Learning Beyond Exams

Great exam results are just tickets to the next stage of education, argues John Lever, Headmaster of Canford. What schools should strive for is to develop minds that know how to roam free.

One of the great pleasures of headship can be appointing staff. Surely all of us have confronted a thin field and had to put a brave face on it, but we have also all had that surge of pleasure when we find within the first 30 seconds of the handshake that a cracking CV is outshone by the stellar person in front of us. The interview is pure pleasure, laced only with the anxiety that this paragon may be snapped up by a rival unless you move fast and well.

Our schools are well populated by such people, indeed they are what make independent education so special and desirable. These are Bartolomew Dias and Vasco da Gama, discovering the Cape of Good Hope and the maritime trade route to India. They are Tim Berners-Lee, Bill Gates, Larry Page, Sergey Brin and other internet pioneers. They are the enlighteners, enablers and enthusers. With them, anything seems possible.

Their expertise will no doubt impress but it is their passion which does the work. They will be caught up in the magic and the mystery, wanting above all to share their excitement. Rare indeed is the pupil who can resist. These teachers are communicators not just of the material but of the very essence of the subject and the resulting alchemy with the young is wonderful to see.

To fill the school with such people and to give them opportunity to thrive, this must be every Head's dream... or so I once thought. In some ways I think it still, but I have come to a realisation. A common consequence of intense love of one's subject can be conviction that that subject is by far the best and most important show in town. Naturally therefore it deserves a greater share of the academic budget and the timetable than it currently receives. Of course it is completely reasonable that the many pupils who are so smitten with my subject should be able to attend days of lectures in London and outings for practical work in museums or river beds or rare downland habitats. 'Surely you would not want to hinder our pupils' excitement in learning, Headmaster? I am doing exactly what you tell everyone on Speech Day makes this school so special.' Er... yes!

The trouble (and the joy) is that other colleagues are doing the same and there are only a certain number of lessons in the timetable, hours in the week, units of fuel in pupils' tanks. Each of those teachers sees the educational priorities that bit differently. Is the outcome harmony or dissonance? That is the question and that is also how we earn our money as Heads. Get this one right and it's champagne: get it wrong and it's ulcers. 'Simples' it is not.

I think it is right that schools should live with this dynamic, indeed they can thrive on it. There can be no definitive answer about how much time should be devoted to Maths as opposed to History, nor is there an answer to which subjects should feature in the curriculum and which should not. Any number of academic policy meetings across the country will have ended in lively disagreement, with strong claim for the inclusion of another examined subject being countered by argument about an already full timetable and the high cost of small subjects. It is usually a case of excessive heat and limited illumination.

So it has been a very great pleasure for me to find many colleagues over my career who, while passionately advocating the merits of their own subjects, are very interested in the educational potential of those boundaries between disciplines which examiners very seldom explore. This enthusiasm has extended to significant chunks of teaching time throughout the school being devoted to non-examined work. For understandable reasons, many schools focus depressingly hard on giving examiners what they want, veering off only for a bit of PSE and Citizenship from time to time. How liberating it has been for staff and pupils in my experience to be much bolder and to explore tangents and unanswerables, the hypotheticals and the messy bits.

In that context, we have found very fertile ground in those boundaries and connections between subjects. In the natural world interesting things happen on those boundaries, the fronts between warm and cold air masses for example, or the shoreline between marine and land-based ecosystems. Similarly, how might political movements, technological innovation, and new ways of thinking in art and music all interrelate, say, in the 40 years between 1880 and 1920? Into the pot we could pop Freud, Picasso, Stravinsky, World War 1 savagery, the car, the radio, female emancipation and the sense that existing social codes did not quite work any more. It is messy and unexaminable but fascinating from many angles and it is a paradigm readily transferred to today. In short it is education, and we like the idea so much that we have introduced a course at Canford based on the value of exploring these boundaries. It is called Connections to reflect what it does, and is given quality curriculum time in every year group in the school.

So much, as ever, relies on inspiring teaching. Staff need to know their stuff, believe fully that it is important for today's pupils and employ a wide range of techniques in delivery. The visiting speaker, internet search, mock trial, multi-media presentation, for example, laced with liberal doses of insightful questioning and ordered craziness. Harrison's chronometer was a brilliant design to keep accurate time on a rolling ship and thereby to enable longitude to be precisely measured. Excellent material for physicists and mathematicians: excellent material for historians and economists too. One little machine and a great deal of subsequent geopolitics. What might today's equivalent be? In the hands of fine teachers, this sort of thinking has great potential.

What is a word? What is language? Who invented zero? How would you use limited public funds? The Socratic method. Is life unique to this planet? How do we know we exist? Trafalgar Square's 4th plinth. What makes music great? Spotting bad science. We tax cigarettes so why not tax fatty foods? It would be easy just to see all this as a patchwork quilt of individuals' pet topics. To the extent that the ideas could keep coming and coming, fair enough. But each one is a challenge to the straitjacket of exams and a reminder that, if it is not liberating, education is nothing. These ideas and others like them feature at various stages in our Connections course, and it has been a joy to see both pupils and teachers inhale the liberation they bring.

Great exam results are tickets to the next stage of education and perhaps that first job or two. That is all. A mind that knows how to roam free and loves to do so, fired by imagination and logic, is a priceless asset that lasts a lifetime. It brings joy and even, dare one say it, the possibility of contributing to the advancement of civilisation and alleviation of some of the world's ills.

Of course academic departments do work wonders to nurture intellectual freedom as well as discipline, illustrated in the Sixth Form by the growing popularity of the Extended Project Qualification, and confidence, curiosity and independence of thought are sources of deep satisfaction to staff who are about to launch their charges into the world. This depth of enquiry can inspire pupils in the humbling realisation of how much more there is out there to know, but my colleagues share my view that breadth is brilliant too and needs to feature boldly in young people's school lives.

It is too easy to use exam constraints, time shortage and parental demands as an excuse for the status quo. We all live with these. I would argue, though, that pupils whose minds are opened and energised are in a better position to handle the demands of exams than those for whom raw results are almost the sole objective. Not only will they be seeing wood from trees but they will be enjoying the process so much more.

Since we are in so privileged a position as educators, and can surround ourselves with so many extraordinarily able and influential colleagues, we really must look deeply at the long term value of what we ask our pupils to learn. They are with us to learn about themselves and the world in all its wonder and complexity and also to imagine how best they are going to contribute. Feeding examiners what they are looking for is surely not the means to that end. 'I will lift up my eyes to the hills,' said the psalmist, and that is what we should be helping our pupils to do as we plan our curriculum.

John Lever is the Headmaster of Canford in Dorset.
This article first appeared in the Spring 2011 issue of Attain.