The culture we create in our school and classrooms is a safe place for children and adults to experiment and to fail fast and safely. By focusing on the learning process rather than simply the outcome, children must have the courage to put forwards their ideas, try them out and learn from what doesn’t work. They must be certain that no adult or child in their class ‘team’ will make them feel ashamed of their ideas or efforts.

We teach children that failure is part of the learning process and should be expected along the way. If children are comfortable to, we share learning from the mistakes we’ve made along the way and accept that learning is more like the second picture than the first.

We live in a fast-changing world of VUCA (volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity). Children will need to be agile in their problem-solving approaches, be able to adapt and change at short notice and be comfortable with complexity.

We also model to children how to give and receive kind, specific and helpful feedback. Each year, children are shown the ‘Austin’s Butterfly’ video which exemplifies how we can improve by listening to feedback. We discuss the video and talk about how we can apply the principles to our learning in different subjects.