SKILLS MATTER!

"The principal goal of education... 

should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things... 

men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers."

There seems to me to be a huge contradiction between the freedom and empowerment for headteachers and schools and the command and control mentality the DfE is imposing on schools and particularly primary schools.

Michael Gove appears to be obsessed with facts and argues that we need a radical approach that would slim down the secondary curriculum leaving secondary schools free to decide how to impart the required body of knowledge but at the same time making the primary school curriculum more prescriptive. However, if you read Dan Pink's fantastic book 'A Whole New Mind', he argues much more powerfully that we are entering not a knowledge age but a conceptual age where Asia, abundance and automation are radically changing the learning landscape. In this new world the key skills will be team work, design, storytelling, empathy, play and meaning. Ken Robinson also argues in his work and in his amazing talks that we must nurture talent, creativity and imagination and that "The principal goal of education... should be creating men and women who are capable of doing new things... men and women who are creative, inventive and discoverers."