From the Head of School

Off Curriculum Learning

Schools are busy places, even when nothing much seems to be going on.  Children don’t come to perform some set of tasks that, once mastered, are constantly repeated.  They are here to learn, which means they are in a persistent state of moving on: mastery merely sets the scene for the next challenge.

Sometimes there is a clear sequence of a challenge then mastery, then the next challenge. We learn the alphabet to write a word; we learn words to form sentences; this achieved, we go on to write complex sentences, then paragraphs; and so on until years later we can write a thesis with established premises, arguments, counter-arguments, analysis and evaluative conclusions.

In this kind of progression there is always a clear ‘next step’ - in education jargon, we call the major next steps ‘standards’ and the minor ones ‘benchmarks’ and we design our learning activities and assessments around them.  Our curriculums are basically a series of standards within and across years, allowing us to monitor each child’s personal progress against a common set of expectations.

But children are not just in school to make linear academic progress.  Learning to master numbers and letters are far from the only challenges they face each day.  They also navigate complex social situations with competing demands.  To be effective as workers and citizens, social skills are as essential as the literacy, numeracy and technical skills they are formally assessed on.

Trips and special events make busy schools busier.  They are also time away from the formal curriculums of standards and benchmarks.  Since the start of the year we have had a lot of them: most notably the Grade 4 trip to Edinburgh, Grade 5s at Nethybridge and the Middle and High School activity week.

These activities are not ‘time out’ from learning. They are core to the experiences schools should provide - an opportunity for children to develop essential personal and emotional skills: self-regulation, self-management, resilience. A time to interact with peers and teachers in non-routine situations, which both engage and progress social skills.

Through these activities, students build a set of memorable experiences with classmates who are not otherwise like them: who were born elsewhere or spent years in another school system; whose home language is unfamiliar, who have family in another country.  It is one more opportunity not just to find commonality in diversity, but to create it.  That is something worth being busy for.