The One Big Thing

Thank you all for coming. This has been four years in planning to get everyone here, so this is not an overnight thing, although it has felt like it this morning.

I came up with the idea of the one big thing because, at one of our previous meetings, it had been mentioned on a few occasions: what would you say if you had the Education Minister in the lift?What would you talk about? What is the 'one big thing' that’s important? I hope you've all come with your ideas of what you think is the 'one big thing' -they’re all on the wall here. Some of them are grouped because some people don’t have one big thing; they have multiple big things! *laughter*

Mine was the ‘Need to Talk’. The reason we got everyone together in the first place was because Louise (AQA) and Liz Bull from OCR, had never met! They didn’t know each other. In one of my previous incarnations, I worked at QCA and QCDA, Ofqual, and all those things where we used to get the subject officers from awarding bodies together and talk about the curriculum and what was going to happen with qualifications. I was quite surprised that two of the major qualification leads didn’t know each other, so I thought, ‘Let’s go.’ I spoke to Steve (CLEAPSS Director), and he agreed that we should get everyone in the room, and here we are three or four years later!

We need to talk, right? We need to talk because if we don’t, then we’re all in our silos. We know what schools are like. I was a head of faculty. I had the original National Curriculum. I had design and technology, food, textiles, arts, business studies and IT. All of that was in my faculty. Yet when I sent a child to the art room for a paintbrush, they’d be sent back with a flea in their ear, having been told they couldn’t have a paintbrush because that’s an art paintbrush and I couldn’t use it in D&T. I never found out what the difference was! But anyway, we need to talk, because otherwise we’re going to be in our silos, okay?

It can be very frustrating. We need to think about the future of the pupils, ourselves, our own wellbeing and our own morale, all those sorts of things. But the most important thing, I think, is this area here, which is from 20-odd years ago, for any of you who are old enough to remember; Shift Happens. I worked with the bloke who did this in the States, and we did the British version of it. 20-odd years ago he had this statement that was important 20 years ago and still is: ‘We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t exist yet.’

It was important 20 years ago but I think it’s even more important today, and I think design and technology, art and design, the areas like this the practical creative areas, whatever you want to call them, are where we can make the biggest inroads into developing pupils who can go out into this world that is a different place from the one we grew up in.