in extreme poverty with no access to hot water heating and food it’s a daily occurrence to what extent do you think the government needs a holistic and
Interconnected strategy around improving and funding all services around young people and what do you think the key priorities outside of Education in northern England could be to potentially positively impact children in our school communities thank you Fiona okay we have we got any other I’m sorry I’m just
Struggling here with the lights a bit to um um I’m going to ask my colleague savan please can we bring up the house lights so that the audience is more visible sorry thank you can I quickly put up any hands here people who in the education World okay uh lady there
Gentleman at the back with his hand up with a pen I’ll take you in in three so yeah I’ll come back to you promise I will yeah I’m afraid my question won’t be about education actually it’s more about political kind of situation and things I’m Russian I’ve been living here
For over 20 years I’m a doctor initially degree in Russia I mean that’s one point you might actually point out in Soviet system the education was free including high education and pretty good level and very comprehensive but my question is so having such a varied experience uh on
Various levels um one who out of modern political figures you would feel like worth looking at and supporting and in relation to that how do you feel about the possibility of trump get winning the next election yeah he just big sharpen take a breath there hold it for a while okay
That will come back to that one and then finally yes gentleman the back yeah yeah yeah say please say who you are yeah with the m microphone yeah yeah question yeah sorry is about education oh okay yeah can you wait until there was a person on the microphone we we’ll bring
The microphone down to you in a minute yeah wait for the microphone yeah hi there um my name is Andre O’Neil head teacher at All Saints Catholic College um in labate Grove I suppose want to know a little bit more about the what you think about the British education
System specifically um the your book talks about you being the improbable Fiona Hill um how do we reduce that probability in the UK and create more Fiona Hills there actually is a Fiona Hill in here as well so there’s a few of us with cloning okay we’ve got three very
Different questions there one about the co context in in the coastal towns which is something I know everybody in education policy is always very worried about one about um the Gastly possibility of trump coming back and one about the British education system how it looks me your yeah and they kind of
These are really you know very much linked together because I mean I think as you laid out here that I mean the schools cannot possibly tackle uh the poverty uh that exists in so many of the regions and you know part of the reason that my school was struggling was
Because of the poverty in the town the sudden you know basically a drop off of uh employment you know from 1981 onwards pretty much every business around in Bishop Oakland closed down and all nearby concert steel works the Sheldon Wagon Works the last of the coal mines
You know just even before we got into the minder strike a lot of the industry had been in Decline beforehand but that was kind of you know the the real drop off a cliff it was quite like shock therapy uh to be honest in uh in Russia
In the 1990s or that what happened also in um East Germany uh in the the same time fre per so was just this abrupt shift and of course coastal towns had the de-industrialization the decline of the the fishing industry the ports and then everybody going off to Tor Molinos
Instead of toi or you know kind of uh Benny D rather than Bridlington uh on their vacations and so even more you have uh this shift I mean there’s also I mean frankly the just the whole structure of the system in the United Kingdom which is very different from the
United States or Germany where I’ve been spending the last six months taking a look at you know some also the education and other systems there because we had a hyper centralization I would say um of um finances and Authority uh in the 1980s as well so I mean I talked about
The local education um Authority in Durham and their you know kind of ability particularly in the 1970s to keep their cultural um budgets alive but by the 1980s that becomes very difficult because what is it just between about five and six% of taxes uh are actually
Kept uh by the local Authority so that’s a problem in itself because in the United States you’ve got um obviously the states and the cities the municipalities have a tax um levying Authority and they can also make a lot of decisions about how educational money is spent which is something that you
Can’t really do in the United Kingdom and in Germany it’s very much the same as well they get a lot of infusion from um the the state or the federal government the national level uh money but they also are able to you know set um goals themselves and to uh to raise
Money and so I mean that in itself the lack of funding of of poor tax base uh you know over um time you know so many hits the economy uh the um austerity uh measures after uh the 2008 2009 financial crisis hitting things even harder I mean that’s when you got the UN
You know coming to look at poverty but really it’s kind of multigenerational problems um I know I have people that I went to school with who are my age you know in their late 50s who never got a job their kids didn’t get a job and
Their kids have not got a job because they’re in um you know basically the councel states where all of the jobs kind of disappeared and they’re not able they don’t have the mobility the physical Mobility they can’t afford a car the bus routs have been cut off to
Be able to get there we had kids walking to school because the bus routes had been uh paired back maybe you know three or four miles you know in all kinds of weathers so I think you know exactly as you laid out here there needs to be a
Holistic approach um it’s tied to um you know basically the patterns of um employment it’s tied to how can you give mentorship and uh support not just to kids but also to their families and there was two programs that I went to look at in Germany that were very
Interesting in the rural region they’ve got this kind of basic professional mentorship program um that’s uh tied to the local University system where they have trained mentors who going into the schools to work with kids from underprivileged backgrounds who are quite you know kind of capable academically but have all kinds of
