It was a huge pleasure - and felt like a considerable step forward - to welcome Deep Learning back into our students' lives.

Coincidentally, the three-day programme began on the same day that I was explaining "The ICHK Approach" to prospective parents, via a Zoom session that sought to make clear the thinking behind the ways in which we plan and provide for students' education at our school, and with what aims in mind.

The central concern I tried to communicate is one that I know ICHK shares with many other schools, some here in Hong Kong and others further afield. The question we are asking ourselves is, how best to revisit and revise the assumptions behind "good schooling" that have dominated the educational scene for at least the past one hundred and twenty years, but which, given ever accelerating and expanding changes in the world of work and leisure, are no longer fit for purpose?

The issue is well illustrated by the graphic (a version of the Clifton StrengthsFinder psychometric), which indicates quite how few of the "essential" character traits and human attributes routinely demanded by fruitful employment after the "4th industrial revolution", are adequately addressed by pen and paper examinations. Arguably, just 6 out of 34 can be evaluated in the exam hall. By not properly addressing all the other skills and qualities in the diagram, schools are doing young people no favours. Students are being required to focus on a very limited band of accomplishments, while neglecting many others.

The problem that more forward-thinking schools face in addressing this shortfall is two-fold.

First, it can be a hard sell to convince parents, who are understandably anxious to secure for their children the best possible prospects for future success, and whose understanding of education is often drawn predominantly from their own time at school. Personal experience counts for a lot, and it can be difficult to shift one's expectations from the comfortable and familiar.

Second, universities, and particularly some of the most "prestigious" universities, are, ironically enough, bastions of conservatism when it comes to admissions procedures (at least, this is the case in the UK; though, perhaps less so in Europe and the US).

The challenge for schools, then, is to convince parents of the advisability of their innovations, while, at the same time, ensuring that for students, along with being offered more diverse and holistically developmental experiences, there is no diminishing of their achievement in examinations.

Our increasingly sure experience is that this challenge can be surmounted without undue difficulty, as it represents, in fact, a false dichotomy: it turns out that there is no tension between enjoying a more rounded school experience, on the one hand, and excelling in examinations, on the other.

As ICHK's record of IB results evidences, there are at least two methods of achieving excellent academic results.

The first, more traditional, route is to concentrate almost exclusively on examination success and on the narrow range of attributes ringed in the diagram.

The second is to concentrate on personal growth as a primary aim, not least by providing opportunities for students to discover in themselves the whole range of other, typically neglected qualities in the diagram. The faith is that, as they flourish as all round people, their love of learning, hunger to be informed, and critical understanding of how the world works will be a major part of that positive development and will quite naturally express itself in academic accomplishment.

Deep Learning, starting in Year 7 and continuing right the way through the school, with all its many and diverse opportunities and challenges, is one of the more important ways in which ICHK commits to that second method.

Should you want to hear me explore this theme further, a recording of the session with parents can be accessed here.