What is school really for? Rethinking the purpose of education
What is school really for? It is a philosophical question, but also a very practical one. Most of us spend a significant part of our childhood and adolescence at school, so it is reasonable to ask what that time is ultimately for — and what a good education should leave behind.
Some answers are obvious. School opens doors to university, employment and future opportunities. It develops knowledge, skills and qualifications. These are important outcomes, and many of them are measurable. Examination results can be compared, tracked and placed in league tables.
But some of the most important parts of education are much harder to measure. A sense of belonging. Confidence. Resilience. Judgement. The ability to form strong relationships, contribute to a community and understand your place in the world. There are no league tables for these things, yet they may be the qualities that matter most long after examination results have faded in significance.
That raises a more difficult question: should we give greatest weight to what can be measured, or to the parts of education that resist easy measurement? As educators, we are passionate about those wider experiences — the relationships, challenges, responsibilities and opportunities that shape a young person alongside their academic learning.
For Sedbergh Headmaster Robin Pyper, this is where the real purpose of education becomes interesting. In this conversation, he considers the balance between academic ambition and broader development, knowledge and skills, challenge and happiness, childhood and preparation for adult life. He reflects on the growing influence of AI, the importance of community and belonging, and the role schools can play in helping young people navigate uncertainty, setbacks and change.
Running through the discussion is a simple but demanding idea: that education should do more than help young people achieve strong results. It should help them understand themselves, make the most of their abilities and use those abilities positively in the lives of others.
If you had to summarise the purpose of school in a single sentence, what would it be?
For me, it is obviously much more than just helping pupils achieve outstanding exam results. That is not the only thing that we focus on here.
In a single sentence: nurturing young people to understand their position and role within the world, and to have a sense of service and improving the lives of others.
What should a young person take away from school that they will still value at the age of 40 or 50?
For me, the thing that has struck me since joining the School community in the Easter holidays is that word ‘community’, and the sense of belonging and togetherness.
I’ve had the good fortune of meeting current pupils and, obviously, current members of staff, and I’ve been really warmly welcomed into the community that way. But I’ve also met former members of staff who, it’s no surprise really given the beauty of the area, still live locally, and also, very importantly, OSs — Old Sedberghians.
I’m always struck by the lifelong friendships that have been formed and also, not just the friendships, but the deep sense of connection to this place: the physical School campus and the hills around us. That has really stood out to me.
So, in terms of 40 or 50 years down the line, it is absolutely about that sense of belonging and togetherness, and the friendship that is there.
We would also want people to reflect on their lives and think that they have lived them true to their own values and to their School’s values as well.
I think also, in this modern day, it’s about an understanding of how to be content in life. So often now, young people are driven to want more, and to do more, and to be bigger and better, and whatever else it is. Actually, it’s about being able to recognise when things are pretty good.
This afternoon is a great example. I can see out to the hills through my office windows. The sun has been shining. We’ve had some amazing rugby fixtures. We’ve welcomed visitors on site for that. We’ve got some hockey fixtures this evening under lights.
Just being able to walk around this afternoon with the sun on my back, I felt incredibly content, talking to the pupils who also felt that was a really lovely and rewarding experience.
I said this to the new joining pupils on Monday morning at Assembly. We’ve got 151 new joining pupils. That’s a significant number within our community.
What has been lovely to see is the willingness of the new joining pupils to throw themselves into all those experiences, but then also the willingness of our established pupils to welcome them in and to look out for them.
I was actually just in a boarding house before this, grabbing a quick bite to eat before coming here, and I literally heard a conversation from one Year 10 pupil to a new joining Year 10 pupil saying, “How are you finding it? Are you enjoying it? Was this afternoon good?”
That was really lovely.
Do we sometimes confuse success at school with success in exams?
Yes, very much so.
I remember quite early in my career — and some parents on the call may have heard me say this before — a very wise teacher who’d been around the block a bit said to me, “Too often, we have mistaken the value in exams for the value of schooling, and we’ve placed too much emphasis on the measurable. Actually, what we should be really working out is how to make the other stuff measurable instead.”
