What’s the point of school?

Asking the big question

Such a simple question, right? 

“Because you have to”

“For your education”

“Everyone goes to school”

“To pass exams, get grades and get a job”

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All wrong.

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The correct answer is found in one of the top lines in the National Curriculum in England: 

Every state-funded school must offer a curriculum which is balanced and broadly which: 

• promotes the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society, and

• prepares pupils at the school for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life.

Boom! So simple.

1. Look after the young people

2. Prepare them for adulthood

Sadly the National Curriculum doesn’t stop there. There are 205 more pages of stuff in the Primary Curriculum and 105 more pages of stuff in the Secondary Curriculum.

I’ve been a teacher for 13 years - I’ve worked in Primary and Secondary settings in inner city London, rural Derbyshire and plenty of other places in between.  Everywhere I’ve been I’ve seen outstanding teachers who deeply want to look after young people and prepare them for adulthood.

But this is not their day job. This is not their job description. This is not how they are judged as teachers and as professionals.

Teachers are judged on:

1. Maintaining classroom behaviour

2. Student progress.

Give that a small moment to sink in, because if we’re not careful we might confuse this list with the first list. They are not the same.

Maintaining classroom behaviour is an important way that teachers keep young people safe, but it is fundamentally about control. Teachers use extrinsic motivation techniques, rewards and punishments (or promises of long-term rewards or long-term consequences), to keep their classrooms under control.

Student progress is not the same as preparing them for adulthood. Just as getting grades is not the same as getting an education.

The National Curriculum wants them to prepare for the “opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life”, but only a tiny proportion of adults are spending their working adult lives writing essays (and AI can now do this anyway), or answering questions about facts you’ve been taught (and Google’s been able to do this for years)

Let’s get back to the basics:

1. Look after the young people

2. Prepare them for adulthood 

With Self Managed Learning the first thing we do is get to know the young person both as an individual and as part of a learning group of five or six. We ask them “Where have you come from?” and “Where are you now?” and we model the answers to these questions to be physical and mental (and spiritual if that’s relevant to the individual). Once we know them, we do our best to look after them or guide them towards whatever support they need.

Once we’ve started to get to know them, we ask them “Where do you want to go?”, “How will you get there?” and “How will you know when they’ve arrived?”. 

We don’t tell young people what to learn or enforce a curriculum onto them. We ask them to dream and plan for their own futures by finding their purpose. 

These are not easy questions for anyone to answer and there can be periods of self-analysis and discovery to find their purpose, but this process is structured and supported. Once we know the answers to these questions we come up with a learning agreement and we guide them and support them to achieve these goals and evaluate their progress as they go.

Let’s simplify the school process, scrap 300 pages of National Curriculum and focus on just two things: 

1. Look after the young people

2. Prepare them for adulthood