Insight Magazine Issue 05, Dukes Education

No.5

Dukes is a family of schools, teachers, learners, and parents connected by our pursuit of an extraordinary life for every member of our community.

We believe that education is a journey to be enjoyed and shared at every stage of life. Insight is testament to this ongoing commitment to learning: a termly publication of articles written by some of the extraordinary educationalists in our schools and organisations. dukeseducation.com

No.5

ACADEMIC AND CREATIVE SUBJECTS AT GCSE AND A-LEVEL, YEARS 9-13 ACADEMIC AND CREATIVE SUBJECTS AT GCSE AND A-LEVEL, YEARS 9-13

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mail@hampsteadfinearts.com

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020 7586 0312

mail@hampsteadfinearts.com

www.hampsteadfinearts.com

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Contents Donatello to Degas: drawing upon the greats in 6 a virtual art studio Candida Cave, Principal of Hampstead Fine Arts College Drawing from life through the zoom lens.

What vital lessons must we learn from the Roman Empire and the Han Dynasty of the second century?

William Russell, Lord Mayor of the City of London and Advisory Board Member for Dukes Education, calls upon every sector to go green in the post-Covid rebuild.

Inclusion in the independent sector — tolerance is not enough Leighton Bright, SENCO & Head of the Lower School, Rochester Independent College Driving inclusive practices at the early stages of life.

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Overcoming mathematical anxiety: a lockdown legacy?

Alison Bissell, Head of Oxbridge Applications A practical guide for parents facing old fears…

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Building back better: The City’s role in a green-led economic recovery William Russell, Lord Mayor of the City of London and Dukes Advisory Board Member The case for green decision-making post Covid.

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How Dukes Education is approaching Environmental, Social, and Governance ("ESG") planning Tim Fish, Managing Director, Dukes Education Rolling out a data-driven strategy to meet ESG goals.

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Careers: preparing for a future we cannot foresee 38 Joss Williams, Head of Earlscliffe Careers counselling after the Fourth Industrial Revolution.

SQE: a new route to qualifying as a solicitor Rachel Davis, Head of The Lawyer Portal Key changes for students who want to go into Law.

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Grade inflation? A predictable accusation Tom Arrand, Head of Cardiff Sixth Form College A defence against armchair commentators.

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Approaches to work/life balance 55 Three perspectives Dr Holly Goodwin, Anthea Humphreys, and Hanna Claydon.

Why young people should study poetry 69 Fran Johnstone, Teacher of English at St Andrew’s College Why the best words in the best order will always matter.

The last word Wit and wisdom from some of the world’s great thinkers.

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Insight No.5

Tim Fish Editor’s letter

I Tim Fish, editor of Insight, is Managing Director for Dukes Education’s colleges, and founded Earlscliffe, a co-ed, international boarding school for students aged 15-19, in Folkestone, Kent.

Bringing Insight to a coffee table near you…

n the 1960s, James Lovelock (1919-), then a NASA scientist, formulated the controversial Gaia hypothesis or theory (named after the Greek Goddess of the Earth).

His theory posited that living and non-living elements of a planet produce self-regulation and that this is the reason for the continued success of life on earth. Lovelock, in simple terms, stated that this homeostatic balance is achieved through perpetual and mutual biotic/abiotic feedback. In Insight N° 5 you will find strong evidence of practical feedback on environmental and social issues given from within our community, notably from William Russell, Lord Mayor of the City of London (co-founder of Knightsbridge School and Dukes Advisory Board member). He outlines the response to climate change not only from the leading financial institutions, but the wider global business community as well. This focus is emphasised in the plans we are making at Dukes for the implementation of ESG (Environmental, Social

and Governance) policy.

Initially, this will be rolled out in our colleges, with close involvement from our student body, whose future careers and daily lives will all point to a level of environmental and social engagement that will far transcend ‘awareness’.

If Lovelock’s approach may be regarded as holistic, so might this edition of Insight, given the triptych of contributions exhibited on well-being and work/life balance sitting alongside the ‘green agenda’. With thoughtprovoking, informative articles on law school testing; future-proof careers counselling; tips for teaching at home; poetry reading and writing; academic assessment; art workshops, and, not least, story-telling, I’m sure you’ll agree that, much like its Chanel namesake, Insight N° 5 offers its sophisticated readership a similar exhortation to that uttered by the fashion house’s eponymous founder: ‘The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.’

Tim Fish Editor 5

Donatello to Degas: drawing upon the greats in a virtual art studio Forced to get creative due to Covid, Hampstead Fine Arts College has started to hold life drawing and art history lectures online for international and British students and agents. Principal, Candida Cave, explores how these events demonstrate the college’s three approaches to teaching art, and how they offer a delightful taster of life as a student at the college.

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hen the first Covid lockdown struck in March 2020, we were in uncharted territory. While Hampstead Fine Arts moved to a full online timetable, we also took the decision to extend teaching outside our student body and deliver workshops online for future international and British students. Dukes representative Natalia Volchugova and I had worked together in Riga the previous year, holding a life drawing workshop for Latvian students. It was a wonderfully positive experience in every way. Our Latvian hosts, Ego Perfectus, were welcoming, organised, and professional.

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The workshop was held in a centrally located hotel where the space was light and atmospheric. The students who attended, aged between 14 and 20, were a pleasure to teach: engaged, hardworking, talented, and highly productive.

The following summer, we held a similar workshop in our Life Drawing Studio at college, this time for British and international agents. We welcomed them into our exceptional studios and gave them a taste of what it was like to be a student with us. I delivered a short lecture which was followed by a life drawing class given by our very experienced life drawing tutor, Suzanne Holtom.

‘ The students who attended, aged between 14 and 20, were a pleasure to teach: engaged, hardworking, talented, and highly productive.’

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Suzanne and I have worked together for many years, not only at the college but also on study trips in England and abroad. We have taken groups of students to museums and galleries in Florence, Venice, Berlin, Vienna, and Madrid, where I would give a short talk in front of specific art works, which the students were encouraged to draw. Suzanne would advise and discuss the drawings in situ. We have always found this a very successful and holistic way of teaching both the intellectual and practical aspects of art.

As we have been unable to travel for more than a year, these online workshops have provided a similar education for both our own students and the wider public.

Suzanne is a practising artist who studied at Cardiff and The Slade School of Fine Art and was included in The Jerwood Painting prize in 2003. Much of her work has been inspired by seventeenth‘Thank you so much for century artists including sending in this wonderful Rubens, Velasquez, and drawing, Henry. You have Artemisia Gentileschi. She achieved both a dynamic sense exhibits regularly in London, of form and wonderful rhythms in the muscular contours of your Glasgow, and Manchester.

At Hampstead Fine drawing. You have very quickly Arts, students are taught established the structure and proportion of the upper body and by practising artists in all creative subjects: Fine Art, this has given a strong basis on Graphics, Photography, which you have animated your lines. The theme was ‘The Figure Fashion, as well as Drama, in Action’ and you have certainly Music, and Filmmaking. We know students greatly benefit captured this. You have also by working with artists who started to define light and dark areas to create three-dimensional are themselves involved in their own practice. It also form and, with more time, you emphasises our belief that would be able to create further academia and creativity contrasts. You have made a go hand in hand and are very impressive drawing in a things that should continue very limited time Henry — well throughout one’s life. done!’. Suzanne Holtom A two-hour drawing class with a life model was something none of these ‘students’ had previously attempted, and it was an unexpected success.

The agents really enjoyed the workshop and consequently referred quite a number of students to study here. They seemed delighted to have the opportunity of experiencing at first-hand what the college offers, which enabled them to recommend the college to their clients with confidence.

With virtual education becoming the norm, in March 2020 we organised a series of workshops comprising a themed art historical lecture, followed by a drawing demonstration for students to emulate. The drawings were then discussed as part of the workshop process, and students were encouraged to then email their sketches to the college to receive personal feedback:

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‘ It also emphasises our belief that academia and creativity go hand in hand and are things that should continue throughout the whole of one’s life.’

In teaching art, we firmly believe in three parallel approaches: firstly, a grasp of techniques; secondly, the development of individual ideas; and, finally, an understanding of art historical contexts. Ever since the foundation of the college in 1978, life drawing has been a key feature in our art teaching. Suzanne runs evening classes every week throughout the academic year.

These are additional to A-level tuition and, although they are

voluntary, she has a constant waiting list. Universities, art schools, and exam moderators frequently compliment us on the exceptional calibre of our students’ drawings.

The lockdown workshops began with the subject of Self-Portrait, one we felt was eminently suitable for the time. In it, we looked at the way artists perceived themselves in drawings from the 15th century to the present day and discussed self-portrait drawings by

Dürer, Raphael, Giacometti, Kollwitz, and Hockney, amongst others. An emphasis was placed on the different approaches taken by artists to give students the choice of drawing themselves either objectively or emotionally. Suzanne demonstrated the various techniques of how this could be done, using pencil, charcoal, coloured crayons, or pastels.

The subject of the next workshop was Still Life 9

Drawing, an opportunity to show how artists elevate quotidian objects into spectacular works of art.

We encouraged students to experiment with fruit, flowers, bottles, bowls etc and demonstrated how they had been used by artists as diverse as Cezanne, Morandi, Warhol, and Cragg.

We delivered these early workshops independently, zoomed from various parts of the country, co-ordinated

by Natalia in the Life Drawing Studio at Fine Arts. Some of the drawings produced were stunning and students were amazed at what they could create in such a short time.

When we came to our most recent workshop, The Figure In Action, Drawing from Sculpture, we had the luxury of the three of us filming together at Hampstead Fine Arts. The Graeco/Roman sculpture The Laocoön was our subject, one of twenty or so casts we have in our studios.

The workshop began with a lecture on works

by Donatello, Rodin, Degas, and Boccioni, followed by Suzanne demonstrating how to tackle drawing a sculpture.

We had an overwhelming response to the workshop.

By popular request, our next workshop will focus on drawing and painting botanical and natural forms. n Candida Cave is Principal of Hampstead Fine Arts College, widely recognised as the leading pre-university arts and humanities school in the UK.

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Feedback from Online Drawing Classes at Hampstead Fine Arts College ‘ Henry told me he needed to send a copy of his charcoal from today’s session. He wanted me to let you know he really enjoyed today’s lesson.’ ‘ Thank you for an extraordinary lecture, it was very interesting!

You’ve mentioned that we can send our work (“Laocoön and his Sons”) from the lecture and maybe get a little review!’ ‘ That was wonderful — thanks so much for the invitation. I would love to join the next one.’ ‘ I’ve never drawn anything in my life before, so to have Suzanne provide that advice and find a real figure on the page in front of me was a real marvel.’ ‘ Thanks so much for an amazing art class. Must get hold of some art supplies for the next one!’ ‘ Thank you, Candida Cave and Suzanne Holtom, of Hampstead Fine Arts College and Dukes Education for an inspiring art lesson on Laocoön’s torso. It was great to hear more about the wonderful sculptures of Donatello, Degas, and Boccioni.

This was our very own Lucy’s from the session.’

