But schools are not, broadly speaking, designed for the curious. They are built on rigid ideas and inflexible expectations. Lessons are short. Specifications are prescriptive; creativity and exploration are thoroughly stifled. Factor in league tables and increasing expectations of teachers and you have a recipe for rote learning and box-ticking your way through an education. The effect on the pupils is profound. “Do we need to know this?” “Will this come up in the exam?” I field these questions more frequently now than when I began my career. Some people might consider this a frugal use of time and energy, strategic perhaps, but I think that would be short-sighted. It is, I fear, a mark that curiosity is dying.

The outlook is not entirely bleak, though that might be the picture I have been painting. What drew me to work at Worksop College was the holistic educational model, one which encourages pupils to be curious about themselves, to explore their passions and find their academic, sporting and creative identities. If we can build on this and create more room for curiosity, then we are making progress in our mission to build a future society of young people prepared to embrace the uncertain, question the unanswered, and do so, hopefully, with enjoyment.

This is what has made me so excited to launch the Electives Programme this year. It is, at its core, designed to enable students to explore ideas and concepts they would never have otherwise encountered. The mathematicians can learn about Music across Borders, the athletes can learn about Greek Vase Painting, the artists can learn about the History of America in the form of Five Broadway Musicals. In designing a programme that is unexamined and unbound by the specifications of their three subject choices, pupils can now learn about anything at all and do so because it is fun and interesting, not because it is “necessary.”

Reflecting a few weeks into the First Elective Series, I have been pleasantly surprised with just how well our Teaching and Sixth Form community have embraced the opportunity. Staff have been willing to create short courses in their own areas of interest and give up their unstructured time to deliver these (several staff even volunteering to deliver more than was asked of them because they see its value). When I stepped into the Sport Psychology Elective and was faced with forty students, some of whom I had never seen engage with the super-curriculum, I felt a little swell of pride. Then I heard them ask questions like “What is it about a Manager’s personality that makes them successful? Can I learn to be a top leader?” and I realised the Elective programme was reaching the right people in the right way. It was far more satisfying a question to hear than any I have fielded about exams, in any case. Sometimes we just need to be given the opportunity to be curious and we might find ourselves asking more questions than we realised we wanted answering. I am proud of the way our school has sought to achieve this, to engage students in the process of learning for the love of learning.

There are more exciting Electives to come. I look forward to seeing how pupils embrace them and how they ignite their curiosity further. I am especially eager to see how our students mature through their final years of their school career and step into a world where their curiosity will lead them, in its wonderful meandering way, to new opportunities. I have always enjoyed this quote from Walt Disney: "We keep moving forward, opening new doors, and doing new things, because we're curious and curiosity keeps leading us down new paths."

In the meantime, I look forward to next term, when I’ll be Exploring Oceans and learning Japanese.

Mr David Jordan
Head of Sixth Form