Author: Gyan Sidhu
A school timetable is one of the clearest indicators of how seriously a school values Co-Curricular Activities (CCAs). If sport, music, drama, robotics and other activities are consistently pushed to the end of the day, squeezed around academic lessons or treated as optional extras, the timetable is sending a message about what the school considers important. Schools that genuinely value holistic education make meaningful time for CCAs because these activities help children develop confidence, resilience, creativity, teamwork, leadership and other skills that academic lessons and examinations alone cannot fully develop.
Schools love the words “holistic education.” You see them on websites, brochures, Open House presentations and banners. We tell parents we want to develop the whole child. We talk about confidence, resilience, creativity, teamwork, leadership and character.
Wonderful. But I have a simple test. Show me your timetable.
Because a school’s timetable tells me far more about what it really values than its brochure ever will. Look at what gets the best hours of the day. Math. Science. English. Then look at what gets pushed towards the end. Sport. Music. Drama. Robotics. Clubs. And sometimes, after the “real school day” has ended, we finally arrive at something called a Co-Curricular Activity. Or worse, an Extra-Curricular Activity.
Extra? If something is extra, surely it means we can live without it. Yet these are often the very activities where children develop some of the skills we keep saying they will desperately need in the future.
Ask almost any school today what children need for an unpredictable future and you will hear similar answers: creativity, collaboration, communication, resilience, leadership, adaptability, problem-solving and confidence. Now ask another question: Where do children actually practise these things?
Certainly in good classrooms. But some of the most powerful opportunities happen outside them.
Put a child on a football field and there is no textbook chapter called Dealing With Losing. They simply lose. And then they have to deal with it. They experience disappointment, learn emotional control, pick themselves up, train again and return for the next game. That is resilience.
Put that same child into a team and suddenly individual talent isn’t enough. They have to communicate, cooperate, trust others and sometimes sacrifice what they want for what the team needs. That is collaboration and leadership.
Give a group of children a robot that refuses to do what they programmed it to do. They try something. It fails. They change it. It fails again. They argue, laugh, research, redesign and try again. Eventually it moves. That is problem-solving, creativity and perseverance.
Put a nervous child on a stage. Their hands shake. Their heart races. They forget a line. Then, perhaps a year later, that same child stands confidently in front of 500 people. That is growth.
These are not “extra” lessons.
In fact, one of the greatest benefits of these activities is that they reveal children whom classrooms sometimes cannot. Schools spend enormous amounts of time discovering which children are good at Mathematics, Science and languages. But children possess far more talents than those measured on an examination paper.
The child sitting quietly in the middle of the class may become completely different when handed a guitar. The student struggling academically may become an extraordinary captain on a basketball court. The shy child may come alive in drama. The child who cannot sit still during a conventional lesson may spend two hours completely absorbed in building something.
And suddenly a young person discovers: “I am good at this.”
Never underestimate the power of that discovery. Confidence in one area can begin changing how a child sees himself or herself everywhere else. Sometimes talent isn’t missing. Nobody has given it somewhere to appear.
This is also why I struggle with the way some schools select children for activities. A child isn’t very good at Mathematics. What do we do? We give the child more Mathematics. Extra lessons. Intervention. Support. Practice. We certainly don’t say, “You aren’t very good at Math, so we’re removing you from Math.”
Yet consider what happens with sport. A child loves basketball but isn’t particularly good at it. There are limited places, so the child doesn’t make the team. Think about that. The child who needs coaching most is sometimes the child we exclude from being coached.
Of course schools should have competitive teams. Excellence matters. Talented students deserve opportunities to compete at the highest possible level. But competitive sport and developmental sport are not the same thing. A good school should be capable of doing both. Let the best compete, but let the beginner begin. The same principle should apply to music, drama, robotics, debate and every other activity.
Parents have a role in this too. I have spent more than 30 years living and working in Indonesia, and I understand the enormous importance parents here place on academic achievement. It comes from a good place. Parents want to give their children the best possible chance in life.
But when examinations approach and time becomes scarce, what often disappears first? Sport. Music. Clubs. A child gets pulled from football practice to attend another tuition class.
I understand why. The benefits of tuition seem measurable. Perhaps 70 becomes 80. The benefits of two hours on a football field are harder to put into a spreadsheet. But during those two hours, that child may have learnt about preparation, discipline, teamwork, leadership, perseverance, losing gracefully and winning humbly. He may have exercised, laughed and formed friendships. He may even have found the one part of school where he truly feels he belongs.
How do we put a grade on that?
And now we have AI. Children growing up today will enter a world very different from the one their parents entered. Knowledge remains enormously important, but simply knowing things will not be enough. Machines can already retrieve information, analyse enormous amounts of data, generate content and increasingly perform tasks that once required highly educated humans.
This makes deeply human abilities even more important. Can you work with others? Can you communicate? Can you lead? Can you create? Can you recover from failure? Can you adapt when circumstances change? Can you persuade someone? Can you walk into a room of strangers and build relationships? Can you keep going when something doesn’t work the first time?
These qualities are not developed by examinations alone.
So if we truly believe these things matter, our schools should look different. Maybe Monday morning occasionally begins with sport before Mathematics. Maybe Friday afternoon isn’t filled with children exhausted from yet another academic lesson. Maybe the books close at lunchtime and the whole school comes alive with football, swimming, music, dance, drama, coding, robotics, entrepreneurship, service and clubs.
Maybe these programmes are run by people with expertise, rather than simply whichever teacher happens to have a free period. Maybe participation and development are take seriously. Maybe parents receive information not only about how their child is progressing academically, but also about the interests, strengths and passions emerging elsewhere.
And perhaps schools should stop treating trophies as the principal measure of whether their activities programme is successful. Of course I want our teams to win. But I also want to know how many children participated. How many tried something new? How many persevered when they weren’t initially good at it? How many discovered a talent they didn’t know they possessed? And perhaps most importantly, how many found somewhere in
school where they felt they belonged?
That is why I increasingly dislike the term Extra-Curricular Activity. There is nothing extra about resilience. Nothing extra about confidence. Nothing extra about creativity. Nothing extra about teamwork. Nothing extra about leadership. And certainly nothing extra about helping a child discover who they might become.
So the next time a school tells you it believes in holistic education, don’t just look at the brochure.
Ask to see the timetable.
Because what we give our children’s time to tells them what we truly believe is important.