I think that’s really, really important for us because, whilst exam grades matter, and some parents quite rightly will pass judgement on a school based on its exam grades, it’s the bits that happen in the fringes, in the boarding houses, in the recital hall, during the drama rehearsal, on the stage, on the sports field — wherever it is — those are the bits that really matter.
Unfortunately, when there’s too much emphasis placed on exam results, those bits can be forgotten.
Ultimately, we are here to develop well-rounded individuals who are going to make a positive difference in the world. Exam results are only a very, very small part of that. It’s that holistic education that we are so good at.
Has the purpose of school changed over the last generation, or are the fundamentals still the same?
I think the fundamentals are the same.
As a school — and I recently finished Michael Raw’s excellent History of Sedbergh — “Tis the Hills That Have Stood Around Us. A History of Sedbergh School 1525–2025”. It is very, very clear that, since its foundation, this is a place which is a school and a charity, and we’re here to help people, I suppose, become better versions of themselves. That’s part of the journey.
The next part is then to send them out into the world to make other people’s lives better.
So the fundamentals certainly have not changed in that respect. I think the way that we go about that, and what is required to achieve that mission of making a positive difference to the lives of others, has changed.
For example, the rise of AI is a significant one. The World Economic Forum talks about curiosity, collaboration and creativity — some of the Cs that get bandied around — as things that are really, really important in order to harness the power of AI.
I think a school like ours is brilliantly set up. Collaboration is in everything that we do; teamwork throughout the whole School. You can see it. You can almost touch it.
Creativity: we encourage people to be creative and think differently. And curiosity, absolutely. We want our children, our pupils, to be questioning all the time and thinking of different ways of doing things.
In a world where information is available instantly, whether through the internet or AI, what should schools now be teaching young people?
There’s definitely a balance to be struck there.
Some educational models have gone very, very skills-based and almost disregarded the acquisition and retention of knowledge. I think there is still a place for learning how to learn and retaining information.
It doesn’t need to be to the same level as it was, say, in the Victorian era, where you didn’t really have readily accessible reference documents. Things have really shifted, obviously, with the tech revolution.
So there is definitely a place for making sure that people have the appropriate knowledge, but that’s no use unless skills can be used to apply that to whatever it is they do.
Those skills need to be flexible as well. They need to be applied not just within — let’s say we talk about critical thinking — a science lab. That critical thinking needs to be applied across all subjects.
But actually, let’s go beyond that and think about critical thinking on the hockey pitch or the rugby pitch, or critical thinking in terms of resolving friendship issues, or whatever it is.
How do we prepare young people for a future that none of us can accurately predict?
You sometimes hear those stats trotted out: 85% of the jobs that our children will be doing haven’t even been invented yet.
So it comes back to our focus on a values-based education, developing those skills alongside the knowledge, and also challenging our children, our pupils, to make sure that they are pushed out of their comfort zone to do different things.
Ultimately, we know as adults that life is far from straightforward, so we need them to have coping and thriving strategies in order to achieve that.
The full boarding environment is really significant because they are here all the time; they have more of it.
But also — and I think this is lovely — from my boarding house visits for tea this evening, there were three Year 11 pupils sitting with two of the tutors who were on duty that night.
It’s actually the access to different teacher personalities who will coach, mentor and support in very different styles. Again, that’s really healthy.
If you have one teacher who’s teaching most of your subjects and then you don’t have any interaction with them outside, you’re not really learning how to work with other people in the same way as if you’ve got two tutors at tea time, you’ve had six different lessons today and some sports coaching as well.
There’s great breadth there in that respect.
What difference will AI make to what young people need from their education?
If I think back to the — well, I can’t think back to the 1970s, but I’ve heard this repeated — in the 1970s, calculators came into education and people said that it would basically devalue maths forever. That would be the end of maths as we know it.
In fact, there was very little change. Calculators were incorporated into how maths was taught, but they really enhanced it.
I think we should not run scared from AI. There is some scaremongering that goes on. AI is here to stay.