Diana Sediqi, Laocoön, charcoal; created during The Figure in Action online drawing class at Hampstead Fine Arts.

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Inclusion in the independent sector — tolerance is not enough Through the lens of his own, traditional school experience, and the alternative world he occupies now at Rochester Independent College, Leighton Bright, Special Educational Needs Coordinator (SENCO), and Head of the Lower School, considers ways the independent education sector can drive inclusion for young people in their crucial early stages of life.

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n 1995, I joined an allboys grammar school in Kent as a 13 year-old. As with most momentous occasions in life, I can still remember it — standing in the playground amongst many other nervous children. Much like Harry and Ron waiting to be sorted outside the Great Hall at Hogwarts, we had no idea what to expect. We were ushered into the School Hall, a dark, 1950s building, lined with oil paintings of previous Headmasters (a term I use very deliberately) and handed a sheet of music with the words to the traditional school song “Consule Cunctis” (“Take

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thought for others”). I can still recite the song today and remember the rugby-driven metaphorical subtext and celebration of ‘800 fellows assembled in hall!’

At this point, I think it is important to emphasise that this is not a criticism of this institution. I loved school; I loved the culture of the school; I loved rugby. I had some brilliant teachers who inspired me and ultimately encouraged me to pursue a teaching career. I still look back on my time at school with dewy-eyed nostalgia and sentimentality. Over the years, however, particularly

‘ Much like Harry and Ron waiting to be sorted outside the Great Hall at Hogwarts, we had no idea what to expect.’

‘ There is danger here though, that uniform rules invariably become pernickety and start to extend beyond matters of polyester and cotton.’

since having children of my own and starting to teach at Rochester Independent College (RIC), I’ve started to reflect upon the experiences of others at the school and how school life was much easier for me — a white heterosexual boy — than it was for anyone who did not fit into this mould.

In terms of inclusion, the adoption of school uniforms is both an inclusive and exclusive decision.

There is undoubtedly safety in similarity. By looking the same as everybody else as a teenager, you are removing one possible route by which you can be singled-out, criticised, or ridiculed. The uniform could be said to give a sense of belonging and community, a feeling of being one body all working towards a common goal with common ideals. There is danger here though, that uniform rules invariably become pernickety and start to extend beyond matters of polyester and cotton. The colour of socks becomes important, the length of skirts, the top button, the drop of ties, the elasticity of trousers, the height of heels, the colour of scrunchies… More serious than this is the fact that the minutiae of uniform rules invariably lead to more general rules on appearance such as hair styles and colours, the length and colour of fingernails, the application of cosmetics.

Emma Dabiri (IrishNigerian author, academic, and broadcaster) discusses this issue in her book, Don’t Touch my Hair (2019), in which

she highlights the fact that the UK education system has traditionally found afro-textured hair difficult, leading to exclusions and suspensions of students. It is clear that our appearance is inextricably linked to our sense of self. Should any of us be telling young people to repress their personalities or racial heritage? On reflection, is it not complete lunacy that a student can be told that they cannot access their education due to their appearance? Perhaps I am missing something? As a follically-challenged 41 year old man, I look at all hair with an awesome reverence -something I once had that is now a distant memory.

In addition to the potential adverse impact which strict ‘uniform codes’ can have on young people, schools and colleges must also be wary of litigation. Just last year, 18 year-old Ruby Williams successfully argued against her school’s uniform policy, with the backing of the Human Rights and Equality Commission.

At Rochester Independent College, we have always adopted a fairly libertarian approach to clothing and appearance for both students and staff. Our argument has always been that a student’s appearance does not adversely affect their ability to learn and flourish. In fact, the freedom of our students to express themselves invariably means that their educational outcomes are better than they would be in other settings. To be a truly inclusive education environment, we have to 15

accept students for who they are, rather than trying to force a square peg into a round hole. RIC is a college which adapts to its wide and varied intake, rather than trying to force students to adapt to us. During my time in the RIC Lower School, I have witnessed a number of students who feel like a weight has been lifted from their shoulders on joining our less formal environment.

They can finally be themselves and concentrate on the important process of learning — and of learning to love learning. The sheer diversity of our intake means that difference is celebrated rather than repressed.

Back in the 1990s, at my school, the only thing to differentiate between one student and the next was the colour of the house tie and accompanying rugby top. I vividly remember being sent home to shave my sideburns as a 17 year-old, which was both humiliating and infuriating in equal measure. I fully accept, obviously, that my struggles were nothing compared to the alienation and exclusion that members of the Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, Queer and Intersex (LGBTQI+) community within my school would have faced. In my five years in secondary education there was not one student who was openly anything other than male and heterosexual; that is 0% of ‘800 fellows’. The school was led by a Senior Leadership Team of white, heterosexual men, with a range of pictures of white, heterosexual Headmasters 16

on the wall in the hall. Whilst the school did not consciously or deliberately discriminate against or exclude anybody, the culture of the institution was inherently not inclusive or diverse.

It is simply not good enough only to claim to be inclusive. We have a duty to take inclusivity seriously and to make changes to our practices. All schools should pursue active rather than passive inclusion. At RIC, all of our staff and students take part in diversity training delivered by the Assistant Head of the Lower School, Deborah Postgate. I think it is fair to say that we have all learned a great deal from this process, not least the fact that none of us is beyond reproach in this area. We have all been given advice and guidance on the importance of degendering our classrooms in terms of the language we use and the texts we teach. We have all learned to understand that every individual has their own story, their own history. If schools do not listen to their students and empathise with compassion and understanding, then we are neither fulfilling our professional obligations as teachers nor are we being decent human beings.

A few years ago, I was asked by a parent to explain our LGBTQI+ policy. I replied that ultimately our values were based upon tolerance and acceptance, which at the time felt like a reasonable response. In hindsight, this just didn’t go far enough.

Tolerance is defined as, ‘the ability or willingness

‘ If schools do not listen to their students and empathise with compassion and understanding, then we are neither fulfilling our professional obligations as teachers nor are we being decent human beings.’

to tolerate the existence of opinions or behaviour that one dislikes or disagrees with.’

Is this all we are aiming for?

Any student who joins us as a member of the LGBTQI+ community has invariably had some additional challenges to those normally encountered by other young people at this stage in their lives. Most, if not all, will have experienced some form of discrimination prior to enrolment with us. LGBTQI+ charity Stonewall has reported that ‘one in five LGBT people have experienced a hate crime due to their sexual orientation within the last 12 months’. If these statistics tell us anything, it is that we must celebrate and promote the LGBTQI+ community rather than simply displaying tolerance. We must all become campaigners and champions for inclusion.

An article about inclusion cannot overlook the area of Special Educational Needs (SEN). It is very important to remember that when parents of a student with SEN come to any Dukes Education school or college looking for a place for their child, it is highly likely that they have already been through a number of battles on behalf of their children. Whether this has been obtaining a diagnosis, engaging appropriate professionals, or trying to account for an unexpected lack of educational progress, SEN parents will have invariably had a tough time.

This is a highly emotional process. To accept that your child may have additional needs is very difficult; to

get others to agree and to formulate a plan can feel close to impossible at times. This is why we must demonstrate understanding, empathy, and compassion in our exchanges with all prospective parents of SEN students.

Regardless of the schools within which we work, we are all dealing with SEN students on a daily basis and must all view ourselves to a certain extent as SEN teachers.

According to the Independent Schools Council (ISC) Census in 2020, 16.3% of students in independent schools had an SEN diagnosis. This compares to a slightly lower figure of 14.9% in the state sector. This means that it is likely that all teachers in all Dukes schools and colleges will be teaching students with SEN every day in almost every lesson.

Don’t forget that there are also many students within our schools who have undiagnosed special educational needs, particularly in our international cohorts, where additional needs may be more difficult to identify.

Many SEN screening tests (the Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing, Gray Oral Reading Test, and Test of Word Reading Efficiency, for example) rely on a good level of written and spoken English, along with some western cultural references. Unless an assessor or SENCO can be sure that the student’s level of English is sufficient, these tests can produce unreliable results, which cannot be used with confidence.

Furthermore, we must bear in mind that, in some 17

countries, young people with SEN can be considered a source of shame for their families, resulting in the nondisclosure of SEN, for fear that these students will not be accepted.

So, what is to be done?

The SEN Code of Practice 2015 states that ‘teachers should set high expectations for every student.’ This has always felt like a good starting point for me in terms of SEN inclusion and is something which is culturally embedded at RIC. As a non-selective, non-uniform school in Kent, we have always attracted a unique range of students, meaning that our teaching staff are used to adapting their teaching methods to cater for a range of additional needs.

We are in the extremely fortunate position of enjoying average class sizes of eight, meaning that we can offer truly personalised learning for each RIC student. Our less formal atmosphere means that our students are more willing to ask for help and raise a hand when they don’t understand. Furthermore, Dyslexia-friendly techniques (such as dividing lessons into manageable chunks; provision of key word lists; writing frames for extended writing; the use of IT) are embedded in the delivery of everyday lessons. Teaching in an SEN-friendly way is simply another definition of good teaching. If every teacher understands (and takes the time to understand) how a student most effectively learns, then a truly inclusive approach has been achieved.

Finally, the celebration and 18

promotion of difference is also vital to the success of integrating and including students from all over the world to RIC. Having students from 31 different nations from across the world at the college is a fantastic opportunity for staff and students alike to learn about new cultures and to understand different perspectives. All staff have a role to play in the inclusion of all students but particularly when it comes to international students.

Housekeeping and catering staff alongside boarding staff and teachers must approach their interactions with international students in a positive and inclusive manner. It can be easy to underestimate the fact that many of our international students are leaving home for the first time and are, in some cases, thousands of miles from their families. Many of our international students are being educated in English for the first time and most are taking on new subjects and topics with brand new terminology and in some cases new technology.

There are some relatively simple strategies and principles which can be adopted to ensure that we provide an inclusive teaching environment for our international students.

First and foremost, give international students a voice — give them the space and time to educate us about their background, to tell us their story. Encourage all students to contribute to lesson discussions, perhaps with some targeted questions

‘ Give international students a voice — give them the space and time to educate us about their background, to tell us their story.’

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which are more accessible in the first instance, while mastery of the language is being established. Introduce group work to lessons with mixed nationality groups who will all be sharing ideas and thoughts without judgement or embarrassment. Start slowly and build up speed; don’t overload international students with reams of information in their first week. In addition to this, close liaison with the English as a Foreign Language (EFL) team and discussions between teachers can ensure that we share success stories as a staff body. Finally we must be aware of our own unconscious bias with regards to certain students and nationalities.

Whether we like it or not, each of us is guilty of making certain assumptions about certain parts of the world, even though these may not bear any resemblance to the reality of our international students’ lives.

This article is only really scratching the surface of inclusion and there is much here that I haven’t considered and many areas which could be explored much further.

However, underpinning each area of inclusion discussed above is the fundamental idea that we must really get to know our students and their families. We must all understand the educational and personal journey that each student has taken which has led them to our front door — the struggles but also the triumphs. Only an honest and open discussion, which highlights both the possibilities and limitations 20

of what we can offer, will ensure that placements work, students get to where they want to go, and families feel that their children are in the right place. In every interview and discussion I have had with parents and prospective students, I’ve stressed that not every school suits every student. We cannot try to be all things to all people.

