Martin Barker, Headmaster, shares the skills children will need in the workplace in 2030 and beyond, and how Westbourne House’s new High Performance Learning framework will give your children the advantage.
I hope that you were able to find some time to read the notes from the meeting about the changes to our school week and High Performance Learning (HPL) last month, or at least may find some time over half term!
It has been, and will continue to be I am sure, a thought-provoking period, but I am in no doubt that we are heading in very much the right direction for the children with the introduction of HPL. I have written here in a previous instalment about how much I value a holistic education for our children, but more and more my thoughts have turned to how well we are preparing the children for the modern world, even beyond GCSEs and A levels. Artificial intelligence is gathering a full head of steam, and plenty of people who make a living out of predicting future trends are making bold statements about the workplace by the year 2030 – one such prediction claimed that as many as 85% of jobs will be different by that time.
Barbara Langford, Director of Studies, and I attended a conference at Wellington College a few weeks ago and listened to a speaker from industry, Dame Janye-Anne Gadhia. Her impressive CV was dominated by her success as CEO of Virgin Money. By the end of her talk, it was almost as if she had written the outline of HPL!
Throughout her talk about the skills that industry leaders were looking for, we heard words such as creative, adaptable, resilient, collaborative, ability to think critically about the world around us and being able to research effectively. It made us feel that the move to HPL was very much ‘on trend’ and should provide an advantageous preparation for the children at Westbourne House.
She also had some interesting things to say about innovation, and how the most telling innovation often came out of hardship – when things become difficult the best innovators meet challenges rather than shying away. People who could actually challenge the process and move outside current ‘group think’. This of course takes a great deal of confidence, and you may recall another pillar of HPL is that of developing intellectual confidence, something that people of all abilities are able to do with the right tools.
That can of course be the confidence to say that you don’t understand something and need it explained in a different way. We had an stimulating discussion with Melanie Saunders, one of the directors of HPL, last week about our introduction of the HPL philosophy to Westbourne, and some interesting thoughts came out of the session. Perhaps the dominant one for me was how crucial the issue of intellectual confidence is for children – if they think they can’t do things, and compare themselves too readily to their peers, it can set the mould for years to come. It is of course something that we do very naturally as human beings, perhaps all too readily at times.
I think our set structures can help that to some degree, allowing for the pace (if not the content particularly) of the work to vary based on the needs of the children. However, every bit as important is imbuing the children with the skills that enable them to realise how they best learn, and that we are all very different in our approach to this. We can all recount examples I am sure of people who have been extremely successful in business and made a great deal of money, who were not very successful at all at school. Our education system has valued the ability to retain and recall facts and being able to sit exams, but as we well know there is a great deal more to it than this.
Back to Jayne-Anne Gadhia, and she spoke of her and other CEOs’ frustration at many of the graduates that they interview nowadays, describing them as ‘Lighthouses in the desert – brilliant but useless’! A clear reference to the great many children who have been prepared for an exam-based approach, something they have been successful in, but at the same time are lacking many of the ‘soft skills’ that we know are becoming so important.
Hopefully High Performance Learning will ensure that Westbourne House children are better equipped than most in this regard in the years to come.
We will be holding a further information session during the Summer Term for those parents who wish to ask more about HPL as well as the structure of the school week, particularly arrangements for Saturdays.
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Interesting articles and podcasts
When Robots steal our jobs: Technology has been replacing manufacturing jobs for years and now it has white-collar jobs in its sights.
Artificial intelligence: Risks of super-intelligent machines.
The AI Revolution: How will artificial intelligence shape our lives, and what should we do to prepare for it? David Aaronovitch asks experts about the AI revolution and what it means for us.
The Future of Skills
Pearson teamed up with researchers from Nesta and the Oxford Martin School to build a research project that moves the conversation about the future of work past automation. Their methodology combines the best of human expertise with the power of machine learning to make more nuanced predictions about the future of work and skills.