Problems maybe they’re in a caring situation where they have to look after family members um or their family are very poor or they’ve got you know some of kind of barriers there to being able to pursue their education and they try to work with them in small groups or one
One that’s quite expensive um and it’s kind of funded Again by the local authorities but then there’s another group called arik Kint which is Nationwide and they tried to pick up all the kids not just the academically gifted but they try to actually set up volunteers of mentors um you know
Basically Countrywide and they’re basically getting a lot of traction because it turns out that there’s a lot of people in the German system high levels of the government um who also from first generation uh going to college but the whole goal is to try to prepare people for college not just for
Other um educational opportunities and I was thinking you know particularly at the back of the book that there’s kind of some of these ideas that you can pick up on I went to Germany after I’d done the book but it was more about how could we create these kinds of networks
Getting back to your question about you know creating more people who can you know move forward with these opportunities how could we can all do it uh some of you are already doing it um I’m trying to kind of pay back trying to meet with as many um School groups as I
Can I do a lot of zooms you know basically um Civic organizations trying to encourage people to just sort of think about how you can engage with someone all of us can go back to our old schools uh we can um you know basically
Reach out to kids and try to help them I try to you know do as much as I can connect people with other people because it’s also giving people a kind of sense uh of um a pathway forward but then you also got to think as I’m trying to do
With the book um money now you know how can you actually set up these hardship funds to give kids a chance I mean if my neighbors hadn’t given me the bus far I would never have gone to the interview i’ would never have had the professor
Who told me to then apply to St Andrews but there were many times when I just simply didn’t have the funding to do something and we need to sort of think about that the schools need to have the support for teachers because teachers can’t be everything but maybe within the
School system to have these mentorship arrangements and you Germans are already starting to do that and I know a lot of schools do it already so I have gone back to my old school which is now Bishop Baron Academy it’s part part of a network and they’re trying to create all
Of this too so I can see some real signs of progress but as you’ve pointed out there’s still real pockets of deprivation in uh the uh UK that are really you know for a large part untouched and so we really have to have interventions but it really also depends
On Devolution you know of authority to local education authorities and also to local governments I know in the Northeast now there’s the discussion about creating a combined devolved Authority but we’re going to have to think about this more broadly you across the rest of the country
Thank you uh but not an easy fix in terms of um Trump coming back I mean I I did have the inward shudder unfortunately there’s a very strong possibility of him coming back and so they awful lot of the things that you know I’m even talking about here where
There’s been a lot of attention being paid in the United States too about education you know there are many people around uh Trump and others who are actually denigrating and talking down education you may have seen Ronda santis you know for example who um is the
Governor of um uh Florida I mean you know pause for a moment because it’s all really hard to think of Florida is such a nice sunny place to be in such a dark spot at the moment and is this really Florida and it maybe that actually Mickey Mouse and Disney World save us
From a lot of this because they’re in a fight with Ronda santis over you know his various attempts to intervene in the education system I mean literally um trying to turn um uh teachers and parents against each other you’ve probably it’s sounds very reminiscent of the Stalin era um in the Soviet Union
Where parents can denounce teachers for picking particular books or students can you know taking books off the curriculum attacking libraries you know education at all different levels in the United States has been under attack and I’m afraid would be you know more likely to be under attack under Trump and there’s
All kinds of other issues that would be extraordinarily um problematic so um you know the election or potential election of trump probability you think it’s better than 50% at this particular moment which should give all of us pause for thought I’m going to come back to
How do we get more Fiona Hills at the end but anybody got slightly more optimistic question than that yes gentleman there with glasses and and we promised you a question too one two is the third question I think it was in the green jacket that we
Yeah you’re getting a mic now okay young lady there with a hand up with the glasses or both of you we take two quick questions from you okay who’s going first yeah okay um hi I’m Tommy Gale I run inside uni oh there you are Tommy yeah
Sorry um and we’re an organization that helps get children from State schools into top universities by peer-to-peer work and Fiona kindly mentioned us in her book um which I was listening to in the car and it was a complete surprise so I near crashed but that was really
Nice surprise um and um unfortunately lots of the stuff that Fiona has talked about about her own experience of the Oxford interview being quite an alienating and difficult process I think is still the case and you kind of see that in lots of the statistics about State School versus private school
Admissions to Oxbridge um so I was interested to know when you when you mentioned about um students going to America um as actually a more realistic option for them with scholarships is that that’s been something we’ve been seeing a lot with the students we work with that they feel more comfortable to
Go to America than 10 miles down the road um guess is interested to know what could our universities be doing better to be more inclusive and to get more children from State schools coming in and is there anything that we could learn from America and perhaps other places like Germany with their
Universities and and how they to it okay thank you should we take the next question so we can yeah just to follow what that gentleman’s saying yeah 1% of the population this country go to sorry please can you talk into the microphone because people are listening online okay
Uh 1% of the population of this country go to Oxford Cambridge 25% of judges are chosen from about 1% of people but my question follows on from the gentleman down here about education um me and a few friends John burco Andy Burnham Greg Dyke we’ve got a Bild going through
