Excessive testing, the quality of teacher training and hierarchy and bureaucracy were some of the issues discussed at Chiswick House School's two-day conference on "Tradition, growth, innovation", which brought together different educational communities and had them engage with a range of interesting ideas and reflections from experts within Malta and outside it. Professor Andy Hargreaves, from the Lynch School of Education at Boston College, strongly feels that childhood years are precious years. In an exclusive interview with Simonne Pace he says one of the ways countries move forward economically and educationally is by decentralising the way in which the system is managed, so people can devote their core energies to the task of teaching and learning.

The word 'change' at first glance looks small and insignificant but its implication is far from simple and direct. All change involves gain but it also involves loss.

When you marry you give up independence. When you have a child it's beautiful but you can no longer spontaneously decide to go and dine out together in the evenings. When you move house, the new place is exciting but you feel sad you're leaving the old one.

Chiswick House School's two-day conference last Tuesday week, entitled "Tradition, innovation, growth", mainly discussed how to bring together these paradoxes of tradition and innovation without them being a cliché, which they can be.

We value computers but we have school uniforms. We believe in change, preparing people for a new society, and are spoilt for choice, but we also believe in firm discipline.

The conference, part of the programme of activities marking Chiswick House School's centenary, took place at the Radisson SAS Bay Point Resort, St George's Bay.

In his paper "Conserving change", guest speaker Professor Andy Hargreaves spoke about futures that have foundations and explored ways of linking the contradictory terms tradition and innovation.

"You can conserve change and you can have change that sometimes conserves," Professor Hargreaves told The Sunday Times. The problem with most educational change within schools and governments is that generally this only has a present and a future but no past. Those who have the wisdom, memory and understanding of an attachment to everything they have known and done before feel devalued and excluded when all that is emphasised is only everything that is modern and new.

Professor Hargreaves, who is British and has lived and worked in England as a primary schoolteacher up to 18 years ago, has taught from his own research and looked at experiences of educational change of almost 300 teachers and leaders in eight secondary schools over 30 years in the US and Canada.

"This really tells you what changes stick and what changes disappear and what makes the difference. When you have a teaching force that is demographically becoming older, which in most parts of the world it is, and there is huge pressure for change, people feel they have no contribution to make and that everything they've done is wrong," Professor Hargreaves said.

"They're embittered with the present and they retreat into nostalgia, an exaggerated sentimental memory of how perfect they believe things were in the past. The cause of their nostalgia is not their age or their sentimentality but it's a present that does not include the knowledge that they bring with them from the past, whether it's right or wrong," he added.

This isn't just a philosophy, but there are concrete ways to do it. It is important for governments, as few now do, to show how the changes they're putting forward build on the past instead of destroy it and sweep it away.

Professor Hargreaves holds the Thomas More Brennan Chair of Education at the Lynch School of Education at Boston College. He left England at the height of the Thatcher years in 1987, "which was a long and protracted period of negativity in relation to education and schools, higher education and the opportunity to engage with schools in the way I wanted".

"As somebody who had a real passion for this work, I became very frustrated with a system that made it so hard for people like me to do the work that drives me," he confessed.

Until one day when his wife walked into the study with an advertisement for a job in Canada and said: "This is the perfect job for you".

Professor Hargreaves had already been to Canada a few years earlier and had been very impressed by the value system in the country and the belief in an open, democratic process for engaging in ideas about how to improve education in society.

"It was a job which gave me endless opportunities to connect theory with practice at the University of Toronto".

Professor Hargreaves carries out improvement work with schools and with systems internationally. The aim is to build the knowledge of people who are sceptical about change into the change process.

"These people grow immediately, just like a child who is not being valued. But conserving change is not just a question of research but also a question of strategy and practicality".

When change comes, the first thing people think is 'how will this affect me?' This is how people think and feel about change in their lives. Some are more prepared to take the risk of challenging that than others. So, in any organisation, there are always a few enthusiasts who are willing, ready and keen to take the risk. Governments will try and cluster them together and have them develop initiatives. But then there is a big group which is much slower and much more cautious about change.

"Talking about it, having clear ideas and then developing a few tangible examples of change gives maximum benefit to the majority of people. In this way they can begin to understand what might be in it for them - giving people time to talk about their fears and worries. People need to vent and bleed, they need to raise their troubled emotions and then see concrete examples of the proposed new practice, from which they also learn negative aspects," Professor Hargreaves said.

Amid the change process, do we do away with streaming in primary schools? All evidence shows that streaming at primary level is morally, technically and economically wrong. You simply cannot identify that early what people's future achievements will be.

"Once children are put into different tracks, they are taught differently. Children in lower tracks have less time on learning and more time on behaviour management and are given less opportunity to learn. The learning and teaching go more slowly, so you add to their disadvantage," Professor Hargreaves explained.

"And the children who are most disadvantaged are those who come to school with the least support from their parents, the least understanding of how to exploit the system to their advantage and the least time for their parents to instil in them more knowledge."

Streaming is socially wrong. It is a profound injustice, it reduces opportunities and is a sign that the nation is not using or developing the best of its potential economically.

As a nation moving into Europe, competing in open borders, in an economy with other nations that do not have these practices very early, you really want to be able to ensure that every child reaches the fullest potential so they can operate at the highest levels of the economy.

The only reasons governments persist with streaming is because of fear that conservative influential middle class parents will be angry if their advantage is taken away. So how do you deal with this?

"First of all, you need a vision which is about both justice and about the nation's talent, growth, development, hope and opportunity. It's important to know that most other countries that are more successful do not engage in this practice, that in a way the country is behind," Professor Hargreaves said.

Creating examples of classes that are not streamed, where teachers are well trained to teach children of more mixed abilities is a solution. Separate streaming from testing, using other mechanisms to allocate people to streams other than standardised testing.

