As an historian, I’ve always been fascinated by the concept of counterfactual history: the ability to ponder ‘what if?’
What if Britain had not decided to get involved in the Great War?
What if Hitler hadn’t made the mistakes he did in invading the Soviet Union?
What if Kennedy had survived the assassination in 1963?
While many would declare this to be something of a waste of time, the propensity to consider it has always represented a skill possessed by the best students within the subject. It allows them to identify the true turning points or key determining factors in the reasons for events taking place.
I first became interested in this kind of hypothesis when I read Niall Ferguson’s book, the Pity of War, where he proposed the idea that had Britain not have joined with France in fighting Germany in the Great War, the millions of lives would subsequently have been saved, that an institution comparable to the European Union would have been created, and that the British Empire would have continued to dominate economically in the 20th century world.
Whether Ferguson is right or not can be argued extensively, but never proven or disproven.
Nonetheless, he sparks an interesting debate.
I was pleased to engage in a similarly interesting level of debate on Saturday when I attended the Independent Schools Association meeting for the half term.
It has become very clear that we are either approaching, or have indeed entered the very definition of a ‘what if’ moment for the independent school sector.
There are several burning questions at this point in time:
How can the different associations within the sector come together to work coherently?
How do we redefine the perception of what independent schools are?
How effective is the inspection process in the independent sector?
Along with this, there is perhaps a wider consideration:
What is the future for our schools?
How can we be the driving force in defining it?
Whilst this raises some unanswerable questions at this point, there is a growing realisation that we have reached a point where things simply can not be the same again after a rather tumultuous five years – a five years which have been all I have known as a Principal.
At the start of that time, the sector showed it could be a leader in the delivery of teaching and learning in a unique set of circumstances through home learning. The dynamism of small, agile schools, who adapted processes through Covid could have been learned from in schools across the country.
In the last few years, my College has pivoted more towards the support of students with additional needs, and particularly, those who suffer from anxiety and, as a result, require extensive support in renewing confidence from a position of fragility. Every student we have ‘turned around’ has been a keenly recognised success of all staff and the small, nurturing community as a whole.
Now, we have a cost of living crisis, growing levels of poverty, and the imposition of VAT on a sector which requires unity and coherence more than perhaps any other. Such factors only serve to fracture further the relationships and trust within education.
And yet, nothing has changed: schools, collectively, work best when there is the sharing of good practice, of resources and of expertise.
The education landscape is not getting any easier, with lingering problems around teacher recruitment and retention, student wellbeing and a lack of funding with which to deal with these areas of monumental concern.
Paraphrasing Rodney King almost feels apt here: ‘why can’t we all just get along?’ for the good of the students in all schools in the UK.
Independent Schools are not the enemy.
As I discussed in my blog last week, the vast majority of the schools we work with in ISA are keen to move the dial in showing that we can offer value, that we can support our communities and that we can help to target those areas which are most difficult to find solutions for. We do not identify with the elitist, snobbish characterizations of our sector.
I know that there is a desire to adapt and adjust what we do to benefit education in the country on the whole.
Every student deserves a chance to succeed – and every resource should be strained in order to assist them in doing so.
Independent Schools can be part of that solution, and we’re keen to play a key role in doing so.