What I can promise every parent and student who walks through the door at RIC is that they will be working with an open-minded and flexible institution, where difference is celebrated. n Leighton Bright is Head of Lower School and SENCO for Rochester Independent College, a creative, non-selective boarding and day college with a rigorous academic culture, for students aged 11 — 18, based in Kent.

‘ Finally we must be aware of our own unconscious bias with regards to certain students and nationalities; whether we like it or not, each of us is guilty of making certain assumptions about certain parts of the world, even though these may not bear any resemblance to the reality of our international students’ lives.’

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Overcoming mathematical anxiety: a lockdown legacy?

Alison Bissell, Head of Oxbridge Applications and mathematician, helps parents face their fears of maths homework head on.

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ver the past year, our children’s education has been drawn into sharp focus. Not least because the classroom was temporarily relocated to the kitchen table. For many families, this experience will have provided a much more intimate insight into the realities of the curriculum — some welcome, some less so. mathematics is perhaps one of the less welcome visitors, with echoes of calculus from the kitchen-classroom zapping us back to our school days. So widespread is our fear of maths in comparison to other school subjects that it warrants its very own category: “mathematical anxiety”.

As our schools re-open their doors, I suspect that the legacy of lockdown homeschooling will be a generation of parents who are far more confident being involved in their child’s learning. With mathematics learning in mind, I share a few tips that will help you to continue supporting your child with their homework.

+ Revise. (Sorry!)

It may be the case that revising a topic independently (or even studying it for the first time) is necessary before you can have a meaningful conversation about it with your child and I’m afraid I don’t have a magic wand on this point. If you do find yourself with your nose in the textbooks, make a particular effort to master terminology as the first priority.

Getting hold of a good mathematical glossary or dictionary will enable you to improve your child’s mathematical vocabulary and reinforce the ideas their teacher has introduced. Also ‘speaking the language’ that your child will recognise, leads me onto my next tip…

Ask your student to be the teacher We all recognise the learning benefits of teaching or explaining a concept to someone else. At Oxbridge Applications, our students are working at an extremely high academic level, typically pushing the boundaries of their A-level curriculum. We find that parents value 23

the role of our academic mentors since they are often one of a small group of people that can use their expertise and experience to give an already-bright student a genuine challenge.

However, I also remind parents of the vital role they place in embedding their child’s learning — even if they don’t feel at home in that academic area.

I hope that my mother doesn’t mind my recalling that in preparing for my Oxford maths interview, I found it helpful to discuss mathematical concepts with her, precisely because the information was new to her.

This forced me to outline my reasoning, highlight my assumptions, and truly scrutinise my understanding of a concept, in order to convince someone who was fresh to it. I would encourage parents to take this approach and empower their children to teach them; this will ground your conversation in a shared foundation of knowledge and allow you to tackle the tricky bits together.

Stay positive Research has shown that when parents empathise with a child who is struggling in mathematics by reminiscing about their shared feelings during their own school days, children’s grades stall. An apparently well-meaning sentiment seems detrimental, reinforcing the idea that maths is difficult and it is natural to feel defeated by it. Perhaps our children require a slightly different approach: one where the challenge of problem solving is acknowledged but they are taught the stamina to tolerate the mental effort. After all, characteristic of this subject in comparison to others is that it lacks the helpful linearity of other disciplines.

I’m sure we can all recognise the reality of grappling with a maths problem in apparent cognitive silence before suddenly something clicks and a solution flows. If anxiety around mathematics is something you and your child have discussed, it may be useful to both note down your thoughts and feelings before getting started — a simple exercise like this has been seen to reduce stress. Reducing anxiety around the activity of mathematics is especially effective in easing the process, since anxiety is thought to drain the working memory, which is of course so vital for good problem solving.

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‘ Perhaps our children require a slightly different approach, one where the challenge of problem solving is acknowledged but they are taught the stamina to tolerate the mental effort.’

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Play with maths Whether it is you or your child who is feeling mathematical anxiety, follow the teacher’s lead and try looking at topics in different ways. mathematical anxiety often stems from the subject’s abstract nature but understanding a concept this way is the final stage in a learning process which could be simplified to three steps. Typically, learners find it easiest to begin with concrete examples that can be touched, seen, and manipulated. Then they can start exploring a topic pictorially, making an initial abstraction from the real world to pictures and colours. Finally, they are ready for a mathematical abstraction and all of the mathematical language and symbols that come along with it. So, if you find yourself stuck at this stage, take the conversation back to playing with dice, counting fruit, or dividing up a pie. From there, you can start drawing shapes or plotting a number line. Before too long, ‘playing’ with the concept in these ways will often lead seamlessly to a more abstract discussion. n Alison Bissell is Head of Oxbridge Applications, the world’s leading consultancy in supporting students with their applications to the universities of Oxford and Cambridge.

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The City’s role in a green-led economic recovery

William Russell, 692nd Lord Mayor of the City of London (2019-21) and member of the Dukes Advisory Board, has put the environmental crisis at the heart of his agenda during his time at The Mansion House. Will we learn from the catastrophic lessons of history? What can every industry do to face the twin threats of Covid and ecological demise with innovation and energy?

This Gresham College lecture was delivered on 1st February, 2021.

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ILLUSTRATIONS BY GARY NEILL

Building back better

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n the second century, both the world superpowers, the Han Dynasty in China and the Roman Empire in Europe, were using new trade routes to sell their goods; trade routes like the Silk Road, which linked Peking and Constantinople. While they were shipping food and textiles, there was another cargo that no one could see. Diseases, to which the separate hemispheres had acclimatised, were now being shared with those who had no resistance to them.

As the scholars of both civilisations wrote at length about their new respective diseases, the world’s peat bogs, tree rings, and ice shelves were documenting another shift. Namely, global temperatures were dropping. The fields of wheat and rice, now mostly empty of farmers who were too ill to work, were experiencing lower rainfall and harsher winds.

Both the East and West were adapting to shifts in the climate. But to cope with this and deal with new diseases was something neither society had faced. How would they react?

Ultimately, they were unable to realise the massive risk that these two issues would have on their worlds. They were unable to help their civilisations and these two crises in combination created the setting for their demise. The Roman Empire fell and a series of civil wars plagued China for the next 60 years. Without the right action, global society was severely scarred for over a century.

Present day Now, let us fast forward around 1,800 years.

It is 2021 and the world is in the grip of a deadly disease. And, with record-high temperatures being set every year, we are experiencing another change in the climate, with all the science pointing to this being a man-made shift. It is difficult to ignore the similarities of our circumstances that we share with our ancient forebears.

Yet things could not be more different.

Why? It largely boils down to one thing: risk. Today, we know the risk of these two global issues. We know the risk in responding to them in the wrong way. Because calculating these huge risks is an everyday occurrence, it is a part of every industry around the world.

Indeed, it was our impressive insurance sector, started in the City of London after

28

the great fire of 1666 ravaged many homes and businesses, that brought risk into the heart of financial decision making. Now, whenever you apply for a loan, get a bank account or take out an insurance policy, your risk is calculated.

The risks of both these crises have also been realised. With Covid-19, much work has been rigorously — and rightly — focused on maintaining a sense of normality, which means staying home to protect the NHS and save lives, while supporting sectors that will drive the recovery.

With climate change, almost all global work is focused on biodiversity and many of the priorities highlighted in the UN Climate Conference, COP26, which will now take place this November. Our world leaders will come together to discuss how they would support their societies to achieve significant carbon reductions,, including investing in new technologies and shifting to new greener industries, so that, by 2050, we will have managed to limit the rise of global temperature by two degrees centigrade.

Building back better Between then and now is the best part of three decades. We will have to respond to the economic fallout from the pandemic and increasing global temperatures show us that the status quo cannot continue to be supported.

Covid-19 has affected our lives more than anything else in modern memory, with the recent levels of UK fatalities almost three times greater than those sustained during the Blitz. It is with full awareness of this that I, nevertheless, tell you that climate change is a much greater and long-term threat to life — to our whole world — than Covid-19. Every person, every business, and every country has a role to play in overcoming this threat.

So, we must ask ourselves: what do we do next?

I have witnessed an incredible response from business leaders. As we are momentarily paused on our journey down the 'green brick road' to COP26, there is a desire from many industries to use this opportunity to ‘build back better’ and to ‘build back fairer’.

Governments and the private sector are looking to find new green and sustainable

solutions to many of the economic problems we now face so that we not only repair and grow from the Covid crisis, but build an infrastructure that can support the changes we want to see by 2050 and protect us against future risks.

In this article, I will focus on why the financial and professional services sector is at the heart of these decisions and what the City of London — and the UK — is doing to ensure any recovery is green and sustainable.

‘ In short, money talks, and what it’s saying is: “Go green or go home”.’

Green financial markets When we think of industries that will make the biggest sustainable difference, we normally think of the automotive or energy sectors. Very rarely do we think of the financial and professional services, like banking and accounting. However, it is this sector that will be the lynchpin for all other sectors — indeed, the whole world — to turn green.

Again, it all comes down to risk. It is a truism to say there is no bigger risk to Earth than climate change but let that phrase sink in for a moment — what does it mean? It means that, as soon as we take in to account the risk of climate change, then we must rethink how we value goods, services, companies and entire industries. Can we continue to value and fund practices and companies that destroy the planet, pollute waters, and endanger our vital ecosystem?

Of course, we cannot. Climate change — and biodiversity loss — must be at the heart of every financial decision we make.

So, the businesses that put environmental resilience at their core will be highly valued and desirable. Those industries we think of as game-changers in sustainability have that reputation partly because of how the financial market values them. The financial market — the regulators, banks, stock exchanges — are making green solutions a high priority.

Companies that employ these solutions are more likely to get loans, attract more investment on the stock exchange, and be taken up by the consumer.

What was once a risk is now the business opportunity of the century, creating thousands of jobs and profits. In short, money talks, and what it’s saying is: “Go green or go home”.

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Green finance in the UK Already the UK has made great strides in supporting this green development. Indeed, we are one of the only countries to have made a law to reduce our net carbon emissions by 100% by 2050. Yet this goal can only be achieved if every single sector in our economy turns green.

I am very proud that the UK has one of the world’s leading financial and professional services sectors. This sector has strong historical foundations and the creativity to innovate and adapt our offer continually.

Green finance has been a core part of our offer for many years, such as in the introduction of the world’s first Green Bank in 2012, the introduction of a new Green Infrastructure Bank, and the Bank of England announcing its ‘stress testing’ of our financial system, which will test the resilience of our largest banks, insurers, and others to different possible climate pathways. This work by the financial sector took centre stage in the UK Government’s Green Finance Strategy, which outlined two distinct ways for the UK to build on its leadership in this important field.

30

Greening finance and financing green These are two distinct and interrelated processes. ‘Greening finance’ is the taxonomy and regulation of climate-related finance.

‘Financing green’ describes mobilising capital into environmentally conscious projects and companies.