Parliament to get rid of the 11 plus do you think this is a good idea very good question yeah it is a great question ladies here here you are they’re going to share a mic and ask a question each put your hand up put your hand up yeah yeah I’m going to come
To this side of the room then yeah hi um my name is Chloe and um I really appreciated this this the lecture um you’ve talked a lot about systemic barriers such as gender class access to transport um I grew up in Ohio uh my grandparents were farmers um I really
Appreciate your your thoughts on this topic um but I also came to London by way of Belfast uh to study migration so I’m very interested in inter intersectional links between migration Mobility citizenship and educational outcomes um was wondering what parallels or maybe contrasts you see between the
US and the UK in terms of race and citizenship and educational outcomes um the US of course has quite a specific history with segregation in schools including my own Community um in Ohio and there are tremendous Regional discrepancies West Virginia being read on the outskirts of DC I’m just curious
About your thoughts on that thank you and your friends got a question um no no okay okay that’s great so we’ve got inclusion in universities the 11 plus and the specific American well we talked I touched a bit about geography and transport and yes yes and the race issue
Comes through in your book which you think is more powerful in a way in America in America um and as um you’ve just pointed out I mean it is a very important uh Factor um in in the United States but getting um you know first to
Um uh Tommy and um his question I want to give Tommy another shout out not just um in the book uh because I read about um what Tommy and his uh colleagues and friends from University were trying to do um in an article and then um you know
They mentioned on a radio program that I was listening to and I thought God if only Tommy had been around when um I had uh got this opportunity to to go down to um uh to Oxford for an interview because what uh Tom and um his friends from
University were trying to do was sort of uh be basically guide people through the process that is it’s like a maze uh for people who are not already in the system and just like a maze there’s all these dead ends and you know sometimes you just need some signifying to you know
Turn around and not just keep walking into the bush and not be able to you know find your way out and I was just really um intrigued by what they were doing it was Grassroots it was just students doing this I mean eventually you got the um Oxford and then the
Cambridge um uh bureaucracy in the S of system to accept what they did it was very difficult was all on a Sho string it’s actually the same what the U the group in Germany are B Kint did it was also set up by students who were the first generation going to German
Universities but again German universities are free so there wasn’t the kind of know Financial aspects of of this and they also set this up and I know that you’ve been trying to expand this out to other universities because it’s not just you know the 1% of people
Going to Oxford and Cambridge I me the United States in fact I think there’s uh kind of 12 universities in total which the the the whole Elite you know end up going through that you know basically run the country it’s all the ivy league and you know a handful of others just
Like the Russell group um here in the United Kingdom and you know it’s really kind of a question about how you can widen access now part of this is also Financial so Oxford and Cambridge have actually spent quite a lot of money fundraising obviously not coming in from
The government to um try to um expand the financial aid to students who otherwise would see this as too much of a barrier as all these big campaigns at um Oxbridge colleagues uh colleges Durham University while I’m now the chancellor is starting to do this as well St Andrews has a mixed system
Because Scottish students go for free under the Scottish system but they are now trying to expand out bseries and hardship funds you know for English students and others who might otherwise find it now difficult to go to St Andrews but in uh the United States this is really key and the big state
Universities like Ohio State as well as the private universities spend a lot of time trying to kind of think about how they can expand um access to education and also to create bridging programs because I mentioned that the um the lecture at uh at Oxford who um
Interviewed me said I could probably do with an extra year which is was probably right of educational bridging because of coming from a pretty straightened um comprehensive skill my air levels were all over the place I didn’t actually use any of my a levels when I got to
University because I couldn’t really put together basically a degree program of the air levels ended up taking because I just took the air levels where there was a teacher who could teach a level uh and so I I’d wanted to do history but the um history Prof uh teacher resigned or
Retired rather the year before and so I had to do art history which actually you know it’s history it’s OT and there’s lots of museums in County Durham so I was actually able to get access to some amazing collections by cycling off to various museums and you know kind of and
There was courses at the museums as well that proved to be very helpful I did geography uh which was kind of we had a great geography teacher and she was obviously amazing uh and then I did English with this great English teacher I mentioned uh before and then I did
French and French proved a bit disastrous because my French teacher was stabbed with a compass which I mentioned in the book and needless to say left the school and then nobody else wanted to come back to teach French and so I was ending up teaching myself french with those real
Tooreal rep you know the whole time and um one French teacher suggested that I just read the Michelin guide uh to France and just kind of get in the mood and I was like great that was kind of really lovely but I read all about Britany and
Uh later wrote a little essay in French about Britany that I’d read about in the Michelin guide so suppose it came in vaguely useful but I mean this was actually kind of you know part of the problem so yes I did need a bridging program and and the St Andre is the
Scottage system you get that extra year for um students who’ve been doing hires but now places like Amhurst I think college was one of the first to do this but Ohio State Harvard’s doing uh bridging programs now all the all of the um colleges and universities in the
