School staff spend the majority of their days teaching subjects. That’s the way our curriculum is organised.

But great teachers know they are also teaching children something else - how we, as human beings, try to conduct ourselves, who we are, understanding the stories about ourselves and our past, and our sense of responsibility to those around us.

In doing this, we are helping young people to learn how they will step into society as adults at some point down the line.

Because of this dimension, schools and colleges show us the better side of what our society can be. When you are in a primary or secondary school or visiting a college, you sense this. Even on a bad day, you still see society at its best, the optimism that young people generate.

It doesn’t have to be like this

In a world that is fractured and fractious, and so heavily dominated by social media that feeds that polarisation, there is a responsibility on us all to show that “it doesn’t have to be like this”.

Young people need opportunities to feel the inherent satisfaction of helping others, not because they are getting paid or because they get a merit mark, but because it makes someone else’s life a tiny bit better. It is one of the best feelings there is.

When I was teaching, I would watch young people getting involved in cooking Christmas lunch for the elderly or being responsible for the catering for the governing body. Those pupils, often quite unlikely ones, would prepare the food, serve it, set the room up and greet the visitors.

In the process, they were learning how to interact with other generations.

The power of volunteering

They were also feeling the rewards of when we focus on others rather than ourselves. That isn’t cheesy, or synthetic: it’s what we know authentic altruism feels like.

When secondary school students volunteer to coach children or run the sports day at the primary school down the road, you see their self-esteem soar as they become experts and begin to realise they can make a difference.

In our screen-based society, young people are getting fewer opportunities to develop the empathy that comes from this human interaction.

The Big Help Out (7-9 June 2024), when thousands of schools around the country can take part in coordinated volunteering action, is an opportunity to showcase this engagement and encourage more of it.

We need, sometimes, to remind ourselves that education is not just about the clinical metrics of performance tables and Ofsted reports; it is also fundamentally about helping young people learn about how society at its best can function.

Lighten the load

Those things have been pushed to the margins. That’s why we need to see a review of the school curriculum and assessment, to lighten it up to create space for other activities that are less easily measured.

We need room in the school day for teachers and other staff to promote, celebrate and embed the idea of service and helping others.

Too often, schools feel hermetically sealed from the real world because of the pressure of everyday demands. The Big Help Out gives us an opportunity to connect by talking about volunteering, going out and doing things for people in the communities around us.

Teachers need to be legitimised in feeling that this is not a distraction, but an essential part of what they talk about, of what they do.

As current attendance figures attest, pupils’ levels of anxiety are higher than they have ever been.

We need the space to focus on the things that really matter - and volunteering is one area that can make a significant difference, both to the person whose life is being made that bit easier and to the development and wellbeing of our children and young people.

There’s hardly a greater mission for all of us in education than that.

Geoff Barton is general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders

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