What should school demand of its students?

Academic pressure, extraordinary opportunities, and what happens when we try to have both.

I recently moved to Queensland and absolutely love it. It’s a massive change for me and my family and very much a positive one all round. I’ve only been in my new role two months but the contrast with my previous experiences have got me thinking about academic pressure, opportunity and the costs of trying to have both.

A few weeks ago, I was chatting to a final-year student in our canteen. In his first three weeks of the term, he’d represented the school at AFL, competed in sports day, played in a rugby 7s competition, competed in a touch rugby tournament and was heading off to play netball that afternoon, nearly all of which involved taking time out of lessons.

He also mentioned, almost in passing, that because of all the competitions, he had yet to attend his English Literature class at all yet this term.

He was pretty cool about it. He had been keeping up. Weather delays the previous term and pushed the schedule into term 3, so this wasn’t a normal three weeks.

Still, I was fascinated. How could he not be bothered about missing a chunk of one of his subjects in his last term before the big exams?

Who should choose?

One of the more interesting parts of moving countries is discovering all the things you thought were normal were really just normal where you came from. I’d had that shock moving out to Asian so I thought there’d be less going back to a western country.

After more than twenty years working in British and international schools, including the last twelve in Kuala Lumpur I knew I was coming to learn different terminology, systems and would be doing a fair amount of searching unfamiliar acronyms under the table during meetings. That has certainly happened and I am now reasonably conversant in ATAR, ACARA, QCAA and AITSL and many other Australian acronyms. Learning them took me back to the letter soup of my early teacher training days.

One thing I hadn’t anticipated though was how quickly the move would make me question some of my assumptions about what we should expect from children at school.

Having over a decade in high-performing international schools where academic achievement carried considerable weight, expectations from students and parents were incredibly high, often relentlessly so. We had parents of children as young as Year 3 turning up to Higher Education events asking about how they can get their little angel into the Oxbridge or Ivy League universities.

Sport, music, drama and everything else were important too. Some of our most talented students inevitably missed lessons to represent the school, or sometimes their country, at a high level.

But generally, we protected lessons pretty fiercely.

My experience in Queensland so far has been quite a contrast. There is loads going on, constantly and sport is absolutely everywhere. Friday afternoons are dedicated to inter-school competitions and having sport matches occurring on several days of the week seems completely normal. Outside school there is football, nippers (surf lifesaving!), swimming, athletics and just about everything else you can imagine.

And the opportunities extend well beyond sport. Yesterday, a good few groups of students from across Middle and Senior school spent from 8:00 am till 6:00 pm in our library to a ‘Write a Book in a Day’ as part of a challenge to raise funds. The same afternoon, our Middle-Schoolers were taking on a Ninja Warrior challenge. Huge numbers of our students from right across the school were involved in the Gold Coast Eisteddfod recently. It lasted weeks with our kids out competing in music, drama and various performance activities. We have kids out on camps and the International Award not long back. At any moment, there will be students involved in service opportunities, competitions, productions and representative teams…it really is incredible and truly impressive what is available to our students.

And to be clear, this was one of the reasons we chose to move here.

My own children love sport, music and drama. One of the attractions of moving to Australia was giving them access to more of all of it. Well, they certainly have that now and as a parent, I love it.

As an educator new to the system, I am finding it more complicated. Because there is obviously going to be an opportunity cost and that’s where I start to struggle.

Frequently that cost is a lesson, more often it is a sequence or day of lessons. Or, as with the student I met in the canteen, it can become a whole heap of classes in the same subject.

Teachers then have an interesting problem. Do they crack on and continue teaching the students who are there? Or do they slow down and wait for the rest of the class before covering the more challenging bits? Even if a student never misses a lesson, their experience can be diminished because other students are out and the impact, whether conscious or not, that has on the pace and sequence of learning.

And if teachers do crack on, how do they manage those who are regularly absent for worthwhile activities and need to catch up? The expectation seems to be that the students own this, but part of this burden is definitely weighing on many of the teachers who I spoke to about missing kids.

Nobody is doing anything wrong here. The student is out doing something truly worthwhile, while the teacher is getting on with their core business of teaching the curriculum.

The problem comes when we expect our curriculum to somehow absorb the difference. But that is hard. We have limited resources: time, energy, headspace! Teachers can plan for a few absences or disturbances with buffer lessons. But when that impact is unexpected and frequent, like when a teams make it to the next round of the state cup, and then into the finals that were not scheduled when the calendar was put together, it is hard to plan for. Success is exactly what you want for the kids, and the school, but the unintended consequences of unforeseen events taking students out of lessons will compound.

We faced versions of this in Kuala Lumpur. International schools can offer an extraordinary range of experiences too, particularly when regional and international competition is added to the mix. We had elite swimmers, golfers, musicians, competition mathematicians, competition speed cubers and, remarkably, even a whistling champion…you read that correctly.

Eventually we became had to get restrictive about missing lessons. Representing your country or competing at a genuinely elite level was one thing. But when the same student was representing the school across multiple sports, completing the International Award, performing in the school production and competing outside school, there wasn’t much school left and academics came first. The interventions were productive and positive, with ‘elite competitor’ agreements set up that the students and parents had to sign that included minimum attendance and work completion commitments.

They were not an ultimate solution but introducing structures for some elite performers helped the school increasingly pushed regular activities outside of lesson time and change the culture to one that protected the sanctity of the lesson, and reflected an ‘every minute matters’ perspective that became more of the norm.

At the time, I saw that largely as protecting learning. How time is used reveals what is valued most, and we openly put learning ahead of everything but wellbeing. Although, writing that last sentence made me reflect on exactly how we might define wellbeing!

The comparison becomes more interesting when I look at my own children. They seem to feel less academic pressure here and, with that, they do seem much happier going to school.

