Everyone at Millfield School in Somerset adheres to the school’s values – to be disruptors, to be curious, to be authentic, to be kind and to be brilliant. Gavin Horgan, the headmaster, is no exception. Indeed, he sets out to be a disruptive force in education, arguing that curiosity, creativity and passion have been side-lined in a results-led culture
Nationally dispensing with GCSEs is Gavin’s immediate disruptive aim. He questions the purpose of a national assessment at 16, when “one third of children are branded failures for not passing GCSE English or Maths. That’s really wrong, it’s really sad,” he says.
Gavin’s view is that GCSEs are being used to measure schools: “If measuring a child’s intelligence is at issue, the CAT4 tests do that online in an hour,” he says.
“Children need the opportunity to acquire functional, lifelong skills in English and Maths”, he says, yet he believes that GCSE English “definitely doesn’t assess the English skills that you need for the rest of your life”.
“If measuring a child’s intelligence is at issue, the CAT4 tests do that online in an hour.”
He believes that GCSEs rely on knowledge recall and an immediate understanding of information in written form – a model of assessment that is particularly alienating for the 40 per cent of students with dyslexia at Millfield. In fact, Gavin says, having this number of dyslexic students gives Millfield a certain edge over other schools, because “Dyslexic people have had to work out their own route around any given problem. Such divergent thinking fosters hugely valuable creative skills. Our neuro-diversity is what makes us special.”
There are dyslexic students at Millfield who have been told by other schools that they will never access GCSE English and Maths. Millfield proves otherwise. As an alternative to the emphasis on knowledge recall at GCSE, Gavin advocates teaching children lifelong skills, particularly those suited to the contemporary workplace.
Networking is the first skill on his list he sees as crucial to the formation of effective project groups, which are fundamental to so many working environments. In this context, he suggests that there are very few things he can solve by himself.
His skill is to find someone who can: “I have the world’s biggest Black Book on my phone, full of people who can solve problems when they arise. I’m a networking tart!”
‘If children are finding things tough, sometimes we say to them, yes, it’s tough.’
Additionally, Gavin wants to teach children the ability to be different people at different times, able to fulfil new roles in project groups as the need arises. He also recognises hard work as a skill. There are no soft options: “If children are finding things tough, sometimes we say to them, yes it’s tough – but get on with it!” Hardworking people get lucky is his view.
Start a dialogue
Curiosity has a crucial role to play in Gavin’s beliefs about education. So much so that his 11-year-old son spent the summer term – boarding for the first time – in Kenya. Gavin describes his son’s experience as a gem: “The sense of curiosity that we can see exploding in him is phenomenal. He told us about roaming the school site with a friend, and picking twenty prickly pears, and eating them all, and he thought that was amazing!” It’s that type of curiosity that Gavin wants to see in his students and staff at Millfield.
This is his mantra: “If a teacher asks a child a question, that teacher should be curious about the answer. If in response to the child’s answer the teacher just says yes and moves on, then we’re going about education in the wrong way. We shouldn’t use questions to check up on children, but to start a dialogue with them.”
Gavin believes that the lack of curiosity in the classroom has its roots in the National Strategies 1997-2011, when the DfE wanted to nail down what children were doing and, in doing so, gradually reduced everything in education into a series of functions.
In fact, because they were so caught up in delivering curriculum models under the National Strategies umbrella, Gavin feels that “being a teacher became like being a plumber: someone who was just delivering a series of parts and connecting them together.”
“The Brilliance Curriculum is being launched at Millfield this autumn.”
Of course, he acknowledges the vital importance of plumbers, but says that’s not why teachers go into teaching. He wants every teacher to be curious, creative and passionate – qualities of true disruptors.
Brilliance
The Brilliance Curriculum, a new model for learning in place of the GCSE programme, is being launched at Millfield this autumn. It has been developed by teachers for children from 3-18 years old, prioritising Gavin’s core values of curiosity, creativity and employability.
Group projects addressing children’s passions and interests will map tangible skills. Children will experience achievement through formative – and gritty – assessment whilst working through a particular challenge.
The curriculum has a skills-based approach which recognises Bloom’s Taxonomy where the ability to remember, understand, apply, analyse, evaluate and create demonstrates a route of progression in learning. Dispensing with GCSEs in favour of a truly independent curriculum could seem risky, but Gavin insists that it’s exciting.
