I became a team player via a painful form of exposure therapy. Or at least that’s what I used to tell myself.
Throughout my schooling, I would dread any task that included the words “in groups”. I would reluctantly gather with a seemingly random assortment of my peers and, usually, stay as silent as possible.
More dominant personalities would set the tone. If they were engaged, the rest of us did what that person wanted to do. If they were not engaged, we did nothing at all until one of us quiet ones caved and did all the work at the last moment. If there were two dominant team members? There was soon a knock on the year head’s door for pastoral mediation.
In time, I learned the basic sociology and managed to get by in groups. Enough, at least, to know what to do when I finally got a job and working as part of a team was as much part of the role as paying my taxes.
This is the narrative I like to tell myself. But, in reality, my education in team work was much broader and deeper.
I am one of four siblings; we worked together as a team throughout our childhood. I had a good group of friends, maintained and strengthened through a form of teamwork. I played rugby every Sunday - a game that simply cannot function without teamwork. I went to watch Pompey play most Saturdays - an elaborate, complex experience of teamwork with 18,000 fellow supporters.
In reality, the stability of society depends on a form of teamwork - and failure to comply is usually met with punishment, either formal, through the justice system, or informal, through social isolation.
In reality, did I need school to teach me teamwork?
It’s a question that came up this week because of the Times Education Commission. Business leaders such as John Lewis’ Sharon White were reported to have suggested that schools were failing to teach children workplace skills, among them teamwork. Inevitably, this prompted many who hold a more traditional educational view to ridicule the commission and try to insulate schools from its “progressive” grasp. They challenged not just the insistence that schools should teach workplace skills, but whether such skills exist.
I’ve no doubt that they exist - denying that you need to be able to work in a team, communicate effectively and be able to plan coherently seems a reach - but I am less sure that they are any different from the skills needed to function in society generally. That you can teach people to be better at these things without domain-specific application also seems obvious to me, although I am inclined to believe that deliberate practice across different domains is likely a useful teaching methodology.
As such, I am unsure how far schools should be the main focus of the business leaders talking to the Times Commission when they call for young people to be better trained in this skill set. Education is stuffed full of demands on its time and choices have to be made. The sorts of skills we are talking about here take a lot of time and careful, iterative feedback to hone. If we dedicate more time to this in schools, then what are we taking out, and at what cost?
It also ignores the role of society. Should we not be asking the government to do more to expose young people to as many opportunities for developing workplace skills as possible, through social and sporting clubs and groups? If businesses are not seeing these skills, then the problem exists far beyond the school gates and would require a much broader change to develop those skills in young people. Perhaps the business world, so eager to see these skills, could fund this great effort?
And yet, I do think school should play a role. Opportunities to work as a team, to communicate effectively, to plan coherently - these should be part of an education, if not its foundation. Thankfully, they almost always are already. Very few schools could honestly say there are no elements of these skill sets at work in their classrooms and corridors (and playgrounds).
Could it be done better? Of course; everyone can improve. Could government do more to recognise and facilitate it? Certainly. But should the business world be rounding on schools alone because of a lack of what they perceive to be essential workplace skills? Definitely not.
