From the Principal
Dear Blue Mountains Grammar School Families,
Part 2: What an Education Worth Having Looks Like at BMGS
In the last newsletter, I reflected on the recently released Future Ready Schools White Paper 2026 by ViVEDUS and the important question at the heart of the report: What is an education worth having in the age of AI? The first article focused on what parents across Australia are asking of schools. This second piece turns the question more directly towards BMGS.
The report is helpful because it gives language and data to something many educators, parents and employers have sensed for some time. The world is changing rapidly, and the model of schooling inherited from previous generations is under pressure. The question is not whether schools should continue to teach literacy, numeracy and disciplinary knowledge. They must. The question is whether that is enough.
The answer, increasingly, is no.
The ViVEDUS report notes that parents are asking for an education that develops the whole young person. In the qualitative responses, very few parents defined “an education worth having” solely in terms of examination results, university entrance, or academic achievement. Instead, parents consistently described education as something that helps children live well, adapt, think independently, contribute to society and flourish in an uncertain future.
That is an important finding because it does not diminish academic learning; rather, it situates it within a larger purpose. It suggests that parents still care about achievement, but they also want formation. They want young people who know things, but who also know what to do with what they know. They want students who can succeed in assessments but also work with others, solve problems, handle disappointment, use technology wisely, and contribute meaningfully to the world around them.
At BMGS, we are not at the forefront of every future-ready initiative. That would be neither accurate nor helpful. Schools should be careful not to pretend to have solved questions that the whole world is still trying to understand. However, I can say with confidence that we have been aware of these shifts for some time. Over the past four years, we have been deliberately positioning our school to respond to many of the same trends this report now captures.
Our Strategic Transformation Project has never been about chasing novelty. It has been about asking a more serious question: what kind of learning will best serve our students in the world they are inheriting?
This is why we have spoken so often about the importance of “yes, and”. We believe in explicit teaching and in inquiry. We believe in knowledge and in creativity. We believe in literacy and numeracy, and in design, collaboration, and problem-solving. We believe students need strong foundations and opportunities to use them in authentic, meaningful ways.
This matters because one of the great risks in education is to mistake familiarity for effectiveness. A classroom can look orderly and still not produce deep learning. A student can complete a worksheet and still not understand the concept. A school can achieve great results and still leave too many young people unprepared for the world beyond school. Equally, a classroom can look active and still lack rigour. A project can look engaging and still be intellectually thin. Innovation without substance is just activity with better marketing.
The future belongs to schools that can hold the tension.
Our Odyssey program is one example of this at BMGS. Odyssey was not designed as an alternative to explicit teaching. It was designed because we saw the need to strengthen the transition into secondary school by helping students build organisation, collaboration, inquiry, literacy, numeracy and confidence in a more connected way.
Students still need explicit teaching and structure. They still need feedback, but they also need opportunities to use what they know, to work with others, to investigate meaningful questions and to produce work that has an audience beyond the teacher’s markbook.
Our design-thinking partnerships have grown out of the same conviction. Through our engagement with educators and thinkers in Australia and internationally, including connections with design thinking networks and future-focused schools, we have continued to explore how young people learn to identify problems, understand human need, generate possibilities, test ideas and improve their work. This is not soft learning because, when done well, it is demanding learning. It requires knowledge, empathy, discipline, creativity, persistence and humility.
Project-based learning, too, is sometimes misunderstood. At its worst, it can become activity without any academic depth. At its best, it is one of the most powerful ways students learn to bring knowledge to life. A strong project does not lower expectations, but instead raises them. Students need to know something, understand something, make something, explain something and often defend something. They need to move from compliance to contribution.
This is why the false choice between “the essentials” and “future-ready learning” is so damaging. It tempts schools either to retreat into a narrow model of recall and compliance, or to drift into shallow innovation without sufficient substance. Neither will serve young people well. We need students who can read a difficult text and ask a better question. We need students who can calculate accurately and interpret data ethically. We need students who can write with precision and speak with courage. We need students who can master foundational knowledge and apply it creatively.
We also need students who can use AI wisely without outsourcing their thinking to it.
