Learning to Lead

There is - or there was during the early part of this new millennium - a mantra that suggests that the most important lessons in life are not learned in school.

The Richard Bransons and Simon Cowells of this world have made celebrity careers out of the statement - emphasising their roles as autodidacts and, in many ways, trumpeting the fact that, in their cases, conformity to an educational system that was patently not meeting their needs, would have been a waste of time.

In their individual cases, they may be right - they almost certainly are.

The generalising adage, however, falls foul of a common fallacy - it confuses necessary and sufficient conditions such that it implies not simply that some important lessons are learned outside of the school environment but that no important lessons can be learned there at all.

This is, of course, absurd.

I have no problem at all with the first premise - we learn a lot about ourselves when we leave the relatively safe confines of compulsory education. Self-management, working under real pressure, emotional maturity - all of these require exposure to the 'real world' (for want of a better expression) to effectively develop. As a teenager, I spent many happy months working first in the pot-wash and then in the kitchen at our local PizzaExpress where I acquired all sorts of experiences that would prove formative in later life: keeping cool under stress, problem-solving, managing complex teams, monitoring and responding to supply and demand.

There is no replacement for getting your hands dirty in the real world. Anything can look good in theory or on paper - but until there is intersection with the wonderful and intricate unpredictability of actuality, it remains untested.

But just because I gained immeasurably from those experiences does not render the experience of my schooling entirely redundant. If we apply a gardening analogy - skills grow shoots and develop into fully fledged, fruit producing plants under the unfiltered sun of real-world experience; but it is education that does the hard and critical task of preparing the soil and sowing the seeds.

I am, and have always been, a believer in holistic education - not simply because I believe children should have access to the widest possible range of experiences as they grow - but because of the unequivocal transferability of skills. To use a facile example - the same tenacity and determination that allowed me to maintain education for pupils during the pandemic, grew out of all of those mathematics lessons on simultaneous equations with which I struggled so much in my youth.

Much has been written on metacognition in recent years and it is absolutely right that we help children to understand and articulate the underlying framework of skills and concepts that they are acquiring alongside subject-based knowledge and understanding; but it is even more important that we (as teachers) understand the link through to what they will ultimately need in the workplace.

Many schools - and especially within the independent sector - claim to teach leadership. It's an attractive phrase to put into the prospectus and to bandy around on the website - but the truth of the matter is that the delivery of 'leadership' as a curriculum element is enormously complex. Once can consider it from a range of different perspectives - the history of leadership, the variety of leadership, the impact of leadership - the styles of different leaders.

The problem is that we are still in an age (for better or for worse) in which examinations rule the educational roost. However brilliantly funky the 'leadership' programme is, it is unlikely to be met either with enthusiasm by the pupils or with real understanding of what it intends to achieve.

Teaching leadership - or any other core skill - isn't so much about the design of the curriculum or the sorts of pedagogy that accompany it. It is an attitude - it has to fully embedded in a clear, fully legible approach within the school that joins the dots between what children are doing now and what they will be doing in the future. They are learning not just for school, but for life.

Perhaps the best case in point is ICT literacy. Anyone involved in the delivery of compulsory ICT lessons in schools or (casting our minds back) in preparing pupils for the ECDL, will tell you that Sisyphus had it easy. Pupils think they know everything already and cannot see the purpose of application of what they cannot yet do. Those programmes that have succeeded best have been those that have sought to integrate ICT literacy into other areas of school life with purpose and clear dot-joining to real-world application.

In our Summer Programme at Oswestry School we will be helping pupils to understand the structures and styles of leadership in the classroom but also giving them every opportunity outside of and beyond it to try their hand at it themselves and a good number of them will be submitting for the AQA Level 2 Project Conversation. These pieces of paper don't mean anything of themselves - just as having a driving license isn't a guarantee of being a good driver - but they are a critical part of tilling the soil so that when real world opportunities present themselves, pupils can rise to them with confidence and enthusiasm.

The nurturing of future leaders won't happen according to any pro-forma or in sanitised classroom sessions - neither will it happen only through the 'school of hard knocks'. The blend of education and reality - tailored to the individual needs, talents and intentions of every child - is the crucible from which powerful leadership will emerge.