‘ One thing I have learned in my real and now virtual travels around the world is this: the money is there; now all we need are the projects.’

Greening finance It is worth stating how the UK is ensuring that all financial decisions are rigorously focused on green outcomes. The UK was one of the first countries to set a deadline for all major companies to disclose comprehensive information on their impact on climate change by ensuring the recommendations from the Task Force on Climate-related Financial Disclosures — commonly known as TCFD — are adopted as standard practice by 2025. We are working with banks and regulators to understand the potential for — or, indeed, the barriers to — the growth of green finance markets. The London Stock Exchange regularly provides guidance to its listed companies on how they can meet environmental standards And we are using our position as a longstanding and influential financial market to further the take-up of green finance internationally.

Financing green Financing green, then, is how we use this sustainable foundation to support the development — and funding — of clean growth products and services. I am not exaggerating when I say that the growth of this market is multiplying at an unprecedented rate. In 2019, funds that were focused on achieving ‘Environmental, Sustainable, and Governance’ goals pulled in twenty-one billion dollars in new money. Between April and June last year, these funds received seventy-one billion dollars of new money.

They are now worth over one trillion dollars.

To give that number some perspective, the entire US federal budget for this year stands at just under five trillion dollars.

To ‘finance green’ properly, we need to ensure that worthy UK products and services can access these funds and, internationally, ensure investment goes towards projects 31

that support clean growth in other countries.

Recently the Prime Minister issued his tenpoint plan to ensure clean growth across the UK. Investment in industries like hydrogen and nuclear power, electric vehicles and sustainable homes will help the whole country ‘build back better’ and the whole UK financial sector — will support this clean growth, ensuring these projects get the sustainable funding they need.

One thing I have learned in my real and now virtual travels around the world is this: the money is there; now all we need are the projects.

Green Finance Institute and Green Horizons Summit I am very proud of the City of London Corporation’s leadership in this field, a leadership we are cementing with our Climate Action Strategy, which outlines how we will achieve net-zero carbon emissions from our own operations in five years’ time, backed with £68 million to support a net-zero Square Mile by 2040.

We have also worked very closely with the UK Government and, through this teamwork, we created the Green Finance Institute in 2018, which pulls together government, research, and financial expertise and identifies practical and commercial means to reallocate capital for a new, sustainable economy.

There really is no equivalent in the world to the Green Finance Institute and, alongside the World Economic Forum, it set up the Green Horizon Summit, which I co-hosted at the Mansion House last November 2020 with Mark Carney. It was a time of action, with major announcements about how the financial sector will help create a climateresilient economy by 2050, including the UK government’s introduction of a new, green taxonomy, to help firms and investors understand the impact of their decisions on the environment and how the Treasury would issue the Government’s first Sovereign Green Bond this year. It was cheering to see such activity and so many countries aiming towards the aspirations of COP26.

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‘I believe we all have it within ourselves to be part of the solution and create a sustainable foundation for our society.’

Conclusion We’re all aware of the risks of inaction.

It is positive to see finance beginning to focus on a climate-resilient future which supports a sustainable economy. But we’re not there yet.

We have yet to reach a future in which every financial decision takes climate change and other sustainable factors into account. This need applies to every single industry — from energy and travel sectors, to finance, and even into our education sector. We need a future where everyone is focusing on building back better. A future in which green finance is simply called Finance.

So, what’s next?

I believe there are three things we need to focus on.

1 2 3

First: What are the global trends and big ideas that financial sectors must consider when shifting to a climate-resilient future on their journey to COP26?

Second: Knowing those ideas, how do we ensure that action is taken to mobilise capital to support this and the UK’s leadership?

And finally, third: What does all this mean for business? How does adhering to these climate responsibilities transform into commercial opportunities?

Our window to act is finite and closing quickly, which is why I am calling for action: action now and action through COP26 later this year. Because, as everyone knows: if you haven’t made a decision to go climate neutral

by COP26 — you’re not part of the solution, you’re part of the problem. I believe we all have it within ourselves to be part of the solution and create a sustainable foundation for our society. By embracing this opportunity ahead of us, we can do the one thing which will help us for centuries to come: to build back better. n

William Russell is the 692nd Lord Mayor of the City of London, co-founder of Knightsbridge School (part of the Dukes family of schools) and a member of the Advisory Board for Dukes Education.

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How Dukes Education is approaching Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) planning.

Tim Fish, Managing Director at Dukes Education, describes how Dukes Education is setting out a roadmap in the academic year 2020-2021, to improve our Environmental, Social, and Governance (ESG) planning across our family of schools and education services.

ILLUSTRATIONS BY GARY NEILL

E

SG offers a framework which enables growth and progress for all our stakeholders through the proactive management of Environmental, Social and Governance factors across all settings, from kindergarten to art school.

The idea that an organisation will be more successful and profitable if it recognises the broader needs of society is not new, but with changing dynamics in how we all lead our lives, it is becoming a priority in any business route-map for the 21st century and significantly, in a post-Covid world.

Former Unilever boss, Paul Polman, argues that CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility) alone is no longer sufficient in a new era of purpose-led business. CSR represents a company’s efforts to have a positive impact on its employees, consumers, the environment, and wider community through self-regulation, listed in an annual report. ESG takes this a step further because it should measure these activities to arrive at a more accurate evaluation of a company’s efforts. In particular, ESG looks at how businesses respond to the challenges of climate change, look after their staff, contribute to the wider community, empower people, encourage innovation, and how they can have a positive impact on supply chains and business partners. For ‘company’ read ‘school’ or for ‘business’ read ‘college’ — 35

ESG factors cover a range of areas: Environmental

Social

Environmental Environmental

Social Social

Governance Governance

Carbon emissions Water management Waste management Deforestation Air and water pollution Social Energy efficiency Energy mix

Labour practices Human rights Community involvement Diversity Data protection and Governance privacy Customer satisfaction Animal welfare

Management structure Board structure Compensation policies Political contributions Risk oversight Stakeholder engagement

Governance

whatever the nomenclature, the aims apply to all settings.

An effective ESG policy must also demand ESG metrics, ie kilowatts of energy saved, tonnes of CO₂ emissions avoided, litres of water saved etc, which become Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) for annual target setting.

An educational setting’s involvement in some or all these areas can be identified and better defined to match the setting and its operations.

Current performance, ie usage, existence, frequency, outcomes etc must be measured and declared. Once this has been achieved, an evaluation must be undertaken in order to prioritise focus, ie which area needs attention because little is being done at present, or because opportunities exist in one or more areas to maximise impact.

ESG impact-planning and evaluation should become part of each setting’s annual business cycle.

Dukes colleges in London, Kent, Cardiff, and Cambridge are working on the implementation of an ambitious yet relevant 36

plan from September 2021, with each college currently focusing on at least one of the three areas (the ‘E’, ‘S’, or ‘G’). This is not a small undertaking and it requires a systematic, holistic approach which involves all members of a community; not least our students. The post-Covid reopening of Dukes colleges allows an opportunity for re-evaluation. The student body's engagement with ESG planning and delivery will be key to its success, as will whether or not ESG becomes part of each student's life after leaving us — whether at university, in the workplace, or eventually in family life (though perhaps without the ‘ESG’ label). Ellen Crozier, assistant Head at Rochester Independent College, notes that ‘ESG requires an intergenerational perspective, beyond the tenure of any team.’

ESG implementation starts with identifying target areas within the three sectors.

For example, within ‘Environment’, an educational setting could identify reducing electricity consumption as an objective, and then plan a strategy for how this could be achieved within a set timeframe, and who would be the person(s) to lead the initiative.

Reduced electricity consumption target

Progress towards target 2020 2021 2022 2023

Reduced paper & printing target

Where the college was in 2020 when the ESG plan was formulated FIG 1

The second stage would be to carry out an impact assessment, which would measure both the amount of electricity saved and the material impact of this over the timeframe set, with suggested action points to correct underperformance. Ellen Crozier has moved away from the matrix method to chart progress in any sector and area and has designed a radar-style chart which is both user-friendly and target driven (Fig 1). Each member of the community should be at the very least aware of a college’s ESG plan and targets, and preferably proactive in playing a full part in achieving these goals.

It is a fair assessment to say that any institution that is prepared to invest time and resources into ESG may well be a better performer in most areas of operation than one that elects not to do so. In a time that has proven to be perilous financially for many independent schools and associated industry segments, any initiative which can add value to the bottom line must surely be taken into consideration. “It may well be in the long-run 1

interest of a corporation,” declared Milton Friedman over fifty years ago, “to devote resources to providing amenities to [its] community or to improving its government.

That may make it easier to attract desirable employees, it may reduce the wage bill … or have other worthwhile effects.” For bursars, accountants, and financial controllers everywhere, BlackRock’s Larry Fink observed in 2019 that “Profits are in no way inconsistent with purpose—in fact, profits and purpose are inextricably linked.”1 With this in mind, implementing a meaningful, transparent ESG plan (in which all community members play as full a role as possible) not only has a positive impact on creating a fairer greener global society, but also impacts a school's financial stability — which sends the strongest of signals to leaders that ESG is a long-term strategy worthy of inclusion in any institution's development planning. n Tim Fish is Managing Director for Dukes Education's colleges and Editor of Insight.

‘Five Ways that ESG Creates Value', McKinsey Quarterly, Nov 2019

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Careers: preparing for a future we cannot foresee Joss Williams, Head at Earlscliffe, speculates on the outcomes of the Fourth Industrial Revolution and its potential impact on student careers. How can educators and careers counsellors support students now, to help them find success in an obscure future?

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L

.P. Hartley might just as well have opined that, ‘the future is a foreign country, they’ll do things differently there’.

When I compare my life with that of my father, I don’t think they were enormously different. We both worked in a number of different countries and had a couple of careers in our lives. We both completed our professional training, taught by others from within our professions, in our early twenties and then updated our professional knowledge occasionally as we went along. We got our news from mostly traditional media, we worked relatively regular hours. Though his daily routines, even at the end of his working life, did not encompass mobile phones, wifi, the internet, or social media, he would still readily recognise the work I do, even if the manner is a little different.

I don’t think my children’s careers are going to look anything like mine.

There is much speculation about the impact of the Fourth Industrial Revolution, and the degree to which machines may take over or enhance the work we do. In my own working day, I am permanently attached to a system of communication and data-retrieval that makes Captain Kirk on the surface of another cardboard planet look like a technological infant. This technological life is certainly beyond the imaginings of just a few decades ago — and I’m just a teacher. By the mid-21st

century, we certainly know that anything that can be automated, will have been. What we don’t know is the extent of what can and can’t be automated.

Historically, we have not been great at guessing this — rather than piloting the flying machine that I was promised by the science programmes of my youth, I can look forward to an autonomous car. Now that machines can perform differential diagnosis and read contracts, we are certainly going to need fewer medics and lawyers, as well as bankers, accountants, architects, and teachers, and those who remain will work in radically different ways.

If you’ve read articles like this one before, you will notice that I have added my own career to the list. I don’t want to engage in special pleading for my own skill set or be blind to the changes that have happened in education in just the last twelve months.

