Whole Education’s ‘What Are Schools For?’ Conference
Delegates listen to final panel debate
Monday was a busy day for the Whole Education team. We held our first conference on the topic, ‘What are Schools for? and were privileged to hear from a diverse range of speakers including Anthony Seldon, Guy Claxton, representatives from both the Cambridge Primary Review and Nuffield Review and BT, as well as teachers and youth workers from across the country.
In the morning, John Dunford introduced Whole Education’s belief in equipping young people with the skills, qualities and knowledge they would need in order to flourish as citizens in the public world, individuals in the workplace, and private people in pursuit of rich and fulfilling lives. Anthony Seldon of Wellington College encouraged teachers to be brave, and to teach according to their professional judgement, not merely in order to pass tests, while Guy Claxton and others pointed to the clear research base illustrating, not only the negative effects of our current system, but the positive outcomes to be had through widening our understanding of what it is to be an educated person in the 21st century. A great deal of issues were discussed on the day, but with the dust now settled, a few key points from the conference stand out for me:
For the surprising majority of teachers at the conference there was a misalignment between the sort of teaching they had wanted to employ when they had first joined the profession and the reality of what their schools and colleges currently asked them to do. Whole Education not only wishes to discover the causes of this misalignment, but is seeking to offer teachers with the tools to rectify it.