In much of the Asian international-school environment I knew, academic achievement carried considerable social currency. Being smart was a good thing. High grades were celebrated and often expected. Making the maths team could be as prestigious as being the basketball captain. Being an exceptional pianist or violinist was impressive and pursued by many. For a huge number of families, admission to an elite university was an explicit goal rather than some distant possibility to think about in Year 12. That same ambition feels slightly less important here, even among our most able students.

I still think there was loads that was good about that culture, especially as a teacher where most of the kids wanted to learn; but the intensity definitely came at a cost.

Even though we advised otherwise, most students of all ages (mostly the exam years) had their evenings and often weekends full filled with tutoring. University conversations were starting to happen ridiculously early. Achievement was competitive, with parents very interested to know where their child ranked in comparison to other students in their year rather than their own progress since the last assessment. For some children, their childhood definitely felt like it was purely preparation for the next selection process.

Schools worked incredibly hard to counter that. Balance and wellbeing were genuine priorities throughout my time in Asia, but much of the pressure existed beyond the school’s control. Intense parental expectations were an all-too-common part of the picture.

We had a dedicated and extremely busy counselling team, robust child protection systems that reflected some of the significant pressures students were experiencing, and pastoral programmes with regular wellbeing check-ins and frequent 121 conversations. A lot of this was focused on academic pressure, much of which wasn’t coming from teachers, but from a combination of cultural, peer and parental expectations.

My experience here so far feels different.

My own children appear more relaxed about school. There is greater space for sport, friends and everything else that constitutes being young. Academic performance is still important, and our school has exceptional results, but it doesn’t appear to dominate identity in quite the same way.

And mostly, I think this is healthier. But I am also starting to wonder whether pressure and challenge are actually the same thing.

I don’t want my children lying awake worrying about grades. I would never want Saturdays swallowed by tutoring (especially now we have beaches to be at!) or every decision at 13 calibrated against a university application five years away. Although, even if we’d remained in Asia, I don’t think this would be how my own kids thought, they always preferred the active and sporting side of school.

But I do want them stretched.

I want them to experience the satisfaction of understanding something difficult. I want them to enjoy the struggle and work hard at something academic and discover that they can do more than they thought. I want intellectual achievement to carry status alongside sporting, musical, artistic and social achievement.

Perhaps my expectations have been conditioned a bit by twenty years in high-performing British and international schools.

I’ve also only been here two months and worked in one Queensland school, so I’m certainly not drawing conclusions about Australian education. I am questioning some of my own assumptions though.

Moving between the two systems has got me thinking about something I hadn’t really considered much before: what should school demand of a child?

Protect every lesson and something is lost too. Kids should get to play sport, perform, compete, go on camps and do things at school they’ll probably remember long after they’ve forgotten what happened in Tuesday’s lesson. But there are still only so many hours in a school day. Something has to give.

A few months ago, I would most certainly have been arguing to protect lessons more. But watching my own children throwing themselves into all the opportunities and seeing them happier about school in general, I am less concerned.

But when you see the classroom and more formal academic learning constantly making way for all those worthwhile things, particularly for students who have exams in a matter of months, I do feel more worried.

This got me thinking about who should make these choices. Is it the students, their parents or teachers, or more formally through school policy?

Students are not always the best judges of what they most need, especially when there is an immediate reward on offer. I know I wasn’t. Given the choice at 15 between attending a lesson and heading out to play sport, I know where I would have been heading.

David Yeager’s 10 to 25 is brilliant on some of this. Yeager draws on research showing that from around puberty, young people become particularly sensitive to social rewards such as status, pride, admiration and respect. That sensitivity continues well into their mid 20s. Given this, choosing between another English Literature lesson or pulling on a school shirt with your mates makes even more sense.

That doesn’t mean students shouldn’t have a voice. Of course they should. But I’m increasingly convinced that the final decision is part of a school’s job.

Schools are full of professionals whose main purpose is to guide and teach young people, and part of that is making decisions about what they need most, what they learn and how much time they need to spend learning it. I don’t think it should sit with individual class teachers, though. We’d likely end up with even more variation across a school and all sorts of unintended consequences if it did.

I think this is a leadership matter. A decision about the philosophy and values of the school. These can then guide decisions about how much time is spent doing what. It also becomes a parental choice, where that is possible, about where you send your kids.

The parameters, boundaries and cut-offs are probably much harder because these opportunities are not free.

As it stands, something has to absorb the missed learning. Students catch up outside school hours, which risks recreating some of the pressure we were trying to avoid in the first place. Teachers find ways to help them catch up, but that adds another thing to do in an already demanding job. Or some of the learning just doesn’t happen.

And maybe that is OK, sometimes. Often the experience really is worth more than the lesson. But I do think we should at least be honest that a choice has been made. And we really do need to think about what happens when those choices start to add up, and whether we can find a better balance.

Finding that balance would take a lot of work. If it was easy, it would probably have been fixed already and I wouldn’t be writing about it here.

One way might be to record and track attendance to lessons and decide where the cut-off is. Should students have to attend 90% of lessons? But then why not 85%? Does only absence for sport or drama count, or does sickness count too? Can you come back from a cold and then miss more school to play for the basketball team? Could we require minimum grades? But then aren’t we punishing the less able?

It is a can of worms. Eventually someone has to make decisions that won’t be popular with everyone.

Which brings me back to the student in the canteen. I asked him if he was keeping up with the missed work. He sort of said he was, and we left it there and went off to eat our breakfast muffins, and me to drink my flat white (extra shot!).

Students aren’t always the best judges of what they know, or what they don’t know. I certainly wasn’t at that age.

Maybe the better question was what three weeks without English Literature had actually cost him and whether it was worth it.

I might find him again on results day and ask him.