In conversation with...Rebecca Glover and Clemmie Stewart

March 2021

In our third podcast of the series, we talk to thought leaders in education, Rebecca Glover, Principal of Surbiton High School and Clemmie Stewart, Senior Head of Prep Schools at Surbiton High. We discuss the most important tools and skills for the workplace of the future and the role of the education system in providing them.

In Conversation With…Rebecca Glover and Clemmie Stewart

Series 1: Podcast 3

Lucy Lewis: Hello, and welcome to the Future of Work Hub’s ‘In Conversation With…’ podcast.  I’m Lucy Lewis, a partner in Lewis Silkin’s Employment Team and in this podcast series I will be hosting exclusive discussions with innovators, business leaders and thought leaders to explore their perspective on what the world of work holds.

The pandemic has accelerated longer term societal, economic and technological trends giving us a unique opportunity, a once in a generation challenge to re-think who, how, what and where we work.

And in this month’s podcast, I’m going to picking up on the ‘Who’ aspect of that by thinking about our workforce of the future. Research suggests that over 60% of children in primary schools today will end up with jobs that don’t currently exist. And that’s largely because of a combination of the impact of longer-term trends so things such as technology and automation but also the economic disruption driven by the pandemic and the impact that has had on jobs. So, school children, and probably actually all of us, need to have the skills to adapt and to learn.

And our guest speakers today are thought leaders in education. Rebecca Glover is Principal of Surbiton High School and Clemmie Stewart is Senior Head of Prep Schools at Surbiton High and they have both been leading the conversation in this area. Rebecca and Clemmie presented a fascinating TED talk last year asking whether parenting approaches need to change to better prepare our children for the future. 

So welcome to the podcast series Clemmie and Rebecca.

Clemmie Stewart: Thanks for having us.

Rebecca Glover: Thank you.

Lucy Lewis:

I wanted to start by asking you both just to introduce yourselves and tell us a little bit about your experience and your background. Rebecca, if we come to you first.

Rebecca Glover: Of course, thank you. And thank you very much for asking us to talk on your podcast today.

My name is Rebecca Glover. I’m the Principle at Surbiton High School, which is a large independent school in Surrey and an HMC School. I’ve been in education for the past 30 years and I have been Head at a school in North Yorkshire as well and prior to that Deputy Head at a state school for a number of years. So, I have worked in both state schools and the independent sector throughout my career. I’m also an ISI Inspector which means I go round independent schools and look at the quality of learning and teaching, I’m also a Governor at St Christopher’s School in Hertfordshire and I’m also a Governor and part of the Education Committee for the Woodard Academy Trust.

Clemmie Stewart: So, my name is Clemmie Stewart. I’m the Senior Head of Preps here at Surbiton High. I’ve been in education for 12 years now, working across both the state and the independent sector and at the moment I oversee our Prep Schools here at Surbiton High and I also support academy development for four of our academy schools on the South Coast through United Learning. And like Rebecca, I’m also a Governor of two primary academies as well, so between us we’ve got a lot of experience in both state and private schools.

Lucy Lewis: Thank you both. It sounds exhausting! Actually, that takes me to my first question. I was going to ask you before we start talking about how we prepare our children for the future world of work, I’m sure that there will be lots of people listening who are parents and they’re juggling their own work alongside home schooling and I know I’m trying!

UK lockdown

As people really experienced in education, I wonder what you think children will take away from this period of lockdown and how that’s going to help them for the future?

Rebecca Glover: Yes, I echo what you’re saying about the challenges of working full-time and also having children at home. I have two teenagers at home who are currently learning independently, I hope, whilst I’m at work. I think some of the skills that they need to take away. I suppose these aren’t new skills but they’re definitely skills that have come to the forefront over the course of the last 10 months and I suppose adaptability and adapting to change is certainly a skill that our children will be developing and have developed. And also, resilience. And I think learning to cope when things are uncertain and having that resilience to keep going knowing that uncertainty lies ahead and I think in the past we’ve always known what’s going to be happening next month and the month after and our lives have had a rhythm. And actually, that rhythm has been completely disrupted now. So, I think developing that resilience and ability to think outside of the box is something that’s certainly coming to the forefront at the moment.

