From its very beginnings, under the leadership of founding Head of School, Roy White, ICHK’s aim has been to develop ‘the whole child’. Schools with this goal have always recognised the importance of academic results, but are equally concerned to encourage the all-round personal growth of their students, believing that success in examinations is not enough to equip young people for what comes once their time at school is over. In this tradition, “academically high-scoring, but intellectually incurious” is not seen as a powerful learning proposition.

When making offers, universities, in turn, have come to be more inclined to consider the all-round profile of applicants, rather than just their exam-based qualifications. This has been a practical move on the universities’ part. In many countries, funding models have shifted, paying increased attention to the drop-out rates of undergraduates, and penalising institutions who cannot shepherd their students through to the completion of their courses of study. Under these conditions, drop-outs become not just a waste of resources, but an actual financial liability. The ideal candidate for a place at university is now seen as someone who exhibits not just sound academic achievement, but also personal strengths such as self-regulation, resilience, joy in learning, and an appetite for challenge. These are the young people who begin their degrees with a genuine sense of purpose and enthusiasm, and who are, therefore, most likely to see them through.

This shift in emphasis will be strengthened by developments in Artificial Intelligence (AI). Leaving aside claims currently being made for the next steps in AI’s capabilities, even at its present levels of performance, AI has revolutionised the ways in which humans are able to gather, marshall, organise, analyse, and deploy information. What is already clear is that many of the cognitive aptitudes that were typically assessed and celebrated in pen and paper tests, are better handled by AI than by humans.

The implications of these developments for schools, students, and, indeed, society are potentially earth-shattering. When the cognitive qualities necessary for academic success – memory and recall, analytic thinking, pattern recognition, attention to detail, rational problem solving – are revealed as being the easiest for machine-learning to emulate, we see that the old order is fast approaching the end of its useful life. Any competent user of AI will be able to manage these once mentally-taxing and time-consuming cognitive challenges effectively.

In their place, a range of uniquely human skills will emerge as the Holy Grail for university Admissions Officers, who will themselves be AI-assisted in their hunt for the human talent needed to pilot AI’s combinatory and calculative potential. Interdisciplinary fluidity, a passion to contribute, self-starting and self-motivation, ethical intuition, a clear and values-based sense of direction and commitment, growth mindset, and an appetite for challenge – these will become the new “jewels in the crown” and, with AI’s suprahuman capacity to process massive amounts of data, will all liable to assessment, in one form or another.

Preparing students to function in such a world is the responsibility of schools right now, because these changes are already visible on the near horizon. It will require a fresh approach – one that takes specifically human strengths as its focus.

We’re confident that ICHK Secondary is well-positioned to meet this challenge – and the materials linked here give a sense of why that is. They also provide the community with an opportunity to review the existing power of AI and how it can be drawn on to enhance human thought and knowledge (and Knowledge!)