Best Practice

What’s the point of school?

How do we prepare students for a future that is unknown? Professor Bill Lucas discusses four tenets of an ‘expansive education’ to help us meet this challenge, and introduces a network which is pioneering these approaches.

Why do we send children to school for 11 years or more? Or to put it another way, as my colleague Professor Guy Claxton has done in his excellent book with the question as its title: “What’s the point of school?”

There are many different answers to this question, but all of them, implicitly or explicitly, have an image of what the educated 16 or 19-year-old ought to be like at the end of the formal school process.

Some say schools are for introducing children to the heritage of the past and acquiring certain knowledge, understanding and an appreciation of the best of their culture.

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