United States are raising money uh basically for these kinds of programs that’s another way of addressing this issue of expanding opportunities you know making people less probable helping people bring in but it requires funding and again you know there’s more propensity for universities in some places to raise money through the
Private uh sector or from foundations and there is for you know um you know maybe um other universities in you know rather bited parts of uh parts of Britain and again even in Germany where it’s funded by the state there are these charitable organizations and foundations
That uh that do this um uh as well uh when it comes to um you know the 11 plus Yes actually I do think that those kinds of um you know rigid uh selective exams should be done away with you know for a lot of people they’re late developers
Right I mean I I don’t know how other people feel about it but I know I did the 11 plus my dad you know didn’t get that chance to do it I know a lot of people who got the 11 plus ended up going off to a grammar school in other
Words but I also know a lot of people who weren’t quite ready for the 11 plus or and and these exams that particular time there were you know people I met later who had been you know penalized and um not not get into a grammar school
Uh because of the fact that you know it was only reading there 13 14 15 people basically come into their own at different stages in their lives which is again why we should also be emphasizing continuing education further education you know it might be that somebody in
Their 30s suddenly then realizes what it was that they really wanted to do with themselves and get an opportunity to continue their education and retrain I don’t think and also there’s a lot of anxiety in in um examination taking as well there’s a lot of um uh basically
Now um uh analysis and data that shows that girls in particular have a lot of anxiety particularly over subjects like math um I had general anxiety I didn’t necessarily have it over math but I know a lot of people who do kind of they see basically a math test and their brain
Just goes blank and lot of people have a hard time with the time tests and if you think about it in life there’s not a lot of uh time unless you’re diffusing a bomb or some other you know kind of critical issue where you have to do
Things in a certain you know kind of rigid uh time I mean there might be when you know you’re a doctor and you’re kind of racing against the clock for an operation but most of our Lives you’re not being asked to answer 20 questions
In you know an hour and a half it’s it’s not NE it’s more of a a test of your ability you know to kind of overcome some anxiety rather than a kind of a a test of uh of your skill so I do think that we should be rethinking that and
Being you know a bit more um circumspect and also in the United States case I mean you do have the standardized tests but there’s actually no discussion of phasing them out because there is an acknowledgement in the United States now that you know people coming from all kinds of different backgrounds minority
Backgrounds you know rural backgrounds uh people have you know different um educational experiences and that we’re really not giving people a chance by having a one-sized fit all and obviously race has um a big um impact in uh the United Kingdom as well and gender and
Other issues but place also plays a very important role and I think as you’re talking about Bridlington there are there large parts of the United Kingdom that are not very diverse I mean in Scotland it’s kind of what 96% white my hometown was 98% it’s kind of really a
Question of poverty and socioeconomic issues and the place itself now that um issue is in the United States of often Amplified because you have the racial um underlay and overlay and additional barriers and I think that what we have to be able to do is overcome all of
Those barriers at the same time gender race you know ethnicity language barriers and place and Geographic barriers at the same time it’s not an either all we have to figure out how we tackle all of this at the same time and I do think there are a lot of answers in
The United States again the public land grant universities in the United States the big state universities are actually very impressive and perhaps you know I might suggest a trip out to some of these places I’ve been to a lot of them over the last couple of years and
Researching the book and then since then and and there’s all kinds of different ways in which we can look at this I mean I know there was a fetish at one point for looking at Finland and it’s educational system but I think we could do a lot by looking at a combination of
The United States the UK again it’s our superpower and also Germany and interestingly the Germans are now looking at the British education system which I was a bit surprised about actually because apparently we’ve we’ve done a lot over of over the years and creating more flexibility perhaps doing
More with less and the Germans are worried now that their systems become too rigid and in fact getting back to the 11 plus question that they’re streaming people too early and pushing people in different directions and not giving people an opportunity to come back and the Germans aren’t that great
At adult education they do a lot of retraining through their um unions and their business um councils the workers councils but they don’t have Fe colleges and they don’t also give people a chance to go back and you know r tool and res skill and so you know they’re actually
Now looking at the United States in the UK as well okay be’s looking at me because you’ve got an online I’m giving I’m giving two long questions we’ve got quite a lot to get through so whilst you pick your next one do keep your hands up
I’m just going to read out a questions back here I’ve got in that row at the back Janet baronson asks thank you for your insights if you could Implement through central government one single program that could have the biggest impact what might it be oh wow I think
Actually we should take a SE of hands here as well for lots of experts here can I just make sure the other two people get their microphones and then L excuse me taking you halfway back into International politics but uh a question um I chair a group which looks at the ethics of
Conflict which is currently engaged in a difficult subject as you can imagine and previously we have found Common Ground between Christians and and Islam on many of the principles about what is is not an acceptable form of warfare today I heard that MSE students at a college in University in London had said
