Head’s blog on HMC Conference
October 2015
Last week I attended my first HMC Conference (the Headmasters' & Headmistresses' Conference) in St Andrews. It was a thought-provoking week, devoted to reflection on preparing young people for the challenges of the future. On the first day we heard from Rohit Talwar, a futurologist who spoke about the impact of technology on our lives, and the need to rethink work if our children are to live to 120.
The Chairman’s address tackled, among other things, some of the anomalies and iniquities of the current examining system; HMC, along with the GSA, has done much work behind the scenes to try and ensure fairer marking at AS and A2 of creative subjects and Modern Foreign Languages in particular. The issue is not simply one of justice and the UCAS prospects of the candidates who take the exams, though these in themselves are critical; it is also one of the fate of subjects such as German, which are already flagging in terms of uptake and suffer disproportionately therefore from the body blow of harsh, inaccurate marking.
The debate as to whether or not it would be better to have one exam board, and/or an unprivatised examining system, and/or whether or not the exam boards should be subsidised, continues. A major argument against one exam board in England is a practical one, we are told: the number of candidates who would need to be processed. At present, schools do at least have some sanction in the face of erratic marking and a byzantine appeals process: they might (for most subjects at least) take their business elsewhere, as SHHS has done in a number of subjects recently. I cannot think of any one of the exam boards which would currently inspire my confidence, were it to be the only award-making body in the UK. I would rather see a review of the prioritising of how scripts are marked and by whom, and of the regulations relating to appeal. As many of you know from experience, these are currently a quagmire with some added booby-traps.
The HMC conference is an occasion which attracts considerable press coverage. What became increasingly salient was the disjunct between what was being said during the conference and what was reported. By Thursday, the decision was therefore taken to ask the press not to attend the session on Wellbeing, which was a great pity since the independent sector is doing so much enhance the health and resilience of pupils in its schools. At SHHS, our commitment to mindfulness and our having another Wellness Week in November are not badges we wear nor events we deploy to tick boxes; they are part of a programme which springs from the ethos of the school. Of course, “Heads have reasonable discussion about their pupils’ wellbeing" is not an attention-grabbing trope in journalism.
My favourite study in what can happen to a story came from the panel I attended at the University of St Andrews. The speakers included two MSPs; Louise Richardson, Vice Chancellor of the University of St Andrews and the first female Vice Chancellor-elect of Oxford University; and Mary Curnock Cook, the Chief Executive of UCAS. The latter’s remarks dominated the proceedings; and rightly so: she knows more about higher education as a whole than anyone else in the panel. She began with a letter which had appeared in the Times the previous week from a girl who had done a degree in Physics, had not enjoyed it, and had then got an accountancy job, and was also not enjoying that, and wished she’d had the courage to work out what she did actually enjoy. We don’t know where this girl went to school— but let’s imagine, Curnock Cook suggested, that she went to an independent school. Why? Because people from independent school apply to only about 10% of the 30,000 courses which UCAS has to offer. These tend to be at Russell group or equivalent universities, and they are in the more “traditional” courses. The point Curnock Cook was making seemed to me to be twofold: first, we should ensure that our pupils are considering the full range of what is out there in higher education and in their future lives—a key theme of the conference; and second, we should keep doing what we are trying to do with regard to careers education and broader exposure to the jobs of the future…. many of which won’t have been created yet. (A phrase which was much used at the conference and is in danger of becoming in cliché in education circles, but I digress.) Curnock Cook gave us one memorable phrase: 'pupils should not sleepwalk through an identikit education into an off-the-peg life.’ And there the story was born. It appeared in the Guardian as http://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/oct/07/private-school-students-are-sleepwalking-into-predictable-careers
Then began its half-life on twitter, with Sam Freedman’s #tinyviolins summing up the predictable lack of sympathy which this story of poor little rich children blindly following their parents inspired in most readers who then tweeted.
Meanwhile, the Chairman’s attempt to defuse what he terms “toffism,” the antipathy to independent schools which puts us all in boaters and top hats then beats us all around the head with the walking canes which have presumably just been wrested from our exquisitely manicured hands, inspired a similar and perhaps predictable response.
Fascinating though the conference was, it is always good to be back in school. And in the meantime, you as parents continue to make the decisions and often the necessary sacrifices to send your daughters to SHHS, while we get on with the job of securing their flourishing…..
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