Reimagining education

I HAVE long had an interest in AI and learning. My background is in psychology and neuroscience, and I spent my summer at university working for Professor Kim Plunkett, who was using neural nets to explore language acquisition. At my last school, I was able to design and implement the Novus Curriculum, which was shortlisted for the School of the Year Award for Innovation and was a reimagining of education for the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

So I speak as both an educator and also as a bit of a geek. Someone who believes powerfully in the moral responsibility to equip our children for the future and who also thinks the time has come to ask some pretty fundamental questions.

I think deep in our hearts, we know that the current British Education System is not fit for purpose.

Now, let me be clear, there are wonderful things about our education system. There are places where the skills are learnt and the children develop. Some of the things that shaped the course of my life happened at school. But I would argue that these life-changing moments happen in a quiet corner caught between lessons or in a debating competition organised by an enthusiastic teacher in their spare time. They happened by chance rather than design.

The current education system has been the same for the last 200 years. It is a knowledge-based system, constructed on the premise that the key to a good life is to learn human knowledge. It was designed in a time of no public libraries, let alone the internet. If you think about this, it’s profoundly weird that we rank our children on a linear scale on their ability to reproduce that knowledge in examination conditions.

And that system has narrowed in recent years. League tables and judging schools on results has led to a real change in school culture. Memorisation, imitation and regurgitation became the order of the day and handwriting fast in timed conditions on your own become crucial abilities. These are the skills at the heart of our current education system. The key skills we equip our pupils with.

And I don’t want to oversimplify. There are some good skills caught in that net – skills of time management, self-discipline and organisation. But they are the side-effects rather than the purpose. There are also a lot of skills that are not learnt, or even worse, trained out of us.

Indeed, British industries have been calling for a radical rethinking of education for well over a decade. They point out that even in the current context, the skills of GCSEs in particular, are not relevant to the skills needed. And now into this already problematic arena, we can throw AI.

For years there has been growing evidence about the direction of AI and technology. Evidence from reports like Deloitte and Forbes, research from Oxford and Harvard, and the voices of Silicon Valley have been warning that we are about to see an industrial revolution perhaps unparalleled in human history.

The advent of ChatGPT has suddenly made clear the direction of travel and the speed of that change is going to be breathtaking.

The problem is that we humans are not great at believing there is going to be radical change. We are not great at seeing things differently. We anchor to what we know. We assume the world will continue as it currently is.

Tom Fletcher, the principal of Hertford College Oxford, makes the point in his book, Ten Survival Skills for a World in Flux, that if you took a doctor from 150 years ago and you put them in a modern hospital, they would be unable to function, overwhelmed by the technology and practices they did not understand. But if you took a teacher from 150 years ago and placed them in a modern classroom, they would feel comfortable with the layout, the material and the assessment processes.

In debating we talk about frames, ways of seeing the world that contain arguments. It’s a psychological trick that limits people’s view and prevents people from seeing there are multiple other alternatives they are not considering.

In education, we seem stuck in our frame. The JCQ which oversees British examination and assessments, has told schools to ignore ChatGPT. Sunak’s solution is essentially simply more maths A-level. Even in the spaces where they are engaging with the technology, it is framed around how we either use AI to reduce workload, e.g. writing reports and creating lesson plans, or how we mitigate against the impact of technology by creating programmes that will identify if a student has used ChatGPT to write a better essay.

But the thing is, that’s not the question. The question isn’t how we can stop technology from writing better essays. The question is, if technology can write a better essay, why is essay writing the heart of what we are teaching?

So I want to talk about questions. I want to talk about stepping outside that frame, and exploring what this will mean for all areas of our society, and particularly in my world, for education.

The first challenge, it seems to me, is that technology is going to allow information to become highly personalised and the potential for manipulation of people and misinformation is going to be increasingly sophisticated and effective.

Therefore, question one for me is what skills can I teach my pupils that will equip them to understand influence, to be able to separate truth from noise and to be resistant to manipulation or false information?

The second major area of impact is going to be in the world of work. It seems clear that this technology is going to cut a swathe through a lot of knowledge-based industries. The careers that generations of young people have gone into knowing they will be ‘safe’ routes to a good life are the very roles that are in jeopardy.

