In this section

Most schools underestimate the potential of their students in many aspects of their lives. We need to be asking how schools can constantly improve their teaching of daily life skills so as to take education well beyond the exam curriculum.

A lot of schools I've seen just don't seem to appreciate what university life will ask of their students. The ability to self-motivate, and to be self-reliant aren't features of school-based teaching. This means that a lot of young people struggle when they get to university.

Too often there is a sense of rush in school life because of a study timetable that does not allow time for consolidation and wholly conscious well-informed decisions. It was the founder of IBM, amongst others, who warned: "Don't confuse activity with achievement."

Extra-curricular activities and after-hours hobbies are an excellent way for teacher and students to earn each other's respect and for students to work with other students. This is even better if it's weekends away rather than just evening-classes. An expedition lasting a week or two is what's really needed. There are far too few if any of these opportunities in the average year for most students.

Why isn't there more acknowledgement of extra-curricular activities and voluntary work in the community? Why can't a grade be attached to these things which counts just as much as an academic grade? Surely, we are sending out the wrong messages about what should and could be valued by our society.

I see a lot of teaching going on in schools, but not a lot of learning. We need to give the young person sovereignty over their own learning, so that they learn because they are desperate to learn, passionate to learn, because they are learning what they personally have chosen. It won't be easy, but it's where we've got to go.

Careers Guidance Services, whether in school or university, are very often grossly undervalued by their institutions. They have too few properly qualified staff running them, and the students are given too little time to spend with them. The usual scenario is a school teacher working on careers-guidance either part-time or just for a year or so, and their careers training will run to barely a few days a year. When you think that hundreds of students may all have careers questions which will underpin their vital life-course decisions, you're bound to ask: are these arrangements enough?

Do teachers and tutors always have to be full-timers? So much can be learnt from strong links with industry and people who can draw on their experiences of a different working world.

Single-sex schools seem to be kept alive by parents who think this environment will bring better grades for their children and protect those children from problematic relationships. This is a great shame. Mixed schools bring such pleasure and essential social skills for their students.

Many specialists in the field of nutrition now estimate that one in five teenagers, particularly young women, are improperly nourished and have stunted growth because of the poverty of their diet. For any educational institution, it is not enough simply to offer food-choices; there has to be a clear educational message here, untainted by an eye to budgetary concerns or, worst still, fast-food sponsorship. Nor is it sufficient to put fresh fish, fruit, vegetables, milk and water alongside a selection of junk foods like chips and sugared drinks. It is the absolute duty of educational establishments to make a well-informed stand, to make a clear and positive judgement, and to exclude confectionery, sweets and mediocre foods from school premises, so as to concentrate on actively promoting health-enhancing snacks and meals.

The current emphasis on exam grades is completely distorting and undermining the whole experience of what school has the potential to be.

Schools Inspectors have acknowledged that financial pressure on state and private schools is motivating many of these institutions to deliberately distort or omit vital careers information so as to gain financially by keeping their students in school for a year or two longer. Also, there is overwhelming evidence that Careers Education and Guidance is severely marginalised by the academic community in many schools and universities where it is regarded as a third-class subject. This is bitterly ironic, because it is hard to think of a more important subject than what to invest years of your life in, and the self-motivational benefits that the vast majority of students derive from finding a vocation, far outweigh its costs in time and money.

What would make a great contribution to young people's self-motivation is not a traditional concept of career guidance, but some far broader category of guidance as regards short or medium term life-objectives. These might come in the form of an outwardbound endeavour, a volunteer task, or a particular study-goal. It is unlikely that Careers Guidance Counsellors alone are appropriate providers of such multi-disciplinary goals.

A British teenager can expect just one interview per year with a qualified full-time Careers Counsellor. Moreover, in their last two years of formal schooling, almost all youngsters will receive less than one hour per week allotted to careers, usually a class hosted by a schoolteacher minimally-qualified to teach it. Almost all school students rate their experience of careers-teaching as extremely negative. Despite which, most of them report wanting more guidance, and believe it would be beneficial in motivating their academic and vocational goals. Presently, sources of guidance are very largely 'informal advisers' drawn from friends or family or from other schoolteachers. In the USA, the problems are all too similar to the British experience. On both sides of the Atlantic, complaints tend to focus on the excessive ratio of students per careers counsellor, and the very credible fear that advice is being biased by the agendas of large corporations or by central government, who very often contribute heavily to the salaries of careers counsellors.

British educational and psychological research professions have too often shied away from studying important issues, such as happiness and well-being, because they say it would be difficult to define them.

Secondary School students very often complain that their formal education is not relevant to other aspects of their daily life nor to their subsequent university or professional lives.

The school in all its guises, whether the head, the staff or the students, needs to show very clearly and very often that its priority is caring about the individual.

Could school teachers more often be practising professionals from other arenas of the working world who teach as a part-time role? It seems that talks given by visitors are a once-a-term phenomenon rather than the weekly event they should really be.

Everyone should have someone else to take care of in school, someone else to look our for. It makes everyone feel the better for it.

Party Politics should be taken out of education because it's leading to ill-advised and too frequent changes of plans and policy.

The trouble with school sex education is that too few competent people dare to tackle the relevant stuff like masturbation, chatting someone-up, sexual self-respect and sexual good-manners; and they certainly don't do it early enough, which can mean age 11 or 12 for many young people.

