View from the Top: Bruno Shovelton on teaching prep school pupils lessons for life

View from the Top is back for 2024! And for the first instalment of the year, we’ve handed over to Bruno Shovelton, deputy head academic at Cumnor House Sussex. Below, Mr Shovelton explains why it’s so important for prep schools to offer a curriculum that promotes wonder and curiosity, and equip pupils in their final years of prep school with the skills they need to be confident learners for life...

In September 2023, Cumnor House Sussex introduced a new kind of curriculum for its Year 7 and 8. We called it ‘Kudos’, coming from the Greek word that means “giving credit for an accomplishment”.

For us, the word Kudos gets to the heart of what an education should promote, especially as pupils reach Years 7 and 8. When pupils leave prep school, they should have an internal sense of accomplishment, the result of a combination of curiosity, enthusiasm, kindness and hard work, and an appreciation of their own innate talents.

The final two years in a prep school are a huge opportunity before everything becomes about preparation for exams. Pupils should have the chance to keep hold of that childlike state of wonder and curiosity, whilst also being equipped with learning tools, habits and values for life. With the opportunities ahead, this should include all the usual applied subjects, as well as things like entrepreneurship, study skills, critical thinking and mentorship. This approach can best be summarised through a key principle: rigour in breadth.

Through our new curriculum, Kudos, Cumnor pupils are challenged at an appropriate level with subject-specific knowledge and skills, while being recognised for their talents and their particular learning profiles. This breadth of achievement is based on challenging and supporting in the right places: you can’t accurately measure the progress or full capacity of pupils just by having them sit still writing for an hour. As one of Talk Education’s previous contributors has noted, pupils should look back on their education and be able to point to explicit lessons they have learned that help them through life, rather than feel like they have just emerged from an exam-taking system.

I believe some of the best lessons are those outside of the classroom; lessons that develop responsibility, build resilience and demonstrate to pupils how to bring out the best in everyone around them, lessons that show them how to pull themselves through mistakes and setbacks, manage their attention and motivation, as well as give opportunities to lead and volunteer. One of our Year 8 pupils recently spent the morning helping in Reception; he was amazing with the children – patient, good-humoured, responsible and committed to the task. When asked about it, he said simply: “I know what it feels like not to get it”.

As the different tides of education rise again, this time with AI, we all have the responsibility to ensure that everything has its rightful place on the curriculum for children aged 11-13, and that they leave prep school confident in who they are and what they can do, determined to help those around them give their best too.