Why do schools need to innovate?

Innovation is one of the core values of our school, alongside things like community, independence and courage. Innovation is treated as something which has inherent value and something which must be encouraged and nurtured in our pupils and in our staff.

BUT WHY IS INNOVATION IMPORTANT?

There are many definitions of innovation, but we define it as having ideas and making something new. What’s critical about that definition is that it explicitly makes the point that you have to be active in order to innovate.

We give our pupils many opportunities to actively create things; things that are generated by their own ideas and that provide them with the opportunity to develop crucial skills.

These skills range between collaboration, planning and creativity, to practical and technical skills around design and coding. We encourage our pupils to be well-rounded in the most relevant of ways – they need to have intellectual dexterity, they need to be creative and they need to be engaged by problem-solving.

Innovation is crucial in schools because it is crucial 
in the current and future workplace.

One of the clubs we run, The Da Vinci Society, is based upon this very premise. Da Vinci was a polymath, perhaps the greatest that ever lived, and we use him as a prompt to our pupils to remind them that this idea of a ‘hybrid’ brain has always been important, but perhaps never more so than today.

The World Economic Forum have repeatedly released research which highlights the importance of agility and flexibility, whether that’s in their 10 most important skills for 2020, or in their more recent 2022 ‘growing skills’ both of which simultaneously signal the importance of creativity, problem-solving and emotional intelligence. The more recent study reminds us that this is in tandem with innovation and technology.

Innovation is crucial in schools because it is crucial in the current and future workplace. To overlook it in the day-to-day lives of young people does not give them the well-rounded education for life, we should all be striving for.