Tired of unnatural poles in the education debate? Without doubt we live in times of uncertainty and change (save for death and taxes); it has always been thus. How we can best prepare for uncertain futures is, itself, uncertain.

To be continually forced to listen to the knowledge versus skills/competencies debate makes me tired, and moves nothing forward. Equally, to admonish teachers for being child-centred when they are surrounded by children, with children’s needs at the heart of their role, is likewise futile.

What does a non-child-centred approach look like?

Teaching knowledge with clarity has a keen place in academic study: for example, learning poems by heart gives us lifelong ownership and access. But just as conducting a journey using satnav teaches us little of the way, teaching knowledge without experimentation confers few practical benefits: an artist must go beyond art appreciation and actually pick up tools to create form.

Experimentation, observation, reflection, growth mindsets, co-operation, autonomy, autotelic feedback, grit and so many more competencies are neither innate nor simply passed down as pearls of wisdom: they are developed.

If we believe that every child has a right to an education, we necessarily believe in a mass system of education as opposed to its elitist forerunner.

The resource requirements and starting points from elitist education will not all transfer – the layers of complex processes that allow our elite schools to produce a disproportionate number of prime ministers go beyond knowledge acquisition. These include skills such as networking, Socratic debate, challenge to the point of failure, feedback, performance and choice. In many ways, knowledge acquisition is the easy part.

Please, please, please can we move the debate forward to find the commonalities in approaches, and not the polar extremes? No one knows with any certainty what future we are preparing the next generation for, let alone five generations hence.

What we do have is a growing body of evidence of what works in learning (Hattie et al), a huge and passionate teaching force who are trainable and open to change, and the best generation of learners we have ever had.

If I have to sit through one more knowledge or skills polemic, I’m going to scream. It is knowledge and skills and competencies and…probably a whole lot more besides, still yet to be discovered. SR