Day 165

Tuesday 01 September

It’s been a crazy day with lots going on but very few physical steps taken. Like many, I have a watch that measures how many steps I have taken. At the close of play, as I sit on the sofa with a cup of tea and the dog on my lap, it is saying 7126 steps. I aim for a minimum of 8500.

I don’t know why I do it really. Most days I hit my target, especially since we have had Mabel. But when I don’t walk the dog, I usually fall short. Then I let those numbers punish me for failing to be ‘active’ enough. It’s another trap of modern living, everything needs to be measured, assessed, impactful.

We do the same with kids of course, and as we prepare to return to school we must take stock of what we are doing. This year all of our year eleven’s and year thirteens received grades based on what their schools believed they were capable of. Not by how many questions they got right in a time limited test. Some criticised this method as it would ‘over inflate’ the students’ grades.

My take is simple. If you want to know what a young person knows about a subject, at a given hour or two, and according to some very specific random questions. Then test.

But if you want to know what a young person knows about the whole subject, across the whole time they have been studying it. Then get the teachers and schools to assess them, not just for their knowledge of the subject but for their passion and live of it. Their ability to debate and discuss, create and resolve. There is much more to knowing a subject than mere facts.

Last month Sir Ken Robinson died. I first came across him back in the noughties whilst promoting the use of technology in schools. He continued to query what we were doing to our education system and was critical of schools being factories of facts, instead promoting creativity as the most important aspect of a young persons development. He said, “We don’t grow into creativity. We grow out of it. Or rather, we’re educated out of it.”

I then started to focus on the issues of poor behaviour in schools and the dramatic rise of the modern phenomenon of attention deficit disorders. Sire Ken had a different view to why so many ‘diagnoses’ were being made, he attributed to our approach to education. “If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low grade clerical work it’s not surprising they’ll fidget.” I find that hard to argue against.

So, as we start a new term, in a new year, having been dealt a chance to start afresh. I hope we learn from the experiences of the Class of 2020. I will be very interested to see what impact, not sitting tests, will have on this years crop of graduates as they move through life? I will keep measuring my steps each day, but if I don’t hit 8500, I will still have enjoyed putting one foot in front of the other and will simply do a few more the next day.