They were no longer able to write essays about the situation in the Middle East because they found their backgrounds were inhibiting them from addressing the issue at all like they’d come to a halt so how could we find a way through education of bridging some of that understanding which is clearly
So missing in an important part of the world which must have featured in your White House life yeah very good question can we just pass the mic along the road this yes yeah then we’ve got three questions yeah you’ve got the intervention the one intervention that would yeah I’m um
Trying to think about that I’m not sure if there’ be one that would you know fix everything but yeah I’m I’m trying to think but actually I think we should probably solicit from some of the teachers and Educators in the AUD about what they would think as well here so
What’s going in higher education with tricky political questions yeah did you want to take another question as well doing can can you hear me yes yes we can so I’m I’m asking a question for the three of us here we’re we’re all long-term campaigners on education and I think
It’s fair to say that we all feel that the debate generally for the last I mean from new labor onwards in this country has been about exceptionalism it’s how do you get The Talented from disadvantaged backgrounds to an Oxbridge college or whatever and you are a wonderful example of
Exceptionalism and your story like all these stories are always fantastic and interesting but that doesn’t seem to us to be the problem with the system yeah the system is the Forgotten third that ask will talk about who fail whatever tests the Tories have set up for them or
New labor before those who fail the 11 plus in the selective Council who are written off at the age of 10 those who don’t go to private school we haven’t mentioned private schools but they are the big problem at the center of all of this do you agree with any of
That we lot a lot to get into these things are actually all you know very much tied together and it was something that I was very mindful about in the book I didn’t call myself the improbable Fiona Hill that was actually you know it
Was ft but I did feel like you know I kept being ask about being a fluke I was very conscious of that because look I went to school with people who were just as smart as I was and I think that the difference for me was that my parents were really engaged
In the idea of Education because they felt that they hadn’t had one in the way well my dad in particular leaving school at 14 extremely interested in things not having any opportunity uh and you know basically being written off right from the very beginning but wanting to still
Have you know um access to knowledge and then finding it later through the workers education associations the gerus association it’s just you know personal reading my mom was always extraordinary happy with her vocational training to be nurse when I asked my mom would you ever do anything different she never would so
There was somebody who was extremely pleased she hadn’t she didn’t pass uh the 11 plus uh in the top you know girls in her school to go to grammar school she was number four and only three girls got a place at the local um grammar school where she grew up in Billingham
And but she you know was actually unfazed by that because she loved being in her she was super proud of being one of the first midwives in in the NHS so it’s actually you know that um there’s different pathways you know to basically getting satisfaction out of your work
And I don’t think that the education system should be set up just with this pipeline I mean when I went to University back in 1984 uh only 10% of uh kids were going on to that kind of higher education at that point of poly Technics as it was
Then and then universities I mean 90% of people were doing you know something else in fact there was a very high uh Youth and employment problem in you know the early 1980s well I mean 90% of people aren’t actually initially going on to very much it took them a long time
To find vacational training and I think that you know precisely what you’re saying here that we can’t have a one-sized fits-all education system and we have to really kind of think and also listen to people I read some really good reports by one of the youth Voice UK I
Think that’s kind of one of the titles about how people would actually like an education where they’re given opportunity to have practical training as well to basically have work experience I mean I did get work experience all the way through because I had to work I mean I I cleaned in uh the
Hospital um those are my connections got me great cleaning job uh but I also worked in pubs and bars I um eventually when I was learning Russian I did some translation I worked in a call center I did all kinds of things and I got a lot enough
Work experience to know things I didn’t want to do but I didn’t get a lot of the work experience I didn’t have any fancy internships I didn’t have any of these kinds of opportunities but I also then worked with an awful lot of people also trying to find their way there as well
Who would have loved to have different ways of fitting back into education to get some training and I think that’s what we have to be thinking about as well in the United States there’s a lot of thinking about public private Partnerships in Germany there’s a lot of
This as well I personally think we have to reinvigorate the uh labor unions again as well and the workers associations and invest a lot in workers education associations so I think we ought to be having a a a conversation about this not just nationally but internationally and looking at various
Things that work because I do not think it’s of good for any society to be basically writing off vast words of your population and we will not be competitive either in the UK or the United States in the international marketplace that’s not what the Chinese
Are doing they’re putting in uh a lot of emphasis on education the Germans are panicking about education right now and they’ve actually got a whole program of leaving nobody behind at all you might you know the United States had the Head Start and No Child Left Behind and you
Know actually been failing a little bit at you know basically expanding all of this but you know many other uh countries are realizing that having an educated population not just an educated Workforce is going to be the absolute key to the Future so the critique that
You’ve had there um is is uh is very well founded and we need to be creative uh and we need to be creative all the way along we can’t write anybody off at different parts of um their lives either I mean my dad you know losing his job
