The Roundup - Edition 116

A message from 
Rich Jones, Head.

I have been thinking quite a lot this week about mess. 

Not the sort of mess I occasionally discover around school, although there's certainly plenty of that, but the messiness of life. In particular, the wonderfully unpredictable, occasionally frustrating, and often rather exciting business of working out what on earth we are going to do with our futures…

We spend a great deal of time asking young people what they want to be when they grow up. It's a perfectly reasonable question, but I've increasingly come to think that it's also rather an odd one. We seem to expect children, who are still discovering who they are, to have some sort of clear understanding of who they will become. As though life is a straight line, beginning with school, moving neatly through qualifications, into a career, and then onwards towards, well…

It's far more likely, of course, to be a squiggly line, full of unexpected turns, wrong directions, discoveries, setbacks, opportunities, and the occasional complete change of plan. And thank goodness for that. This week provided some rather lovely reminders of precisely this.

On Monday, I spoke to our Senior School pupils about Arthur Conan Doyle, the creator of Sherlock Holmes. Doyle trained as a doctor and spent years preparing for a career in medicine. Unfortunately, when he opened his practice, hardly anybody came to see him. He later attempted to become an eye specialist, with similarly underwhelming results. Not exactly the glittering career he had envisaged. But while waiting for patients who never appeared, he began writing stories. And in doing so, he created one of the most recognisable fictional characters in history.

What I find fascinating is that his years studying medicine weren't wasted. Far from it. His understanding of observation and diagnosis, inspired by one of his medical professors, helped him create Sherlock Holmes. The apparent wrong turn turned out to be rather important.

I suggested to the pupils that we are all unfinished. That there might be things we are extraordinarily good at which we haven't even discovered yet. And that perhaps we should be a little less worried about knowing exactly where we are going and a little more interested in what we might discover along the way.

Then, rather wonderfully, our Humanities Futures careers event on Tuesday evening brought this idea to life.

We welcomed pupils from St Chris and other schools, alongside an extraordinary range of speakers from law, politics, archaeology, cultural heritage, mental health, media, marketing, academia, and the charity sector. It was a terrific evening, full of thoughtful questions, lively conversations and genuine enthusiasm for the possibilities that studying the Humanities might offer. Our keynote speaker, Dr Melanie Bigold, was particularly inspiring.

Melanie trained at professional ballet schools from the age of ten and, understandably, imagined her future would be in dance. But injury brought that ambition to an end. What might have seemed, at the time, like the closing of a door eventually led her towards English, Drama and Literature, to universities in Canada and Oxford, and ultimately to a successful academic career. A squiggly line if ever there was one.

But Melanie's message wasn't simply that life sometimes takes unexpected turns. It was that we have a responsibility to explore those turns ourselves. To read, to research, to investigate, to follow our curiosity and, crucially, to create opportunities rather than simply wait for them to arrive.

I particularly enjoyed her reflections on artificial intelligence. She warned against becoming too dependent on AI as a source of truth, research and answers. After all, where will the knowledge come from if we stop doing the reading, thinking, questioning and discovering ourselves? She made the rather brilliant point that it is today's young people, our future readers, thinkers and researchers, who will have to feed AI with new knowledge. If we surrender our curiosity and simply accept whatever answers technology offers us, where does that leave the next generation of discovery?

It struck me as an important challenge. Technology can be a remarkable tool, but it cannot be a substitute for intellectual curiosity, independent thought, or the willingness to explore something for us.

And, of course, that is precisely what education should be about. Not simply preparing children for jobs which already exist, but helping them become curious, adaptable, thoughtful people, capable of navigating a future none of us can confidently predict. There were two other conversations this week which rather neatly captured all of this.

It reminded me of my own ambitions at about eight years old. My primary school teacher asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up, and I announced, with complete seriousness, that I intended to become “a Nazi hunter”.

My teacher, doing her best to be encouraging, replied, "That's nice, dear, but I think they might all be dead by the time you're old enough."

I shared this story recently, and one rather astute person observed that, given the state of the world, perhaps I shouldn't rule it out just yet. We laughed, but there was something rather sobering in the observation too.

What connects, I think, is the extraordinary openness of childhood. The ability to imagine a future without immediately worrying about whether it is realistic, achievable, or sensible. 

Somewhere along the way, however, we become rather more concerned with straight lines. We begin to measure success through qualifications, promotions, job titles and carefully constructed plans. We ask young people to make decisions about their futures at an age when they are still discovering their interests, abilities and identities.

Now, I am certainly not suggesting that planning is pointless, or that hard work and ambition don't matter. Quite the opposite. But I do think we should be careful not to confuse having a plan with having a purpose, or an unexpected change of direction with failure.

Sometimes the most valuable things we learn come from the experiences that didn't go quite as we expected. Sometimes an apparent failure becomes the foundation for something extraordinary. And sometimes the most important opportunity is the one we didn't even know existed until we were brave enough to explore it.

That, for me, is one of the great privileges and responsibilities of working in a school like St Chris. We have the opportunity to help children discover not simply what they can do, but what they might become. To encourage them to try things, to ask questions, to take intellectual risks, to change their minds and to recognise that there is no shame whatsoever in discovering that the path they originally chose isn't the right one. We should celebrate the squiggly lines.

This week was a wonderful illustration of what happens when we open doors and allow young people to glimpse the extraordinary breadth of possibilities beyond them.

So, as we head towards the end of another busy week, perhaps we should worry a little less about whether our lives, or indeed the lives of our children, are following the lines we originally drew. The future is going to be messy.
And that's not necessarily something to fear.

After all, a straight line might be the shortest route between two points, but it doesn't always make for the most interesting journey.