Good habits formed at youth make all the difference’– Aristotle

Pupils ‘Good habits formed at youth make all the difference’ – Aristotle James Featherstone celebrates the soft-skills revolution

In the 1979 BBC documentary ‘Public School’, Dennis Silk, Warden of Radley College, said that a school’s main purpose is to help its pupils acquire ‘the right habits for life’. The best part of 40 years later, most of modern educational thinking seems to be agreeing with him.

We are reminded frequently by political and social commentators of the increased importance that employers are placing on ‘soft skills’, terminology that with one bullishly ill-advised adjective undermines and undervalues the very point these commentators and employers are making. Anthony Seldon made the headlines and, arguably, the first waves when he was Master of Wellington College with his Wellbeing Lessons, his insistence on ‘service’, and his school’s sectorleading focus on Character, Grit and Resilience. The founding of the UK-wide Jubilee Centre for Character and Virtues (2012) and the rapid rise in in-house initiatives such as Failure Week (Wimbledon High School), Silent Retreat (Blundell’s), Bounce Week (Latymer Upper), RAK – Random Acts of Kindness Week (The Perse), all suggest pretty strongly that we are, as a sector and as a nation, becoming slightly less hesitant to agree with Professor James Arthur’s assertion (2013) that ‘character matters more than attainment’.

There is a great deal of talk across the educational sectors about the quasi-impossible task facing schools today: as Richard Riley (US Secretary of Education under Bill Clinton) once put it, ‘We are currently preparing students for jobs that don’t yet exist…using technologies that haven’t yet been invented…in order to solve problems we don’t even know are problems yet’. Terrific emphasis continues to be placed on the importance of STEM (Sciences, Technology, Engineering, Maths): the future is computer-based; educate children for that future.

And yet Andrew Pinsent, Research Director at the Ian Ramsey Centre for Science and Religion, University of Oxford, makes the point that from here on in anything that can be automated will be, and anything that can be run by/done by computers will be. This raises the question ‘what’s left for people at that point?’ to which his answer is ‘all the important stuff’. To think on that a little longer: in a world increasingly governed by and served by machines, the ‘soft skills’ (empathy, gentleness, emotional intelligence, manners, nuance, persuasion, social intelligence, kindness, subtlety of expression, interpretation of information, team work, leadership, self-reflection, self-awareness, resilience, perspective: in short, insight) are going to be more important than ever. Will Gompertz, the BBC’s Arts Editor, takes this line of thinking to its logical conclusion and makes the case for every school being an Arts School; because, he points out, everything else will end up being done by computers.

As is usually the case with these things, there is a balance to be struck. Schools must embrace the use of technology as a learning and communication tool, and must recognise the importance of digital literacy in the lives and futures of their pupils. At Exeter Cathedral School we are pleased to have introduced Digital Wellbeing for our ten to thirteen year-olds. But schools must also be environments where ‘soft skills’ are highly valued, modelled, promoted and prized. As I have said before during my soap-box moments, the job of a really good school is to work with families to help pupils acquire the right values, habits and skills for life.

In a world increasingly governed by and served by machines, the ‘soft skills’ are going to be more important than ever.

Silk, Seldon, Pinsent and Gompertz may all agree on what matters most, but none of these can claim to be the first to have thought of it. For that, we ought to turn back to Aristotle: ‘It is not unimportant, then, to acquire one sort of habit or another right from our youth; rather it is very important, indeed all important’.

James Featherstone is Headmaster of Exeter Cathedral School