Get rid of teachers who don't love to teach, because good learning is all about discovering a passion for your subject, and students can spot an apathetic teacher a mile off.

This extreme emphasis on examination in the school curriculum is distorting the whole purpose and pleasure of learning, and is overshadowing the unexaminable but none-the-less essential elements of the school experience. The tail is wagging the dog, because people aren't really learning, they are learning to take exams.

Though class-sizes of 12 students or less is one way forward for better education, the real goal is each student learning independently at his or her own pace.

It's an unfortunate irony that, where the business of a good school is in trying to give young people confidence to develop their own centre of gravity, most young people are scared of being different.

Bearing in mind your school life might last anywhere between 11 and 20 years, I think a successful and enjoyable experience is just as important as a successful working life. It is a profound shame that school is too often seen as a preparation for life, rather than as a life in itself. 20 years is quite a career by any one's measure, and it's not a dress-rehearsal.

The relationship between intelligence test scores and performance in other areas of life, such as work, is low if not non-existent.

Many students would greatly benefit from an apprenticeship at 16, rather than more academic work in college, and some students who would be best for an apprenticeship even a couple of years younger. Keeping them in school does them a grave disservice.

Even at the most caring schools, there is too rarely one to one time given young people on a regular or reliable basis, and it's a shameful fact that nine-tenths of Secondary School students can go through their entire school career not ever having someone sit down with just them for an hour or more to talk about anything that the student regards as important. The school rarely considers this, but the student is all too aware of it. If there could be a rescheduling and resourcing so that one to one hours become the weekly norm not the yearly exception, it is extremely likely that the benefits would show themselves in greatly enhanced exam results, appropriate career orientation, and mental and physical health.

Schools have a moral duty to educate the whole person - physical , intellectual, emotional and spiritual. In the present climate of academic league-tables and examination reform, many schools are paying far too much attention to things academic, which comprise only one part of the intellectual dimension. This disproportionate emphasis has resulted for many years now in the erosion of extra-curricular activities, and hence the severe neglect of the other three major dimensions of a young person's development. This gross imbalance is resulting in stressed, disillusioned and confused young people who are too often poorly equipped to cope readily with what complex modern life will require of them. Such a misguided educational ethos impoverishes not only the young individual, but very quickly takes its toll on wider society. But we can change that, and we can change it today.

You have to allow learning to be messy - involving false starts and mistakes.

For outdated historical reasons, academia has far too much attention and kudos in our society and in our schools. There are other far more important and relevant attributes. For instance, community service should be regarded as more prestigious.

Putting 25 people in a class and hoping they'll learn something is a long shot. School is a blunt mechanism for teaching anything, and it's the individual who suffers when it doesn't work.

Mixed schools provide a great opportunity to learn how to be friends with someone from the opposite sex, without having to be dating.

Schools do a great dis-service if they conspire to deny access to the Armed Forces recruitment teams. Many schools are guilty of this, because they fear the financial penalties to their school for losing 16 year olds who might otherwise stay on and do further years of schooling. The Armed Forces offer many young men and women good opportunities in a wide range of skills and experiences in modern-day Peace Keeping and Disaster Response roles.

There's never enough choice of sporting activities in school. I can appreciate there's financial restrictions, but only having five or six team sports just isn't enough. Loads of people never find anything they like, so they don't get in the habit of doing sport and feel they're failures. We can't all be good at football and cricket.

Extra-curricular activities shouldn't be optional add-ons, otherwise their benefits miss the very youngsters they can most help: the ones with narrowed horizons and limited experiences, the ones who won't allow themselves pleasure until certain perfectionist goals have been achieved. So we should make these extra-curricular activities compulsory for all young people, but we should also make them as pleasurable and rewarding as possible.

Drugs, sex and depression very often don't get discussed properly at school because schools are nervous of these subjects that require too many resources to deal with effectively.

Peer mentoring not only helps the mentored person, but has the added benefit of developing in the mentor a sense of pride in being useful. It doesn't need to be the only form of mentoring in operation, but it can be part of the safety-net of support.

Modern-day teachers with packed academic timetables very rarely have sufficient time for the pastoral care and careers-guidance roles that all students require as a matter of course.

Teachers need highly and proactively supportive headteachers, or else the teacher's position is too often untenable in the face of hundreds of individual students and their parents.

A lot of our best schools now run study classes that focus on how to develop memory skills and other techniques that feed directly into the exam culture. What is interesting is that these places very rarely even look at how to understand and deal with issues of emotional self-management.

Excellent nutritional standards in our schools, universities and work cafeterias would save the country enormous sums in healthcare for long-term problems caused by inadequate diets.

There's still a big gap between what we know school food should be and what it is in most cases. There are disgraceful variations in quality and nutritional value, and it's no surprise that ravenous teenagers will always be tempted by chips and pizza if they're on offer. We have to offer better.

Remember that 'Just say no' - isn't enough. A young person needs to want to say no to drink and drugs, and this requires them not feeling too miserable, and not hating themselves. To achieve this, their parents, schools and mentors need to be supporting them in every aspect of their life.

There needs to be a complete re-evaluation of what education is for. What knowledge and skills do people need now, and what will they need in 10 years' time? It's not going to be easy for the system to adapt, but there will be a very high price to pay if it doesn't.