Artificial Intelligence is going to be doing a lot of the work on algorithmic tasks.

As Richard and David Susskind have it in The Future of the Professions: ‘The best and brightest professionals will endure the longest — those who perform tasks that we prefer to leave in the hands of human beings. But there will not be a sufficiency of these tasks to keep armies of professionals in gainful employment’. It is quite possible that, as with previous industrial revolutions, this one will throw up new tasks to be completed. Yuval Harari in Homo Deus points out that the crucial problem, 39

‘is creating new jobs that humans perform better than algorithms’. One reason that doctors have traditionally been well paid and well regarded is that, for the human brain, differential diagnosis is extremely difficult, requiring great knowledge and understanding of the pathways through it.

A.I. machines love this stuff and can do it in milliseconds.

Firms, from the ‘Big Four’, to Starbucks are already ignoring degrees, A-levels, and GCSEs, and using their own systems to assess capacity, as it is now, rather than historical evidence, to select. PwC would already rather recruit you at 18 years and give you the training they know you need, than wait until you are 21. And your CV is going to be read by a machine before a human sees it.

Some of this is here now.

A child entering secondary school this September will finish her Master’s degree in 2033. Schools cannot simply be planning for that to be the only path and option for this little girl. The World Economic Forum has already nailed its colours to the mast and stated that what schools are teaching is not what future employers or employees need. Students will need to be true, life-long learners; they will need to identify the gaps in their own knowledge and fill them, rapidly, in a short time frame, and ideally for free. Taking years out of earning for a degree that was out of date before it was designed, let alone taught, does not make 40

sense. She will need to tell her employer what to do, rather than wait to be told.

She will need to be flexible, adaptable, courageous, and active. Schools and universities have so far avoided this responsibility by pointing at the ‘soft skills’ acquired alongside a content and skills-based curriculum, but there is no reason why those skills cannot be acquired as she learns how to network, code, data-mine, and think creatively.

Since we cannot see the future, we must make sure our students are ready, whatever comes, both intellectually and emotionally.

This, above all, is going to be vital. You have to be on your feet and ready for what comes next, no matter what has happened to you so far in the story. For this reason, my students and colleagues are used to hearing me say (bored of hearing me say?) that our boys and girls need to be future-proof and resilient.

We must impart technical skills, and make them as complex as possible — the divide between those who are comfortable with technology and those who struggle must be overcome: we don’t all have to know how to code, but we must understand coders and how to work with them, or we will not even get into the room where the adults are talking.

Historically, teachers have been slow to adapt and thus it is almost a truism that our students help us work the technology we use to teach them.

Paradoxically, if machines take on the algorithmic stuff, we will be pushed into the human corner, where empathy, communication, and creativity lie. Computers can compose, but you need a human ear to be moved and assess merit and musicality.

As E.M. Forster said: ‘Only connect!’ Once we have new ideas, we are going to have to be able to work with people and persuade them to listen and adopt our ideas. My students have, habitually, been lazy communicators.

The contract — that your teacher will read whatever you write or listen to whatever you say — has not served them well in that regard.

The Twittersphere inclines them to believe that as long as they passionately believe something, then they are right. This is not a useful way of assessing your own ideas or presenting them to employers.

And finally, we are going to have to keep finding and nurturing that spark of curiosity. We cannot possibly teach our students what they need to know to have a full life, but we can encourage their own desire to know what’s next.

We don’t know what lies at the end of the tunnel, but we can give the students a torch, show them how to use it, and equip them to step out boldly. n Joss Williams is Head at Earlscliffe, an international GCSE and A-level college for students aged 15-19, based in Folkestone, Kent.

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SQE: a new route to qualifying as a solicitor Rachel Davis, Head of The Lawyer Portal, sheds some light on the Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) and how students interested in pursuing a route into law should approach this new qualification.

I

n 2017, the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA) announced a change to the qualification process for solicitors. The new Solicitors Qualifying Examination (SQE) will come into effect in September 2021. This article will detail the changes made, the new process for aspiring solicitors and look at how students can best prepare for the assessments.

It is worth noting that the route to becoming a barrister remains unchanged.

Any candidate must complete either a Law degree, The Bar Practice Course and pupillage or, a non-Law degree, the Graduate Diploma in Law (GDL), The Bar Practice Course, and pupillage.

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What is the SQE and how do you qualify under it?

The SQE will essentially centralise the qualification process for solicitors, creating one national, standardised system, devised to assess candidates more consistently.

There is a four-stage process to qualify as a solicitor under the SQE route. From 1st September 2021, candidates must have: » A degree (not necessarily Law) or degree equivalent » SQE 1 and SQE 2 (a candidate must pass component 1 in order to progress to component 2) » Two years of qualifying work experience (QWE) » Passed the SRA character and suitability requirements What is a degree and degree equivalent?

By the time a candidate applies to qualify as a solicitor, they need to hold a UK degree, awarded at Level 6 (or above). Alternatively, a UK qualification can be considered a degree equivalent if it meets any of the following criteria: » An accredited qualification at Level 6 (or above) » A regulated qualification at Level 6 (or above) » An apprenticeship at Level 6 (or above), approved by the government departments of England, Wales, and Northern Ireland » A qualification of apprenticeship at Level 9 or above of the Scottish Credit and Qualifications Framework, accredited by the Scottish Qualifications Authority (SQA) The SRA has also given scope for some non-UK qualifications to be deemed eligible. See the SRA website for further information on this.

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‘ Candidates can obtain their two years through a training contract in a law firm, through placement years, or legal clinic and pro bono work.’

What is SQE 1 and how will it be examined?

SQE 1 will test ‘functioning legal knowledge’.

This looks at a candidate’s ability to apply the law on realistic, client-based scenarios.

Topics examined follow these two subject areas: Business Law and Practice, Dispute Resolution, Contract, Tort, Legal System of England and Wales, Constitutional and Administrative Law, EU Law and Legal Services.

Property Practice, Wills and the Administration of Estates, Solicitors Accounts, Land Law, Criminal Law and Practice.

It should be noted that Ethics and Professional Conduct will be examined pervasively across the two assessments.

SQE 1 assessment consists of two, five-hour, closed book exams, taken on consecutive days. Each paper will have 180 multiple-choice questions, with one best answer to each question. Candidates will be allowed three attempts to pass SQE 1 in six years, before they can move on to SQE 2.

What is SQE 2 and how will it be examined?

SQE 2 will test a candidate’s practical legal skills. The strengths required include client interviewing, advocacy, case and matter analysis, legal research, written advice, and drafting, amongst others.

SQE 2 will be assessed over five half-days, comprising 16 tests. 12 of these will be written; four will be orally examined. Those orally examined are split between advocacy and interview notes and legal analysis.

Qualifying work experience (QWE) Candidates must complete a minimum of two years’ qualifying work experience under the SQE. The rules governing this element are less stringent than the current process, given the requirement that qualifying work experience need only be in a legal setting.

Candidates can obtain their two years through a training contract in a law firm, through placement years, or legal clinic and pro bono work. Candidates can also combine work experience, undertaking this element at a maximum of four organisations. Each work experience must be signed-off by a qualified solicitor.

This element of the SQE can be obtained before, during, or after SQE studies, but it is anticipated that most students will complete this after SQE 1.

It is important to note, though, that some law firms may require the entire two-year period of qualifying work experience to be with them in order to practise there. As such, training contracts may remain a popular means of completing the two-year QWE. What happens after completing SQE 1 and 2, and the QWE? After passing the two SQE components and completing two years of qualifying work experience, candidates can apply to the SRA to be enrolled as a solicitor. Pending suitability and character tests, a candidate will be enrolled at this point.

What happens during the transitional phase?

The SQE process is not yet compulsory.

Students who are currently completing a Law degree, conversion course, Legal Practice Course (LPC), or training contract can choose between the old and new routes. Similarly, students can continue with the current route if, before 1st September 2021, they complete, start, accept an offer, or pay a deposit for a Law conversion course.

If candidates are starting their LLB in September, they must accept their offer and start their course by 21st September to continue with the current route.

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How can I prepare for the SQE? There are four options when it comes to preparing for the SQE: 1. Complete a degree incorporating SQE preparation. (This may be relevant only for students taking Law degrees, and the extent of course help is yet to be confirmed.)

2. Completing a degree, either Law or non-Law, then taking an SQE preparation course with a provider (which can take up to a year).

3. Completing a part-time SQE preparation course whilst undertaking further study eg a Master’s Degree.

4. Whilst not advised, a candidate could skip preparation and simply take the tests.

It should be noted that universities have not yet confirmed incorporation of SQE preparation into their courses. It remains to be seen whether doing so will be applicable only to students studying Law. It is also worth considering that universities such as Oxford and Cambridge may not adapt their courses to incorporate SQE preparation so, for students seeking a degree at more traditional universities, it is likely that a preparation course post-university would be the best choice.

What options are there regarding preparation courses?

There are a number of preparation courses from varying providers, lasting anywhere from three months to one year.

Examples include: » Barbri » BPP University Law School » Chancery Lane Institute for Professionals » City, University of London » University of Law However, the SRA continues to review its approved SQE preparation course providers on a regular basis so it is worth checking the SRA website.

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How much will the SQE cost?

Obtaining the SQE is split into two sections, cost-wise: the fee for taking examinations and the price of course preparation.

The total fee for examination is £3,980: » SQE 1: £1,558 (covers 10 hours of examinations testing candidates’ functioning legal knowledge) » SQE 2: £2,442 (covers 14 hours of written and oral tasks testing both practical legal knowledge and skills) The cost of SQE training varies in price depending on institution and course. One example is Barbri, which offers their SQE 1 Prep Course for £2,999 and SQE 2 Prep Course for £2,999, totalling £5,998.

Can I obtain funding?

Law firms who currently support trainees through the LPC will sponsor SQE students when they transfer onto this route.

However, there is still little detail on obtaining sponsorships or receiving government loans from non-training contract candidates.

Rachel Davis is Head of the Lawyer Portal, the UK’s leading consultancy providing support to students applying for Law, in association with the Law Society, the Bar Council and CILEx.

Current route Current route

Qualifying Law Degree

OR

+

+

Legal Practice Course

+ Training Contract

+

+

SQE Stage 2

+ Qualifying Work Experience

Professional Skills Course

SQE Stage 1

Must pass SQE 1 before Must pass SQE registering for SQE 2 registering for

SQE Stage 2

+

Degree or equivalent

OR SQE Stage 1

+

+ Training Contract

+

Graduate Diploma in Law

+ Professional Skills Course

+

OR

+ Legal Practice Course

Degree or equivalent

Qualifying Law Degree

OR Graduate Diploma in Law

From September From2021 September 202

Qualifying Work Experience

+

Satisfactory Satisfactor character and character a suitability suitability At the point of qualification (and ongoing)

At the point of qualification (and ongoing)

Satisfactory Satisfactory character and character and suitability suitability

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8

9

7 6

Grade inflation? A predictable accusation Tom Arrand, Head of Cardiff Sixth Form College, explores the nature of forecasting and the necessary origin of the higher grades achieved by ‘Covid-era’ students last year.