If anyone has written an email on Gmail or Hotmail, the predictive text is AI doing its thing. That kind of Google search thing that gives the summary at the top: that is AI as well.
So actually, we need to accept it and embrace it. There is quite a big educational part there, which as a school we are working on.
We’re talking to a few partners about how we can actually introduce an educational model within the School.
There’s an ethical or moral bit to that as well. The way that education is set up, children can short-circuit the system and jump through tasks using AI. But ultimately, what we need to do as educators is get them to understand that that is not helping them in the long term.
What we actually want them to do is use AI to augment or facilitate, but not to do the work for them. The creative thought, the problem-solving, has to come from us.
What matters more: what pupils know, what they can do or who they become?
That is tough. I think it’s a combination of the three. All three things are really, really important.
We need to be clear as a school how we measure success, but also we need to help a young person understand what their own measures of success are.
What they can do obviously builds up to who they become, and the knowledge sits with that. So I think they’re all interconnected.
If we were, I suppose, judging former pupils on their lives to date, then we would look at who they have become. That’s always a very gratifying experience for us as teachers when we invite them back and we see them, because you can see how far they’ve come in that time.
How should schools balance academic ambition with the broader development of character?
For me, ambition is not something that is isolated to one area of school life.
Actually, we see across the School that those who are aspirational and ambitious in one area find that it transfers into other areas as well. Sometimes some pupils need reminding that these things are not mutually exclusive.
To have high aspiration and high ambition in academics will also transfer onto the sports field or into the music classroom.
That said, we need to be careful as a society about putting too much pressure on our children. Ambition is one of our core values, and I think that’s great. We would be mad not to want the best for our children and want our children to want the best for themselves.
Equally, we need to recognise that they’re still children — all of them, even those in Year 13.
What is important is that they can have moments where they don’t need to take themselves too seriously. They can just enjoy each other’s company. They can just enjoy the surroundings around us.
It’s not purely focused on more, better, faster, bigger, cleverer, whatever it is. There are those moments where actually a lot can be gained from just being content and enjoying ourselves.
What responsibilities do schools have beyond helping pupils achieve strong results?
That goes back to my initial view of education, which is around nurturing well-rounded, grounded individuals who are going to go and make a positive difference in the world.
Academic results form part of that because ultimately they open doors and opportunities. The way that society is currently set up — and I don’t think it’s going to change anytime soon — judgement is made on those.
If you get certain grades, that will allow you to get a place at university or a certain job. So that’s important, but that’s only part of it.
It’s about the character development that goes on here at School that means they can harness their skills once they get into those positions, and their influence is greater as a result.
Should education be designed primarily to open doors for the individual or to prepare young people to contribute to society?
It’s the contribution to society which is absolutely the most important thing.
That idea of service runs through everything that we do here. Those conversations that we will have both observed over these last couple of days — the older pupils looking out for the new younger pupils.
Sedbergh Gives Back last term, where we had literally hundreds of our pupils in the community improving the lives of others.
That’s our heartbeat. It’s our calling. It’s not about us. It’s about how we can support others.
I’ve had the benefit of working in four schools prior to this, and all the schools have been slightly different, but ultimately they have had a relationship with their local community.
I’ve never worked in a school where the relationship has been so strong. It feels like we are at one with the community.
The number of emails that I get on a weekly basis from members of the community telling us how impressed they are with our young people because they helped show a tourist to their Airbnb and could direct them that way, or helped someone with their bags, or whatever it is, or were just polite and pleasant — it’s really lovely.
So we talk about our core values a little bit, but actually the great pleasure for me is to be able to stand up in Assembly on a Monday morning and read out an email from a member of the public highlighting those values actually being lived out.
What are the greatest challenges facing young people today, and what part should schools play in helping them navigate them?
I think the biggest challenge — and this is where you get behaviours that feel at odds with their own values or don’t meet our expectations — is self-esteem.
If we can support pupils, and we do this very well, to develop high levels of self-esteem, my experience is that everything else falls into place.
It’s important to have the right structures here in order to do that, and there are a whole range of them.
