It is perhaps understandable that the findings suggest students place school at the core of their learning and that their teachers are instrumental in ensuring their learning paths are kept true. In a school of high academic standards where examination success is celebrated, it also unsurprising that an important function of learning should be seen as preparing students to be in a position to perform well in exams. This is after all part of the business of school. For the majority of our students, the next phase of their lives involves tertiary education and they need high standards of academic achievement in order to access that provision. But do they also need other skills, competencies and literacies?
An increasingly prevalent view is that young people in the 21st century need to bring to their learning a flexible skill set and outlook to take up their place in the adult world. These skills include creativity, global awareness, critical thinking, media and information literacies, adaptability, flexibility and distributed collaboration (Jacobs 2010, Lemke et al 2003, Partnership for 21st Century Skills 2009). These weren't manifest in the evidence from this study, learning appearing to be largely an individual rather than collaborative activity, with a tendency towards dependence rather than independence, inflexibility rather than flexibility. However you have only to talk with our students and view their school experience in the round to find that the majority are articulate, analytical, creative, considerate and aspirational individuals with school being about much, much more than examinations. But this is an impressionistic view and generalises across our student body as a whole. We are charged neither with assessing these skills, nor with reporting them to external bodies and therefore don't have mechanisms in place through which they are recorded. The question is do we need to?