T

he results fiasco of last summer impacted students, teachers, schools, and universities in a variety of ways.

There is no need to re-tell the story of exam cancellations, Centre Assessed Grades, algorithms, and U-turns.

We are, as people often like to remind each other, where we are. And this year, the challenge of delivering a grade to young people which is a fair reflection of their true potential, is even more complicated.

The length of time spent out of formal education, coupled with the lack of many rigid assessment opportunities in school, mixed with the disparity of provision between different schools and regions, makes the whole situation deeply complicated and worrying.

Amidst all of this, schools and teachers have had to contend with an understandable yet unfair accusation — that grades were deliberately and knowingly ‘inflated’ in 2020 and that this will be repeated in 2021.

Grades were indeed higher in 2020 than in previous years. Students awarded a high grade (9-7) at GCSE rose from roughly 20% to just shy of 26%, whilst the rate of students 49

achieving a ‘good pass’ (4 or above) at GCSE rose by 9%. At A-level, the number of passes was an all-time record and the percentage of students achieving an ‘A’ grade rose from roughly a quarter of all entries to over 38%.

Every measure demonstrated the same pattern. Despite the pandemic, the ‘class of Covid’ achieved higher grades than their predecessors. For many commentators, this could only mean one thing: deliberate grade inflation.

Centre Assessed Grades (in 2020) will now be known as something different. In Wales, the title (at the time of writing) is Centre Determined Grades, because the grades will be based entirely on the determination of the centre with no intervention from the exam board or an algorithm (other than in the event of appeals). As centres continue to await clear guidance on how these will be delivered, we do know that they will be based on (a) the work a candidate has done within the context that they have been able to learn; and that (b) mock exams, classwork, homework, and other assessments will all play a part in deciding the grade that a centre will apply in any given subject. Colleges such as Cardiff Sixth Form College will work hard to ensure that the process of delivering grades to students is robust, fair, evidence-based, and conducted with absolute integrity.

None of this answers the core question of why these grades were and will probably again be higher than in previous years.

We return, therefore, to the assumption that centres deliberately and knowingly inflated these grades in 2020 and intend to repeat this in the coming year. The fact that they did not is difficult to demonstrate but stems from the fact that we are all viewing the grades of 2020 and 2021 in the wrong way. Indeed, the intention of government in 2020 was to ensure a national results profile that was in line with previous years. This may well have been where the problem started. It was simply never possible to achieve this when there were no exams to differentiate between candidates.

The role of schools and colleges was to identify the grade that would most likely be achieved in a normal year. I am confident that this is something we did very well, based on all of the individual data.

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Why the disparity, then? And why the automatic and unfair assumption of deliberate grade inflation? Is the same criticism levelled at economists who failed to predict 148 out of the past 150 recessions? What of weather forecasters, who are reported to be accurate 80% of the time in a five-day forecast, dropping to 50% of the time when forecasting ten days into the future? Let’s all just be clear that forecasts (be they economic, meteorological, or academic) will never be a precise science.

Results in 2020 were not deliberately inflated. They were accurately forecast by schools based on the available evidence. Allow me to explore this question through a sporting analogy. Another national summer pass-time, cricket, may hold a clue as to why the evidence and the outcome don’t always match each other. If we were to add together the batting averages of the starting England XI in the middle of 2020 and compare the total with the average first innings score of the England team over previous three years, we would notice that there is a difference. I did this exercise in a stolen moment last summer and found that the combined averages of the England XI came out at roughly 329 whereas the average first innings score achieved by England was considerably lower, at roughly 290. This meant that, in order to ensure that our ‘predicted’ England score was in line with previous performances, a number of the players would have to be predicted considerably lower than their averages whilst none of them would be able to excel and score a century. In short, someone would have to tell Jimmy Anderson (avg 9.7) he had scored a duck (0) without ever batting. Rather you than me.

How many goals will Harry Kane score next season? How many points will the Welsh rugby team score in the Six Nations? What is the likely box office return on the next big Disney blockbuster? You tell me. But if asked to predict the outcome, I would look at the data first and be willing to be wrong because I cannot know the variables (such as the impact of injury, under-performance or a sudden ambivalence towards animated characters).

What does this show? It would be appalling for any school to predict failure or underperformance for any young person simply to

C-19

‘ How many goals will Harry Kane score next season? How many points will the Welsh rugby team score in the Six Nations? What is the likely box office return on the next big Disney blockbuster?’

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satisfy the need to be in line with previous years. Every child has the chance to succeed when they enter an exam hall (or take guard, in a cricket match) and the role of schools was to identify the likely outcome for that child.

Now put yourself in the position of a teacher, asked to contribute to the school’s effort to deliver a Centre Determined Grade.

Let’s say you have a GCSE Maths class of 30 students in which you identify five candidates who have the genuine potential to go on and achieve a 9, the highest grade possible. You know that the questions in the exam and the performance of the candidate on the day will make the difference, but what do you do when the differentiating factor of exams is removed? Is it for you to decide which of these talented mathematicians do or do not achieve the top grade? Or do you simply, and rightly, identify that a 9 represents their true potential? And what of the students who are working hard to achieve a good pass? Let’s say you identify ten students who, in your professional judgement would, in a normal year, probably achieve a 4 but who also may, if things do not go their way, underperform. The responsibility on schools and teachers accurately to identify the difference between a candidate who will achieve a 3 or a 4 is monumental and, for that student, life changing. Is it not the moral responsibility of schools to identify the potential (based on robust evidence) whilst acknowledging that only an examination could realistically differentiate?

Grades were higher in 2020 and will be again in 2021 because there were no exams and therefore no opportunity for students to under-perform. Likewise, there was no opportunity for students to surprise themselves and achieve one or two grades higher than expected. The desire to be ‘in line’ with previous years was a significant error and the algorithm proved to be a deeply unfair process. But perhaps the error extends to the awarding of grades designed to represent exam grades. Make no mistake, the grades given in 2020 and 2021 are not the same as grades achieved under exam conditions. They are a completely different thing — an evidence-based estimation of likely performance and an indication of potential.

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Perhaps a different grading system entirely should have been considered? Split grades (A/B or C/D) could have been considered as could a different naming system altogether (such as the Distinction, Merit, Pass criteria we see in music exams). That is by-the-by.

But, when it comes to learning lessons from the pandemic, (in addition to questioning the true purpose and value of exams), we all hope that the process by which any improvements are made involves genuine consultation across the education community as well as a quest to seek the right outcomes by asking the right questions.

Teachers, young people, and schools have demonstrated resilience and determination like never before — something mirrored in all areas of society. The qualifications awarded in 2021 will not bear much resemblance to 2019 or before, because they are not the same thing. A child who spent the past year learning online, if they were fortunate enough to be able to without significant difficulty, cannot be assessed in the same way that a child who attended classes for two years of a GCSE or A-level course was, pre-pandemic.

The grades they carry with them for the rest of their lives must be a fair and accurate representation of their true potential, delivered with integrity and in good faith.

We should stop comparing those grades with previous years and we should be grateful to all educators who, despite the challenges we have all faced, remain the only people capable of offering a realistic interpretation of the child’s potential in any given subject. Above all, we must push back against armchair commentators who bemoan ‘grade inflation’ and ask them if they could do a better job in their field of expertise? n Tom Arrand is Head of Cardiff Sixth Form College, the world’s leading A-level college by results, with a highly international student body, based in Cardiff, the capital city of Wales, UK.

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Approaches to work/life balance: three perspectives Already fragile, the physical and mental boundaries between work and our lives beyond it have undergone an attritional onslaught over the last year. Students, education staff, and parents are all experiencing new challenges when it comes to self-managing for efficacy and happiness. Three leaders across the Dukes family explore approaches to ‘work/life balance’.

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Maintaining a work/life balance for students

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Rethinking Leisure

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The importance of employee work/life balance for sustaining long-term business success

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‘ We need to put our phones down and make eye contact.’

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Maintaining a work/life balance for students

Dr Holly Goodwin, Head of Pastoral Care and Boarding at Earlscliffe, explores the issue from the student point of view.

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s it possible for our young people to make a distinction between work and life in the Covid (and indeed post-Covid) era? For over a year, our students have been back and forth between screen and classroom, glued to their phones for updates from schools, from their friends, from their government. Can we break this pattern of 24/7 working? Can we help them to extract themselves from a life of always on-call? It is my view that as educators we can and must take responsibility for enabling our students to return to some form of normality; that normality is what they are craving, and normality is what we can model in our own lives.

Managing our own expectations of students and being a responsible role model is crucial.

Put simply, if teachers, school leaders, and pastoral staff are constantly on phones and screens whenever students see us, we allow the expectation to take hold in our students’ minds that this is acceptable behaviour.

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Reaffirming our connection with others through face-to-face contact is going to be exceptionally important over the coming months and years, and we must model this for our students.

So how can we do this? A few years ago, I started my first Deputy Headship and I was keen to develop my own knowledge on how to manage people. A former Headteacher of mine, now a close friend, told me that the most important thing was to be present.

Be visible, he said. Make them think you are always round the corner, ready to be there even when they’re not. Ready to notice things.

Ready to provide comfort or advice when they need it. He was talking about staff, but it also applies to students. We need to be there for them to listen and provide advice. We need to show them that we work, but we also live.

We need to talk to them about how they’re feeling and what they’re doing and where they’re going (even writing that sentence fills me with excitement!) and we need to do it, as far as possible, face to face. We need to put our phones down and make eye contact.

But this is not just about soft skills.

Post-pandemic, Personal, Social, Health, and Economic (PSHE) provision also needs to step up. Incorporating study skills into the curriculum is something we have done for years, but study skills have changed.

Helping students to manage their own time is a key part of our role and our responsibility

as educators and leaders. When you work through a screen from your bedroom, you lose the ability to take the advice given to you in normal times. And when normal times come back, you need reminding of these key rules: get outside; put your phone away; talk about your problems. PSHE comes into its own when we teach our students simple, practical solutions to what can seem complex topics.

Encouraging physical activity is going to be crucial as well. Schools are going to have to invest in sports teachers and coaches, asking (and in some cases pushing) even the most reluctant of students to take a physical break from their studies and get outside in the fresh air. We have been actively discouraged over the last year to spend time away from home, and it’s now a mental and physical struggle for students to reverse their thinking.

It’s a key mission for schools to get on board with facilitating exercise and helping our students to address their stress through physical activity.

Dealing with student stress through mentoring and coaching programmes is another way that we as schools can start to address the work/life balance of our young people. This mentoring is best placed to come from those they respect: the staff who work with them daily and listen to their problems.

I am confident that, post-pandemic, there will be government schemes flying around, with money available for mental health projects. If we have the option of making decisions over how this money is spent, we could do much worse than channelling it back into coaching our staff, who can then cascade to our students. School staff are equipped to listen to and respond to messages from professionals with whom they are unfamiliar; students need these messages to come from us. If this means ripping up the timetable for a couple of weeks in September and spending time on coaching and mentoring our students, so be it. It will pay dividends.

