If you haven’t watched Jesse Ilhardt’s excellent TED talk on Early Years education yet, all of us at Great Ballard would highly recommend it. We watched it as part of our leadership team’s pre-term INSET and the fascinating thing was how it seemed every bit as relevant to our GCSE teachers as it did to our Pre-Prep staff. Jesse makes so many good points, from the danger of comparison culture to the power of play in growing the brain. In one brief talk she demonstrates the futility of an education system built solely on memorisation and tests, and the dangers of obsessing about short term goals over long term value. 

It tallied really well with another session run by our Maths department, who celebrated the power of puzzles and problem-solving, but also noted just why we find it hard to make space for it in our weekly planning. The real lesson of the puzzle is in the struggling and the effort, the collaboration and the hypothesising and not so much in the final answer itself. But what cannot easily be measured or completed in a fixed time period is unlikely, any time soon, to find its way onto a GCSE curriculum.

And that’s why it takes real courage to be a teacher at GB. We know the importance of exam results and we build our offering around a traditional core. We recognise that strong literacy and numeracy and a set of good GCSEs open the door to so much more, and that can never be underestimated. But alongside what can be learned and memorised, marked and logged, we also treasure those less visible skills, the ones that take longer to evolve and are hard to assess in an exam. We actually want our children to struggle, to try different methods, to experience failure and to be creative. We don’t want them to be identical, to all follow the same narrow, taught path or to conform to a single model that exemplifies a successful GB pupil. Through growing, cooking and computing, through a variety of clubs and activities, through running their own businesses and through the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award Scheme, we ensure that their “core” curriculum stays broader than in other schools - all the way from the age of 2 to the age of 16 when they leave us. 

It’s so important that, for as long as is possible, we remain what Jesse would refer to as “brain builders” rather than just “brain testers”.  It’s yet another area where the strengths of great Early Years practice can inform and shape a great school. You can pass Science exams just by learning the outcomes of experiments, but you only become a scientist by actually doing those experiments and learning to love the risk, the challenge and the wonder that comes with them. And if the only children in your school still getting muddy outdoors or attempting puzzles that don’t have a solution are in your Pre Prep, then something is going seriously wrong. 

We never forget at GB that we are preparing students, not just for exams, but for life beyond. As every adult has learned in the last few years, that life is unlikely to stand still or to be straightforward. And as every infant knows, it’s that very unpredictability and promise of challenge and change that keeps on making it so much fun!