In 25 years’ time, we will look back at schools today and ask ourselves if we were stark raving mad to have let them be so narrow and so low-achieving.
We need schools for the 21st century but we have a school model designed in the 19th century for mid-20th-century employment and late-20th-century technology.
Writing this takes nothing away from those who have worked so hard for their brilliant (or otherwise) A-level and GCSE results. Academic work matters. It is more than the backbone of any decent school system: it is its brain as well. But for a body to function, a brain also needs a heart, limbs, flesh and blood.
Since I left running schools two years ago to run a university, it has become even clearer to me that these other bodily appendages are missing from most schools.
But when they hear this stuff, education ministers become angry and defensive. They should listen instead to what is being said. They have a heavy responsibility for preparing our young for the world that they will face. The hopes of millions of young people depend upon their judgements.
Let’s agree that the job of a school is in part to prepare people for work. Yet, year after year, employer organisations including the CBI complain that school leavers are ill-prepared. They are right: we have never been much good at technical education, but the new T levels that will be phased in between 2018 and 2022 are a move in the right direction. They are to be applauded.
‘A tidal wave of digitalisation’
A tsunami is already beginning to break on our shores: the tidal wave that is digitalisation and artificial intelligence. This could be the greatest boon in our lifetime, making possible an Eton-class education for all in the country.
Digitalisation will transform forever the job market, as a new World Economic Forum report makes clear. David Deming of Harvard warns that the subjects schools currently focus upon - those that require sequential reasoning and recall - are precisely the activities that algorithms perform much more successfully than human beings. Schools should instead be teaching the human skills that intelligent machines will never be able to replicate.
Late in the day, our government has begun to wake up to schools developing the character and life skills of the young. They recognise what every good teacher could have told them all along - that a focus on character will improve, not undermine, the academic focus of the school.
We might also agree that schools exist to help prepare young people to lead a successful and fulfilling life. Proficiency in academic subjects is of course a necessary condition for this, but it is not a sufficient condition. All young people need to be exposed to the arts, creativity, sport, adventure and challenge. Yet these have too often been squeezed out of school and successive generations will wonder why we let this happen.
The days of the large employers and factory production lines are gone. All schools should be teaching entrepreneurship. Some organisations, like Young Enterprise and the Peter Jones Foundation, are providing such opportunities, but we need to go much further. Every student between Years 9 and 11 should be taught how to set up companies, identify markets, organise business activity and collaborate in groups to achieve set objectives.
Our schools could so easily be much better than they are - more joyful, more collaborative, more stimulating and more productive. Despite my concerns, I’m an optimist and I’m looking for great things to come out of the Department for Education over the next two or three years.
Sir Anthony Seldon is vice-chancellor of the University of Buckingham
