Forget School

Why young people are succeeding on their own terms and what schools can do to avoid being left behind

Martin Illingworth

• Publisher: Independent Thinking Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781781353554
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

Written by Martin Illingworth, Forget School: Why young people are succeeding on their own terms and what schools can do to avoid being left behind is a wide-reaching, engaging enquiry into the things that young people actually need from their education.

Schools are at a crossroads: either they respond to the real world of change, challenges and possibilities that face young people, or they become irrelevant.

Young people need to network effectively, manage their finances responsibly, and be digitally proficient and alert to the world around them. If schools do not adapt their provision to nurture these capabilities, then today's youth will increasingly turn to alternative sources to seek out the education they need.

Drawing on the experiences of young self-employed adults, Martin Illingworth's Forget School shares key insights into the ways in which education can be recalibrated to better support young people. In doing so he provides practical suggestions around how schooling culture, curriculum design and pedagogical approaches can be reconfigured in readiness for the emerging shifts and trends in 21st century life and employment.

Martin sheds light on how young people perceive school's current provision, and offers greater insight into what they think needs to change if education is to work for generations to come. He also explores the importance of digital proficiency in the 21st century and how young people, as digital natives, both acquire it and leverage its benefits independently of school instruction.

Essential reading for anyone working in education.

9

Chapter 1

CONFIDENCE

‘In my business, in my line of work, you are always trying to stand out. I think I spent a lot of my time at school trying to blend in.’

A theme that came up time and again in my interviews was that of confidence: the overriding importance of having it and the debilitating effects of lacking it. I have placed it as the first of the themed chapters because it was highlighted by my interviewees as being very important, and the main thing that their schooling had not provided them with. The criticism was usually not about the way that the teachers were with them as pupils. Rather, it was about not having learnt about how to be comfortable in new and challenging situations. This was perhaps the life skill that most felt that they had to learn for themselves after they left school. This is, I think, a real failing of the current school system. We need to look at the skill of being confident and work out how to teach it explicitly. Confidence and self-belief are surely foundational building blocks for success and achievement. We can all recognise the child who sits quietly in the corner during lessons, delivering written work well above curricular expectations but never speaking. What is our responsibility there?

‘At school there was always this definiteness about knowledge that turns out to just not be true. Everything always seemed so important and I felt so small … unimportant in comparison.’ 10

Most of the young agree that you don’t get opportunities to learn about and develop confidence in school. School is where they learnt things that don’t seem to have a lot to do with their lives. Furthermore, it was not really made clear what school had to do with the real world around them. I wonder if we pay enough attention to telling the pupils in our classrooms what the value of them being there might be. What are the skills, knowledge or new perspectives that are being gained in today’s lesson and what are the applications of that learning in the real world outside the school gates? Can you answer these questions about your own classroom? If you can, do you spend time making sure that your pupils know the answers too? In listening to them talk about this subject, it seems that the young feel that they came out of school with a lot to learn about what’s really going on. The perception is that this lack of ‘real’ knowledge can seriously knock your confidence when it turns out that you don’t really know anything.

How the young perceive their value and their ability to join in successfully with the world around them are significant factors in how their life chances will develop. Being confident means having the strength and courage to make healthy choices, to accept risks and be able to manage setbacks. More and more young people are choosing or having to go out into the world of work on their own. They are entrepreneurial, open for business. As self-employment continues to become a larger and larger part of the job market, young people increasingly have to learn that they have agency and that they can work autonomously. This mindset will come from their own confidence in their abilities. However, it is also reliant on an adult world that sends them positive messages about who and what they are. For instance, the reaction from some quarters about including LGBT topics as part of sex and relationships education is problematic. If we think that children shouldn’t learn about homosexuality, for instance, are we saying that it’s not okay to be gay? Surely it would be better to let our young people know that non-heterosexuality is not really a thing of any great remark: it’s ‘normal’. That 11attitude would move us further away from the abhorrence of homophobic and transphobic bullying. Young people need to feel confident in themselves, and how their identities will be met, in order to present themselves and their ideas clearly and persuasively.

Stepping out into the adult world, whether that is the world of work or university, is a scary step. Presenting yourself and your ideas, and believing that you will be taken seriously, is also a challenge that will have to be faced by all those who want to make it on their own. Whether you are turning up as a young ‘apprentice face’ in a large company or setting yourself up as a freelancer in an established field of work, you need to believe that you are going to be able to do it.

The young also need to feel comfortable with the ways in which they are making contact and pursuing opportunities. The mediums through which our young communicate are changing rapidly. Communication still encompasses physical meetings, but more and more often the setting for business is online. Young people need to be able to present themselves effectively across a whole range of platforms. This will also mean learning how to make the best use of these different environments.

‘If you are going to be heard, you have to speak.’

I think we can all agree that the way in which the young see jobs and making a living has changed since their parents’ generation. The whole idea of work has moved away from single occupation careers – just a means to pay the bills – to a far healthier view of your working life as a way in which you are able to express yourself.

