Children who lack resilience have never learned the value of failure

Bryan Padrick, Vice Principal and Director of Studies at independent all-ability LVS Ascot, discusses why his school views resilience as a fundamental requirement for human progress and success...

A new educational buzzword has appeared – ‘resilience’ – and I fear it will suffer the common, expected fate of all buzzwords: here today, gone tomorrow, replaced with the latest educational focus or fad. However, resilience is not a mere fad, a box to tick on the way to earning an ‘excellent’ or ‘outstanding’ or whatever the next superior grading mark from ISI or Ofsted might be. Resilience is not equivalent to raising self-esteem, identifying trigger warnings or arranging beanbags kinaesthetically during quiet reading time. No. Resilience is far more: resilience is a fundamental requirement for human progress and success. If that claim appears a bit grand, I challenge anyone to dispute the fact that without the ability to bounce back from adversity, to learn from mistakes – without the sense of robustness these lessons instil – at the very least human history would look a lot different.

In many ways, it is a shame resilience has had to become an educational buzzword for its necessity to be recognised. As recently as a decade or so ago it was just a part of life. Fell off your bike? You shed a few tears, but climbed back on. Argued with your friends? You sorted the issue or got new ones. Failed a maths exam? Hopefully you learned from your mistakes and improved next time. Didn’t improve? Well, maybe maths wasn’t for you. However, for a number of (mostly well-intentioned) reasons, this capacity has been gradually educated out of students and their parents. A fear of upsetting someone’s self-esteem or appearing to be too critical, coupled with the desire to wrap children in metaphorical cotton wool to prevent them from needing to bounce back in the first place, has produced a generation of students who lack resilience. They have never learned the value of failure because they have never been allowed to fail.

Resilience is intimately connected to failure and for the former to be present, the latter must be allowed and even encouraged. This is where resilience encounters one of its greatest challenges: schools, and parents, who refuse to allow children to fail. Ones that do not allow young people to slip and fall, to make mistakes – to, in short, experience the very conditions which enable resilience to flourish. No longer learned through experience, resilience must be taught. To do that, one must be allowed – encouraged, even – to take risks.

Now, as I explained in a recent assembly, this encouragement to take risks is not permission to do stupid things: there is nothing positive about drink driving, taking dangerous drugs or attempting to shoot an apple off your best friend’s head with an air rifle. But it doesn’t take long to find examples of risk takers without whom our world would be a far less colourful and exciting place – a world without whom comfortable satisfaction with the status quo is preferable to challenging ourselves to progress, improve and change.

At LVS Ascot, we have convened a working party composed of subject teachers, department heads, pastoral staff and students to address these issues and identify ways to educate resilience back into children. The whole school, cross-curricular nature of the party is integral to its success: the teaching staff cannot insist on positive failure if the pastoral staff are not supportive, and the students need to understand the advantages of being pushed outside their comfort zones. The initial challenge has been identifying the need to address our own difficult relationships with this topic. As educators and parents we have been lulled into discouraging risk-taking and failure and by doing so have diminished resilience, in both our students and ourselves, sometimes without even knowing it. Disagree? I’m sure most of us have been a part of a conversation where someone has confessed that, though they had been allowed to do X, Y or Z as a child, because of the state of the world today they would never let their children to do the same.

Whether changes in the state of the world are real or perceived is a topic for another time, but the point I am making is simple: addressing the issues preventing resilience requires a cultural shift amongst staff, students and parents. It is a challenge and a risk, certainly, but one we must be willing to take and one we must be willing to model. There should be no illusion that it is going to be easy, but if there is one lesson we can already learn from resilience, it is that worthy outcomes rarely are.

LVS Ascot is a co-educational, independent, all-ability school for children aged 4 to 18. The school’s mission is to inspire independence. Character education is a key aspect to LVS Ascot life, starting with the Infant & Junior School where pupils from Reception to Year 6 study towards a diploma based on five sets of learning values and skills. These are risk taking and resilience, collaboration and self-confidence, initiative and independence, curiosity and creativity, and empathy and reflection. 

www.lvs.ascot.sch.uk

This article first appeared in Which London School? & the South-East 2019/20, which can be read below: