This paper - originally started with my colleague Trevor Folley - undertakes to outline suggestions as to how we as a School can get from our position as a provider of quality education to a higher position as a beacon of excellence developing a new environment of personal development – ultimately having pupils with a more rounded education.
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I believe The **** **** School is stuck at ‘Very Good’ when we could be forging ahead to towards and achieving ‘excellence’. The original paper ‘There is Always More in You’ outlined the philosophy behind the proposed additional curriculum and briefly outlined its content. In this follow up paper I continue the rationale and suggest ways forward. The proposals are necessarily radical and in no way do I expect this school to stop doing what it does successfully, but proposals are just that and may have to be taken piecemeal.
I am concerned that not to change **** ****’s perspective on and delivery of education may be viewed as partial neglect of our role; this is because we are seen by society as being (partially?) perhaps locked into the pursuit and transmission of knowledge as the ‘end’; it is also culpable neglect not to impel young people into experience.
We have to ask ourselves three questions: What are we really currently trying to achieve with and for our young people? What should we be trying to achieve? What must we as an organisation sacrifice to get there? Our timetable is full to capacity, our teachers are working harder than ever chasing so many personal and corporate targets in a day, that is led at a frantic pace.
However, we do want our young people to learn, and they want to learn; they even seek experiences in other forms which education has failed to give alternatives to, and we ask ‘Why?’ We as educators must be held responsible for many young peoples’ rejection of some / all aspects of the formal education curriculum; and yet **** **** is a good school, which still has ‘hold’ of the vast majority of our youth and this gives us the advantage that I believe we have over many other educational establishments.
We have an imperative moral mission to nurture the whole school to develop more enterprising curiosity, pupils with undefeatable spirits, tenacity, readiness for sensible self-denial, and above all compassion – not sloppy emotion, but care.
My proposal presented in the first paper is that each pupil needs a four-fold programme of involvement. One subject needs to be dispensed with – or equivalent time made available. Every teacher needs to align themselves with one of the four elements of this Additional Curriculum: Service, Challenge, Responsibility, and Internationalism.
These are common names for the initiatives which are useful to help describe each personal project; we may re-name them; a national figure-head may be used for motivational purposes – and these may change every year or two.
The staff will chose their own project to get involved with in some way – we must capitalise on staff enthusiasm; we do not want ‘climbing ducks’ where those with no skill, aptitude, drive, or knowledge are forced to get involved when they have abilities elsewhere. National figures can be a motivating force, but these are not critical to the venture.
There are three ways to win youth. There is persuasion, there is compulsion, and there is attraction. I am quite certain that the youth of today respond better to the service which is demanded from them in the interest of others than to the service which is offered to them for their overt benefit and improvement.
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Every pupil should play some part in the running of their school community as a prelude to moving out towards involvement in and service towards the communities beyond the school gates; this has already had its seeds within the school: responsibility towards one’s peers; responsibility for one’s own actions; the exercise of responsibility – perhaps 6th formers on the Leadership Team or Governing Body?
Pupils eg. Years 9-11 should be given a placement of their own choosing, under guidance, in the community to undertake ‘Service’ for a minimum of 20 hours over at least three months – perhaps longer. Service is concerned with the fostering and development of a sense of responsibility and a feeling of care and compassion towards all fellow beings (the ultimate goal of true citizenship is to render service to other people); our pupils are not subjected to experiential education very much – and it shows every day around school – too many suffering ‘spectatoritis’ being just onlookers wanting to be fed because initiative has been eroded.
As adults aware of youths’ needs we have a collective mission to break their comfort zones by placing them in situations that stretch them beyond their previous experiences.
The ‘Gifted & Talented’ team, Learning Support / Special Needs, Physical Education, and Outdoor Education need a vastly wider role to present ‘Challenge’…...a bombardment of challenge to such a degree and magnitude that self confidence and self awareness is developed – through these youth having to ‘dig deep’.
I want for our young people equality of opportunity to expect to be challenged: nurturing for all not just the strong, the affluent, or those that shout the loudest. It is a dereliction of our duty as educators to force youth solely into nerve-exhausting practices employed by all schools with too much emphasis on the academic and exams – who then say “….our pupils do not want to learn”. They do but perhaps not in the formal way.
Physical education needs to be seen to challenge the weak and more outdoor education needs to be made available to those with special educational needs. This proven tool cannot just be the preserve of the able. This special needs course should be available instead of lessons studying another formal subject.
The oft-misunderstood role of outdoor education is a barrier to understanding. The more outdoor education becomes a core item the quicker our young people will understand what overcoming a challenge really means. We are not in business to create survival instructors, bug-eating obsessives, or ‘Barry Howard clones’ – but we do want to challenge - and challenge takes time.
In the School’s Outdoor Education programme ‘challenge’ is enrichment and we constantly see pupils who have never been challenged – in any aspect of their lives. Thus our themes and topics are great catalysts for launching an exploration of ‘self’; once this takes place the youth then use the outdoors (and all aspects of education) not just as a ‘corridor’ to move through everyday just to get from home in the morning and back to home in the afternoon without being affected by any aspect of learning – but use this as a ‘changing room’ to slowly metamorphose into a more fully developed young person.
Learning becomes different as this discovery of self develops self confidence; taking on any challenge – setting large goals – stretches one’s ability. Our role has to be that we encourage our young people to understand that there is more in them than they previously believed.
Our role in practical terms therefore has to be to create opportunity, motivate individuals and groups, and deliver them to the ‘point’ of experience.
To do this we need an organisation; this will have mature staff with a commitment to fulfil a mission above and beyond seeing and managing pupils in school for academic purpose; this staff must operate on a parallel additional educational track. This is not an alternative to the academic, neither must it be subservient to it.
Staffing – not necessarily teaching staff for we use all our adult resources – logistical admin. infrastructure, access through pastoral teams to pupils, time (for both parties), and authority, needs to be invested; links to the community need to be set up and nurtured; perhaps also nationally.
The total support of Governors, and Senior Management – and for that matter the teaching body – is not a luxury, it is critical. Unless this is seen as an education as much as Science, and English, and History, it will be devalued from the outset. We are impelling our youth into experiences to raise their capacity to be productive, responsible, and capable – because we care about them. We must beware of too much caution breaking out here.
As professional educators and responsible adults at **** **** School, we have a unique chance to build a ‘changing room’ to involve the pupils in personal development; we can impel the school toward and grasp excellence – achieved through our reputation for consistency, and now innovation………….and not a little risk and daring.
© Barry Howard
August 2005
