Head's Blog | Navigator | Embley School, Hampshire

It is hard to believe a week has passed since our Welcome Evening for new joiners. It has been another busy week at Embley but a very significant week for the world with recent developments touching all our lives in one way or another. In my address to the parents and children starting with us in the Senior School in September, I touched on a question that I am often asked by parents and one that at the recent Society of Head meeting and the HMC meeting in May will focus on is the way schools are preparing children for the future.Contrary to popular opinion - or not so popular opinion depending on how you view it - we do not have a secret stash of knowledge that we share with the ‘elect’ on joining Embley. Surprising I know, but there you have it. In our defence, no one has this stash. The future is, by definition, unknown and unknowable. I did pose the same question to the parents in the audience, how are you preparing your children? To which some volunteered that they are sending them to Embley! Ok, don’t you just love audience participation. It may have been tongue in cheek, but I think my question is as fair as the one levelled to schools. 
 
On a practical level, we are of course keeping in touch with developments in knowledge, modification to curricula where the change is a consequence of extension in human understanding or exam board requirement. The former speaks to the progress in our understanding of the world, the latter more often suiting a wider political agenda (driven, I have no doubt, by the desire to prepare children for the world or the world of work, but there is a big difference).
 
Embley (and any authentic school) is not a training facility for a job. This forms some of what we do but by no means the heart of what we are about. Just think about it reasonably for a second… If we are preparing for the world of work and that world is uncertain, what does that preparation involve? At best it is schooling in the familiar when what is required is education to deal with the unfamiliar; to not just cope with change but to be fuelled by it and naturally predisposed to accommodate routines to deal with it. The capacity to deal with this is not so much in understanding ‘plate tectonics’ but the critical awareness to question so called wisdom; to be diligent in fact checking and to be logical in the unpicking of arguments, the better to sort the cant from content. 
 
It seems to me that the preparation for the future is not in teaching a body of knowledge alone but an attitude of mind, a set of qualities or characteristics that allow children to navigate the terrain when the detail of the map is uncertain. The children spent much of last Thursday evening criss-crossing the site, getting to know their teachers, their fellow students and the Embley way by charting their progress against the Embley Pupil Profile. It is the compass we devised and use, the better to equip the children to be their best, to make their way authentically and with purpose in a world of change. How do we prepare children for the future? By creating knowledgeable navigators with a clear purpose and the capacities to make progress.