Accountancy, law, medicine and actuarial science are all very much in the sights of this technology. And sadly, it now seems that many of the more creative roles which early speculations thought would be exempt from this revolution, are also going to be in the firing line. So what roles will be left? What skills or aptitudes can humans uniquely offer and how do we teach those skills?

We don’t do this often in education – ask why. Why do we teach this way? Why do we invest 14 years of every person’s life and a huge amount of money in formal education? If you honestly looked at the system, the answer to why we teach something is a) because we always have and b) because it will improve a child’s performance in an exam.

We teach in subjects because that’s what our teachers did, in classes because that was the model in the early 1900s and in lessons and schools because that was the model created post-industrial revolution. We teach content because it will be measured, and skills because it will help them get a higher mark in an exam.

So question two is – what skills and knowledge are they actually going to need?

It’s a hard answer to pin down but when I speak to stakeholders and look at the research, I have identified a few themes that I think will be true.

They will need to:

n Feel comfortable with technology.

n Be curious, critical thinkers and innovators.

n Be communicators and understand the context and the mechanisms of influence.

But more than all that, most powerfully they will need to be flexible. Emotionally and intellectually flexible.

Flexibility will be the gold dust of the next 20 years. The ability to bend, adapt and learn. To not hold rigidly to areas of expertise but to link, move and change, and to do so with a confidence of spirit, a sense of groundedness and self and a sense of enjoying the process of change.

That is not easy. Most people are not great at flexibility – they like safety. They like getting stuff right. Fear of failure is not just a cliche, it’s a deeply-rooted part of a high achieving culture.

And education is terrible at flexibility. Too often, the majority of our days and of those 14 years of education and what we report on, assess and communicate as important is about memorisation and rigidity, not about flexibility.

Question three, then, is how do we teach these skills? How do we create an environment that allows young people to not only build the cognitive skills of flexibility but also the emotional skills, the ability to constantly learn, adapt and change, fail and rethink and proactively dive into the unknown and navigate it with joy rather than trepidation?

I don’t think there is an easy answer. Speaking with business leaders, we decided we learn through failure. Painful time-consuming failure. And mostly that wasn’t at school. As one of them said to me, she thinks the most powerful lessons her daughter will learn at university are not from the course but from negotiating with terrible housemates over who takes out the bins.

The question then for us is how to build those opportunities into the system. How do we shape our educational offering so that rather than these skills being learnt by chance, they are learnt by design? That’s an exciting challenge and it’s where my team are starting.

At The Ladies’ College, we had already begun a journey to start to position at the front of this. We are a Microsoft Showcase School, one of only 60 in the UK, a testament to our use of technology both in learning and teaching. We made the decision to reallocate time to skills like coding, understanding the role of technology in media, and design thinking.

We’ve hired our first director of innovation to look at our wider curriculum and for 2024, we will be launching a new sixth form parallel curriculum to start to authentically focus on building the skills the girls are going to need in the future.

And while we don’t know the answers, we are dedicated to asking the big questions. How can we fray the edges of the school, so that rather than siloing children off from society for 14 years, we start to learn together, working with businesses and other stakeholders to develop innovative and effective programmes and interventions?

I think that point is powerful. We have a unique opportunity here. At The Ladies’ College, we have talked about how our size is going to allow us to move quickly through this space, to be agile, proactive and adapt in a way that many schools can’t. Guernsey is the same. We are small and could move quickly. But more than that we are closely woven. I think we are really well equipped in Guernsey to move into this space and to start to take the lead.

And on a personal note, I think we have a moral obligation to do that. The girls that come into my Year 7 next year will graduate from school in 2030. When they leave, the world will look different. The jobs that their parents and grandparents moved into may no longer be available, the skills they need will have changed. So simply holding on to the ways we have always done things, holding on to systems that make us feel safe and comfortable, is not good enough.

We must be brave. We must see outside the frame. We must turn our eyes to the horizon and be ahead rather than behind the curve, in order to equip our children with the skills they are going to need to not only navigate this future, but thrive.