Over recent years in England and across the Western World, there has developed an epidemic failure of the mental well-being of our children and young people. Employers talk openly about how young graduates entering the workplace have a sense of entitlement without an appropriate work ethic, and yet young graduates find themselves with a weight of university debt yet no obvious channels or opportunities to enter the workplace at an appropriate level proportionate to the qualifications gained at University.
I am very grateful to Sir Anthony Seldon for his recent reference to Professor Sylvie Delacroix, Chair in Digital Law at Kings College, London and her warning about our growing subservience to AI and Large Language Models (LLMs). I am probably just as grateful to Malcolm Gladwell for his first optmistic treatise for business culture, ‘The Tipping Point’ (2002) and his most recent review of the same ‘Revenge of the Tipping Point’ published this month.
Claires Court left the National Curriculum for Reception to the end of Key Stage 3 (ages 4 to 14) in 2006, and did so because in our pursuit of perfection to be the best at meeting UK Government’s expectations of a modern curriculum, their required approach was clearly failing our children. The loss of choice, sense of purpose and direction, particularly the children’s growing unwillingness to take risks, write creatively and collaborate with others had become the major block to perhaps the most important purposes of education, above all giving the children and young people that sense of Agency they need to make choices and decisions that impact the world around them. Helping children understand agency can help them build a strong identity, feel a sense of belonging, and develop resilience. Here’s what that looks like for very young children and here for young people and adults why they too might need to take a look at their lives and how to build a greater sense of Agency.
Everything we now do in our school work is question-based, promoting a positive sense of inquiry and increasing engagement. Our curriculum is as diverse as our co-curricular activities, permitting choice and extension as often as possible. What we have learned is that a very good amount needs to happen at group/collaborative level, and it’s clear that plenty of non-judgmental engagement is needed to ensure groups of neurally diverse children can work effectively together. The arts, creative and sporting activities are essential to provide those common opportunities for engagement, whether that be kicking through the puddles together on the way to our forest area at Ridgeway, or the class-based, child-led drama activities leading to Commedia del Arte or Shakespeare reinterpretations at lower secondary.
Education in the UK has been led by ‘Bad Actors’ for a decade or more, leading politicians forcing a massive reduction in curriculum choices on schooling in England, Wales and Scotland, promoting the importance of a mechanistic narrow set of subject choices and dispensing with great rafts of subjects on which our British economy thrives no longer available in the state sector. University subject-based departments have shut throughout the UK for 15 years and continue to do so in 2024. It’ll be no surprise to learn that we have an extraordinary shortage of Chemistry teachers already, which is only going to get worse. Driven by the government, the host of practical elements of exam subjects that can only really be marked in situ have been reduced hugely and then marked so harshly that grade differences arise only from written answers in timed exams. No wonder our engineers and medics have lost the opportunity to develop the dexterity needed for practical craft skills. AI is going to help in all sorts of ways across the host of industries now adopting it, but the robots to repair jet engine nozzles or carry out microsurgery without a supervising human are still a long way off.
Inevitably our sector has been shaken to the core by the ‘bad faith’ shown by the new Labour government now choosing to levy VAT on private school fees. The golden thread that runs through our sector is the core understanding that developing agency for our pupils is essential, particularly if you want them to develop their skills and talents to the extreme. Just today we’ve witnessed England cricketer Joe Root become the greatest English batsman ever (262), well supported by Harry Brook (317), Ben Duckett (84) and Zac Crawley (78) in scoring collectively 823-7 against Pakistan in the first test in Multan. Whilst all were talented cricketers at the outset, they honed their skills in private schools because the teachers and facilities are funded, of course, but also because the time is made available as well. It’s not just about sport, but in every aspect of what our schools offer, above all what private schools offer the children is the time to develop in school all of the life skills they need. I watched my grandson and year 2 swimming this afternoon, everyone in the pool swimming 2 lengths using the crawl stroke. The pool was built at the same time as all the other swimming pools in the local primary schools; ours is the only one left, because the state primaries might have swimming & water safety required on the curriculum, but no funds from the local authority now to support same, and now released from local authority as academies or free schools, they are exempt from this requirement, and thus don’t set out to meet in in the first place.
