I don’t expect you to know who Sir Anthony Seldon is, but I am going to give you a pen portrait anyway. I happen to have known him for quite a while now, as he was educated at one of the schools I taught at (Tonbridge School in Kent) and also taught there himself. Now listen carefully to this, because it is pretty amazing. He then went to Oxford University and went on to a career in education, including spells as Head Master of Brighton College and Wellington College, and Vice Chancellor of Buckingham University, the UK’s first private university.
Since then, and before, he has become a bit of an icon in the world of education, honorary historical adviser to Number 10 Downing Street, writing in national newspapers, appearing on television, contributing to the Times Education Commission. He has been a Board member of the Royal Shakespeare Company, a Fellow of the Royal Historical Society, also of the Royal Society of the Arts, also of King’s College London. He co-founded the Centre for Contemporary British History, and also an educational initiative called Action for Happiness; and was executive producer of the film version of Journey’s End. In his spare time, he has written 45 books, most notably his biographies of the last six Prime Ministers. He is reputed to have a driver and several PAs, covering all 24 hours of the day – who knows if that last bit is true, but certainly – and extraordinarily – he replies to most texts within minutes. Anthony was knighted in 2014 for his services to education and modern political history. He is, quite simply, one of the country’s highest possible achievers.
In August, just after A Levels came out, Seldon wrote an article in the Times aimed at pupils who had failed to get into university. In it, he revealed, just as remarkably, that his own grades at A Level had been CEE. What he wrote next was interesting. He said you had three options. The first was to go into Clearing with an open mind – this means that you end up at a different university to the one imagined, often doing a different course to the one you had hoped for; it may, he said, be the making of you. The second was to go for an apprenticeship. It may be that university is not your own best bet, and many have been successful by going straight from school into work. The third, and the one he in fact took, was to retake your A Levels. He wrote this:
“If you re-sit your A Levels with the right attitude and approach, you may realise how you could have done better, and end up with stronger results. Resitting will often be a successful and satisfying experience, but remember: attitude is all. You will know what you are up against.”
Presumably he did ok second time around, as he got into Oxford University!
So, what should be taken from this story? Well, you can take all sorts of things. If you like, you can take away that it really does not matter what you get in your A Levels, as you can be successful later anyway. And to some extent that is true. But I don’t think Anthony Seldon would pick out this as the moral of his story – it must have been pretty awful to open that envelope (as you did in those days) to find CEE written on it; and I certainly do not think he’d recommend it as a preferred course of action. What he would recommend is knowing this: attitude is everything. And, I think, deep down, we all know that. We can see it everywhere. In the holidays, I also listened to a podcast called Diary of a CEO (some of you will know it) with Steven Bartlett interviewing Dr Joe Dispenza. Dispenza, like Seldon, believes in the extreme power of the mind to overcome all setbacks. Both, interestingly, are into meditation as a way of harnessing that mental strength. Or you can look at the Spanish women’s football team winning the World Cup despite, reputedly, falling out spectacularly with their manager and losing 12 of their best players. Presumably, again, the mind kicked in as they faced adversity, determined to prove the doubters wrong – and obviously since then, they have had further battles to face. The interesting thing for today, and I will come back to it later in the assembly, is that it often takes adversity to find the levels of attitude needed to succeed beyond all expectation.
You boys will mostly not have faced extreme difficulty in your lives yet; some of you will, and you will already be deciding how to respond, but most will not. Which, in some ways, puts you at a disadvantage over those who have. “Necessity is the mother of invention” is a proverb attributed most often to Plato; and is a similar thought.
Ultimately, A Levels are a competitive exam; and winning any form of competition involves desire, hard work, determination and grit. Perhaps it took Sir Anthony Seldon a severe setback to develop that grit. For most of you, you will need to find a way to do so yourselves. So my message for this year is to find a way to develop, and enjoy, academic grit. You won’t regret it!