He explains: “I’m very lucky to be the head of an independent school where people trust me. It’s the stuff that happens around the edges of formal education that makes for the development of children. Post-pandemic, parents now realise that more than ever before. And they want children to be happy.
“It’s the stuff that happens around the edges of formal education that makes for the development of children.”
“What I’m proposing is that we will deliver the Brilliance curriculum in place of GCSE, and in three years’ time we will see students getting better A-Level results and students who are happier and more successful when they leave us. That will be the best evaluation of our model.”
Authenticity
Gavin’s commitment to living by Millfield’s core values is a strong indicator of his own authenticity. He defines being authentic as “allowing other people to be authentic too, giving people space to be who they want to be without being judged for that”. When the student community represents 70 different nationalities – as at Millfield – finding credible space to be an individual within a unified whole is crucial. Everyone is recognised and applauded for who they are.
It is partly Millfield’s cultural and economic diversity that encourages authenticity. The school gives away £8.5 million in bursaries every year, funded from fee income. Effectively, wealthy families pay for those with less income to attend the school.
Gavin’s ambition is to raise £100 million in bursary funds by 2035 in order to promote greater diversity within the student body still further.
‘Calling out’
It can be difficult to uphold authenticity on social media. Standing up to cancel culture, Gavin is clear that “I should be able to say things that you maybe disagree with but which we can have a discussion about. And then we can agree to be friends and have a different conversation. I fear that, too often, if someone disagrees with you on social media about one thing, then they want to disagree with you about absolutely everything.”
“I’m a white bloke, I was educated at Oxford…I don’t fit into a box with suffering written on it.”
Nevertheless, Gavin wants his students to recognise that using their voice and “calling out” on subjects of importance to them can make the world a better place. Millfield has encouraged its students to react to climate change activism, Black Lives Matter and Everyone’s Invited with legitimate questioning and some tough but accurate discussions. Gavin believes that there has to be an appreciation that calling out against suffering and injustice can be done without shared experience and still be authentic. Gavin’s own rationale is down-to-earth.
“Look, I’m a white bloke, I was educated at Oxford and I’m headmaster at Millfield; I don’t fi t into a box with suffering written on it. But I can use my voice, and my students can use their voices, to improve outcomes for people who have suffered in a way that I do not understand. I will be an ally, an up-stander, to those who suffer.”
Muscular kindness
There is a bracing quality about Gavin which is best described by his definition of kindness: “I talk about kindness as being quite a muscle thing.” Gavin goes further with his definition: “Kindness is your mate telling you that you’ve screwed up and that you need to go back and sort things out, and holding you to account until you do.”
He believes kindness is about more than sharing your sweets; kindness at Millfield, as Gavin defines it, is something solid to hang on to and makes students and colleagues alike into friends for life. Gavin is proud of Millfield’s position as a vivid and vital element of the wider Somerset scene, where twelve members of staff are governors in local schools.
Gavin’s aim is not to sit above the town of Street where Millfield is located but to live alongside it. His has a relaxed and personable approach to community life: “I know a lot of people who just walk past the gates – and I think they know me!”
“Gavin is proud of Millfield’s position as a vivid and vital element of the wider Somerset scene.”
During the pandemic, Millfield’s commitment to kindness meant that the school stepped up. They delivered every medical prescription which needed delivering across the whole region. In parallel, Gavin was worried about what lockdown meant for children on free school meals. So Millfield set up and funded a programme to provide an entire week’s food for every family who had a free school meal entitlement in the town.
As the programme caught on, these food hampers – delivered by Millfield staff – were feeding over a thousand people a week. That was kindness through hard graft and a willingness to embrace a grittier side of life.
Transforming lives
Gavin closes our conversation with an uplifting story which illustrates his faith in discovering brilliance in every child. “We have had one student here who was actually registered homeless. She was sofa-surfing when she came to me. Tessa Munt, a local councillor and previously MP for Wells, saw the girl’s qualities at a schools’ leadership event. She asked if I would help. And I said yes. We offered her a place in boarding. She’s now off to study medicine. There’s proof for you that education transforms lives.”
This article was first published in the latest print edition of School Management Plus, out now.