In Conversation with Lord David Puttnam

What skills do young people need to thrive in today’s complex world?

Lord David Puttnam speaks to INSIGHTS on cultivating a personal and creative identity, the likely impact of AI on education, and why schools need to focus on individual well-being in preparing young people for an increasingly uncertain future.

David is the Chair of Nord Anglia’s Education Advisory Board, which provides external perspectives to challenge and enhance the organisation's educational offering across its global family of schools.

We’re living in uncertain times. What are the skills and mindsets that young people need to navigate today’s world?

It sounds obvious to cite ‘resilience’, but there may never have been the need for a more crucial peacetime quality.

I think schools are developing a greater awareness of the struggles a lot of children are going through, and the importance of finding the most appropriate and empathetic response. I believe that getting this right will prove a key differentiator among schools in the future.

As adults, we are learning all the time. For example, what I found most fascinating about the Netflix series Adolescence was that emojis were being used by young people as a language. I’ve yet to meet an adult who can honestly claim to have understood that.

Unless we understand the nature of this kind of ‘trigger’, how can we discuss, let alone cope, with the ramifications of it?

The strategies schools deploy in helping young people navigate what can be an incredibly difficult period of their lives have everything to do with how successful they are at managing it.

We are trying to help them answer the existential question—‘who am I?’ 

Did you have a ‘who am I?’ moment?

I teach around fifty to sixty seminars a year to aspiring filmmakers, and the most important thing I try to encourage is a better understanding of their own identity.

In doing that, I talk a fair bit about the ups and downs of my own journey.

I try to explain that the only raw material a storyteller starts with is their own lived experience—you’d be amazed how many would-be filmmakers are surprised by that!

I was always an avid filmgoer, and at fifteen I went to see a movie called East of Eden starring James Dean. That film allowed me access to any number of the complexities that I’d been hiding within myself. For example, I adored my father, but as I hadn’t really met him until I was almost five it had become, in some respects, a complicated relationship.

The film contains a line: ‘A man has a choice, and it's his choices that make him a man.’

Looking back, I was only suffering the anxieties of just about every teenager of my generation, but I believe my development began seventy years ago in realising that, yeah, I actually do have choices in who I want to be. And it happened at the movies!

What are some of the biggest shifts you’ve seen in education, and what do they mean for schools?

I think schools and their teachers are being asked to come up with answers to quite an extraordinary range of issues. They are being required to play a role in the evolution of a society that’s more complex and profound than any single generation has experienced in the past.

It’s no longer about cramming knowledge into people's minds, and getting students through maths exams, or teaching them to write intelligibly. It’s far more about how to develop as human beings at a time when we may be an endangered species.

A few months ago, I was talking to the head of one of Nord Anglia’s secondary schools in Bangkok about how she feels AI will affect teaching and learning, and she offered what I thought was an extraordinary insight: “I can’t view them as a cohort anymore. Each one is an individual, and I need to take the time to know each one of them that much better.”

AI offers us the opportunity to be more insightful about every student as an individual, each of their educational needs, and as a result offer them the possibility of an improved outcome. It's a little like laser surgery. You can be that much more precise about what every child needs, and where their individual problems and opportunities lie.

How do you see AI affecting future generations?

AI throws up a lot of genuinely complicated issues.

If we’re smart, we should learn a very big lesson from the development of social media, where we kind of assumed things would work out okay, but of course, in the end, that wasn’t the case. 

It’s been hard work sorting out the wheat from the chaff in interpreting the various impacts social media has on the lives and values of our students.

One of the first things I ever helped organise at Nord Anglia was a speech to our Principals by Baroness Beeban Kidron regarding the impact of unregulated social media on young people’s emotional development. As an audience I think we were polite and quite receptive, but evidence suggests that in hindsight we were—like everyone else—very complacent.

I’d be tremendously worried were educators to become similarly complacent about AI.

Without doubt it’s a technology that has the capacity to be very helpful. I use it a little, mainly to help simplify or streamline my thinking. The results are often surprising and can be invaluable, but it only becomes really useful if you ask exactly the right questions. It’s the quality of the input that creates added value.

As a filmmaker, how do you see the role of schools in unlocking creativity for students’ development? 

I sincerely believe that every child has an innate ability to develop his or her imagination.

What we're not so good at is finding where that imagination lies, and how best to stimulate it. 

In Helen Lewis' book The Genius Myth, she makes a really important point: by attributing creativity to a relatively small group of ‘geniuses’ we’re unhelpfully separating them out from the expectations of most of us in society. These iconic people—Mozart, Picasso, or Chaplin—who we venerate as geniuses are also, through hard work and commitment, very, very good at pursuing their craft extraordinarily well.

They are exceptional, but I think we let ourselves off the hook by regarding them as utterly unique.

My own experience is that you get a run of around a dozen years during which you can develop and come to really trust your creative instincts, where you’re able to absorb lessons from those doing the best innovative work and know what energy levels you need to compete. In many respects it equates to a form of athleticism.

If you accept that there is this ‘thing’, let’s call it a talent, how do we set about ensuring that every child has a moment at which they're introduced to the stimulus that might just unlock that talent?

So, schools should focus on uncovering and developing passions. But how do we find creative ways to get that passion to appear?

There is no one answer, and a great deal of it must come down to parents.

We should encourage parents to look at the possibilities offered by a rather more holistic view of their child’s future. One that can include tech but is not just tech, nor is it simply about securing their futures by urging them into investment banking!

What parents really ought to be thinking about is helping unlock their child’s passion, because it’s through pursuing their passion that a child can become extraordinary—and probably a great deal happier.

How you give people access to things they can turn into lifetime fulfillment, I’m not sure; but I am certain that if you love something you're likely to be good at it, and you're good at it you've got a better than even chance of enjoying a fairly satisfying life.

I’m lucky to have enjoyed several conversations with the Principal at Nord Anglia in Pattaya.

She is enormously impressive and told me that she spends an overwhelming amount of her time meeting and talking to parents, on and off site, about the potential of their children; really getting to know them. She finds that by getting closer to the parents she is able to do a better job of connecting them with her colleagues, and the needs of her students. 

You’re the founding Chair of Nord Anglia’s Education Advisory Board. In what ways has its focus developed?

As an EAB, whenever we collectively focus on an issue—say metacognition, professional development, safeguarding—the results we achieve tend to be better and more lasting than we ever anticipated. 

Most recently, in terms of safeguarding, I think we've made a real difference. The arrival of Sir Peter (Wanless) offers us an even greater focus to our safeguarding responsibilities, along with new insights into the whole area of well-being. Peter’s role is to act as an independent assessor of how well we're doing. And it’s vital that he is thoroughly independent.

Similarly, we on the EAB have always been encouraged to be wholly independent. Andrew Fitzmaurice, Nord Anglia’s CEO, has been brilliant at ensuring that we retain that independence. 

But I'm very keen we don’t ‘spin our wheels’ in areas where we will never see tangible results from our efforts.

What are you most proud of in your own career?

It's very simple: the National Teaching Awards. I feel I did a lot of good work at the Department of Education for five years in helping the teaching profession to both re-evaluate itself and command the respect it deserves.

The awards helped recognise and dignify the profession. The other thing they did was help bust through the ridiculous notion that all teachers are the same—that a teacher is a teacher is a teacher. In truth there are great teachers, good teachers, and less good teachers.

It made total sense to identify who the very best teachers were and to celebrate them; to find out what might be the secret source that lay behind their success and hopefully emulate and aspire to it.

Read more from INSIGHTS: When children have all the information a click away, does having knowledge matter?