If we start within the classroom, we have small class sizes, and that means that the teacher develops a less transactional relationship with the pupil and more of a nurturing, mentoring one. Thus, the pupil will get better care and attention.
That doesn’t mean the teacher is doing everything for them, but it means that the teacher knows the pupil better. Therefore, they know when to push and to challenge, and when to step back, and when to get an arm around and support.
It starts there in the classroom, in terms of our teaching and learning. It absolutely is in the boarding house as well.
I spoke to the School about this. It was a lovely moment on Monday where we handed out prefect ties and scarves for our new prefects for the year ahead. Whilst they have the formal recognition, the status and the title that comes with that, I said to the whole community: “Look, everyone has the potential to lead here, whether you’re in Year 9 or Year 13.”
Through leading and helping others, that develops your self-esteem. That’s the science of altruism. You feel better as a result of helping other people, which is why that is so fundamental to us.
So self-esteem is a big part.
Connected to that is social media. I made reference earlier in this conversation to this absence now of contentedness.
Social media is driving this desire to want the flashier thing or to look like that, and that chips away at self-esteem as well.
I’m pleased that the Government is taking very direct and firm action. I’m not sure that it’s going to be enough. It’s a step in the right direction, but I think more will be done.
There is also, again, a responsibility for us to try and help young people recognise what social media is doing to them.
When I have conversations with pupils about this, my question is: “Do you feel better when you come off a stint on social media?” Invariably, the answer is no. Then it begs the question: “Well, why are you doing it?”
Social media will continue to be an issue.
Other areas where I know that young people are becoming increasingly concerned, or the challenges they are facing: there’s anxiety around the climate. There is anxiety around geopolitical tensions.
That feels incredibly overwhelming to us as adults. But if you’re a 14-, 15-, 16-year-old child, then that can feel very, very hard to navigate.
So it’s about supporting them to understand the issue and then, again, encouraging them to think about ways that they could influence a change of behaviour.
What is the relationship between happiness, challenge and achievement in education?
It’s almost like the Holy Trinity.
They are inextricably linked. If you’re happy, then you’re going to be more likely to take on challenge. If you take on challenge, you’re more likely to achieve in different parts of life.
So that combination, I suppose, is a really, really healthy one to have.
We absolutely want our young people to experience challenge. Some of that will be challenge that they put upon themselves. I don’t know — pushing themselves to do an extra half an hour of prep, let’s say, or independent study; pushing themselves to go and do a few more hill sprints; pushing themselves to go and do that extra early morning music practice, whatever it might be.
We want them to challenge themselves.
We also know that they are going to face challenges that aren’t of their making. They’re going to face setbacks and disappointment, but that’s healthy because, with our support, they will develop coping and thriving strategies.
Sometimes it might be that someone isn’t selected for the team they want to be selected for, and children can react in different ways. Some children can suck it up and go, “Right, I’m going to go and train harder.” Some children might get upset or angry.
If they’re getting upset or angry, that’s the point — and this is where we’re very fortunate — where we have really good educators who can identify that, take them to one side and not tell them what to do, but get them to reflect and think about how they could possibly do things differently.
Resilience is one of our core values. Is resilience something that can be taught, or does it develop through experience?
I have a bit of an issue when people talk about character education in the sense of, “This is how we teach it,” through what I would call formal education.
Formal education is when you go into a classroom and the teacher says, “Right, today we are going to learn about this,” or, “We’re going to learn how to do this.”
I don’t think that character — and resilience would very much fall into that character bracket — can be taught in that way.
This is where you need really, really skilled educators.
Coming back to my previous point, this is where people can identify where someone might need that support to get through the challenge. But equally, they might say, “Actually, I think they’ve got that in them,” and they can step back and allow that person to find their own way.
Because once they’ve got through that challenge, they look back and they think, “Well, I did that for myself.” That has developed their resilience.
So the next time they meet a challenge, they’re going to be better off.
I would never claim that we would teach that directly. It is certainly one of our learning intentions. It’s certainly something that we want our young people to develop, but it will take every single different shape and form and direction.