Lastly, but certainly not least, we need to encourage our students to have fun. As a concept, fun feels like it’s been removed from our lives recently, through necessity of course, but this doesn’t mean it has been easy.

It’s been hard, and it’s been harder for young people. The students I teach and look after at

Earlscliffe are 16, 17, and 18. Key moments in their lives have passed them by; 18th birthdays have been spent inside with a cake and a small bubble of friends; a lone walk to get a takeaway coffee has been the highlight of their Saturday. Our students have lost their social lives, their down time, their friends.

I can’t deny that this side of the pandemic has made them, and me, and probably most of you, angry. But we can make it better.

As schools reopen and restaurants and cafés come alive again with life and laughter, so their fun will return. We can help them along this path and provide opportunities for the most reluctant to socialise.

Part of this return to a work/life balance for our students will involve an element of compromise on our parts. We’ve been used to an environment for over a year now where closeness is not tolerated. Even before the pandemic, we were wary as educators of allowing students to move, both physically and emotionally, outside the boundaries we set them. My feeling is that there will be a period of time when students will push these boundaries, and that our response to them is crucial to how they move forward as young people. They will want to test us and they are right to: we are responsible for reimagining the way we live now. If that means students exploring their identity and their relationships with others in a different way, we must support them in doing so and set them up for success.

Positivity is, of course, a key element to the success of any plan. Going for a run on a beautiful day is much easier than dragging yourself through a rainstorm. We must smile at our students and be happy that they are back in school. We must tell them how pleased we are to see them and how delighted we would be to help them. We are role models and we need to take this more seriously than we ever have done in our lives. Post-Covid, our students’ work/life balance can be happier and more productive than it was previously, but only if we work together as only we know how.

Dr Holly Goodwin is Head of Pastoral Care & Boarding at Earlscliffe, an international GCSE and A-level college for students aged 15-19, based in Folkestone, Kent.

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The importance of employee work/life balance for sustaining long-term business success

Services Director at St Andrew’s College, Cambridge, Hanna Claydon, considers leadership approaches to work/life balance and the impact this can have on an organisation.

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number of years ago, a wellrespected senior colleague complained in a meeting that staff felt uncomfortable taking their lunch breaks because the leadership team never took theirs. That prompted HR to start sending a weekly email, encouraging staff to take their lunch breaks. Whilst those emails were met with a few disdainful sniggers, they did prompt colleagues to start pausing their working day to read in the botanic garden, meditate, or go for a run with friends. It was a minor change but represented a small blossom of what might come to bloom later on.

Fast forward to 2020, when many employees were catapulted back into their homes for a new style of working that not only posed its own challenges to work/life balance but that also became a catalyst for change. Those who no longer had a commute often began to find other, more rewarding ways of using that precious time. For others, it represented a blurred distinction between work and home life, with working days that seemed never to end. Either way, the topic of work/life balance was now frequently on our minds.

As the child of a successful entrepreneur of the Baby Boomer generation, who modelled his work ethic on Paula Radcliffe’s tight focus,

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I can understand that, for some leaders, the thought of a workforce whose interests lie outside of the workplace might send shudders down their spine. However, times change, and technology is making new ways of working not only possible but also advantageous.

Whilst employee work/life balance might mean working shorter hours for some, it can also mean flexible working, working from home, four-day weeks of compressed hours or even just making sure that those elusive lunch breaks are actually taken. In fact, one size won’t fit all, and it is therefore essential that some flexibility is built into the system.

The benefits of better work/life balance for employees are relatively obvious; reduced stress levels, better health, and increased job satisfaction lead the way. However, the Harvard Business Review states that surveys show that managers and executives describe the ‘ideal worker’ as someone with no personal life or caregiving responsibilities. So how can employee work/life balance be reassessed so that it is viewed as a benefit to the long-term success of companies too?

See pp 66-67 for Hanna's 10 Ways Employee Work/Life Balance Leads to an Organisation's Success.

Why do we value work/life balance at Dukes?

Work/life balance is a relevant factor across our four values at Dukes:

We lead with the heart We are for: placing the highest value on people Good work/life balance means that people come to work with passion and energy day after day.

We’re a team We believe: once you’re part of the set, you’re set for good Good work/life balance systems bring harmony to teams, enable the redistribution of work more evenly, and promote stronger networks.

We love learning We are for: joy in learning at every stage of life Good work/life balance facilitates learning both inside and outside of the organisation, allowing staff to develop knowledge and transferable skills that can boost their confidence and contribution to the organisation.

We do it well We are for: expecting the best from everyone and for everyone in the family Good work/life balance prevents burnout and enables staff to give our pupils their very best on a long-term basis.

Hanna Claydon is Services Director at St Andrew’s College, a boutique GCSE and A-level college for UK and international students, based in central Cambridge, UK.

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Rethinking Leisure

And, relevant to all of us, Anthea Humphreys, Director of Learning at Knightsbridge School, draws upon a number of ‘happiness studies’ to show us how, when it comes to ‘having fun’, we’re often doing it wrong — and how we could do it better.

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f you were to ask a group of people whether they would rather be at work or leisure, it would be unsurprising to hear a chorus for leisure. But when studies repeatedly show that people are less happy at leisure than they are at work, it is time to rethink leisure.

Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi1 was researching how people feel about what they do. For his study, participants were messaged at intervals throughout the day and asked two types of questions: 1) What are you doing, with whom, would you rather be doing something else? And, 2) How are you feeling (are you happy, concentrating, motivated, have high selfesteem)?

When people reported high levels of concentration, efficacy, and happiness, a state he called ‘flow,’ people were often absorbed in an activity at work. When people reported a low mood, feeling distracted and unsatisfied, they were more likely to be at leisure.

Why is this? Csikszentmihalyi suggested that it is because we choose to spend time in passive activities that do not allow a person to use their skills, interact with others, or pursue their interests: ie consuming whatever is served on the Netflix menu or allowing the super algorithms on our phones to tell us what we are interested in.

Another reason for this, according to Laurie Santos, author of Yale’s worldrenowned happiness course2, is because we are particularly poor judges of what will make us happy. We therefore choose activities that we think will make us happy, but in fact, do not; a phenomenon that researchers have called ‘miswantings.’3 So is there a better alternative? Certain approaches show a great deal of promise.

There are ways in which we could transform our leisure: prioritising experiences over objects; concentrating on a social outlook; exercising a better quality of attention; acting kindly; setting challenges; and learning more about ourselves.

Quality of attention We often view our attention as a limited supply, to be stored up and invested in only what is important. So, in our leisure, we often 2 https://www.coursera.org/learn/the-science-of-well-being

1 Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi (1997). ‘Finding Flow: The Psychology Of Engagement With Everyday Life.’

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3 Gilbert, D. T., & Ebert, J. E. J. (2002). ‘Decisions and revisions: The affective forecasting of changeable outcomes.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 82, 503-514.

Simple work/ life balance steps for staff that we can all consider choose activities that do not require much of this precious attention, opting to watch TV passively, or phone scroll, or sometimes both. While this is fine and enjoyable, it is the amount that matters.

Csikszentmihalyi suggests that complete engagement is what we should be aiming for.

Some activities encourage this more readily (eg playing music, arts and crafts etc) but it is a quality that can be cultivated in all activities.

It is especially useful for ‘maintenance activities’, that is, chores, which take up a part of our leisure time. Trying to wash the dishes in a different order or with especially great care and skill, awakens us from autopilot and is more enriching, especially when we are playful and curious with it.

This type of quality attention is also supported by mindfulness activities such as mindful eating, mindful walking, or attentive listening meditations.

Challenge Whether it’s a puzzle on your phone or a crossword in the newspaper, we voluntarily choose to spend some of our leisure in challenge. We are a challenge-seeking species and harnessing this trait is an ideal way to cultivate ‘flow.’ Setting ourselves challenges just outside of our comfort zone demands attention and effort and results in a sense of accomplishment and pride. Thinking of ways to challenge ourselves on a small or big scale, is a worthy use of our leisure.

1 Lead by example;

take that lunch break.

2 Consider the

workforce as a whole and how delegation can be advantageous to all levels.

3 For staff who are

stressed, use tools such as the Wheel of Life, to help them consider their life in a holistic way and how greater balance could make them feel better and work more effectively as a result.

4 Send a regular staff

well-being survey and consider work/life balance as a possible solution to some of the issues raised.

dukeseducation.com

Experiences over objects A significant amount of our leisure goes on spending the money we earn at work.

Rather than spending our hard-earned cash on objects, Laurie Santos suggests investing 63

Rethinking leisure…

a few prompts What have you been curious about?

Are you challenging yourself?

Do you need to set any goals?

Are you spending your money more on objects or experiences?

Think of a kindness you noticed today.

How are you investing in your relationships?

Could you make a new connection?

Have you found the “wants” in some of your “musts”?

Is this intrinsically rewarding or for an extrinsic reward? dukeseducation.com

in experiences. Surprisingly, when we invest in travel or going to a concert, one of the reasons we find these leisure activities so rewarding is that they end. As Dan Gilbert quips, ‘a new car sticks around to disappoint you. But a trip to Europe is over. It evaporates.

It has the good sense to go away and leave you with nothing but your wonderful memory.’

Santos highlights that this is down to a trick of the mind called ‘hedonic adaptation’, whereby we get used to things over time and they become less satisfying. So, spending our leisure on things which have an end will make us happier. This is why setting ourselves goals, to act as an artificial end point, also makes us happy.

Kindness When we spend time noticing kindness around us, or remembering kindness we have experienced, we feel happier.4 It is a quirk of the mind that when we think about kindness, we feel happier. This can also be seen in the Buddhist ‘loving kindness’ meditations. Thinking about kindness can also lead to acts of kindness, which, when they are done on the same day, also boost happiness. In an interesting study by Liz Dunn and Mike Norton5, they gave $5 or $20 for people to spend on themselves or on others, and, regardless of the amount, people who spent it on others always reported being happier. Giving to others more than ourselves is therefore a good way to spend our leisure.

Social Connection While it is important to spend leisure time resting and taking time for oneself, we should also aim to spend it on making social connections. Without fail, this is one of the most significant factors on levels of happiness.

While we already know how rewarding it is to spend time with close friends and family members, we may not realise that making connections with anyone, such as strangers on trains6 or the barista at the coffee shop, 4 Otake et al. (2006). ‘Happy people become happier through kindness: A counting kindnesses intervention.’ Journal of happiness studies, 7(3), 361-375.

5 Dunn et al. (2008). ‘Spending money on others promotes happiness.’

Science, 319 (5870), 1687-1688.

6 Epley & Schroeder (2014). ‘Mistakenly seeking solitude.’ Journal of Experimental Psychology: General, 143(5), 1980.

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also significantly boosts happiness. It creates a sense of having been noticed, of mattering.

So spend leisure building a web of connections.

Being you It is not unfair to say that most people don’t know how they’d better like to spend their leisure or what they’re particularly interested in or good at. That is why it is important to take time to find out. One of our worst mind traps is that we seem to be wired to make relative comparisons. That is why a bronze medallist will be happier than a silver medallist, when they both compare themselves to the gold winner.7 Taking time to find out what energises you, what you like is key. How? Keeping a journal or diary to reflect on how different activities in the day made you feel.

