Gwyn ap Harri

Hi, nice to meet you! My name is Gwyn ap Harri - thanks for dropping by and showing some interest in this stuff. I am the CEO of XP School Trust, a group of schools in the UK that allow kids to express who they are through their work. I am also the CEO of realsmart, an edtech company that empowers us to learn more and learn it faster.

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August 25, 2023

We’re not the weirdos

We’re not the weirdos! “This is an age of dyschronia, where everyone feels they belong in their own anomaly. They are at home in absurdity. And yet, to question this absurdity is to become absurd.” - Rob Davis, The Book of Forks. Since lockdown ended, our schools in Doncaster and Gateshead have hosted over a thousand visitors from all ...

July 6, 2022

How to teach complex concepts that stick

In these last few months, I have never learnt so much. To teach adults how to lead, I have had to dig extremely deep into what it means to be human. I’m glad that, for now, my head is back out of the rabbit hole. But I have almost drove myself mad as well as my friends, colleagues and family as I wonder around with balloons, ‘hello fre...

May 14, 2022

Leadership is polarised too…

I hate to say this, because I don’t want it to be true. I want a world where we are all diverse and multifaceted and interesting and bouncing off each other, muddling our way through whatever this crazy thing called life is. I hate how the world seems to be emerging as two-sided; left, right - trad, prog - red, blue - whatever… But as ...

November 14, 2021

Childhood

I woke up today on this Sunday morning, reflecting on the different childhood experiences I had compared with my eldest son, Jac. In many ways we are the same, but our experiences are very different. Jac is now 17. When I was 17, my dad was living in London, as he had been for three years on and off. My sister had left home and my dad ...

October 9, 2021

No Excuses

No excuses I saw High Tech High in 2012 and I knew I had to create a similar school in the UK, then I visited Expeditionary Learning schools and knew I could. Two years later, XP opened in Doncaster, UK. Like us, HTH & EL gets many visitors a year, and I wonder why there aren’t more schools like HTH & EL in the world. How can you see t...

October 7, 2021

Ideas and trust…

It was 2002. I was a secondary teacher of Information Technology in Hatfield High School in Doncaster, the school I went to as a kid. I had a Computer Science degree, and I was being asked to teach our kids how to use PowerPoint. The first curriculum module was called ‘All About Me’. Half of the kids were gleefully creating horrendousl...

September 5, 2021

Building success on success

I recently realised I’d made a mistake. Something didn’t feel right. I’d committed to doing something which I know would have worked but I felt I was being drawn into a cul-de-sac. But it was just a feeling until I realised what I was doing and could name it, and therefore could state the solution. I’ve been working on ‘productivity’ a...

May 17, 2021

Supernovas and black holes

I have described relationships as supernovas and black holes before. Some relationships no matter how much energy you put into them, suck the life out of you (black holes) and others make you feel bigger than the sum of your parts (supernovas!). I’ve always tried to get rid of the black holes and invest in the supernovas. This is the s...

May 2, 2021

Copying is not cheating…

… it’s how we learn! One of the main reasons XP has been successful so quickly is our ability to copy success. To see success somewhere else, and copy it. That sounds like a really obvious thing to do, but a lot of people seem to have massive barriers to this. When I visited High Tech High in 2012, I actually didn’t think about not cop...

April 14, 2021

Show me...

I often say that the biggest mistakes I’ve made in my professional career have been when I’ve employed someone for their apparent skill set, and not their character. That need to fill that space in your organisation, the slight panic because they ‘can do’ what you can’t. The relief when they start... ...then the bullshit starts. ...whe...

March 18, 2021

Seven years work

For over two years now, I have been obsessively thinking about and actively working on simplification. Building XP, we made a racing car. Faster than any other, better than any other, could win any race, but only if it didn’t blow up before the end. When we get things right, the results are spectacular, but as we grow, we find that peo...

March 12, 2021

Once more with feeling...

I’m sat in a lecture theatre in Apple University, at 1, Infinite Loop, and the guy presenting to us says, “when designing product, we start and end with this... ‘how does it make me feel...?’...” Our initial designs for realsmart learning maps are nowhere near where we have ended up. We’ve archived these notes probably for nostalgic re...

March 11, 2021

Can one person change the world?

I’m reading a couple of books about the halcyon days of ‘britsoft’ - when it was possible for one person to create a computer game that became a smash hit. I remember playing ‘Monty Mole’ on my ZX Spectrum in the early 80s, programmed by the very talented Peter Harrap who lived in the village I went to school at, and I had the privileg...

March 11, 2021

realsmart

I formed my company, realsmart.co.uk in 2004 in Aberdovey, Wales. 8 years later, I found out Outward Bound had started in Aberdovey too. This was after I had decided to open a new school based on Expeditionary Learning, which was born out of OB... must be something in the welsh water... At realsmart, we created five portfolio tools... ...

March 11, 2021

Hey World!

So, I've been following this company based in Chicago ever since I created my own company, realsmart.co.uk in 2004. They're called basecamp.com and they make two products I use every day... basecamp which I use for all my projects (I currently have six...), and their new take on email, hey.com - which now allows you to blog, from an em...