It depends on that individualised experience for that pupil. That’s where a very committed, knowledgeable staff, with a very good staff-to-pupil ratio, allows for that coaching and mentoring to happen.
We talk about keeping children younger for longer. How do schools protect childhood whilst also preparing young people for the realities of adult life?
Linking back to the social media point, there is a real danger of rushing children through childhood, and we don’t want that.
We know through neuroscience that there is such a significant part played by those formative years and allowing children to be children, developing through play and understanding.
I might be talking about slightly younger pupils here, but I really believe that it extends up to those teenagers as well.
Allowing that kind of childhood experience is pretty special. You see those moments — a snowball fight, or here, which I saw quite a bit of last term, river swimming — where they can just be themselves. That’s a really magical and special thing.
Equally, we’d be really silly to keep them as children, wrap them up and protect them from everything up until the age of 18 and then say, “Right. See you later,” because then they’re not set up.
So there does need to be a bit of a balance there in managing that. But I think the pressure of society for children to grow up too quickly is a pretty dangerous one.
What role should mistakes and failure play in a young person’s education?
I think I said this to Year 9 parents on Saturday when they dropped their children off. The Year 9 pupils, the first thing they do is go up Winder, which is a really lovely thing. And the poor Year 9 parents had the pleasure of my company for an hour.
One of the things that I said was that I’ve worked in pastoral roles my whole life, and that’s the bit that really gives me the buzz: supporting others. Now it’s not just supporting pupils; it’s also supporting colleagues and, indeed, parents as well.
Through a lot of experience as a wayward 14- or 15-year-old, I know that we all make mistakes. I still make mistakes on a daily basis.
The thing when I am supporting a pupil through a challenge where they’ve made a mistake is that I will always say — and I firmly believe it — that it’s not the mistake that defines us. It’s how we respond to that mistake which is the most important thing.
Again, if we can help the young person reflect on that mistake and learn from it and become a better version of themselves, well, that mistake has actually been a really positive experience.
It’s about trying to get them to understand that, so that they don’t have a fear of failure and they’re willing to take, I suppose, good risks, for want of a better phrase.
Again, that’s what we’re set up to do. That’s what the staff body understands.
In an increasingly connected but often fragmented world, how important is a school’s role in creating community and belonging?
I actually wrote my master’s dissertation on this.
Community and that sense of belonging are the bedrock of everything that we need to achieve here.
If we’re talking about the individual teacher-pupil relationship, until you have that really strong sense of rapport, you can’t maximise that pupil’s learning. So that has to be the basis for everything.
Building trust, getting to know that young person, so that once you’ve got that, they can really flourish with support from that teacher. That is absolutely essential.
You’ve got that on a teaching and learning level. You’ve got that sense of belonging and community, and the sense of identity. The strength of identity here as a School, and also within each boarding house as well, is a really special thing.
Believing in each other is a very, very powerful mechanism for getting even better.
I think when we see the sort of events that go on throughout the year as well, there’s that sense of belonging from the parents and from the staff attending events, being part of the community. I said this to parents over the weekend: that belonging is very much about the parents being involved as well, both from a point of view of supporting their child.
We know that the best possible outcomes for a young person happen when there is a close and collaborative relationship between home and school, working very, very closely together.
Ultimately, we all want the same thing, which is the best for that child.
So there’s that part, but then there’s also the broader social element. Parents have placed a lot of trust in us and so we want them to get something from it — not just helping develop their young person into an absolutely awesome version of themselves, but actually them being able to make social links and feel connected to the School in that respect.
Gone are the days where you drop them off at the train station at the start of term and then you pick them up at the train station six weeks later. We want to encourage that connectedness.
Sometimes parents will live too far afield to come and visit us all the time, but if they can identify, with our support, those events that are actually really worth coming to — things like Carol Services, Wilson Run, those kinds of things — then they will get that.
But also, because of the way that we are now set up — the Teams call we’ve got here, for example — connecting with others, and particularly with Housemasters and Housemistresses, is much easier to do.
