Successive governments have attempted to analyse the DNA of independent schools. For years they have tried to work out the key ingredients which when mixed together form a recipe for educational success. When politicians have looked at the sector’s DNA, they have been drawn to certain aspects such as independence from local authority bureaucracy, full control over the curriculum, separate financial control and autonomy, or strong governance arrangements. All these factors play a part in the sector’s success but they do not account for everything. What is the missing ingredient?
Open any independent school prospectus and you will often see similar expressions or buzz words. “Caring for the needs of the individual”, “nurturing academic success”, “striving for excellence”. To the cynic, it can feel akin to the cliched phrases found on the worst of CVs (“I’m a self-motivated individual but also a great team player…”) but underneath the promotional banality is a very serious point. Independent schools do all sorts of activities simply because they know it’s the right thing to do. Beyond the academic, they excel at sport, punching well above their weight, as exemplified by the number of Olympians whose talent was spotted while at an independent school.
IAPS schools also encourage debating and public speaking, community service and charity work, outward bound and Combined Cadet Force. Often these activities take place outside of normal school hours but as a result they strengthen the overall community of the school as a body which develops talent.
You can easily find examples of excellent maintained schools which have equally broad ranges of activities beyond academic learning. Critics of the private sector argue that it is only because of the fee-paying nature of our schools that they have the resources available to offer these things. But when you are trying to distil down the essential qualities of independent education – the oft-cited DNA – it is this “other half” which often gets overlooked and dismissed. Its value cannot be over-estimated but how can you more broadly define this set of values, objectives and activities?
For some time, IAPS schools have been engaged in trying to define this framework but to do so means tackling the fundamental question of the purpose of education. Is it to just provide a workforce? For personal development? Or is education just intrinsically valuable? For David Hanson, the chief executive of IAPS, this question lies at the core of what the association is trying to achieve: “Our schools are not here to educate the next generation of selfish bankers. In everything we do, there has to be a responsibility. We are trying to articulate something which has often just been intuitively understood, across the generations. The privilege of quality education means that you bear responsibility and work with a moral, social conscience. A really good education lets you make value-based choices.”
Traditionally, these value-based aspects of the curriculum found a home in PSHE (or similar sounding acronyms) lessons that aimed to give children a grounding in key issues which they would encounter in later life. It helped to give them an understanding of all manner of topics from relationships and alcohol through to morality and finance. “The trap that they immediately fell into,” explainsHanson, “is that they allocated a coordinator and space in the timetable. It was just another lesson but called ‘life’! Some schools decided that they had to assess it, and it became a nonsense. Somewhere they knew it was important but they didn’t know where it lay. It’s the same problem with trying to teach creativity. It’s something which has to be woven into the fabric of school.”
If PSHE and similar subjects were flawed in their execution, how do you deliver a set of values and concepts in education without falling into the trap of compartmentalising it into an actual subject? The answer lies in what IAPS call Education for Social Responsibility (ESR).
“It’s not about the rolling acres, it’s not about the resources, it’s not even about academic curriculum – it’s about the values you hold.
“We don’t want it to be a subject to be taught in the classroom. We don’t want it to be an interesting theme to be done in an activities week. We don’t want it to be something to be specially labelled. We just want it to be explicitly known and understood and delivered through everything else.”
The ESR Working Group of serving headteachers has developed a coherent set of advice and resources for IAPS schools to draw from. The group is led by Neil Jones, head of St Joseph’s in the Park in Hertfordshire, who is the IAPS subject adviser for ESR. Marcus Culverwell, head of St Mary’s Reigate, is writing a book about sustainability and climate change, meeting with key groups associated with ESR in the UK and has given presentations to committees and conferences within IAPS. Robin Davies, head of Barfield School, has written articles about learning outside the classroom, while Tim Pitman from Westbourne House runs a lively blog about teaching Education for Social Responsibility.
For Julie Robinson, director of education at IAPS, Education for Social Responsibility is all about promoting a sense of social responsibility beyond oneself: “It is encouraging children to do the right thing for its own sake, to have a better world. The ISI reports for our schools show that they have very strong social, moral, spiritual, and cultural eminence. ESR develops that with some clarity so that through history, or through geography, or through any subject, you can promote in the children a sense of their place in the world and their responsibility to do the right thing.”
Some people will be concerned when there is any discussion of morals and determining what should be taught to children. They will rightly ask: who is defining the morals? Hanson is clear on where the dividing line between ESR and teaching morals lies: “I don’t think there is a defined set of morals – you would be on very dangerous territory and you are going to unravel. I think that there is a fundamental moral to the story, if you like. A lot of what we are about culturally is about self-sufficiency, self-reliance, independent learning, standing on your own two feet – and there’s no problem with that. Am I here for a short time on this planet just for me, or am I working for the collective benefit? That’s nothing to do with faith. Everything out there that works is dependent on discretionary effort. Why things work is because people want to engage with others; they want to be part of something more than just themselves.”
The “secret ingredient” which is reflected across the independent sector is very neatly encapsulated in the values of ESR and Hanson believes parents will identify with it immediately. “There are some who believe that a miserable, Gradgrind hot-house experience is the best thing for a child – very few parents believe that. Most parents want children to have a rounded education that is beyond the core. It should involve arts and sport, the humanities, outward bound and community work. They want that because they know there is more to education than the academic curriculum.”
Matthew Smith is the editor of Attain, the leading magazine of the independent schools’ sector and official magazine of IAPS – attainmagazine.uk.