That last point may become one of the defining educational challenges of the next decade. The ViVEDUS report notes a growing parental anxiety about AI and technology, not simply as tools, but as forces that may erode the very cognitive capacities schools should be building. Parents are not merely worried that young people will cheat with AI. They are worried that young people may become dependent on it.
This is where schools need to be more thoughtful than reactive. The question is not simply, “How do we stop students using AI inappropriately?” The deeper question is, “How do we help students develop the kind of mind that can use AI wisely without being diminished by it?”
That requires more than rules. It requires the formation of attention, judgement, curiosity and intellectual courage. It requires students to experience the productive struggle of learning. It requires them to draft, fail, revise, question, test and improve. It requires them to know that speed is not the same as understanding and that having an answer is not the same as having learned.
It is possible that in the age of AI, one of the most important things a school can do is not teach students how to get answers faster, but how to become the kind of people who can ask better questions, test the answers they receive and know when something is true, wise, useful or good.
The report also points to one of the great tensions in schooling. Only 37.64% of parents believe their child’s school is effectively developing broader skills and qualities. The report rightly observes that part of the problem may be visibility. Schools often claim to value creativity, collaboration, resilience and problem-solving, but these are rarely measured, assessed or reported with the same consistency as academic achievement.
This is a serious issue for all schools, including ours.
In education, what we measure tends to become what we value. And what we do not measure, even if we claim to value it, can slowly become invisible. If a school says it values creativity but never provides students with serious opportunities to create, test, refine and present original work, then creativity remains a slogan. If a school says it values resilience but removes every struggle before it becomes productive, then resilience remains an aspiration. If a school says it values critical thinking but rewards only recall and compliance, then critical thinking remains decorative.
This is not a criticism of academic rigour. It is a defence of a richer understanding of rigour. A rigorous education does not ask students merely to remember more. It asks them to think more deeply, express themselves more clearly, wrestle with complexity, respond to feedback, develop mastery and apply what they know in meaningful ways. A rigorous education does not avoid difficulty. It helps students learn how to face difficulty with courage, skill and purpose.
This is why I keep returning to the idea that learning must become a deeper partnership between teachers, parents and students. For too long, schooling has sometimes been imagined as a hierarchy. The system sets the requirements. The school delivers the program. The teacher provides the instruction. The student receives the learning. The parent observes the outcome. That model has never fully captured the reality of good education, but it is becoming increasingly inadequate for the world ahead.
Learning is becoming a conversation.
Teachers bring professional expertise, knowledge of curriculum, understanding of pedagogy and deep care for students. Parents bring knowledge of their children, family values, encouragement, aspiration and trust. Students bring curiosity, effort, questions, personality, capacity and emerging agency. When these three voices work together, learning becomes more than a transaction. It becomes formation.
This is the thinking behind the Learning Playbooks we are developing for staff, parents, Junior School students and Senior School students. These documents will not simply be procedural guides. They will help name what we believe learning is becoming at BMGS. They will offer a shared language for how learning works, what good learners do, how teachers design powerful learning, how parents can support growth and how students can increasingly take responsibility for their own development.
In many ways, these Learning Playbooks will point us towards a future in which education is understood less as a hierarchy and more as a partnership. We look forward to sharing the Parent Playbook with families by the end of this term, and to continuing this important conversation together.
That matters because the young people in our care will not inherit a simple world. They will need strong foundations, but they will also need flexible minds. They will need knowledge, but they will also need wisdom. They will need confidence, but they will also need humility. They will need to achieve, but they will also need to contribute. They will need to be employable, but also deeply human.
The ViVEDUS report is helpful because it captures what many parents, educators and researchers are increasingly seeing. The question is no longer whether schools should change. The question is whether schools can change wisely enough to preserve what matters while developing what is now required.
At BMGS, this is the work we have been leaning into for some time. Not perfectly. Not completely. Not because we have all the answers. But because we believe our students deserve an education that does more than prepare them for the next test, the next report or the next ranking.
They deserve an education worth having.
And an education worth having will not be built by choosing between the essentials and the future. It will be built by having the courage to say yes to both.
Warm regards
Steven Coote
Principal
This document has been reviewed for spelling and grammar. Please note that as such, it may identify some content as being generated by AI.