The Governors, my top team and I have recently been pulling together Highgate’s aims for the next five years in our 2025-30 School Development Plan.
The plan, which you can see here, aims “to galvanise efforts and focus planning and effort in areas where the School is either at greatest risk or sees greatest opportunity.” It has three overarching priorities.
One relates to our financial position, with the goal of ensuring that “neither the School’s curricular and co-curricular offering nor its charitable reach is reduced, and so the latter may grow.”
Another is to respond to “the changing effects on young people, on families and on parenting of pupils’ ‘online lives’ in terms of their wellbeing, behaviour and values.”
Both of these are urgent, ensuring we direct our discretionary effort – i.e. that which is not already allocated to the day-to-day but ever-important, and no less prioritised, teaching, learning and pastoral care – at issues which are, right now, directly affecting the school and our community.
The third and final goal, however, is much broader: “Strengthening the School’s ability to provide an open-minded and humane education responsive to changing political tensions, in particular if faced by regulatory or external pressures.” Let me explain.
To me, an open-minded education develops and protects free-thinking and receptiveness. It guards against taking opinions off the shelf as a means of finding a place and an identity in society or community.
It promotes enquiring minds, tolerance and curiosity. A need to know more and understand better. An avoidance of rushing to judgement. A recognition that diversity brings benefits. An acceptance that we must keep learning. A goal of being wise rather than being right.
But I don’t think an open-minded education is enough. It must also be a humane one: that is, to take a dictionary definition, giving children learning that is intended to have a civilising effect on them, because, rather worryingly, people are simply not civilised without it.
I have been setting out this rationale in our start-of-year parent information evenings which gave all Senior School families the opportunity to meet up with each other, touch base with their child’s tutor or Head of House/Year and pick up the pastoral and academic roadmaps for the year ahead.
By way of example, I explained to parents of Year 8 that in lessons we are teaching more than good content and skills; we are also laying down intellectual habits and attitudes to learning, the stuff which will make the next phase of living and learning possible, and will stick. The same goes for that we are doing in school more generally – that is, in class but also in clubs, on the sports field, in the lunch queue, on educational visits – where we also teach how to acquire and to interrogate attitudes and principles.
This is the time when values are grown and instincts forged. The red lines we draw help us hardwire in the pupils a belief in, and an understanding of, right and wrong.
We don’t expect the children to get this right all the time. They are becoming good people, but becoming is the operative word. They may not be there yet. So, while we want them to hold themselves, and each other, to account, they (and we) must also understand that each moral decision they get wrong, each red line they cross, is a necessary opportunity to learn, an underpinning of those defensive walls which will protect their values and their judgement from the slings and arrows of prejudice. So much, so familiar, perhaps.
But this is difficult. Humans are born with the capacity to be inhumane. The adults charged with bringing them up and teaching them have been the means by which children became humane and adopted civilised and civilising behaviours. But the online world, with its unregulated, algorithmically driven diet of faddish celebrity influencers, performative behaviours and political posturing, brings unwelcome and alternative voices into children’s lives. Children copy some of these and experiment with others, sometimes to toxic effect on those around them and their own values.
An open-minded and humane education is our antidote. Establishing instincts of good and evil, right and wrong; vaccinating children against stronger strains of prejudice and cruelty; enabling them to argue and debate without offending or angering, and rooting this in much more deliberate teaching and awareness of the alternative views which neither school nor family nor society will have sanctioned. The changes at Highgate will be incremental as we seek to counter the risks posed to our children by unfettered, or only retrospectively fettered, technological changes, as we explain and persuade pupils that there are no short cuts to securing this critical kind of humane and civilised wisdom. You may have read an earlier blog about our thinking here.
An open-minded and humane education that ensures our children develop values, become civilised and withstand the confusing, contradictory world which risks invading and disturbing their childhood, their adolescence, is an exciting, galvanising venture for us; far from being a defensive measure, it should be a liberating one which will, we hope, capture imaginations and facilitate lively minds rooting their more mature versions in wisdom and judgement. It’s easy with even the most cursory glance at your news feed to feel that this will be hard, that it may even be doomed, but I encourage you all to be upbeat: a wise mentor once explained to me that there’s not a problem in schools which, if correctly identified and diagnosed, can’t be resolved. Optimistic and realistic in equal measure, I take great comfort in that insight!
In pursuit of an education based on those principles we will be thinking hard about how we engage with the effects on our pupils and their families of global events and climate change; our charitable work and the views of our community neighbours; our approach to modelling and teaching appropriate methods of debate and discussion; our constant exhortations to read widely and well – because we believe that these ostensibly simple responses, but often overlooked, will work.
Much of this of this will happen in lessons, clubs and societies, tutor time, assemblies, PSHE, RSE and so on: in other words, through the things we do every day. But you will notice certain emphases: that same wise mentor told me that only after you’ve said something so often – he suggested seven times – will it be remembered, and I wonder if the Highgate message about reading, and why we need to read, is getting close to that (apparently) magical number of effectual repetitions? I doubt you will see an overnight change in your children – who are, in many cases, already imbued with open-minded and humane attitudes – but I hope that, when we review the year and particularly the five years, we’ll be able to look back and think that, at the very least, we prepared.
About the author Adam Pettitt, Head Adam has been Head of Highgate since 2006. He was previously Head of Modern Languages at Abingdon School and then Deputy Head at Norwich School. He read French and German at university and continues to teach both subjects to Y9 pupils at Highgate. Beyond work, Adam enjoys running marathons and is a recent convert to inter-railing.