What do young people learn from living and working alongside people whose experiences, strengths and viewpoints differ from their own?
It is so important that we have diversity of thought, diversity of opinion, but we also have diversity of what I would call protected characteristics as well within our community.
Two fundamental British values — they’re enshrined in law and schools are required to teach them and respect them — are mutual respect and tolerance.
As we know as adults, you go out into the world of work and you are going to meet a whole spectrum of people. Having those qualities, and the ability to be tolerant and to have mutual respect — your opinion might differ, but showing that respect — is so important.
We have a very healthy pupil mix here. We have a very healthy staff mix as well. Respecting people for who they are as human beings rather than making a judgement is in our DNA, and it’s very important.
How important are relationships between pupils and adults to the success of an education?
The relationship, as I said, is at the heart of it. It is the absolute core of it.
The most rewarding moments for me as a teacher are when I catch up with former pupils from previous schools and, soon to be Sedberghians as well, I hope.
They reminisce about moments shared together, the journey, the ups and the downs, where things have either been challenging or they’ve gone really well.
It makes you realise that that is what it’s all centred around: that really close rapport and level of support.
If education is ultimately about helping young people to lead meaningful lives, what does that mean in practice?
I think it’s really about taking the opportunities for learning to happen in school.
We can have that reactive element to education where people can reflect.
If they feel good about themselves, if they have self-esteem and they feel content in themselves and they’re comfortable in their own skin, that’s when they’re going to be making that really positive difference to the lives of others.
Then that life is meaningful for them. They feel like they are adding value. That’s when you create that very magical mix within a community where everyone is looking out for each other.
The other thing that I heard the other day: I think that there’s a company in London that is set up by OSs and only employs OSs because they know the type of people that they’re going to get. They know the type of values that that person embodies, and that’s the kind of person that they want to work with.
I think that’s an amazing thing.
When people leave school, how should we judge whether their education has been successful?
It comes back to that point around making the measurable important, which is what we’ve done.
It is easy to measure exam success, and so society has done that. What is a greater challenge is making the important measurable.
So how do we define success and then try to work out how to measure it? And I’m not sure we really want to measure it.
Meeting an OS who left 20 or 30 years ago — that’s when you’re going to get a sense of whether the education has been effective, has been good, has been valuable.
I can say, hands down, having met a lot already in my very short time here, that the education we offer, that experience, is absolutely spot on for nurturing and developing the young people that we really want.
You’ve probably given the pupils a lot of advice about how to embrace a Sedbergh education. Is there anything in particular that you’ve said to them that you’d like to share?
My Monday morning Assembly was my first chance to talk to the pupil body. I spoke about Dolly Parton.
We spoke about this idea of making a positive difference to the lives of others. I spoke about the fact that Dolly Parton and her music made a really positive difference.
But the thing that I had not appreciated, and people would have picked this up reading her obituary, was that when she was growing up, her father was illiterate. He couldn’t read, couldn’t write.
Dolly Parton’s fame and fortune — she didn’t just use that for its own sake. She then started the Imagination Library, which is a charity that’s set up to provide books for free to children all around the world.
Figures vary, but one figure I read was that she, through her charity, had provided, at the time of her death, 300 million books for children around the world.
So we spoke about this concept of service to others and helping others. That is an amazing example.
I did say to the pupils that I doubt that many will be as famous or as rich as Dolly Parton, but that doesn’t really matter. It’s doing what you can with what you have which is the most important part.
If you don’t have anything, you can still make a positive difference to people’s lives. It’s very, very easy.
Thinking Together: A Sedbergh Conversation Series
Education is about far more than what happens in lessons or examination halls. This term, Sedbergh has launched Thinking Together: A Sedbergh Conversation Series, a programme of short online discussions exploring some of the fundamental questions at the heart of education.
The series brings together senior leaders from across the School to respond to parental questions and share perspectives on teaching, learning and young people’s development. The first conversation, What Is School Really For?, took place on Wednesday 9 September, exploring the purpose of education in a rapidly changing world.