WELLINGTON WELL-BEING FIGHTS THE GLOOM OF GLADGRIND

The following is an extract from a speech given to the College of Teachers by Dr Anthony Selden, Master of Wellington College. Anthony Selden is a leading opinion former in the independent sector of education, unafraid to challenge received educational wisdom which can be, he would argue, ill founded and not in the best interests of children.

Based on the work of many, including the educator Kurt Hahn and the Harvard psychologist Howard Gardner, at Wellington we base our entire schooling on the belief that each child has eight aptitudes or intelligences. They form an octagon, and they are in four sets of pairs, the logical and linguistic, the cultural and the physical, the social and the personal, the moral and the spiritual. All of these intelligences are valid, perhaps even equally so. Schools have concentrated on just the logical and linguistic intelligences. Worse, they have done so in a thumpingly pedestrian exam-centred way. Is it surprising that truancy levels are so high and that schoolchildren are saying they are less interested in school than ever?

Schools need to ask the question, along with Gardner:“Not how intelligent is a child: but rather, how is the child intelligent?” All children, like all adults, possess these eight faculties. All need to be ‘led out’ by schools. If schools did this better, and based it on challenge, on discovery and on learning, rather than on memory of facts, on dull repetition and on instruction, then schools would become places of delight which pupils valued.

Playing fields need to be brought back, orchestras and music placed at the heart of the curriculum: dance for everyone; physical exercise, outdoor adventure and challenge the rights of every child. For children from less privileged backgrounds, school becomes all the more important in opening up the eight faculties.What is not opened up by the age of 16 or 18 is often left dormant all life.We should be preparing our young to live life to the full: instead, we condemn many to a ‘half-life’, if that.

Once children start to believe schools are places where things are being done for them, rather than done to them, their interest would revive. All schools would become the places of delight, of excitement and of harmony that the best currently are. Schools must be places that open doors, not leave them unopened.

Second, external testing and examinations need to be severely cut back: the abandonment of testing at Key Stage 3 was a move in the right direction. The biggest curse has been league tables. These have had four main drivers, all of whom have gained from their existence: government, able to claim year on year ‘improvements’; exam boards, eager to gain new business by showing improved results; the media, able to publish and comment on fatuous indicators of ‘top schools’; and, I regret to say, some Heads, who have distorted education at their schools and impoverished the lives of some children to show meaningless league table advance.

No single fact has had more damage on British education than league tables and the construction put on them by a press that should have known much better. The press claim to be acting in the interests of the consumer: I have yet to meet any discerning parent who does not think that they are junk, utter junk.

Testing and examinations have spread in Britain and elsewhere in the world, because of a lack of trust - of schools, Heads and teachers. Government officials have sought, through exams and testing, to make education ‘teacher proof’ around the world. But as Professor Jeff Thompson of the University of Bath has written: “The inevitable consequence of exams is that teachers will teach to the test.” Long ago, we gave up teaching history in Britain: we teach history GCSE; the teaching and learning of biology has been replaced by instruction for biology AS level; the teaching of maths by the teaching of maths A-level.

I do not advocate avoiding rigorous and constant assessment: Professor Dylan Wiliam of the Institute of Education has argued persuasively about the role of formative assessment or ‘assessment for learning’ in raising standards. I favour academic inflow, and rigorous assessment of students and teachers. Rather, I am arguing that the curriculum must determine the assessment, rather than the assessment determining the curriculum. This is utterly key.

We do not need so many national external exams - we could perhaps get away without any until the age of 18, as they do in America until they sit SATs and APs. We could move to a ‘light-touch’ exam system; inspection is moving in this direction, so could exams. GCSEs and A levels should be swept away in favour of exams like the International Baccalaureate, with its Primary Years Programme, its Middle Years Programme, and Diploma Programme. Where GCSEs and A levels concentrate on assessment, IB concentrates on the curriculum; where the former focuses on teaching and instruction, the latter is centred around learning; where the former is national, the latter is international; the former emphasises memory of facts, the latter discovery. We also need to learn to trust teachers again, to trust heads and to trust schools.

Third, we need to take well-being of students at school and university level far more seriously. It is a truism that mental illness amongst school pupils and university students is now at epidemic proportions. Yet many educators and far too many commentators in the media continue to sneer at what they do not understand. Some have sniped at ‘happiness’ classes because they allegedly teach children to be selfish: but the core message is that the best way to feel good yourself is to do good to others.

The whole aim is to help each child find harmony within themselves, harmony with others and harmony with the environment. The teaching of well-being is grounded on an increasingly strong research base, centred on ‘positive psychology’ founded by Professor Martin Seligman of Pennsylvania University in 1998. Psychologically, mentally and physically healthy students also perform better at their studies.We should not have needed Jamie Oliver to tell us that children need to eat better food and to exercise more. In five years we have moved from a world where it was faddish to think about the teaching of well-being, to one where it is now irresponsible of school heads and university Vice Chancellors not to ensure it lies at the very heart of their institutions.

Fourth, we need to get back to human scale in schools. It is madness to have huge anonymous state schools,where the children are not known.A core factor making the independent sector in Britain the most successful of any school sector in the world - apart from their independence, which all schools should have - is the comparatively small size of the schools, and the fact that senior schools are broken down into manageable units called ‘houses’, usually containing between 50 and 60 children.

Twenty-first century schools must be personal, and each child and their parent must be known as an individual. In factory schools, they were on the production line: the parents dropped them off at age five and picked them up at the age of 16 or 18 with periodic ‘works outings’ along the way. In the twenty-first century school, the parent and child lie at the heart, in a place where warm and strong personal relationships really matter.