Pen Portrait: Daisy Christodoulou on grading exams, touching grass, and lunch at the Oval

This is Pen Portrait, our interview series with the people shaping ideas about the future. This month, we put questions to author, former English teacher, and Director of Education at No More Marking, Daisy Christodoulou.

What are you working on right now?

We’re working on a really exciting assessment project about solving GSCE mock marking. For 10 years now, we’ve worked with schools on an innovative technique that improves writing assessment, called Comparative Judgment. In the last 18 months, we’ve added AI into our systems. And what we’ve done in the last six months is optimise everything for GCSE mocks.

Mocks are a major pain point for schools in England. I used to be an English teacher, and they take an incredibly long time to mark. We’re blending human and AI judgment to make a much quicker and more reliable system that also gets kids feedback as well.

How is the world different now compared to when you were a child?

The enormous difference is technology – internet, high-speed communication, etc.

I also think healthcare is so much better. My grandmother had a stroke when I was young, and a stroke then was just really devastating.

It’s been really interesting, just over the course of my lifetime, that a stroke obviously can still be devastating, but the amount of people who now live with it and live a normal life after it – that’s been a huge shift that you really notice.

Has AI changed anything about your life?

It’s completely upended my life! I’m not sure I’m that happy about it, from a business perspective. We specialised in the assessment of writing long before large language models came along. So we’ve added a lot of AI into our systems, which in lots of ways is brilliant, and it has improved our systems. The flipside is we now have dozens more competitors, in a way that we didn’t have a couple of years ago.

What aspect of the future makes you most concerned?

All technologies are double-edged. You can do more good things with them; you can do more bad things. I think that’s totally the case with AI. So there are lots of aspects of it that keep me awake at night in good and bad ways.

There’s a lot of talk at the moment about what it means for the UK. We are really quite dependent as a country on professional services. AI could massively disrupt those if we don’t have any of the new companies that come to dominate those areas.

What’s something that people commonly get wrong about your specialist subject?

Student attainment does not come pre-packaged in categories. I think a lot of people have a misconception that kids come in three categories: below average, average, above average.

The reality is that, like a lot of phenomena in life, student attainment is on a continuous distribution. Going from the top of one grade to the bottom of the next grade doesn’t really, in underlying terms, matter that much. You’re crossing an arbitrary line.

It’s quite distorting, because I think it also makes people get into this habit where they think quite a lot about closing the gap. And actually, if you think distributionally, you would think more about how you need to move the mean.

What was the last film you saw in a cinema?

I honestly don’t know… but I desperately want to see The Odyssey, and I really want to see it in a cinema.

What was your first job?

I worked with my grandparents and my parents. They had a stall on Petticoat Lane in East London.

What’s the best place for a lunch meeting?

I’m a big cricket fan, and I love the Oval. They have a really nice restaurant that overlooks the ground. Or you can just sit in the stands.

What’s something you’ve read that changed your thinking?

I have been really quite profoundly influenced by a lot of Tom Holland’s work. I read a New Statesman article by him that set out the thesis of his book Dominion, back in 2017. And that got me thinking about the argument he was making there.

There’s another really interesting thinker, who weirdly ends up in some similar conclusions, but from a completely different angle. And that’s Joseph Henrich – [he wrote] The Weirdest People in the World and The Secret of Our Success. He kind of ends up making some similar points about medieval Catholicism, but from a standpoint of evolutionary psychology and some very mathematical approaches to cultural evolution.

Does keeping up with online ‘discourse’ matter?

Yes and no. It’s good to be well-informed. I think it is also possible to be too well-informed. There’s probably an optimal level.

It is possible to be too online for sure. It’s important to ‘touch grass’. Another phrase I really like, from Matt Clifford, is “the stubborn persistence of the physical”. Life does not just happen through a wire on a screen. Physical embodiments matter. And we see that in the economy: it matters where the submarine cables and the oil wells and the oil pipes are. But I think it also matters in your own life.

What’s your favorite podcast?

So, as I said, I’m a big Tom Holland fan, and I do really love The Rest is History. I know it’s a boring one, but I was on it back in its early days, so I feel like I’m an OG The Rest is History person.

What’s your favourite album?

I’m quite a big Bob Dylan fan. I really like Blood on the Tracks.

Where do you find new ideas?

Old books. I like Victorian novels. Reading them gives you different angles on the present.

How does change happen?

There can be big, external shocks that force you to reappraise the way you think about things. And those can be things like the pandemic, war, energy shocks. Those force you to question some of your assumptions, or adapt.

That’s a point Hayek makes, in ‘The Use of Knowledge in Society’. You can have a hurricane in Brazil that causes the price of coffee to rise. And you yourself don’t have to know that the hurricane has happened. But, then maybe you don’t have the same coffee, or you switch to tea. Different pieces of knowledge can interact, and you can have external shocks in a system that force you to think about doing things differently.

What’s the best career advice you’ve ever received?

I can actually remember my head of sixth form saying to me: whatever job you do, there’ll be something in it that you don’t love.

She said she didn’t love all the photocopying she had to do, and her tactic for dealing with that was just getting in early on a Monday morning to try and get it all out of the way.

The more general principle I think is true. It’s a sort of realism. You can’t expect perfection in any aspect of life. And you’ll probably be happier if you don’t expect that.

Daisy Christodoulou is Director of Education No More Marking, a provider of online Comparative Judgement software for schools. She is also the author of three books about education – Teachers vs Tech, Making Good Progress, and Seven Myths about Education – and one book about VAR, I Can’t Stop Thinking About VAR. A former English teacher and University Challenge champion, she lives in London and is a fan of West Ham. She writes the No More Marking Substack.