May 24th 2019
Parents will be aware of the significant shift in the entry processes to senior schools at 13+. Schools now pre-test boys in Years 6 or 7 with less emphasis placed on the Common Entrance (CE) exams at the end of Year 8. Last week, I attended a schools’ conference on the future of the CE exam. The two keynote speakers were: Mungo Dunnett, an educational research consultant who specialises in the independent sector. I have worked with Mungo on and off over the last 10 years and he knows the market extremely well, having conducted over 28,000 parent interviews. Mungo was followed by Sir Anthony Seldon, Vice Chancellor of the University of Buckingham, who previously led both Wellington and Brighton Colleges as a transformative head.
The two speakers were extremely clear that Britain’s education system must adapt to the rapidly changing world if today’s children are to succeed and thrive in the modern workplace. Mungo focused on the skills that individuals can develop dividing these into three categories:
- Hard skills, such as taught knowledge and examination based qualifications
- Cognitive skills, such as judgement, perceptual efficiency, creativity, lateral thinking
- People skills, such as the ability to persuade, adapt, show empathy, to lead and be led.
In 2016, a World Economic Forum (WEF) report predicted the top ten skills which will be most attractive to employers by 2020. For details of these, please click here. What is interesting to note is that the skills listed are all cognitive or people skills. In the words of Tony Wagner (Innovation Education Fellow, Harvard), “The world no longer cares how much you know; the world cares about what you can do with what you know.” Sir Anthony Seldon used the London cab driver as an example. Everything the cabbie has learnt through “The Knowledge” has become invalidated with the development of satellite navigation. Such changes will happen repeatedly over the coming years as transformative technology is developed.
Clearly there is a balance to be made as knowledge underpins understanding, and the current UK educational model (GCSEs, A-Levels and University Degrees) are heavily exam based. However, the key point being made was that being good at exams will simply not be enough to thrive in the modern world.
The conference I attended was an internal debate within the independent sector about the future of CE, although the two speakers focused on macro issues in attempting to find a solution to the micro problem. Sir Anthony Seldon made the point that 90% of current prep school children will survive into the 22nd century. They should not be hamstrung by an educational system that was developed for the 19th and 20th centuries. Moulsford moved away from the full suite of CE exams with the new curriculum implemented in 2017. This focuses on developing those cognitive and people skills (as identified by the WEF), as well as ensuring that boys’ learning is underpinned by knowledge.
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