In Conversation with Gavin Horgan

- IN CONVERSATION WITH-

GAVIN HORGAN

HEADMASTER, MILLFIELD SCHOOL

Zoe MacDougall talks to Gavin Horgan about his intentionally disruptive approach to education and his belief that curiosity and kindness are essential values for every student at Millfi eld.

Everyone at Millfi eld School in Somerset adheres to the school’s values – to be disruptors, to be curious, to be authentic, to be kind and to be brilliant. Gavin

Horgan, the Headmaster, is no exception. Indeed, he sets out to be a disruptive force in education, arguing that curiosity, creativity and passion have been sidelined in a results-led culture.

A certain edge

Nationally dispensing with GCSEs is Gavin’s immediate disruptive aim. He questions the purpose of a national assessment at 16, when “one third of children are branded failures for not passing GCSE English or Maths. “That’s really wrong, it’s really sad.”

Gavin’s view is that “GCSEs are being used to measure schools: if measuring a child’s intelligence is at issue, the CAT4 tests do that online in an hour. “Children need the opportunity to acquire functional, lifelong skills in English and Maths”, yet, for example, “GCSE English definitely doesn’t assess the English skills that you need for the rest of your life!” He believes that GCSEs rely on knowledge recall and an immediate understanding of information in written form – a model of assessment that is particularly alienating for the 40% of students with dyslexia at Millfield. In fact, Gavin expounds, having this number of dyslexic students gives Millfield a certain edge over other schools, because “Dyslexic people have had to work out their own route around any given problem. Such divergent thinking fosters hugely valuable creative skills. Our neoro-diversity is what makes us special.” There are dyslexic students at Millfield who have been told by other schools that they will never access GCSE English and Maths. Millfield proves otherwise.

As an alternative to the emphasis on knowledge recall at GCSE, Gavin advocates teaching children lifelong skills, particularly those suited to the contemporary workplace. Networking is the first skill on his list as being crucial to the formation of effective project groups, which are fundamental to so many working environments. In this context, he disarmingly suggests that there are very few things he can solve by himself. His skill is to find someone who can: “I have the world’s biggest Black Book on my phone, full of people who can solve problems when they arise. I’m a networking tart!” Additionally, Gavin wants to teach children the ability to be different people at different times, able to fulfil new roles in project groups as the need arises. He also recognises hard work as a skill. There are no soft options: “If children are finding things tough, sometimes we say to them, yes it’s tough – but get on with it!” Hardworking people get lucky is his view.

Sense of curiosity

Start a dialogue

Curiosity has a crucial role to play in Gavin’s beliefs about education. So much so that his 11-year-old son spent the summer term – boarding for the first time – in Kenya! Gavin describes his son’s experience as a gem: “The sense of curiosity that we can see exploding in him is phenomenal. He told us about roaming the school site with a friend, and picking twenty prickly pears, and eating them all, and he thought that was amazing!” It’s that type of curiosity that Gavin wants to see in his students and staff at Millfield. This is his mantra: “If a teacher asks a child a question, that teacher should be curious about the answer. If in response to the child’s answer the teacher just says yes and moves on, then we’re going about education in the wrong way. We shouldn’t use questions to check up on children, but to start a dialogue with them.” Gavin believes that the lack of curiosity in the classroom has its roots in the National Strategies 1997-2011, when the DfE wanted to nail down what children were doing and, in doing so, gradually reduced everything in education into a series of functions. In fact, because they were so caught 

GAVIN HORGAN

Gavin Horgan is the Headmaster of Millfield School. Raised in a mining village, Gavin attended Stonyhurst College on a bursary before progressing to read Classics at Oxford. He went on to teach in the state sector in Lambeth – “if your lesson lacked pace and interest you had a riot on your hands!” – before undertaking senior roles in international schools in Argentina and Sri Lanka. He returned to the UK to become Deputy Rector of the Glasgow Academy. Prior to joining Millfield in 2018, he was Head of Worksop College.

Gavin says he took the role at Millfield “as the school is distinctly different and not shackled by tradition. It has the resource, the attitude and the capacity to lead the way and define education in the UK, now and in the future”.

