Talent nation

In 1996, a journalist called Andrew Adonis wrote an article arguing that Tony Blair, if elected as prime minister, should become his own Education Secretary of State. Education was so important that, in his words, ‘sustained prime-ministerial attention is now so necessary’.

With a new Prime Minister in place in the UK, it is tempting to suggest the opposite approach – is education too important not to be left alone? Tempting, but unrealistic. Independence for the Bank of Education is never going to happen, largely because the bank balance is so healthy. If you want the cash, you have to accept the scrutiny. The attention may feel intrusive at times, but the alternative is even bleaker. Besides, nobody ever went into politics to tiller-touch.

So, what should Gordon Brown do? Or perhaps more importantly, how should he do it? The Chancellor has already talked about a new approach to politics, engaging partners in the making, as well as the delivery, of policy.‘I don’t think you can solve problems without involving people’. So style may become as significant as substance. Even prime ministers need a pedagogy, especially one with a far greater passion for ideas than the current incumbent.

But, at the same time, a new leader may need a new narrative for education; a single, simple idea which can both spark debate and motivate change. Personalisation has tried, and largely failed to do this. So here is another try.

Design our education system around one aim: to identify and nurture talent. This is talent in its broadest sense, as opposed to current thinking, where government guidelines state that you can only be ‘gifted’ in the main curriculum subjects, and only be ‘talented’ in art, music and PE, and where schools largely focus attention on the ‘usual suspects’.

To use the dictionary definition, talent means ‘an aptitude or ability; a capacity for achievement or success’. Why talent?  It’s the one resource our future economy will depend on, ‘the new oil’, as one Middle East education minister claims. Not everyone can be equally talented, but every young person should have an equal chance of finding their element, those activities which get you going, cause you ‘flow’.  Everyone has a right to find and indulge in their obsessions, no matter how groovy or geeky, and some will need more support than others to draw out what may be latent within.

Such an aim would not replace the standards agenda – literacy and numeracy are key foundations for talent development. But it would ensure that those standards became our servants rather than our masters. It would also reinforce the need to promote social and emotional learning and other key competencies, as well as add new emphasis on the development of skills for creativity. Finding your talent can give you new motivations to succeed in those other key skills.

It would require schools to become connected in a way that only a few currently achieve. Connected to the learning opportunities that the world outside them presents, from local businesses to national organisations to global resources. It would also need schools to connect far more with the passions that pupils engage in outside school, harnessing and celebrating these interests. It is hard down to pin down the link between a school’s connectivity and its performance, but it is equally difficult to find successful schools that aren’t connected in this way, that don’t seek and say yes to the opportunities that the wider world offers their young people.  Schools can do nothing on their own, least of all become talent generators. And the role of schools would be to nourish collective as well as individual talents, in particular the collective potential of the communities they serve. We may need young people to create and navigate their own ‘talent maps’, finding, rating and linking the opportunities available beyond the school, in their neighbourhood and beyond  We would also need young people to support the development of younger pupils’ talents.

The novelist Hanif Kureishi wrote that ‘ambition without imagination can be clumsy’. The next Prime Minister needs the imagination to prioritise talent generation above all else, and the courage to inspire schools to do this. In England, we have already had ‘Every Child a Reader’ and ‘Every Child Counts’. How about ‘Every Child a Dreamer?’

 

ABOUT THE AUTHOR

Mr Joe Hallgarten is Learning Director at Creative Partnerships, in London, England, United Kingdom.

 

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