And the minds in his 30s um you there’s no opportunity that point to retrain and it was always in his 30s I have friend ands and relatives who’ve lost their job in their 50s uh and could retrain my sister lives in Spain and got actually money to retrain um after her um job
Folded under under Co so there’s you know lots of places are actually you know investing in this and thinking you know that people can you know do various things so maybe getting back to that question about the one intervention thing that intervention was be to thinking about education in a holistic
Fashion again as a continuing lifelong learning uh and giving people the opportunity I mean I’m extraordinary lucky that I work in a place like the Brookings institution where I’m a senior fellow and I have the opportunity to learn things all the time but you know we have institutions like City lit where
I was speaking last night actually talked to a couple of people here who were taking courses local um technical colleges you know there’s all kinds of things that we should be um really investing in and um trying to uh trying to pump up and I’ve missed one of the
Question one question about the with your foreign policy hat on about why it is that some students feel that unable to deal with contemporary um look I think kind of got an atmosphere right now in high educational establishments that we didn’t have when we were there when you had all kinds of open
Discussion I mean I must have had incredibly uncomfortable conversations while I was at University with people and you know now we have a kind of a culture where everything is out on um social media where people get um attacked for you know expressing uh Divergent views uh you know all the way
You know back in um school I mean I remember back back in um you know mic my Elementary School teach is encouraging us to take on hard questions uh obviously it’s somewhere like Bishop Barrington at the time we were kind of living a lot of the hard
Questions so there wasn’t really much of debate about it but it was one of the things that I really appreciated S Andrew is meeting people who were not like me uh who would come up with Divergent um uh points of view and I think you know you’ve hit the nail on
The head there it’s extraordinary difficult under the kind of curent environment on college campuses here in the UK and in the United States to have just open debates uh that are mediated uh you know by people um so this is um it’s it’s happening more in Civic organizations I I was also very
Interested in Germany at seeing how debates were being handled it’s um more open debate actually there in university they a lot of Civic groups that go out to uh basically um structure and shape uh discussions uh you you mentioning this from the religious perspective in the United States a lot of interfaith
Groups that actually still sit down you know and talk about um various uh issues there’s there’s a number of them I don’t know actually how much they’ve been affected over the last um weeks by you all the tragedies in the Middle East but definitely Civic groups can play um a
Role as well it doesn’t just have to happen in universities but I think you’ve just put your you know finger there on a on a major problem uh where the educational environment was supposed to be expanding inquiry and you know people you know basically having to face
Up to the fact that you know people don’t always think like you and they have you know different uh very different perspectives you’re going to have to deal with you know as you go on through your life okay well take a quick round of final questions Joe at the back
And this lady in the front two ladies in the front if you can ask quick questions chat there and this lady here has had a hand up yeah yeah with a black scarf one yeah okay Joe thank thank you very much and thank you for a great talk Fiona my
Question is to you as a foreign policy practitioner and whether you think the decline in the I’m sorry whether you think the decline in the teaching and learning of modern foreign language languages is making it harder for us to understand how other countries see us and also making it much more difficult
For us to anticipate changes in countries such as Russia and China yes I think it is can we just the other but anyway I’ll hold that thought but got the hi my name is sh I’m an journalist I’m here because of Education um there are million Afghan girls in
Afghanistan that they have the same dreams like like you they want to read they want to write but they are not allowed to study so what’s your message for those girls and also related to Afghan girls education what’s your message to the world thank you oh that’s
A good question yeah we come okay a couple of things thank you very much for your talk as well it’s been fascinating um I’m a teacher maths funny enough um and first of all I just wanted to touch on your point about exams um I feel like
We should be quite careful in dismissing them we only have to look at what happened to private school grad over covid to see quite how catastrophic that was uh for a lot of students from from under privilege backgrounds um secondly is um your point about broadening the uh
Broadening the sphere for what you can do in terms of education and what points you can enter the workforce um why do you think this has taken so long because I don’t think this is a particularly new phen phenomenon I know when I graduated right there was still all this talk
About these massive multinational companies doing entry from 18 even some from 16 um I look now and it’s actually no better in fact is worse so what what’s been holding back all of these all of this Goodwill because it it clearly hasn’t happened okay thank you yeah lady here with the black scarf
Yeah again echoing everyone else’s um opinion of great talk thank you uh I’m a transport planner um so I’m with you in terms of Mobility uh but I’m also going back to University next year and I’m 50 so I’m I’m with you in terms of continuing education but my question is
Um my stepdaughter is at Oxford um her best friend came from a comprehensive and what really disappointed me was when I heard that she is going through she’s going through um medicine so obviously really difficult course to get on to and she was told so she’s she’s got all the
Way through to Oxford and she’s told uh if you don’t understand how to answer the questions that’s kind of your problem and I just wondered when you were when you finally got to your fantastic university did you have that issue in terms of trying to sort of adapt your knowledge and your education
To the way in which this great institution had decided that you needed to learn yeah okay we’re going have to be quite quick with these answers we’ve got question about modern foreign languages limiting our understanding of other parts of the globe we question about Afghanistan and the world more generally
