Robin Bevan, Headteacher, Southend High School for Boys, UK
Why are we doing this? Reimagining the purpose of education
Sometimes, as educators and leaders of learning, we need to pull back from our immersion in the relentless activity of our institutions; to drop the weights of obligation and ask ourselves why we do what we do. This is exactly what we did at Southend High School for Boys a few years ago. There is nothing new about examining core purpose but, very often, it focuses on the school-leaver as the end product. Instead, we set out to imagine our students a decade after they had left school. What would they be doing and how would we want them to be living their lives? More significantly, we found ourselves drawn to the question of what we would want them to be like. We were aligning ourselves with an honourable tradition of liberal education, that ‘Nothing is worthy to be the aim of education, unless it is also worthy to be the aim of a man’s [sic] life for here and
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