An education on the road. | Andrew Fitzmaurice | TEDxYouth@BISHCMC

Good afternoon everyone. My name is Andrew Fitzmaurice, and I'd just like to start with a small survey which is important to me, maybe not so important to you. This is actually my second TEDx talk, and I'd just like to ask how many in the audience have seen my first one? Thank you, Jodi. Yes, not many, so I need a bit more effort out there. What I'd like you all to do is go onto YouTube and view it. There's a reason why my views are so low compared to the others. Not just because perhaps I wasn't up to it, but also because I thought like today, it was a slightly unfair competition. Firstly, the person who was on immediately before me, and you can check this out on YouTube, was a guy called Takeo Chris. This guy Takeo Chris is a French guy, young, late 20s, very fit. He came on, pair of black trousers, black t-shirt, he's got this big shock of wavy black hair. Anyways, the similarities with me ended because what he'd actually done to get his talk onto TEDx—I was talking about my experience at school at Dartford Grammar—and what this guy had done, talk about trying to upstage you, but Takeo Chris had done no less than jump off the Eiffel Tower wearing a pair of rollerblades and landing onto an incline. There was an audience similar to today, a lot of young people in the audience, and you can imagine that Takeo Chris got quite a few more hits on YouTube than I did. Then I was feeling a little bit disappointed about that, and I said to one of the students, 'Oh, you know, disappointed the way I've come up so short compared to Takeo Chris,' and, you know, I wasn't perhaps one of the better presenters. And this is that have you heard of the expression being damned by faint praise? So this lady said to me from our year 12, she said, 'Don't worry, Andrew, you weren't the worst.' Thank you very much. Anyways, so getting on today, I want you to go out, however you feel about this, I want you to go out and watch it because that's what counts. Right, so I'm going to talk about my education on the road. My education on the road started an awfully long time ago. It started in Liverpool in 1964, but I can tell you how long ago 1964 was because Mr. Rowlands and Mr. Williams down the front here had just started their teaching career. So you imagine that it was an awfully—I think I was in one of their classes actually—it's an awfully long time ago. But I started in Liverpool in 1964, and then my parents—my mother was a nurse, my father was a policeman—and they emigrated to Toronto. Mum worked at Toronto General Hospital, and my dad was on the motorbike police with this big Harley-Davidson in Toronto. We lived there for a couple of years, went to school there, having been to school in Liverpool. We then went to Ottawa—I promised Jen I was going to mention Oshawa—so when Dad got following Toronto, and next went to school in Oshawa. There we are, as you are also in Canada. We went from Toronto to Oshawa by car, but I was in Oshawa for around about 18 months, two years, and then after that decided my parents had the wanderlust, got on the road again, and went all the way across to Vancouver. So I'm around about 11 years old by this stage, and this is my fourth school that I'm starting. To feel that, you know, this is quite challenging. And then when I was 12, they decided to move again, and this time came all the way back—where are we? There we are—by boat up through the Panama Canal all the way to first Southampton and then to London. Ended up going to school in London, and the reason I'm telling this story is because I think it's incredibly challenging. When we heard from Mr. Olen about 55 different nationalities in our school here, and many of those students will be what are known as third culture kids, and that's where you are learning a curriculum outside of your home country, and that can be really difficult and challenging, always being the new student at school. And I remember when I was 12, having come back from Canada, and I arrived in London at school in Edgware in North London, and then all of a sudden I was expected to do long division. And you still do long division, but you know, long division, I had never heard of it. I don't know what was wrong with the Canadian curriculum—I last saw Jane at the end of this—but we didn't do long division. So I would sit at the back of the class just making it up. I think it was Mr. Rowlands and Mr. Williams again teaching me. So I would sit at the back and I would just write whatever number came into my head down. And of course, it was very difficult because you are moving from school to school, you're always the new person, and you're always trying to get involved in a curriculum with a subject perhaps in a different way that you've been taught it or at a different stage of that curriculum to the one that you had been at your previous school. I think I moved again then in London. By the time I was 13, I've had something like seven schools. And that was part from, you know, going for the sympathy vote so that you vote for me and watch the video, but apart from going for the sympathy vote, that actually I feel did an awful lot for me as an individual because always being the new kid meant that I'm never frightened of new things. So even as I've become older and older, and I'm, you know, in the executive committee of Nord Anglia Education, and I'm probably around joint oldest in there, I often think of myself as perhaps the least frightened about new things and about change. And I think a lot of that is because of my experience as a child moving around from school to school, and I think that's given me, you know, some unique opportunities and unique insights, things like resilience, you know, being used to change, not being frightened of new situations. When I think about the education that we're able to provide at Nord Anglia for students in our schools, I think about the way that we're trying to do the same thing for people who attend a Nord Anglia Education school anywhere in the world. I just want to follow now by showing you this brief video, which were a hundred of our students during the summer last year, or this year, sorry, went to UNICEF, attended the high performance event, ambassadors, delegates to the UN. I think there are thousands of delegates there, and our students were there attending, students from all of the schools, and they were talking to a delegation from the UN about the things that affected them. So what I'd like to do is just show you a brief video of what our students did while they're in the UN event in New York during the summer.

So, through the UN event that we have each year and through our camp in Tanzania, over a thousand of our students will attend this year. Many of our students here have already been, you know, through the facility that we have in Switzerland, through collaborations that we have within the region, within Mr. Williams' region of Northern Europe, Southeast Asia. You know, what we're trying to do both in terms of bringing people together, whether it's in a particular destination or enabling people to collaborate online, we're trying to help our students to develop the skills that are going to help them in a really fast-changing and difficult world. So I think of the skills that I got on my educational journey and how they equipped me for my life, and what we're trying to do is provide those tools or tools that are going to be suitable for our students in what is a very fast-changing world. One statistic that I'm particularly struck by, which is used by the World Economic Forum, is that of students entering school today, by the time they graduate, two-thirds of the jobs that they will take up when they graduate don't currently exist. If you think about that, of the students just coming into year one, by the time they graduate, they're going to be graduating into two-thirds of the jobs that don't exist today, and that's because the world is changing so quickly—artificial intelligence and all the other things that are disrupting the experience that we have. So one of the things which is really important, not just in terms of a 21st-century educational skill but also in terms of our ability to make the world a better place, which I know is something that when we survey our students, they care most passionately about, is their ability to come together and to understand each other's views across different countries, across different cultures, and to do that in a way to be able to collaborate and constructively address the world's problems. Now I know that you're going to be hearing an awful lot more about that during the course of today, but one of the things which we're really passionate about, we believe as an education organization, is that we want to align with our students' belief that together we're going to be able to make the world a better place. I'd like to finish with a quote from a really famous third culture kid, and that's Barack Obama, and he said, when he was addressing a school event in Arlington, Virginia, and this is particularly aimed at our students: 'We need every single one of you to develop your talents, skills, and intellect so you can solve our most difficult problems.' Thank you very much for listening to me, and I very much look forward to listening to the rest of the event.