Question about these other routes into education at 18 which seem to be narrowing rather than widening yeah and then they kind of difficulty yeah look I I think on languages um personally I think everyone should um really have some exposure in some fashion to Modern languages because you know it’s no good
Just um you know using you know Google translate and you know getting the kind of the literal translation of something or dualingo um as great as it may be I actually was trying that in Germany to try to improve my German I got very good
At being able to go to a grill party barbecue but it wasn’t really helping me to actually go out and having any of my professional meetings so it’s kind of there are limitations here because I mean in learning a um a foreign language it really does expand your mind it’s a
Bit like mathematics and and music and all the other kinds of things that you know help you to um broaden you know your perspective on the world but really to understand the context and the way that people think and I have to say that you know studying Russian was one of the
Best things that I ever did and I did take advantage you know when I was at St Andrews of the opportunity just to go and take classes in another language for a couple of weeks or a couple of months there was actually you know you could have these free language courses I mean
Again you can you know do that now too and it really did help me on understanding the way that uh people in other countries really thought about things because there was just the whole conceptualization of language and you realize a lot of things are Lost in Translation and I would actually really
Advocate that even though we’re trying to put an emphasis on stem people should take Humanities courses and should have some exposure at least to um a foreign language not you know I know it’s easy now everyone speaks English English is has become a tool it’s really no longer
A cultural signifier uh but um that’s not an excuse anyway uh in terms of Afghanistan um and the world and you know and the world you know at large women’s education girls education is so important I mean it’s just an absolute tragedy what’s happening in Afghanistan
I really wish that I personally could do something about it it’s amazing that you’re here I hope that you know we’ll collectively be able to help you to be uh an ambassador for girls education and I think that all women and all people you know r large have to do their utmost
To make it possible for girls around the world and everybody you know at large to have access to education in some forms we have to be really creative about that and I think it’s just fantastic that you’re here and if there’s any way that I think you know myself and anybody else
Here in the audience can help you you know kind of figure out your path forward and how to help you know people like yourself um I hope that we will be able uh to do that and I think it’s also part of thinking about these other Pathways into education it’s a good
Question why haven’t we done this I mean in fact if we go back to 1918 and 1919 there some of the first big reports that the British government did on education there was already these ideas that we needed to have a well educated population and adult population uh as an
Antidot to demagogy and that was kind of one of the lines in the 1919 adult education report and here we are again at a time of demagogy not just Donald Trump you know but this post truth environment that we’re in this was after the bolic Revolution getting back to the
Russian idea again when people were worried about the rise of totalitarian systems and the best antidote to that was people being educated and having access to an education around you know across their lives like we have an opportunity now to certainly to to rethink that I think it is Will
Political will uh I I think it’s often you know the Germans themselves you know realizing they thought that they were doing extraordinary well for a long period of time and now they’re suddenly realizing that their own social Mobility is actually um uh grinding to a halt 70%
Of Germans in some recent poll said that no matter how hard they worked they couldn’t see themselves getting ahead and that is you know in a country that you think about having great Educational Opportunity so it’s a common problem and I think now that we’re um uh recognizing
That you know um I’m actually been so surprised by how many people are writing about this right now it’s not just uh you know you’ve been writing about this for a long time but everyone is waking up to the fact that as Educators here have known for a very long time that we
Do have an issue uh private sector the future of work the whole debates about Ai and where we headed from now this is the time to try to make a change so we’ve got to basically start rallying people together and and I think um you know when uh you talked about your uh
Daughter’s friend yes I did actually have a lot of those issues um when I got to St Andrews and again I’ve got some friends from St Andrews here who actually helped me out at the time or came from the same uh background I have to say that I was very lucky and you
Know pops that’s one of the reasons now that sometimes has ranked so high as it is in the university rankings the professors actually um took um some care and attention I actually found that there were people I could go and talk to uh hidden behind the scenes there were
Often some you know lectures at the University actually also come they’d come through the grammar school system but they’d come from you know more impoverished backgrounds and they understood and they actually did take the time if I went into their office hours so you know what um your uh
Daughter’s friend is hearing is obviously pretty dispiriting but hopefully and you know people like Tommy are here um right now who did go through the oxid system there might be some um peer-to-peer support groups or some actually you know really useful uh faculty members who actually could uh
Give some advice I think people are more mindful of that now I think medicine is a particularly hard uh very hard discipline as you said you know they’re they’re ex they’re really pushing people you know very hard so maybe maybe outside of the Medical Faculty there might be you know some assistants
Elsewhere we do think have to think about College counseling more of these bridging groups people are more aware of that that there’s not again one size fits all and often you know just having a linear path towards examinations or not understanding the questions I often didn’t understand the questions at all