Authenticity

up in delivering curriculum models under the National Strategies umbrella, Gavin feels that “being a teacher became like being a plumber: someone who was just delivering a series of parts and connecting them together.” Of course, he acknowledges the vital importance of plumbers, but says that’s not why teachers go into teaching. He wants every teacher to be curious, creative and passionate – qualities of true disruptors! Brilliance The Brilliance Curriculum, a new model for learning in place of the GCSE programme, is being launched at Millfield this autumn. It has been developed by teachers for children from 3-18 years old, prioritising Gavin’s core values of curiosity, creativity and employability. Group projects addressing children’s passions and interests will map tangible skills. Children will experience achievement through formative – and gritty – assessment whilst working through a particular challenge.

The curriculum has a skills-based approach which recognises Bloom’s Taxonomy where the ability to remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create demonstrates a route of progression in learning. Dispensing with GCSEs in favour of a truly independent curriculum could seem risky, but Gavin insists that it’s exciting!

He explains “I’m very lucky to be the Head of an independent school where people trust me. It’s the stuff that happens around the edges of formal education that makes for the development of children. Post-pandemic, parents now realise that more than ever before. And they want children to be happy. What I’m proposing is that we will deliver the Brilliance curriculum in place of GCSE, and in three years’ time we will see students getting better A-Level results and students who are happier and more successful when they leave us. That will be the best evaluation of our model.” Gavin’s commitment to living by Millfield’s core values is a strong indicator of his own authenticity. He defines being authentic as “allowing other people to be authentic too, giving people space to be who they want to be without being judged for that”. When the student community represents 70 different nationalities – as at Millfield – finding credible space to be an individual within a unified whole is crucial. Everyone is recognised and applauded for who they are. It is partly Millfield’s cultural and economic diversity that encourages authenticity. The school gives away £8.5 million in bursaries every year, funded from fee income. Effectively, wealthy families pay for those with less income to attend the school. Gavin’s ambition is to raise £100 million in bursary funds by 2035 in order I don’t to promote greater diversity within the student body still further. fit into a ‘Calling out’ It can be difficult to uphold authenticity box with on social media. Standing up to cancel culture, Gavin is clear that “I should suffering be able to say things that you maybe disagree with but which we can have a discussion about. And then we can written agree to be friends and have a different conversation. I fear that, too on it. often, if someone disagrees with you on social media about one thing, then they want to disagree with you about absolutely everything.” Nevertheless, Gavin wants his students to recognise that using their voice and ‘calling out’ on subjects of importance to them can make the world a better place. Millfield has encouraged its students to react to climate change activism, Black Lives Matter and Everyone’s Invited with legitimate questioning and some tough but accurate discussions. Gavin believes that there has to be an appreciation that calling out against suffering and injustice can be done without shared experience and still be authentic. Gavin’s own rationale is down-to-earth.

“Look, I’m a white bloke, I was educated at Oxford and I’m Headmaster at Millfi eld; I don’t fi t into a box with suffering written on it. But I can use my voice, and my students can use their voices, to improve outcomes for people who have suffered in a way that I do not understand. I will be an ally, an up-stander, to those who suffer.”

Muscular kindness

There is a bracing quality about Gavin which is best described by his defi nition of kindness: “I talk about kindness as being quite a muscle thing.” Gavin goes further with his defi nition: “Kindness is your mate telling you that you’ve screwed up and that you need to go back and sort things out, and holding you to account until you do.” He believes kindness is about more than sharing your sweets; kindness at Millfi eld, as Gavin defi nes it, is something solid to hang on to and makes students and colleagues alike into friends for life.

Gavin is proud of Millfi eld’s position as a vivid and vital element of the wider Somerset scene, where twelve members of staff are governors in local schools. Gavin’s aim is not to sit above the town of Street where Millfi eld is located but to live alongside it. His is a relaxed and personable approach to community life: “I know a lot of people who just walk past the gates – and I think they know me!”

During the pandemic, Millfi eld’s commitment to kindness meant that the school stepped up. They delivered every medical prescription which needed delivering across the whole region. In parallel, Gavin was worried about what lockdown meant for children on free school meals. So Millfi eld set up and funded a programme to provide an entire week’s food for every family who had a free school meal entitlement in the town. As the programme caught on, these food hampers – delivered by Millfi eld staff – were feeding over a thousand people a week. That was kindness through hard graft and a willingness to embrace a grittier side of life.

