Challenging preconceptions of Montessori learning

Can you tell us a bit about your role, and the ethos of the Montessori Group?

I'm CEO of the Montessori group. I have responsibility for all the entities and activities that sit within the Montessori group, which includes the International Montessori Institute as well.

Since I became CEO, what I’ wanted to do was to go back to where Maria Montessori started. Her first school was in the slums of Rome, and one of the first Montessori nurseries in UK was set up in the East End of London by the suffragettes. So the purpose is very much about giving children, particularly from socially disadvantaged backgrounds, an opportunity to fulfil their potential.

There is a misperception around the world that Montessori is for the elite, it's for the middle class, it's expensive. And I wanted us to go right back to the social impact part of it and say, no, it's not. It's about using education as a tool to create positive social change. 

Everything we do is with social impact at the heart of it - will this make a difference? Will this make people's lives better? Will we be able to positively benefit children? 

And I don't care if somebody calls it Montessori or not. We are a sufficiently well-known brand. If we work in an area where, for whatever reason it is counterproductive to talk about one story because of the misperceptions around it, then I don't care if we don't call it Montessori. At the end of the day, it's all about the children. 

Why was the International Montessori Institute established, and what would you like the Institute to achieve?

One of the things I felt very strongly about was making a Montessori degree accessible to a large number of people. I wanted it to be a university outside of London, and a place which could also have the capacity to do research in a meaningful way.

As the Montessori Group we try to have policy dialogues and, every single time I've tried to do that, we find ourselves asking where's the research on that? The research is mostly US based, but obviously it's as not meaningful to British and European policymakers as the US has a completely different sort of socioeconomic structure to the UK or Europe. The aspiration will be to have a Professor of Montessori.

I think we have to move to Montessori being seen as the alternative to what the education system is at the moment. We all know that it's those social emotional skills that are going to come to the forefront, and Montessori is very good at that, as it is with numeracy and literacy. 

The education system we've had up until now started in the industrial revolution and is no longer going to be fit for the future. So we need to understand what that means, and we are quite uniquely placed to be able to offer that change. 

For me, having a Montessori degree that was purely Montessori, rather than an add-on module, is a huge part of that. I'd like young people to see a Montessori degree as a pathway to working in education, teaching anywhere in the world, and it doesn't have to be in a Montessori setting. 

And that's the key thing for me – we're not creating Montessori trained teachers or just to work in Montessori settings, and the influence those educators can have in all sorts of settings will be vast. That will be what will shift that paradigm – it'll be having people working on the ground with a new approach to the curriculum, whatever curriculum they're working on, anywhere in the world. 

They have the ability to think about how that curriculum is implemented with what they have learned through studying a Montessori degree.

What is the impact you’d like the International Montessori Institute to have on children and learning?

We know from research done in the States that Montessori has a huge impact on the achievement gap. There was a study looking at the achievement gap between children from low socioeconomic backgrounds versus those who came from sort of more privileged backgrounds – taking half a cohort of children from the lower end of the income group into Montessori and comparing them with those that went through more traditional schooling, and it reduced the achievement gap. 

We've known this for 100 years, this is why Maria Montessori became so famous – because of the work she did in the class of the bambini in Rome. What attracted everybody's attention that here were these children who were seen as destined to a life of poverty, and they started doing these amazing things. 

So we know this anecdotally, we know this from practice. And now there's research showing that children who have been through Montessori have better physical and mental wellbeing as adults.

We need to build resilience into our institutions, into our organisations, into our companies, into our society. And we have to build resilience within people.

Montessori is very good at creating that kind of emotional resilience. So it's going to have a significant impact on those children, as they're growing up in a very complex, challenging, and difficult decade. Two years into 2020s and we've already had two years of pandemic and now war in Europe, which is not going to end anytime soon.

If anyone thinks that it's going to be an easy decade, they're wrong. And so we need to build that resilience within our children so that they don't get affected by it so that they can live through it and become the leaders that we're going to need in the future.