Clemmie Stewart: Yeah, I’d agree with that. You don’t have to look far at our youngest children to see that natural inquisitive nature and they’re naturally agile and often you’ll find a more traditional education process can sometimes remove some of that, whereas the children at home at the moment are having to be independent and resilient and think very creatively about some of the problems that they have to solve. We’ve also noticed that some of our youngest pupils that they’re actually getting involved with the day to day running of the home. They’re helping to cook, they’re helping with their siblings, reading them stories and just having some of those real life experiences that often you would be having in other sort of Scandinavian countries where education doesn’t formerly start until 7, our children are getting some of those wider life experiences which I think is really powerful and something we should probably reflect on as we move back into normal life as lockdown lifts; how we can still get the benefits from some of those experiences.

Rebecca Glover: I think also for the older children, actually the opportunity to really be a family unit again and have regular meal times which often doesn’t happen because they’re so busy doing other things in their lives, but actually, even the daily briefings and families coming together to discuss the daily briefing, I think is something that will last into the future. And actually one of the concerns that we, as educators, have is that our children, because they’re not with their friends, they’re losing that ability to communicate but actually I’m finding in my own household and in discussion with other parents across the school, that they’re actually having much more in-depth conversations with their children because they have the opportunity to do that which in the past we haven’t because we’ve always filled every moment of our busy lives. So, I think having those opportunities and having those created for us, is something that hopefully will continue into the future.

Clemmie Stewart: I think that’s a really valid point. The other thing I think we’ve also noticed is that the children are seeing their parents at work which I think is really powerful. And at the risk of them sort of gendering the conversation, I think for our girls particularly to see both mum and dad and how they contribute to their work and how they manage that, is such a powerful role modelling experience for them, I think that’s actually really quite exciting.

Rebecca Glover: And our sixth formers certainly, as they’re looking into their future careers, and not only considering now what their passions are but they’re also considering the longevity of their careers, and I know we have girls and boys moving into careers that possibly won’t last a lifetime, but many of the sixth formers now are considering what are those essential careers and what are the essential careers and the sustainable careers currently in this pandemic. So it’s teaching, working for the NHS, critical workers, and I think we’ll find over time that many of our children will move into those roles, knowing that they are really important roles so I think reflecting on the importance of the jobs that people have is something that will come out of this particular pandemic.

Lucy Lewis: Thank you both. That is really, really interesting. And yeah, I agree we find that the children ask and are much  more interested in our jobs and what they involve and who we’re talking to and it is an opportunity actually to talk to them about work so I definitely share that experience.

Parenting styles

I wanted to pick up quickly on resilience because it was one of the things that really stayed with me when I listened to your TED talk as a parent. This idea that we’re snow plough parenting, we’re removing grit from our children. Can you just tell our listeners a little bit about how you started that discussion and what the basis of the talk was about?

Rebecca Glover: Yes, Clemmie and I between us, as we mentioned at the start have almost 50 years of education under our belts and what we found, certainly over the past decade is that increasingly parents have become more and more involved in their children’s learning, to the extent that in some cases, the parents have taken over their children’s learning.

And we’ve found in schools that we are questioned constantly around the progress that children are making and ensuring that each and every child progresses as much as they can. But I think we’ve found certainly that there is certainly a great deal of parental expectation and a great deal of parental input far more so than a decade ago. And in discussing this, Clemmie and I came round to the thoughts that actually we’re not allowing opportunities for our children to fail, they can’t fail at home and they don’t fail at school. And we’re not allowing them that learning from failure in any aspects of school life or home life.

And whereas when I was at school, parents tended to take a step back from their children’s education and allow their children to get on with it. We don’t now and as parents we absolutely are fully involved and fully invested in every aspect of our child’s life to the extent that we’re helping them with homework, we’re even doing their homework. We are sending emails to teachers at the drop of a hat rather than allowing our children the opportunity to learn from some of those failures and those safe failures that they can have in school.

