When reviewing and evaluating the ways we school children, we can hope for one of two outcomes: that things remain the same or that they change. 

If we hope for the former, it is because we are happy enough with the way things are and believe in the promise of school’s current direction of travel. In this case, we can join the sector’s priestly caste, familiarising ourselves further with the scripture and dogma of education orthodoxy and with the ‘science of learning’, interpreting and reinterpreting the tenets of established doctrine, honed, now, over the course of some 150 years, mopping up the remaining pools of shortfall, in our hunt for best practice and better ‘results’. There is a vast, lucrative industry devoted to these ends. 

If, on the other hand, we hope for change, it is because we understand that school’s current model is not, in fact, fit for purpose; that its continuation in its conventional form holds little promise; further, that perhaps, in a world already threatened by the polycrisis, it actually makes things worse. In this case, we adopt a prophetic role, joining a quest that has featured as a counterpoint to school’s mainstream narrative almost since its inception, but which, recognised alternatives such as Montessori, Waldorf, and Reggio Emilia notwithstanding, has not yet succeeded in offering a substantive counternarrative. Any such counternarrative would amount to a Kuhnian shift in paradigms, manifesting in a new ‘problem field’ and a new ‘normal science’ by which to address the problems within it. As is inevitable when supposing the potential of a new paradigm, we can, from within the confines of the old, hope, at best, to adumbrate its contours and some of its possible features. 

There will be occasion later to explore the characteristics of the current educational paradigm, but suffice to say for now that it includes a cast-iron commitment to one quality above all, which is measurability. Two further qualities subserve this commitment, that is, standardisation and commensurability. All told, they situate school in an objective world of prediction, optimisation, putative correctness, and the ‘gold standard’ of examinations. In glimpsing the new paradigm, we look, naturally, for other signs.

To say the new paradigm is ‘new’ is not to say that it is recent. In 1929, in his essay The Aims of Education, Alfred North Whitehead sketches a more organic, vital, dynamic, and experientially-informed approach to school which, a century on, has both a contemporary and an unrealised feel. In identifying ‘the first requisite for educational reform’, Whitehead incidentally identifies why reform has proved so elusive: “The first requisite for educational reform is the school as a unit, with its approved curriculum based on its own needs, and evolved by its own staff. If we fail to secure that, we simply fall from one formalism into another, from one dung hill of inert ideas into another.” The truth, of course, is that schools, even independent and international schools, have been drawn more closely into a system that obliges them to run someone else’s curriculum, based on generic needs, evolved elsewhere. By and large, school continues to excel in platforming inert ideas. 

Beyond the pressures and strictures of centralised systems (both national/supranational and paraeducational), there are other structural and pragmatic reasons why this should be the case, even if governments, accreditation agencies, and exam boards loosened their hold on what schools do and what they might become. The person entrusted with guiding a school through its operations is the Head of School, who has a tremendous amount on her or his plate, so that, even in the case of a Head sincerely committed to leading change, the day-to-day buffeting of events takes priority over deep-seated innovation. This is perennial: the urgent subsumes the important; managing subsumes envisioning. 

In these circumstances, the likelihood of systemic, let alone paradigmatic, change is vanishingly small - and so, over the years, it has proven, despite good intentions. 

Any solution to this dilemma must itself be structural and, given the nature of the problem it is addressing, not just novel but in all likelihood anomalous. And so it is, at ICHK Secondary, a school community that prides itself on its now well-established record of purposeful, effective, impactful innovation, we have taken the step of crafting a new role, separate from but consultative with the Head of School and the Leadership Team, whose remit is to continue adumbrating, sketching, and, ultimately, helping to build and consolidate the new paradigm of education that we have been developing as a school over the past decade of operations. I am privileged to be the first to assume that role. 

The role of Mission and Vision Architect (MVA) represents a deliberate structural intervention on our part, designed to hold open the space that operational necessity otherwise routinely closes. It is a position responsible not for managing the present but for stewarding the emergence of the possible; attending to those questions that the urgent rhythms of school life perpetually defer; accelerating the rate at which we might be offered a vantage point from which to continue to plot a more productive way forward. I say ‘continue’ because we have been on this path for a while now, and have made significant progress: ICHK Secondary is definitely a school unlike any other and, to their credit, our students graduate bearing the hallmarks of that difference. Yet our journey has barely begun - and, at a time of rapid change and profound disruption, the challenges facing schools only proliferate at the threshold of new social and cultural realities. 

Standing at this threshold, we suggest that the path forward will not be mapped by strategic plans or implementation frameworks. It will emerge through committed communities of practice, through schools brave enough to claim their autonomy as Whitehead envisioned, through educators willing to embrace their prophetic calling even when the outcome remains, as it must, uncertain. The Mission and Vision Architect represents our structural response to this challenge, gesturing towards a more radical transformation: the reimagining of school as a living laboratory for human flourishing in an age of intense, endemic, deepening uncertainty.