Leadership Likes: Mr Murphy

The prize winning scientific writer Roger Lewin said “Too often we give our children answers to remember rather than problems to solve”, but he would be amazed by the number of ‘solution finding’ opportunities our girls embrace here at Croydon High School. Just last week the Mathematics department held a whole problem solving morning for Year 7 students, where they worked in teams to solve unfamiliar puzzles.  This one-off event is just the start of their investigative journey in the subject and by the time they join the Sixth Form many are ready to enter the “Senior Mathematical Challenge” organised by UKMT. Eight of our students were awarded certificates for their performance in this year’s challenge.

Head of Maths, Mr Rew confirmed that it is not just about the competition itself but also about developing their overall problem solving capabilities He says …”these styles of problems are used regularly within lessons to provide depth of exposure to problem solving, which ultimately contributes to excellent A level outcomes in Mathematics.”

On Monday I was attending a meeting with Mrs Leppala in Science and found myself waiting for a large group of students to complete a practical in her laboratory. It transpired that this was part of a selection process to identify a team to compete in “Top of the Bench” competition held by the Royal Society of Chemistry. Interest in this competition from Croydon High pupils is so intense that we simply have too many students who want to enter and so are having to whittle down the numbers to meet the entry requirements. Those students who are not fortunate enough to make the final team will have other opportunities when the Physics, Chemistry and Biology Olympiads take place later in the year.

Throughout the week in Enterprise Technology, students from Year 2 up to the Upper Sixth have been participating in the Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge. This competition runs in over fifty countries worldwide and aims to stimulate interest in problem solving and logical thinking. It will be followed by the Year 8 CyberFirst competition, organised by the National Cyber Security Centre, where our students will pit their wits against a range of cryptography problems, analysing and cracking complex codes and ciphers.  This year, we are also hoping to enter our first contestants into the British Informatics Olympiad, which aims to find the top five young programmers in the country who will represent the UK at the international competition next summer!

Whilst the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) has identified that boys tend to perform better in individual problem-solving tasks it also noted that girls were about half a year ahead of their male contemporaries in collaborative problem solving.  Through the range of opportunities available at Croydon High School, not limited to those mentioned previously, we are addressing problem solving on both an individual and collaborative level, giving our girls a chance to shine and fulfilling our ethos of “every girl, every day”.  Watching our students build resilience by engaging with the questions in these challenges and seeing the creative methods they employed to come up with an answer made me think about the importance of problem solving in their future lives.

Problem solving is valued highly in our economy, and is something that is consistently evaluated in school, university and in the workplace. Employers hope that every new recruit will bring a fresh perspective to the old ‘problems’ or new challenges that their business might face. As a result, demonstrating strong problem solving skills can be the secret to success when applying for university, a job and indeed throughout one’s career.  In the past few years we have seen first hand the need for society to be adept at adapting to and overcoming unforeseen problems, so preparing the next generation to be able to do this is one of our most important goals here at Croydon High School.

My experiences of just this one week have made me feel that, if our girls are anything to go by, this really won’t be a problem.

Mr Murpphy

Assistant Head (Digital Strategy)