"Keep streaming for a little while, but use teacher tests, interviews, continuous judgments about classroom work - methods that are less stressful and less constraining on the curriculum and on teacher and learning, than the 'paper and pencil test'," Professor Hargreaves suggested.

The public needs to be taught to do away with testing but not with assessment. The idea is to introduce a better kind of assessment that enables the teacher to help the child because this provides information about the child.

This is the way England has just moved in the primary years. Two new measures have recently been introduced whereby children are now being tested individually at the time of year that is most comfortable to them, which reduces stress, and more emphasis is being put on teacher-designed tests because government research shows that this actually leads to more achievement.

England has also had the problem of a vast national curriculum together with other study pressures on primary schoolchildren. Middle class parents were learning that their children weren't enjoying school any more, that they were spending many hours in a place that no longer made them happy, in a period of their life where happiness is so important.

"It's dreadful as a parent to see your child unhappy. It's an awful way to spend childhood. And precisely because parents became unhappy with their children's experience, England has now shrunk the curriculum and the teacher has more discretion and flexibility. It's still too early to tell but results are not falling," Professor Hargreaves said.

Countries like Finland, which are the highest achievers in literacy, have a set national curriculum, which is broad, and not much based on content as on the concepts and understandings that children need to learn and acquire. It's ultimately the role of the teacher in the school to work out in relation to the children they know best how to meet outcomes for learning.

"So a curriculum is not judged by what you teach but by what children should learn, in terms of what they understand. And what you teach may vary, depending on what is important for the children to learn. So it's not a question of should you have or not have a national curriculum, but whether this is based on content or concepts, skills and attitudes," Professor Hargreaves said.

"If it is, then you must have very well trained teachers. A flexible curriculum with badly trained teachers is a disaster. The country should be asking: who is training your teachers? And how well do they do the job? This should be a huge national priority and should not just be a matter for the discretion of the University."

Children will tell you what makes an excellent teacher. They are wise and their perception fits the research. An excellent teacher is somebody who knows exactly what they're teaching, have a mastery of the subject and content of their area of learning.

If they're in primary school, they should understand the mathematics of their teaching, they should be good models of literacy for their children, and should also have an understanding of the basic scientific processes.

Children know they're imperfect and make many mistakes. What is important for children is that "the teacher doesn't give up on them, that the teacher will always persist and believe that they can achieve".

Children feel teachers help them learn when teachers understand how they learn best. Children learn in different ways. Some learn well by listening. Others learn well by talking or by watching.

"We tend to see different intelligences as separate. Some people are good with their brains. Others are good with their hands. But good teachers know that you can use one intelligence to transfer to another. Good teachers know that children learn differently and so organise their classroom to engage with these different kinds of learning," Professor Hargreaves explained.

Loving teaching, which was covered by Professor David Halpin at the conference, means a passion for your particular subject and a deep love for your work - a love for children in the most virtuous sense - almost looking at them as people who are part of your family. Teaching is an act of love, in all these senses, when it's done at its best. Professor Halpin is head of the School of Curriculum, Pedagogy and Assessment at the Institute of Education at the University of London

"But some teachers lose the love of their own learning and their own subjects. They don't renew themselves, they don't read, they don't stay engaged, especially in high school, where they have so many children to see that they find there are too many to love," Professor Hargreaves said.

"High schools need to be re-organised to make that connection to the young person stronger. And because some teachers work alone in their classroom all the time, they lose the connection to other teachers around them and consequently lose a sense of attachment to their school or institution. Teaching is an act of love and systems can easily destroy or corrupt it."

Primary education sets the foundations and it is generally believed that what primary education should mainly emphasise is literacy and numeracy, the most important issues being learning how to read, write and count.

"This is true because without literacy almost nothing is possible later. Literacy should not be hard and is an important priority, especially in a country where people easily speak multiple languages.

"However, research on successful schools in disadvantaged communities, whether urban or rural, shows that these schools do emphasise the basics. But the most successful schools are those which enrich the curriculum and the process of learning."

Excellent teachers must also make children feel that learning is really connected with their lives and the questions and experiences that are compelling for them. So an ideal foundation is a foundation in the basics of literacy and numeracy together with foundations in other areas of learning that invade the child and essential foundations in emotional literacy.

"In years to come Malta will begin to look different. There will be more diversity, more faiths, more religions. And emotional literacy is also learning to be with, not just tolerate, but accept and value people who are different as well as ones who are the same," Professor Hargreaves said.

Professor Hargreaves has recently moved to Boston with his wife after spending 10 years in Canada. However, he said, "I will always be British because I was born and raised there for 37 years".

Professor Hargreaves works in England very regularly and consults with a range of organisations right up to government level. He still feels very attached to England and doesn't have negative feelings, but, he feels he is also "partly Canadian".

"What I picked up from the Canadian ethic is an ability to work with people easily. It's a very collaborative and inclusive environment at every level".

"I've still got all the humour and bite of being British. But I'm a little more relaxed for parts of me being Canadian."

A professorship, funded by a legacy left by the Brennan family who gave $3 million to Boston College, has given Professor Hargreaves the possibility to promote social justice and connect theory and practice in education. The family named the chair after their son who was killed on the 104th floor of the World Trade Centre four years ago.

The biggest accountability measure every year is a report which the professor has to write to the Brennan family on how he has spent his year.

"Have I spent it well? Have I lived this mission in an honourable and committed way? Did I come to Malta for the right reasons? What will it achieve? Will it further my mission?"

Having buried two close friends in the year before he moved to Boston also makes the professor think a lot about his immortality. "Is there something else that I should really do or take on?"

Putting aside these profound thoughts, he chuckled: "I will definitely enjoy walking around the island today."