So Clemmie and I discussed the type of parents that we have become and the type of parenting that we are experiencing in schools and that’s how we came up with the podcast and I know Clemmie is going to talk to you now about the different sorts of parenting that we have experienced.

Clemmie Stewart: Yes, so we’re talking around these sort of themes around parenting and there are some quite well-known terms out there such as ‘helicopter parenting’ or ‘snow plough parenting’.  So, helicopter parenting is when you hover above your child just observing everything and the minute there’s a crisis you swoop down and fix it for them and make sure it doesn’t happen again. Whereas snow plough parenting is where you literally go before your child just knocking out any barriers or issues that your child might run into. The one we particularly liked was an approach called ‘curling’ which is like the winter Olympics when you see them curling where you’re literally ironing out any friction long before your child gets there and as Rebecca said, all of those things, whilst they’re done from  a place of deep routed love and nurture and wanting to care for your child, you are in fact actually just preventing them from experiencing those little failures, and those little barriers, that they need to have as part of their formative experiences of life.

And so we’re talking about these different approaches and how frustrating they were and sort of jokingly said we need to invent our own and this is how ‘trampoline parenting’ came about. Because, what we realise is if we could design the perfect parent, if there ever was such a thing, it would be one that just keeps bouncing their child up. So, they go up, they have some freedom, they have some independence, then they’ll fall, and something will go wrong, and they’ll drop. And you’re still there. And you wrap around them and you nurture them back up and then you spring them into the air and off they go again. And every bit of learning they do, comes from that constant bouncing up, experiencing new things but you never leave them. You’re still there to support them but they increasingly bounce further and higher away from you with the idea that they become fully independent resilient adults who can go into life and make the very most of the opportunities available to them.

Rebecca Glover: And I think we feel it is the school’s job to provide those opportunities in a safe environment for children to feel those slight stresses that you get from failure. So, putting children into what we would call the pit. So, giving them problems that they can’t necessarily solve straight away or they have to solve as part of a team and really get into the core of not being able to do something so that they can learn from those little stresses of failure. So, when they experience failure again in the future, they have the toolkit to cope with that failure.

Clemmie Stewart: One of the best analogies I think that we discussed when we wrote our TED talk which now seems more pertinent than ever, was almost developing a vaccination against sort of the negative impact of failure. So, if we give them little doses of failure, quite often they then become really comfortable with it and you do start to hear children say, ‘Oh it’s fine, it’s just a mistake, that’s how we learn’. And they’re becoming increasingly confident with it. So when they do then hit a big failure later in their life, like not getting a job they wanted, or a breakdown of relationship, they’ve got that vaccination to fall back on to know that they can rise again as a result of the failure.

Rebecca Glover: And one of the interesting outcomes of this pandemic and one of the frightening outcomes of this pandemic is that children’s wellbeing, and the issues that we’re having with some of the wellbeing about our girls and boys in school is now we have fourfold the number of really serious mental wellbeing issues that are coming to the forefront. And that’s because our children, and the children that we’re raising have such high expectations of themselves to have everything perfect. But actually, when things aren’t perfect, they can’t cope with it. So, I think we need to provide, and this really does reflect on the TED talk we did 12 months ago, and it’s really been brought to the forefront. We absolutely need to provide our children with the toolkit to cope with things changing, with that resilience that we talked about previously and to cope with failure so that they can manage themselves through any pandemic or any disappointment that comes their way.

Lucy Lewis: Thank you both. It’s really fascinating, and I love the visual imagery around trampolining parenting, I think it’s something as a parent to really aspire to. I really enjoyed the TED talk.

If I turn for a second to look ahead slightly, so we look at the workforce of the future and in our last podcast we spoke to Peter Cheese who you will know is the Chief Executive of the CIPD, and he talked about the importance of lifelong learning of bringing education and colleges closer to business so you enable people to develop skills throughout their lifetime and we know from the World Economic Forum that they produced this report and they talk about the top 10 skills of 2025, so things like analytical thinking and innovation, resilience, creativity, problem solving and one of the things I think was really interesting that you talked about earlier was preparing children for this idea of having many careers, not just one career.

dynamic learning

What do you think are the most important tools for children that are going to be stepping out to drive that workforce of the future?

