St Edward’s Teaches Me A Lesson in Recognising What Matters Most
Recently I was speaking at St Edward’s school in Poole in my role as President at Dorset Chamber of Commerce and Industry. I had been asked to give out prizes at a leavers celebration event and to inspire the young people and their parents with a speech. In the end it was me who was leaving the event inspired because I had learned a valuable lesson in living important values and measuring what matters most.
For almost an hour I gave away awards to young people that had nothing to do with academic achievement. The evening was a celebration of something far more important. It was an evening recognising what made these young people good people.
I found myself giving awards for arguably the most important things in life – discipline, wisdom, courage, humanity and spirituality. To my surprise, the awards I was handing out were recognising those who had demonstrated that they were living the schools values (or virtues as St Edward’s calls them) kindness, resilience, love of learning, leadership…
The leadership at the school wanted to celebrate what made their young people special by celebrating the whole person rather than just the academic result. Most of these fantastic young people would have gone unnoticed and unrecognised at the school I attended where prizes were given purely for academic and sporting achievement.
Afterwards I spoke with Chris Farrow at the school and he explained that the leadership worked with the young people to discuss the values (or virtues) that should be recognised and rewarded. They then spent a lot of time catching children doing the RIGHT things and rewarding that behaviour with credits.
Simple and brilliant. As a result I got to hand out prizes to great young people for what really matters in life – many of whom would have been overlooked by the traditional educational system.
As an employer if you had to choose between two otherwise identical CVs but one candidate’s CV cited awards for leadership, kindness, love of learning and courage, which would you select?
I’ve been writing in The Business magazine recently about the importance of defining our values and living them in business and here I was being taught that lesson brilliantly in a school.
St Edward’s does a great job of recognising the character traits and attitudes that businesses often care more about than pure academic performance.
Should all schools define the values they think matter most and encourage their pupils to live those values by relentlessly catching people doing the right thing?
Shouldn’t all businesses do this too?
A few days later I reflected upon the fact that I was there to inspire young people but in the end I was the one who left inspired. Working with educators and young people can be so rewarding. Another life lesson learned.