Pangbourne College on failure and success

The Head of Pangbourne College Oliver Knight on why exposing children to failure and setbacks is a way to build self-confidence and agency

The modern world seems to teach us that success is easy and talented people can achieve great things with relatively little effort. It also seems to teach us that the individual is at the centre of their own life and their needs should come above all others.

The reality, as we know, is profoundly different. Success is the result of hard work and dedication, while happiness comes from being in the service of others. Our children should not be afraid of difficult things and being in situations where they think they won’t succeed. They should be able to embrace failure and see it as the bridge to future success.

We want Pangbournians to thrive in uncertain situations, to face unknown outcomes and to embrace novel experiences. The adventurous experiences at Pangbourne, driven through our adventure curriculum, don’t just mean going out into the wilderness, they mean approaching life with a set of values: Freedom, Self-reliance, Responsibility.

In the words of one of the great educational disrupters, Seymour Papert:“There is only one 21^st Century skill, and that is the ability to act intelligently when faced with a situation for which you have not been specially prepared”. Or, to put it another way, what do you do when you do not know what to do? This is the true measure of a person’s character and what we aim to foster at Pangbourne through our adventure curriculum.

We also know that we seem to be in the midst of an adolescent crisis and that this appears to be affecting girls disproportionately. While no one fully understands the reasons for this and the debate is a polarising one, our view at Pangbourne is that developing resilience and the ability to bounce-back from short-term failure is protective against some of these issues.

“Placing students in uncomfortable situations and seeing them succeed and fail is a way of helping them build a positive self-narrative”

Emotions are part of the human experience and feeling sad is a normal response. As Professor Andrea Danese, general secretary for the European Society of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry, said recently: “Facing challenges and distress is normal and important in terms of individual growth. That’s how young people develop emotional resilience – they learn coping skills in the face of many small challenges and build self-confidence about their ability to cope. The narratives we build matter”.

Our adventure curriculum, placing students in uncomfortable situations and seeing them succeed and fail, are part of Pangbourne’s response to this and our way of helping all our students build a positive self-narrative. That narrative is not based solely on success, but on errors and mistakes and on seeing how we come through these setbacks over time.

This is as true for receiving a detention as it is for falling off a high ropes course. Failure matters and is a normal part of the process of growing and learning. It is how we talk through and deal with failure that creates the narrative we hold of ourselves and our agency in the world. Our role as parents and educators is to help our children navigate through setbacks, not protect them from failing.

Pangbourne College pangbourne.com

Further reading: ISL London on the importance of developing leadership qualities