In our junior school, we have now deployed Merlyn Origin, an AI assistant for teachers that uses large language models (LLMs) to generate content and provide voice control for classroom technology. We’ve been one of the few lead schools in the world to embrace AI with Merlyn, and now as generative AI becomes commonplace in the workspace, our children will learn how to live with and gather Agency when using this new computing power that is now available across every dominion. One of the leading AI thinkers is Professor Sylvie Delacroix and she has warned that we have perhaps only 2 or 3 years to gather our wits together to stay ahead of AL and LLMs – in short, we can see the AI revolution coming, but can we make it socially acceptable, and will humans maintain the lead as we need to, so that we ensure we keep the skills we need to develop onwards. https://www.kcl.ac.uk/events/beyond-ai-safety-can-we-make-the-ai-revolution-socially-sustainable
AI has been with us since the dawn of computing and the Big Bang saw the loss of huge volumes of human work as the machines took over; IBM invested massively in trying to develop AI to replace teachers – they recognised many years ago that they could not, but what they could develop were LLM AI tools to enhance the work of teachers further. Hence Merlyn was born, its data-set reserved, clean and suitable for the use of children. When we ask Merlyn now who is the British Prime Minister, it will tell us Rishi Sunak, as its knowledge within takes about 3 months to scrub up and update. Ask Merlyn more correctly to check with Google who’s in charge, back will come the correct response of Sir Kier Starmer (apparently). Children and teachers using LLMs will inevitably learn not to ask the ‘what’ but better still ‘how’ to ask the right questions and in time, to check the ‘why’ they need to use AI for the specific purpose in hand.
Here’s Gemini’s take on why the state sector national curriculum is letting down its schools and children:
The concern that the English National Curriculum doesn’t adequately foster agency and self-worth in young people stems from several key factors:
Standardized Testing and Narrow Focus: The increasing emphasis on standardized testing can lead to a curriculum that prioritizes rote learning and memorization over critical thinking and creativity. This can limit students’ opportunities to explore their interests and develop a sense of personal agency.
Lack of Personalization: A one-size-fits-all curriculum may not cater to the diverse needs and interests of all students. This can make it difficult for students to feel connected to their learning and develop a sense of ownership over their education.
Limited Emphasis on Social-Emotional Learning: While academic subjects are important, social-emotional learning (SEL) is also crucial for developing a sense of agency and self-worth. If SEL is not given sufficient attention, students may struggle to build confidence, resilience, and the ability to navigate challenges.
Lack of Opportunities for Choice and Autonomy: A curriculum that is overly structured and leaves little room for student choice can limit students’ sense of agency and control over their learning.
Teacher Workload and Pressure: High teacher workloads and external pressures can make it difficult for teachers to provide personalized attention and support to all students. This can impact students’ sense of belonging and value.
It’s important to note that these are concerns and not necessarily definitive statements about the English National Curriculum. Many schools and educators are working to address these issues and create more student-centered and personalized learning environments. We’ve some great state schools in our locality, but in so many ways they are hamstrung by the required narrowness, lack of human and cash resource.
This week Claires Court hosted the ISA London West Areas Art exhibition at the Norden Farm centre, aimed at the 100 private schools in our region. From the host of entries across a myriad of fine art, 3 dimensional, textile and digital offerings, winning entries travel up to the national exhibition just after half-term. The Independent Schools Association Autumn Study conference supports the work of its 670 private school members, covering many special needs, specialist, faith and other foreign language schools as well as mainstream partners such as ours. ‘We’ are not the schools featured in the national press with ‘boaters’ and ‘tailcoats’; with over 200 of our schools smaller than 100 and covering the age ranges 2-11 or less, such schools are intimately embedded in their local community, arising from the needs therein and shaping part of the jigsaw our towns and villages need. With over 125,000 children in our schools gathering a core sense of Agency from their ‘work and play’, we form the major ‘raison d’etre’ for why UK Education is being exported throughout the world – it works and serves the needs of its children and families really well.
Regular readers know I follow Simon Sinek’s work carefully, hence the regular reference to the ‘Why’. In his 2019 book, The Infinite Game, Sinek identifies the following: “We can’t choose the game. We can’t choose the rules. We can only choose how we play. In finite games, like football or chess, the players are known, the rules are fixed, and the endpoint is clear. The winners and losers are easily identified. In infinite games, like business or politics or life itself, the players come and go, the rules are changeable, and there is no defined endpoint. There are no winners or losers in an infinite game; there is only ahead and behind.” I believe my principalship is formed around ‘architect leadership’, and frankly I’ve never been interested in a narrow finite game for education either, because we can’t afford for our children to be ‘losers’. Humanity deserves greater things than that, in which we can always learn from the past but understand we are all have a stake in shaping our future, that’s where Agency-for-All comes in to bat – hoping of course to do as well as Root & Co!
A Principled view 