Rebecca Glover: Yes, I think schools are still very heavily based on a traditional curriculum. And I think we need to move away from that traditional curriculum and that is what we are doing here at Surbiton High School and Clemmie will talk about that in a moment. But I think there are four areas that we need to be preparing our children for, for the future.

The first is problem solving. The second is self-management. The third is being able to work with people and the fourth is being able to use technology and the development of technology. And by problem solving, I’m talking about allowing our children the opportunity to learn to become analytical thinkers. To become innovators. To become complex problem-solvers and critical thinkers as you mentioned.

With regards to self-management, we’re looking at resilience, stress tolerance. Making our children flexible and allowing them to be able to adapt to new situations.

I think working with people is an absolute key for schools, a key priority for schools and we need to allow our children to be able to actively listen to other people and look at their own learning strategies, but also looking at their own leadership and their own social influence as an individual.

And then finally with the technology and the use of development of technology, we need to make sure that our children are going out into the workplace with all the tools that they need technology wise, but also the opportunity to be able to move technology forward for themselves, so that they’re not afraid of anything that might come down the line in six months’ time, 12 months’ time. So, they have the ability and opportunity to use the technologies that are going to be out there in the future.

Clemmie Stewart: Absolutely. And I think as Rebecca says, you know at Surbiton High we’ve thought really strategically about this and we’ve been using a programme now for several years called ‘Developing Learning Habits’ and it’s a fantastic piece of work that came out of some research that was done into the ‘millennial graduate’ and what its perceived, they struggle with in the world of work and also the world of further and higher education and therefore tracking back and considering how schools can actually teach some of those core skills that Rebecca was referring to. So, things around managing distractions. Developing perseverance. Capitalising on the resources available to you so that when you are in that world of work or that world of further education and you don’t have that heavily scaffolded approach you find in schools, the children can start to reflect on well I know how to persevere, and I know what I can do but I also know what to do when I don’t know what to do and using some of those core skills. And we teach that right the way through the children’s education here.

It was a project that we started with our oldest children up at the High School but in fact the year group that are most able at doing it naturally are indeed in reception and so what we find is we’ve got children who can talk about the process of learning and talk about the process of problem solving with a very, very clear narrative around it which they can then pull upon when they go into this world that’s slightly more uncertain.

I think Rebecca is absolutely right. For some children, yes, they will still follow that very traditional trajectory of university, teacher training or medical training or becoming a lawyer whatever it might be. But that’s becoming a smaller minority and in fact many of our children will do some work in business and they might move across to a different sector and they might be entrepreneurs or intrapreneurs. And so, what we also have to make sure we do is give children that real life context of those experiences. So we have an entrepreneur in residence who leads social enterprise projects right down from our A level girls into reception so that our children know how to scale a project, build a prototype, manage a budget, negotiate with their friends when they don’t agree on the same concept and we keep giving them those real life experiences so that when they do go into their futures, they’re able to pull up on those experiences and that context.

Lucy Lewis: Thank you. That’s really, really fascinating.

education

Do you think that’s a model that can be applied more generally to the education system or is it just too big a monolith to move?

Clemmie Stewart: I don’t think it’s too big a monolith and I think if ever there was an opportunity to have these conversations it is now, there has been some fantastic discussion around what is the purpose of education. We’ve been in this situation for nearly a year now so actually what parts of traditional education have we missed and have we really had to pull upon and actually where have we been innovative and where has that bought benefit to the children rather than a negative outcome. I think there’s some fantastic work around the apprenticeships and t-levels and just looking at different approaches of education and I think you need to start with that really fundamental discussion about what is it our children need to be able to do and broaden the discussion base away from just educationalists, who absolutely need to be part of the conversation, but also to the world of business to all of these different stakeholders so that there is a nationwide approach that really understands who we need in our workforce and how we can bring out the best in them.

