Before Roehampton I was a teacher, including three years as a head teacher. But the job I do now I love. There are a number of different strands to it. A big part of it is training new teachers, but I get pulled into other things too, and a lot of my work over the last few years has been about curriculum development.

That started back in 2012, as England was changing its national curriculum, and the biggest change was the shift from ICT to computing That work then took me into curriculum development in other countries too, and I’ve had the genuine pleasure of working with education ministries in some wonderfully exotic places, helping them decide what they want their school curriculum to be, what they want the children in their schools to learn.

The starting point for almost all of that work is the same question: what does a country see as the purpose of its curriculum, the purpose of its whole school system? It’s worth pausing on that yourselves for a moment. What do you think the purpose of education should be? What is schooling actually for?

The work I did in Vietnam made this very clear. Across Vietnam, education is seen as being about securing the prosperity of the nation. It isn’t so much about each child reaching their own individual potential as it is about the country as a whole doing as well as it possibly can. A lot of my more recent work has been in Bhutan, the Himalayan kingdom, a small country, about the size of Switzerland, with only a million people. There, not just education but the whole constitution prioritises this idea of gross national happiness. Education in Bhutan is about making a happy people, alongside passing on the core principles of Buddhist culture and the country’s values and beliefs.

So what about us? What’s the purpose of the curriculum here in England? There’s legislation for this. The 2002 Education Act says a school’s curriculum must be broad and balanced, and must promote the spiritual, moral, cultural, mental and physical development of pupils at the school and of society. So there’s a purpose here that goes beyond the school gates. But the Act also says the curriculum should prepare young people for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences of later life. So here in England, the purpose of school is explicitly about what comes next, about preparation for the next stage.

As you leave Crossfields and move into whatever comes next for you, I hope you can look back on your time here and see it as exactly that: preparation. But it’s worth thinking harder about what the best preparation actually looks like. For a long time, this has meant passing on the best of one generation to the next, introducing young people to the best that has been thought and said. I think school should certainly still do that. But I suspect there’s more to it than that now, because the pace of technological, environmental and cultural change is so quick that the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences ahead of you may look quite different from those your parents had, or that my generation had. And perhaps the best way to prepare you for that isn’t simply to hand on the best of our past.

So what does matter? What are the most important things you learn at school? This is an exercise we do with our new trainee teachers, asking them to work out what really matters most. It’s worth your pausing on it too. What’s the one thing, or perhaps the two things, that matter most from your time at school?

Two things make it onto my own list. The first is reading. You all learned to read years ago, I know, but stop and think how remarkable a skill that is, because it’s the skill that unlocks all the others. Once you can read, and as long as you’re sufficiently motivated, as long as you’re curious about the thing in front of you, as long as you’ve got access to books or to text online, you can teach yourself pretty much anything. You don’t need someone else to teach you. So that’s my first item: school must teach children to read, and in doing so it hands you the key to teaching yourself everything else.

The second is character, the sort of person you are. One of the things school is genuinely very good at is teaching you how to be a decent human being, how not to be an idiot, how to be the sort of person other people want to spend time with, can rely on, and make friends with. A lot of my trainee teachers worry enormously about managing the behaviour of their class, about how to get thirty children to sit still and behave so that they can get on and teach the computing, or whatever the subject happens to be. I don’t think that’s quite the right way to see it. I think the thing we teach that matters most isn’t really the subject content at all. It’s that sense of self-discipline, of decency, of knowing how to behave.

Another exercise we do with our trainee teachers, fairly early in the course, is to ask them what they remember from their own time at school. You’ve all just been through this very recently, so you’ll have plenty to say: the reading, the getting on with people, and all the rest of the content too, the science, the maths, the PE, the art, so much skill and knowledge picked up along the way. But our trainees tend to be quite a bit older than you, some in their early twenties, many older still, coming to teaching as a second career, and when we ask them what they remember about school, the answers are rather different.

Look around you now, at the people sitting with you, and ask yourselves the same question. What will you actually remember of your time here? I hope some of it will be the brilliant teaching you’ve had in lessons. But if you’re anything like my trainees, what you’ll remember won’t mostly be the curriculum content. It’ll be the trips you went on, the shows you put on, perhaps the matches you won, the odd thing that happened one lesson that nobody saw coming. The things that were different from the ordinary run of days. The things that make ripples all the way down the stream of a life. Some of you will have seen Pixar’s Inside Out, with its core memories. What will your own core memories of Crossfields turn out to be? Take a moment now to notice.

This is a point of transition for you, and I hope you all have a thoroughly good summer, and make the most of the gap between this phase of life and whatever comes next. But I don’t think you should stop learning, just because you’re leaving school. Too often in my line of work we talk about education as though it’s a thing school does to you. It isn’t. Yes, it happens in the classroom, in the library, at school. But it happens in so much of the rest of life too, and as you think about how to prepare for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences ahead, one of the key things will be a willingness to keep learning for yourself.

From here on, you’ll take increasing charge of your own education. Rather than it being a thing teachers do for you, it becomes, gradually, a thing you do for yourself. That’s been one of the real gifts of my own schooling: being shown that I could teach myself things. We had Thursday afternoons set aside for independent projects, where we chose something we wanted to learn about ourselves. I went off to the local library and realised I could teach myself things there, and that habit of taking responsibility for my own learning, and reading in libraries, only grew from that point on.

There are so many ways to do this now. Libraries still matter. Reading still matters. Wikipedia is a genuinely remarkable resource for this kind of thing. And, of course, so are the generative AI tools, the chatbots. I don’t know what your own view of these has been so far. But if you use them in a way that gets them to explain things to you, to teach you things, rather than simply to do the work for you, they can be a far richer and more meaningful way in than just outsourcing the task, which we’d all rather you didn’t.

And that brings me to the future you’re stepping into, one in which generative AI may play an even bigger part than it has over the last four years or so, which is roughly how long it’s been around in this form. Many of us think the world of work is going to look quite different, because the kind of work you can do just sitting at a computer typing, or even sitting in a Teams call talking, is exactly the kind of work AI systems are becoming rather good at.

I don’t think that’s cause for despair. I think it’s a genuinely interesting invitation to work out what actually matters as we move into that kind of future. I’ll come back to my work in Bhutan. The King there has said every pupil in the country should learn about AI, so part of my project was helping teachers decide what that ought to mean for their digital technology curriculum. But it was never only about how the technology works or what you can do with it. It was also about returning to the things that make us happy, that make us fulfilled, that allow us to flourish in what may turn out to be quite a different world.

I think those things include curiosity, a real desire to find things out. A willingness to make things, to create things that are new and different, and to take genuine delight in that craft of making, in showing what you’ve made to others, in sharing it. I think they also include courage, and character, and compassion. These are things AI may, in time, learn to imitate. But they’re things where you can still do something genuinely distinctive, genuinely different from anything an AI is doing on your behalf.

So let me draw this together. As you move from Crossfields into the next phase of your life, I’d point you to just a few things. What Crossfields has really given you, in terms of preparing you for the opportunities, responsibilities and experiences ahead: that’s reading, and it’s getting on well with other people. What you’ll actually remember from your time here, alongside everything you’ve learned. Taking that bit more responsibility for your own learning and your own education, as the role of school and of your teachers gradually recedes. And, underneath all of it, working out what it means to be a good human being in this remarkable, and genuinely exciting, world.

Remarks at senior prize giving, Crossfields School, Reading