Head’s Weekly Update

This part of the academic year always necessitates a return to the first principles of the College. As we plan for the future we need to make sure that we are planning toward the mission and not just building without looking up. So the questions we ask as a senior team are about what kind of education your children are receiving, and why we believe what we believe about how to do it. I wanted to set out the thinking that has been guiding our work this year and thus the focus for the next. 

A book I keep returning to is Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows, published fifteen years ago, which argued that the internet was not a neutral tool but a cognitive environment, and that prolonged exposure to it would physically reshape how we read, focus, and remember. Carr was writing about adults and the early web. The picture for children growing up inside a fully matured internet economy: short-form video, algorithmic feeds, AI chat interfaces, is considerably starker. Our children are, in a way few generations before them have experienced, living inside an entirely abstract world. Screens, feeds, the AI they will encounter throughout their working lives. They will probably spend more of their waking hours in symbolic, mediated, abstract cognition than any group in human history. As adults we have created this and it is worth pondering our creation and what we have allowed. 

This changing reality for our children matters because it changes what schools are for. The recent Milburn review into young people not in education, employment or training contains a line that has stayed with me all week. The education and skills system does not fail by accident, but by design. It is designed to produce qualifications rather than working adults. Reading this as a Head requires an uncomfortable honesty. The system I have spent most of my adult life working inside was built to optimise for one measurable thing, examination performance. The system has done this very efficiently. The cost, Milburn’s evidence suggests, is everywhere. A million young people for whom school was something to be endured rather than a foundation to build on. A generation arriving in adulthood without the capacities the world will actually ask of them.

There is a distinction here, derived from Sinek via Carse, that is a profound one for those of us leading schools into the future: the finite vs the infinite game. Some activities are finite games: defined players, fixed rules, a clear endpoint. The point is to win. Other activities are infinite games: the players change, the rules evolve, there is no endpoint at all. The point is to keep playing well and to keep the game itself worth playing. Education, properly understood, is an infinite game. Raising a thoughtful, capable, flourishing adult has no finish line and no fixed scoreboard.

The qualities that matter most: judgement, resilience, curiosity, adaptability, the capacity to keep learning, cannot be reduced to a grade.

And yet, as a profession, we have built a system that treats education as a finite game. League tables, examination grades, Progress 8, university destinations. Each a finite metric, and as school leaders we have spent years getting very good at optimising for them. There is no shame in this, the finite games matter, they open doors, and we owe it to your children to help them through those doors. Pangbourne sends pupils to demanding universities, and we will continue to work hard at that. Without strong exam outcomes, many students will fail even to get through the initial AI filtering. But the finite games cannot be the whole point. Once your child is through that door, their grades are the least interesting thing about them.

What we are trying to build at Pangbourne is something more ambitious. It is the slower, harder project of raising what I have started to call unautomatable young people. People who are thoughtful, reflective, physically literate, and confidently adventurous. People who know themselves through their bodies as well as their minds, who have a tested relationship with discomfort, and who therefore arrive in the world with something unmistakably their own and that can never be taken from them. 

There is a further reason this matters, beyond the rise of AI. Your children will live their working lives through a sequence of structural changes none of us can fully predict. The organisations they join will reshape themselves. The careers they begin will not be the careers they finish. Industries will rise and fall, technologies will arrive and be displaced, institutions they trust today will look very different in twenty years’ time. This is not a new feature of working life, every generation has lived through change, but the pace and depth of it are unmistakably accelerating. The only stable point across all that change is the person themselves. The capacity to encounter disruption, sit with the discomfort it brings, and respond to it with judgement and humanity intact is, I believe, the single most important thing a school can build in a child. Without it, change is something that happens to them. With it, change becomes something they meet, absorb, and shape. The human element, the recognisable self that persists through these transitions, is not preserved automatically. It is the deliberate product of an education that has spent years asking a child to test themselves against difficulty and discover what remains. It would be disingenuous of me not to point out my worry as some of our students head off into the future. Their lives will be filled with constant change, redefinement and complexity. They need to be equipped to deal with this and not be sheltered from it nor have their agency removed. For change and reinvention to be seen as something to fear, something to feel threatened by and something that is acted upon them is to leave them ill-equipped for the world they are about to enter. It feels comfortable in the moment, but deeply uncomfortable over the horizon. 

A companion to this concern is the work by the Psychiatrist Robin Berman. She has spent thirty years working with families and has written that one of the concerning patterns of contemporary childhood is the inversion of authority between parents and children. Loving, well-meaning parents, fearful of being unkind, exhausted by the daily negotiations, raised themselves by a generation that was perhaps too harsh, have shifted towards a parenting style that prizes their child’s immediate emotional comfort above almost everything else. Berman’s clinical observation is that children raised in this way often develop a particular kind of fragility. They have not been required to sit with disappointment, to absorb a no without it being negotiated, to feel parental love as something that includes occasionally not getting their way. The cost shows up later, when the world begins to say no in larger and less negotiable ways. They have no equipment to meet it. 

This is the deeper reason we take your children outdoors so much. Not for the photographs. Not for the CVs. Because a young person who has led a team across difficult ground, who has been cold and tired and made good decisions anyway, who has learned what their own body and judgement can actually do, has had practice at exactly this: encountering something hard, something unpredictable and occasionally something undesirable, and remaining themselves through it. A long day on a mountain is, among many other things, an act of cognitive rehabilitation. The screen, the feed, the notification, all of it falls away because none of it can help you. Your child is simply there, working out the next move with their hands and their head. Fully present in a single moment. This is increasingly rare for the generation we are educating, and increasingly precious.

In an age where AI will perform shallow tasks faster and more cheaply than any human can, and where the institutions of working life will keep transforming around your children, the premium shifts to those who can think deeply, decide calmly under pressure, navigate repeated change, and remain recognisably themselves through whatever comes next. These are not classroom skills, and they cannot be examined. They are built slowly, through repeated experience of being fully inhabited in something real, something living, something concrete.

None of this is a rejection of academic rigour, it is an amplification of it. We will keep working hard at examinations, university preparation, and the visible markers of success. We are determined to provide each of our students with the currency they need to access the best university or apprenticeship. But alongside the finite game, and ultimately more important than it, is the patient work of building young people who are able to navigate the unpredictable and uncertain world of adulthood. 

Our end goal is the students leaving Pangbourne will not be automatable. They will, through whatever changes around them, remain themselves.

Best wishes,

Oliver Knight