Moving on
Keeping ahead of the robots Virginia Isaac urges parents and pupils to look around and ahead At the HMC Annual Conference in St Andrew’s last year Mary Curnock Cook, chief executive of UCAS, expressed her concern that students from the private sector were in danger of ‘sleepwalking’ through their education, sticking to a narrow range of courses and careers, often going to the same universities their parents attended. She said that of the 30,000 different courses on offer at British institutions, half of all privately educated students applied to just 1,500 of them. “Independent schools should encourage their students to be independent-minded and to develop a sense of future self that breaks the mould a bit”, said Curnock Cook. Looking back on when I was a governor for seven years of a prestigious private school in Gloucestershire, we often asked in council meetings about university entrance successes, particularly the numbers of students going to Oxbridge and Russell Group institutions. Never once were we told (or indeed did we ask) about what happened to the students post university. It seemed that the sole concern of the school and governors was to ensure that the pupils got first class exam
results and were accepted into a high ranking university. Job done, I was told and I still hear this when I visit high-flying schools today. In this respect one can hardly blame the school. If this is what parents are expecting, it would be foolish to suggest a seemingly unconventional university course or, indeed, other options. But the world in terms of higher education and youth employment is a very different one from when those parents were leaving school. The vast range of courses, the reality of student debt and the rapidly changing employment landscape means that decisions made at 16 and 18 carry far more weight, or have far more serious consequences if they are the wrong ones. 25,000 students drop out of university in their first year. This is inevitably as a result of choice of wrong course or institution or even going to university in the first place. We all recognise that the world of work is becoming more complex, but we are perhaps unaware of the speed with which things are changing. Bill Gates said once “We always
‘Soon this will all be ours.’
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Spring 2016
*CCR Vol53 no1 Spring 2016.indd 22
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