Transforming lives

Gavin closed our conversation with an uplifting story which illustrates his faith in discovering brilliance in every child. “We have had one student here who was actually registered homeless. She was sofa-surfi ng when she came to me. Tessa Munt, a local councillor and previously MP for Wells, saw the girl’s qualities at a schools’ leadership event. She asked if I would help. And I said yes. We offered her a place in boarding. She’s now off to study medicine. There’s proof for you that education transforms lives.” ●

ZOE MACDOUGALL is an educational commentator with extensive teaching experience in the independent and maintained sectors. Zoe also contributes to

timewithmytween.blog

Photo: Mill eld School

Education has been utilising technology to improve teaching and learning for many years, but the impact of the pandemic over the last few years has accelerated this process and propelled in-classroom device use to new heights. Now we are settling back into business as usual, it’s worth taking the time to review your classroom device provision and to assess whether it is optimised to deliver your priorities for your school, students, and parents.

Inhouse or outsource?

You may currently be providing and supporting your classroom devices inhouse; the school purchases a device for each student and teacher and employed IT staff ensure that these devices are maintained and repaired. Could you out-source this? Working with a trusted partner company can prove to be a highly cost-effective way to deliver a standardised Bring Your Own Device (BYOD) scheme. It can mean no capital outlay, reduced admin and maintenance work for your IT Team, and great rates on insurance and warranty extensions to ensure peace of mind. Some providers are even happy to work with you whilst keeping the cost impact entirely off the school’s books, reducing the workload for your Finance Team and demonstrating value and transparency to your parents.

KPIs?

How are you measuring the return on the investment you and your parents are making? One of the biggest negative impacts on the successful use of technology in the classroom is device down time. If teachers cannot guarantee every student will have access to an appropriate and familiar device for the full duration of every lesson, it limits the reliance teachers can put on utilising the devices throughout lessons. Whilst lots of relevant measures (learning outcomes, teacher workload reduction etc) can be hard to quantify or attribute directly to a 1-2-1 scheme, student digital downtime can be calculated accurately and easily, with the gold standard of course being 0%.

5 QUESTIONS

TO ASK WHEN IMPROVING YOUR 1-2-1 DEVICE SCHEME

Written by Jo Hopper, EdTech Professional and former school governor.

Value adding?

Having 1-2-1 devices in the classroom enriches your student’s learning environment, but are there things you could be doing to extract more value? A good teacher CPD program, specifically focused on supporting technology integration into classroom lessons is probably one of the most valuable ways you can build on your device provision and ensure long-term impact. If you have outsourced your provision and made sure that the provider is offering a service with minimal downtime, you can confidently begin a program of digital CPD, knowing that your teachers and students have the tools to follow through in the classroom.

Specs and standards?

Whether delivering your provision in-house or out-sourcing you want to make sure the devices you and your parents invest in are fit for purpose. If you are outsourcing, your partner should be able to help you with this but knowing what types of programs you will want to run, the life term of the devices you expect, and whether you are wedded to a particular brand are all good things to think about. Consider creating two example usage journeys for a typical teacher device and a typical student device. Look at what programs will be used, where the device will physically be, and what is it that is attempting to be achieved with the device at each stage. You can access a free Device Journey Template at easy4u. school/device_journey to help you with this process.

Leading the way?

UK independent schools are known for setting the highest standards in education in the UK, supporting local state schools, their communities, and building charitable partnerships with schools across the world. High profile digital education brands such as Microsoft, Apple and Google all want to see schools using their technology in successful and innovative ways and have created programs which schools can join to showcase their dedication to outstanding digital teaching and learning. Thinking about whether you would like to be a flagship digital school and building this into your device strategy is well worth the effort. It can help to attract the best teaching talent, open funding opportunities, and raise the school’s profile.

There are so many options and opportunities when it comes to classroom technology that it can feel overwhelming, and the rate of change is huge so it can be hard to keep up. But ensuring your classroom provision is high quality and consistent creates a great foundation on which to build. ●

To find out more about the latest ways that you can deliver a successful 1-2-1 device scheme, visit easy4u.school/ISMP