Either because they’re geared towards people with a different kind of cultural awareness there’s a kind of cultural capital that people have again it’s like that Maze and you don’t know I didn’t even know what terms meant and and and I it wasn’t just I could look them up in
The dictionary or use Google translate for you know kind of something from another English term I just simply didn’t understand the context and I would often have to have someone explain that to me because you have to code shift you know from different backgrounds it’s actually been in a way
You are learning a foreign language uh or a different kind of a different context the way that people think okay well we’ve just got one very quick quick quick quick yeah thank you um hi I’m glad you brought up code switching because I was going to ask you education
Is just one step in the pipeline yeah and in um say the foreign policy World IR world that you come from it’s very elitist very male pale stale um uh what can institutions and we see in the UK with the cabinet being very like in the past eonian um what can be
Done institutionally to ensure that people who go through the education system and take those great steps when they reach the um great institutions that they actually stay that they aren’t turned off and they don’t leave after a year or two because they don’t know the codes they don’t get the support they
Need etc etc etc well there’s some really good that because we still come back to the question about how we get more Fiona Hills one minute we’ve got one minute so I think that is how we get more Fiona Hills is tied up to that because how do people keep going in a
Way that you in the way that you did yeah because I do think it’s like the dropping out because there are people who do drop out um on the way because it’s just too hard and just um you know they’re they feel like they’re on they
Get knocked back by they do and it’s really setting up all of these s of support mechanisms and I think there’s a bit of good news here is in the fact that actually the UK government in particular has worken up to the fact that there needs to be more diversity
And they need to work harder at it in fact over the last few days I’ve been in London I’ve been asked to speak to Social and Mobility networks in inside the UK government and I was actually kind surprised to find that some of them been in place for the last 10 years it’s
Just they’ve been going along in fits and starts because covid you know threw a lot of things off as well but there’s a real determination now to bring people in from different backgrounds you’ve got to start with schools and I I did uh one um event for the National Security uh
System and I kept thinking what are they going to explain to they show in schools about the different kinds of jobs that you could have because when I was in school I had no idea that there were jobs like this so you could be an engineer you could be you know in
Software an it in a national security context but you wouldn’t know that those kinds of jobs are out there so the key is um basically linking into schools like my MP Derek Foster did when I was 13 or 14 coming in but it’s also what he did and I mentioned that at the
Beginning was follow up his constituent office followed up so I think actually you know when we do start to think about local government and MPS maybe they just need to do some of the oldfashioned you know kind of work of actually doing constituency work which is not um always
That attractive to those who are parachuted in from somewhere else into the kind of the local area but to kind of really engage with our constituents it it’s not the case Congress people do that very often in the United States think thinking about to do you know your
Local Congress person from Ohio they’re probably doing some kind of performative strange politics in Congress at the moment I don’t think Marjorie Taylor green is doing a lot of constituent work you know for example not that she’s from Ohio but you really do need to have all
These different you know kind of levels of interaction and follow up and support it mentorship offline now aren’t we so we’re going to have to do it to a close be is waving at me yeah be is giving is that yeah yeah thank you both so much [Applause] Please
11 Comments
Absolutely great story teller! She is so relatable.
1) Her approach is so refreshing. over the last 10-15 years, a sort of pessimistic public malaise has settled over the West like some sort of plague of learned helplessness. Everyday on TV, there is no shortage of pundits & politicians with dire predictions moaning about the problems with in society but offering any solutions. However, Hill's serious but undramatic framing of the Education issues is very motivating! After watching the video I felt encouraged that education reform is possible…we just have to do it! 2) Why the big rush to wrap up exactly on? What'd, they rent the room out for wedding reception!? lol
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I am an American and I have to say our education system is horrible. The US Navy once again lowered their test standards because of the high failure rate. I talked to two exchange students and they said our system is a joke. I agree 100% with her!!
I feel an affinity with Fiona Hill. I too am from a working class Durham family and I too studied Russian at university. I have the greatest respect for her. And I'm actually quite pleased with myself. 😂
Watched
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It’s seems that American university system is quite good but also has many facets that have nothing to do with academics: sports is an example. I wonder what would happen if they were stripped of all the extras and returned to bare bones with primarily professors and academics. It won’t happen, but might rescue the costs and provide education for jobs instead of the “experience of colllege” of course, the experience is a great thing but maybe it adds to the costs? I’m not expert on it
My experience with German system is that it does not make it easy to return to school and explore new careers. It seems to be built from significant decisions made at young ages (4th grade decided which path you will follow) university age (trade school or university etc) but it’s not set up to evolve and change throughout life
One must understand the poorly educated are easier to manipulate by the powers that be.
Brilliant. Really calling for a holistic approach and a demonstration of yes, there is such a thing as society and if we don’t recognise that there are consequences, likewise if we do, there are opportunities. It does call for a great generosity of spirit and willingness to persuade those with a vested interest in the status quo, that life chances and greater equality of opportunity benefits everyone.