The typical overseas education event attracts students, and their families, who often ask about what country provides the best education. Concerned about their outcomes, they tend to consider the country first and the school second. It makes perfect sense.
While it is important to consider student outcomes, it is important to think about what we mean by success. How do we define student outcomes and how do we define educational success? For many, success is aiming as high as possible and going to Oxford, Cambridge or the Ivy League. In our own independent sector, we continue to view school rankings as a marker for student achievement, not as one single metric out of a hundred-and-one.
In recent years, many parents, and many children along with them, have come to view positive mental health, the opportunity to try new things and resilience as part of successful educational outcomes. For many, a good education has come to include the development of their confidence, the discovery of their leadership skills and their ability to work as a team – to name but a few.
This is where British independent education has made wonderful progress in recent decades. While the highly selective schools will still use, as their main metric, the academic success and exam results of their students, they have largely started following their non-selective counterparts and copied their more diverse extracurricular and pastoral developments. This goes too for the development in their attitude towards boarding; including reducing the amount of Exeat weekends and appreciating the need for students for more variety in their relationshipships with boarding staff.
Non-selective schools have been leading the way in these fields as, traditionally, their student bodies have always been more diverse and as they, traditionally, have been far more inclusive than their highly selective counterparts. Providing programmes that opened doors other than just the academic ones and understanding students’ pastoral, extracurricular and more personal requirements.
British independent education may seem, from the outside at least, to be too much steeped in tradition and largely immobile. Too much reticent to change. However, it is exactly that tradition which provides the opportunity for innovation. Within the tradition of British education is the ambition for excellence. British schools strive to provide the best education possible. That may once have been the donning of stuffy prefect gowns and keeping off the grass just about everywhere around the school grounds, today it is the recognition that every child is different. Educational success is different for everyone.
Non-selective schools led the way, selective schools have followed. What is on offer is a British independent sector open to a multinational and multi-character student body, diversity of thought and a new understanding of what educational excellence is all about. While academic excellence remains on the menu and while schools will have a clear academic ambition for all of their students, there is also a clear recognition that every student’s path is slightly different. The road to academic success might be different. The very definition of educational success might be different. Schools invest in both getting to know their students as well as the facilities and resources to provide them with that individualised pathway. This makes British independent education among the very best for student outcomes.
