Patrick Farmbrough

Delighted to be spending the day at our ‘Culture in Action: Behaviour, Attendance & Personal Development’ conference with so many colleagues within and outside of GLT. Looking forward to a day full of inspiration and insight, focused on how to embed ‘belonging’ into our schools.

We are sending our kids to school to memorize facts that AI can retrieve in 0.3 seconds. We're grading them on essays that AI writes better than their teachers. We're preparing them for jobs that won't exist by the time they graduate. The entire education system is training humans to compete with machines at what machines do best. That's not education. That's sabotage. The schools that survive will teach thinking, not memorizing. Creating, not repeating. Discerning, not obeying. Every other school is a museum that doesn't know it yet.

What do Michaela, Mercia, Mossbourne, King Solomon Academy and West London Free School have in common? They all achieve excellent outcomes? Yup. But also, they're all startup schools. I think it's harder to turn a school around than to start one up, and we got in a long conversation (argument?) with Nick about whether or not startups can be a model for other schools, and how it somewhat frustrates me when we emphasise the startups, and don't look for models of best practice in turnarounds. What do you think? Tune in and share!