The young have a better starting point than their elders did, with all the access that they have to the wider world. Their mothers and fathers might well say to them – as my interviewees reported that their parents had – that when they were at 12school you were sold the idea that when you left you decided what you wanted to be, then a careers officer would deem whether that was a possibility. The idea that society sold you was that you would be doing that job until you retired. You need to get a stable job and stick at it! Are you, as a teacher, still peddling this idea?

This next generation does not see this path extending in front of them. If you go to school now, you should expect to take on a number of jobs and you will need to adapt and change constantly throughout your working life. Some of the jobs you might do have yet to be invented. Some that already exist will change beyond all recognition because of technology and society’s demands. Some of the jobs and professions that our children might aspire to will be gone by the time they leave school. This poses a real need for schools to acknowledge the shifting nature of the job market and prepare children appropriately. Are you and your colleagues well-versed in these shifts? Are the changes in the skills that we require of our workers reflected in the curriculum design that you offer? How does your numeracy provision take into account the way in which the world is changing?

‘University was a doss … it wasn’t proactive enough and it was beginning to have an impact on my mental health. I just couldn’t see the point … so I quit.’

Schools generally still offer the idea of lifelong employment in a single career as a viable possibility and, indeed, the norm. The importance of job security and knowing who you are going to be seems to give schools authority to speak on behalf of the adult world, but that is no longer the case. ‘What are you going to become?’ used to be a valid question that might shape a useful schooling for you. The idea of building a ‘stable identity’, which was always a building block of past educational offerings, is not going to be suitable in 13the future. The advice about lifelong careers traditionally delivered by a careers officer is defunct. Today’s young people are going to have to reinvent themselves many times over. This is going to take huge courage and adaptability alongside emotional strength. Well-being is going to be constantly challenged. Some people will get left behind if they follow the old model of sticking to one job or career for a lifetime. You just can’t rely on that job always being there. You are going to need a range of skills and a willingness to adapt if you are going to keep your options open wide enough.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) has estimated that over the coming twenty years or so, ‘14 percent of jobs are at high risk of being fully automated, while another 32 percent at risk of significant change’.1 This will require some people to retrain entirely and some to develop their skills as their job changes. This will require self-confidence and the knowledge that you are able to meet the challenge of learning, unlearning and relearning. This is an unfamiliar process in our schools.

As I mentioned, most of the young people who I interviewed had moved from salaried roles (that might once have supposed to be ‘for life’) to using any paid employment as a means of funding what they really want to do. Making use of a contracted job (or several) whilst you get your freelance work up and running is also an increasingly frequent model.

Look at the rise of the ‘slashie’ phenomenon in Britain. A slashie is someone who works more than one job at a time. Young workers in particular are embracing the idea of holding multiple roles. This was initially born of necessity for those who needed to work more than one job to make ends meet, but the young have put a more positive spin on this situation. Diversifying your work and career choices is seen as a way of making money to support your interests and also giving 14yourself the chance to hit ‘lucky’ in more than one area. Anyway, why should you confine your working life to one of your interests when you may have a number that you’d like to pursue? Employers are offering shorter and shorter contracts, and that’s if they offer a contract at all, which has also forced the young into thinking about their plan B – and building a backup plan into their perceptions of working life.

‘The money’s decent but you never know when the work will dry up, so I can’t commit full-time.’

Another recurrent theme surrounding confidence was conveyed by the interviewees who told me, ‘I can do better than that.’ Young people say that they are not afraid of hard work and are prepared to put in a good deal of time and energy. This has driven many of my interviewees to seek out ways of starting up business ventures for themselves.

‘I mean c’mon … they were making these designs that were so poor … so I added in my ideas and they liked them and then they just took them! I wasn’t getting any credit and I wasn’t getting any of the profit from the design work … like, how long are you going to put up with that … it’s like stealing. It’s part of the reason I left really. I knew I could do it better and hopefully get rewarded for it … putting the profits in my pocket instead of theirs.’

Why work for someone else and pour your efforts into their pockets, particularly when you feel that they are not putting in the same level of effort, skill and creativity? The key here is confidence. Do you have the confidence to try to break out on your own? You have to believe that you can find a way to get up and running, get the help you need and just go for it.

15It’s called agency – believing that you are in control, believing that there is another way. The fact that the model of a job for life has been eroded has had at least one positive impact, in that the young are more able to commit to an endeavour that they are not certain will succeed. They are more likely to give something a go in the knowledge that you can always do something else if it all goes wrong. When I listen to teachers talking to children about their futures, more often than not the discussion is about becoming an employee. It ...

Table of contents

• Praise
• Title Page
• Dedication
• Epigraph
• Preface: introductory remarks
• Contents
• Voices: an explanation
• Chapter 1: Confidence
• Chapter 2: Digital proficiency
• Chapter 3: Connections
• Chapter 4: Money management
• Chapter 5: Happiness and well-being
• Chapter 6: Relationships
• Chapter 7: Developing talents
• Chapter 8: Making decisions and being creative
• Chapter 9: Ethics
• Chapter 10: ‘Qualifications’
• Chapter 11: Discrimination
• Chapter 12: What do children need to know in fifteen years’ time?
• Chapter 13: What can schools do right now to avoid being left behind?
• Chapter 14: ‘Final decisions are made in silent rooms’
• An afterthought
• References and reading list
• Index
• Copyright