AS CHILDREN RETURN this week for the new academic year, it is a fair moment to ask what role our schools are fulfilling, and if they are doing a good enough job. Do they exist to maximise a child’s academic results, as measured by the imperfect device of examinations and tests? Or is there a wider vision, embracing the development of a child’s intellect in the broadest sense, as well as their cultural, moral, sporting, social and spiritual faculties?

Successive British governments have taken the narrower view. With external assessments at 7, 11, 14, 16, 17 and 18, our children are now the most heavily examined in the world. This steady drumbeat of exams is good for government. Each August, results show improvement in pupil performance year on year. Governments assert that their policies are working, and taxpayers are receiving value for money. But is such heavy emphasis on testing good for children?

League tables have further emphasised the importance of exams, and have encouraged teaching for results, ie, the teaching of the techniques of, say, history GCSE or chemistry A level, rather than the teaching of history or chemistry. By making us believe that league tables are the only way to judge the value of a school, the education press has encouraged this transition to schools becoming exam factories. They thus proclaim that this or that school is one of “Britain’s best”, because they are at the top of the tables. Tables do indeed have merit in focusing the minds of teachers and pupils, and giving parents objectively comparable data. But they always require careful interpretation.

Parents strain and fight to secure places at “top” schools. Many do so because they genuinely believe their children will do best in them, but some are motivated by a desire to impress their friends with their children’s, and presumably their own, perspicacity and intelligence.

Phew. Job done. Life’s problems solved? I don’t think so. Many top academic schools — and state schools are far more culpable than independents — focus far too heavily on exam success to the detriment of wider education. Spending on state schools has soared since 1997, but little money has gone into extracurricular enrichment, while sports fields have continued to be sold, swimming pools have closed and numbers willing to take school trips have declined. For far too many, the education experience in mainstream schools is narrowing at a time when it should be broadening.

More worrying still is the strain the system is putting on many children. One Harley Street psychiatrist is seeing five children from the same class of one hothouse London school. They are suffering from depression, anorexia and a sense of worthlessness brought on by the feeling that they’re trying to fulfil the goals of others rather than their own. The obsession with exams is wrong; most reasonable people accept this truth, but barely anything is being done about it.

Maybe the status quo would be justified if it met its objectives. Universities, paradoxically in view of the glut of exam information they receive, complain that they cannot discriminate satisfactorily between the intellectually able and the merely well drilled. What about employers? The CBI last month expressed its concern that many school leavers are “unfit for work”, lacking basic literacy and numeracy skills. Teachers are no happier, and see their creativity and professionalism in the classroom being sacrificed to formulaic exam preparation. Liberal education is being replaced by mere instruction.

We do not have to accept the status quo. We need to assert the broader vision of education, that schools are there to discover, nurture and develop all aspects of a child’s faculties, recognising that what is not awakened at school may not be later in life. By the time pupils leave school, they should be equipped with a clear idea of who they are and what they want to do with their lives. They should possess rounded personalities capable of working in, and contributing to, society and enjoying its opportunities to the full.

This term at Wellington College we are embarking on two initiatives to help our pupils to achieve this wider vision. Building on the ideas of Kurt Hahn, the German educationist, and Howard Gardner, the American psychologist, we are adapting our curriculum and extracurricular life to the development of the seven faculties or intelligences which each human being possesses: logical, linguistic, aesthetic, sporting, emotional, social and spiritual/moral.

Achievements in all these seven areas will be recognised in a final graduation diploma when pupils leave. We are also beginning wellbeing (colloquially called “happiness”) classes, which will challenge pupils to explore themselves and their talents, learn in a practical way how to look better after their bodies, minds and emotions, enhance their relationships with others, with technology and the environment, and help them to learn how to make themselves, not others (including friends and parents), the masters of their lives. These initiatives may not change the world, but they are our response to the need for a more holistic education; and I believe independent schools have a duty to be innovative.

With a broader vision of education that develops better the whole child, the learning of mathematics, languages and science will improve. The purpose of schools should ultimately be to teach people how to live. What greater goal can there be?



Anthony Seldon is Master of Wellington College

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