Rebecca Glover: And as Clemmie says, I think now is the most perfect opportunity to look at what is happening in schools and make it fit for the 21st/22nd century. It would be easy when schools open again to fall right back into what we’ve always done in the past. But we’ve decided here at Surbiton that actually when we do re-open, we’re going to recover some of that lost learning if there is any and look at those gaps in the learning if there are any. Recover the wellbeing of the pupils and the members of staff in school and then redefine and reinvent. So look at what has worked so well over the course of the last 10 months and actually start putting some of those things into our curriculum so that we have really taken the very best out of the last 10 months and moved it forward for the girls and boys in our school.

Clemmie Stewart: I think a core consideration to make there as well kind of refers back to our initial conversation of our TED talk and that is about managing parental expectation. I think a lot of our parents invariably, and I say that in lovingly, of my own parents, almost sort of consider what they think they want for their children in terms of careers, future and opportunity and assume that that’s a Russell Group University and for some of our children it absolutely is and that’s the right outcome for them. But we need to get more comfortable with acknowledging that that is not necessarily the right outcome for every child and that different paths out of school into the world of work and future education are far more broad and there are far more opportunities there but we’ve got to be more comfortable with that conversation I think.

Rebecca Stewart: I think parents need to be comfortable that the children are not necessarily going to follow the trajectory that you wanted them to follow and I think more importantly now, and what I’ve learnt as a parent actually, is that you have to allow your child to follow their passion because passion will lead to success, rather than following what you want them to do because you weren’t able to do it yourself or because you see that as the best route for them. It’s really allowing your child to flourish in the knowledge that you are guiding and supporting them, but you’re not directing them in a way that you want them to go, but in a way that they want to go.

Lucy Lewis: That’s really valuable advice. And actually, it’s a nice sort of circular way to bring to an end when we talk about education because it’s the point I made right at the beginning. We need to remember that we have this once in a generation challenge to re-think how we do things. But before I let you go, I’ve got one question that I ask all the guests on this podcast series,

Future of work

and I was wondering what each of you personally think will be the biggest and most radical change for the future of work that we will take forward with us out of this pandemic?

Rebecca Glover: I’d hope that its linked to the way in which we assess children. I think we need to look radically at the GSCEs and A-levels and the terminal examinations that the children take and given the last two years the children have not been able to take those terminal exams, what impact as that had and what difference does it really make by not doing exams. So, I’d like to see a complete overhaul of how we assess our children. Are we assessing the right things? Do we do it in the right way? Or are there other opportunities that we could explore as a consequence of what’s happened over the past 10 months and certainly two years’ worth of GSCEs and A-levels.

Clemmie Stewart: Yeah, I’d absolutely agree with that. And I think we also have to look at ourselves, not only as a school who educate these young people and are therefore changing our practices to bring out the very best for them, but we are also a big employer of these young people who are going to be coming and working for us. And we now know that they want something really quite different. And I think the pandemic has bought that into sharp focus for them. They want greater agency. They want greater flexibility. And if we’re going to recruit, and indeed retain the very best of these young, inquisitive, agile minds, then we need to make sure that the systems and processes we have in place as an employer are set up for that. How are we encouraging that lifelong learning? How are we encouraging meaningful development and CPD opportunities so that they’re continually growing, learning and improving to secure best outcomes for our children? How are we supporting flexible working? How are we supporting opportunities of sharing best practice across sector and indeed across industry? And I think it is one thing teaching children how to do that, but then we’ve got to ensure that we’re prepared for those graduates to come in and shine within our workplace.

Lucy Lewis: That’s a really good point. Thank you both so much. It’s been a fascinating discussion. 

If any of our listeners would like to find out any more about our discussion I would encourage you to go to www.trampolineparenting.co.uk.  You can listen to the TED talk that Rebecca and Clemmie have talked about. You can also follow Clemmie on Twitter @cstewartshs and Rebecca @principleshs. 

 Thank you both.

Clemmie Stewart: Thank you so much.

Rebecca Glover: Thank you.