One of the most important factors is that it is intrinsically rewarding. The biggest energy-sapper and danger to motivation is doing something for an extrinsic reward.

We must enjoy doing something for its own sake, rather than an external reward that might come from it. For example, exercising because you enjoy the feeling versus aiming for the perfect beach body. Of course, we all have to do things we must, but in reframing our minds and finding what we want out of it, it gives back a sense of ownership and desire that keeps motivation and energy high.

‘ The biggest energysapper and danger to motivation is doing something for an extrinsic reward.’

Conclusion When we consider the fact that how we spend our time is how we spend our lives, most of us want to spend that time well. Rethinking our approach to leisure can be a powerful way of helping us to do just that.

Anthea Humphreys is Director of Learning at Knightsbridge School — a happy, vibrant, and community-focused school in the heart of London educating girls and boys from ages 4 — 16.

7 Medvec, V. H., Madey, S. F., & Gilovich, T. (1995). ‘When less is more: Counterfactual thinking and satisfaction among Olympic medalists.’ Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 69(4), 603–610.

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10 ways in which employee work/life balance can contribute to the long-term success of an organisation

By Hanna Claydon, Services Director at St Andrew’s College (continued from p. 61)

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Combatting Burnout

Employees with better work/life balance are more likely to avoid burnout.

As a result, they are likely to remain loyal to the company for longer.

Anyone who has ever had to recruit for key roles will know how hard and costly it is to find the right person.

Circadian Rhythms

It is widely acknowledged that some people work more effectively at different times of day. In some industries (such as software engineering and advertising), certain departments choose to arrive at the office later in the day because that’s when their creativity peaks. Whilst the average operating time of schools is fairly set, staff in some of the ancillary departments might fall into this category.

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Increased Delegation for Career Pathways

In some cases, in particular where more senior and mature colleagues are able to work flexibly, it can improve succession planning for the organisation. It encourages the delegation of some of their tasks to those lower down the hierarchy so that they can develop and are less likely to leave because of what appears to be a lack of opportunity for career progression.

Networking

Employee contacts outside of the organisation can also be of use to the company. That can mean learning from others, sourcing suppliers, or generating customers. Having time to build up those useful contacts at the local rugby club, bootcamp, or school gates is often more effective than exchanging business cards over a glass of warm Chardonnay at a networking event at the local Ibis.

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Rapport & Morale

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Staff who have time to pursue their own interests outside of work may also be more likely to have better relationships at work. When colleagues are able to talk about the recent football match or their camping trips, it builds rapport and boosts morale because everybody’s day is more pleasant.

Energy

Providing opportunities for balance doesn’t necessarily mean that staff will be less dedicated. Employees who are more satisfied and refreshed are more likely to approach each working day with the drive and passion that helps make the company become truly exceptional.

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Staff Flexibility = Business Flexibility

Where flexible working is established to allow staff to pursue their own interests or caring responsibilities, it can mean that a business also ends up with better coverage and can remain open longer.

For example, staff starting work early are able to spend more of their time communicating with contacts in the Far East and are then able to leave in time for the school pickup.

A Healthy Staff Body

Whilst some managers may be concerned about reduced productivity of workers who opt for a better work/life balance, it is helpful to acknowledge that productivity may actually be improved through fewer sick days and better overall health. Employees who have the time to exercise are more likely to be healthy and to have fewer chronic conditions such as back pain. Denmark is hailed as a country with high levels of work/life balance, but it also has one of the world’s highest productivity rates. Their goal is to make sure that everyone has a chance to lead a healthy life outside of work. Whilst opportunities are there for parents, they are also there for single people, who often have schedules full of sports activities, social meet ups and volunteering commitments. According to the Organisation for Economic Co-Operation & Development (OECD), this work/life balance helps keep employees healthy and improves workplace safety.

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Attracting Top Talent

We should also remember that the recruitment marketplace is changing and, where there is fierce competition for the best candidates, organisations may have no choice but to consider how to make themselves more attractive. Offering work/life balance opportunities is a key part of that. It is a shame to lose out on attracting the best talent, merely because a person is keen to coach their local football team or pick up their grandchild from school on a Thursday afternoon.

The Bottom Line

“That’s all very well but what about profitability?” you might ask. It’s a difficult one to measure in isolation, but the combination of increased productivity, lower staff turnover, reduced absenteeism, and healthier employees bodes well for profit margins.

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Why young people should study poetry Fran Johnstone, Teacher of English at St Andrew’s College in Cambridge, argues that language — and poetry, as the highest form of language — are essential instruments for intellectual growth in young people.

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have, several times, taught students from countries where the curriculum does not include studying their own language beyond the age of twelve.

“We speak it perfectly well”, they often point out, “Why would we need to keep studying it?”

It became quite easy for me to answer this after we tried comparing a couple of short films in one group.

The aim was to expand their English vocabulary, so I had chosen two very different animated films. Both had won prizes. When I asked them to

compare the films, the class agreed unanimously that they liked one and not the other.

I asked, “Why?” Because one was good and the other was not, they explained.

“Yes”, I said, “But why?”

We like that one, they told me, but we do not like the other one.

“Yes”, I said, “But why?

What made one better than the other?”

Well, they said, beginning to wonder what was wrong with me, one is really nice and we like it, and the other is certainly not so nice, so we do not like that one.

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And this is where their powers of analysis ended.

Confronted with two things, they could say that one was nice and one was not nice, but they had absolutely nowhere else to go with that conversation. They had no sense of needing to develop a personal opinion, justify it, or explain it — as long as there was a generally accepted view, that was enough for them.

And how did an opinion gain general acceptance? By being repeated a lot, and/or by being held by the person who spoke most loudly.

But what has this strange phenomenon to do with poetry? One step at a time: let’s look at prose quickly first.

If you can’t examine an idea, a piece of writing or a work of art in detail and develop a set of ideas of your own about it, you end up accepting everyone else’s ideas. This may often be fine; it’s probably what most of us do most of the time. But at certain times, in elections, for example, it is important that we examine ideas analytically, develop our own views, and are able to express them clearly and defend them, if necessary. Most of us have only language with which to do this, though a lucky few may also have the ability to express their thoughts through music, dance, or painting.

If you haven’t practised the language of critical analysis, you have none of the verbal tools needed to do so, and the verbal tools are the same as the intellectual tools. Without the right words of your own, all you can do is follow 70

the opinion of the people shouting their opinions most loudly.

Where does poetry come into this? Poetry, ‘the best words in the best order’, as Coleridge put so crisply, is verbal communication at its most powerful. Layer upon subtle layer of meaning can be compressed into a few deceptively easy words in a poem. With only a little practice, a student can release this explosion of meaning, and work out what it could all mean for themselves. It will involve analysis, critical thought, and even a little self questioning; it might include the need to examine complex ideas and put oneself into the mind of a writer in another age, another country, a society very strange and distant from one's own. In other words, it will be a real education.

Keeping poetry back from students because it is too difficult is like locking challenging paintings into a ‘Qualified People Only’ room in a gallery. It’s patronising nonsense. Young people want to tackle the tough stuff. They are the ones who will have to keep the art form moving — look at Amanda Gorman at the Presidential Inauguration.

I’m not saying that a couple of sonnets, a bit of Shakespeare, and 14 poems in a GCSE poetry anthology alone will equip a young person for 21st century living, but I’m certainly saying that it won’t do them any harm (if it’s well taught).

Once trained, they will be able to identify the vagueness, assumptions, exaggeration, and over-generalisation that

characterise everyday debate — more able than the students I mentioned at the beginning who couldn’t spot a metaphor if it bit them on the nose.

They will also be able to identify mystery and beauty.

But the beauty of poetry is another subject altogether.

‘But as for me, helas, I may no more; The vayne travail hath weried me so sore, I am of them that farthest cometh behind;’ Sir Thomas Wyatt — expressing beautifully exactly how it feels to start teaching English Literature, online, at 7am! n Fran Johnstone is Teacher of English at St Andrew’s College, a boutique GCSE and A-level college for UK and international students, based in central Cambridge, UK.

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The last word…

Every week at Dukes, we share a ‘quote of the week’ offered up by one of the team. We’ve collected some of our favourites from the Spring term.

“When you do something beautiful and nobody notices do not be sad.

For the sun, every morning is a beautiful spectacle and yet most of the audience still sleeps.”

John Lennon Tim Fish, Managing Director, Colleges

“I still believe in paradise. But now at least I know it’s not some place you can look for. Because it’s not where you go. It’s how you feel for a moment in your life when you’re a part of something. And if you find that moment ... it lasts forever...”

Richard (Leonardo Di Caprio) — The Beach.

Offered by Tony Blignaut, Regional Admissions Director (Asia) for Cardiff Sixth Form College

“I can’t change the direction of the wind, but I can adjust my sails to always reach my destination.”

Jimmy Dean (yes, that Jimmy Dean, for the sausage aficionados amongst you..)

Offered by Dr Ricardo Tavares, Director of The Career Portal

“A podium and a prison is each a place, one high and the other low, but in either place your freedom of choice can be maintained if you so wish.”

Epictetus Offered by Richard Fletcher, Director of Performance

“It always seems impossible until it is done.”

Nelson Mandela Offered by Gareth Collier, Principal of Cardiff Sixth Form College

“ The paradox of education is precisely this—that as one begins to become conscious one begins to examine the society in which he is being educated.”

James Baldwin Offered by Dr Chantelle Jackson-Boothby, Director of US university admissions consultancy, A-List UK

“Since her fear did her no good, she ceased to be afraid.”

From The Company of Wolves by Angela Carter.

Offered by Eliza Cummings-Cove, Director of Marketing & Admissions for outer London Dukes schools

“My friends and teachers at Eaton Square come from all over the world.

“People do not buy goods and services.

These friendships make our lives They buy relations, stories, and magic.” richer; we can learn tolerance; and, most importantly, we can all speak the Seth Godin Offered by Scott Giles, Group Sales & international language of kindness.”

Year 6 pupil at Eaton Square School Offered by Sebastian Hepher, Principal of Eaton Square

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Marketing Director

Dukes Education is a family of nurseries, schools, and colleges based throughout the UK, in London, Cambridge, Kent, and Cardiff.

Our schools cater to children from 0 – 18, serving them from their earliest years at nursery until they leave school to go on to university.

Surrounding our schools, we also have a collection of complementary education offerings – day camps, international summer schools, and university application support services. This way, we create a wrap-around experience for every family that joins us.

Dukes Education 14-16 Waterloo Place London SW1Y 4AR +44 (0)20 3696 5300 info@dukeseducation.com dukeseducation.com Founder and Chairman Aatif Hassan Dukes Board of Directors Aatif Hassan, Jon Pickles, Mark Bailey, Tim Fish, Glenn Hawkins, Libby Nicholas Dukes Education Advisory Board Glen Fendley, David Goodhew, Christine Leslie, Pam Mundy, William Russell

Dukes Education Group Ltd is registered in England and Wales number 09345899. Registered Office 14-16 Waterloo Place, London SW1Y 4AR.