Resilience is the wrong word. Range is the right one

This blog was kindly authored by Neil Fox, professor of film practice and pedagogy at Falmouth University.

The students who arrive at Falmouth most ready for an undergraduate creative arts degree are, more often than not, the ones who came through an academic route. They studied history or English literature at A-level. They added a drama production, an Arts Award, a Trinity grade or a Guildhall paper alongside. I’ve come to call them the Range Students. Their experience tells me something the DfE needs to hear, and something universities like mine should be paying closer attention to.

They arrived having done two things at once. They worked through demanding academic study, with the discipline and intellectual habits that requires. They spent evenings, weekends and school holidays in rehearsal rooms, ensembles, theatre groups or studios. They learned, often without ever naming it how to take direction and give feedback; how to fail in public and try again; how to work with people they did not choose, towards deadlines they did not set, on something larger than themselves.

What they did not do was treat their school years as a single track running towards a single number.

That matters because of what I now see them having to unlearn. By the time young people arrive at university, they have had 15 years of outcome-based thinking. Numbers and letters at the top of certificates have been telling them, repeatedly, who they are. A serious undergraduate year has to dismantle some of that before it can do much else. No one will ever ask my students in a job interview what grades they got at A-level. What will matter, slowly and then all at once, is where they studied for their degree and what they did while they were there.

The Range Students arrive with that dismantling already half-done. Their creative life ran in parallel with their academic one and was assessed differently – through performance, audition, portfolio and the judgement of an examiner watching them in a room. They are used to being seen working, not only graded after the fact.

That comfort is rarer than it used to be. The students arriving now have grown up inside a more risk-averse, outcome driven system, with less unstructured time and more protection from failure. Many reach us reluctant to start without a brief, uneasy with uncertainty and quietly afraid of being seen to get something wrong in front of other people. The Range Students are, increasingly, the exception.

‘Resilience’ has done real damage in education. I understand why it has been adopted so widely. Trinity College London’s recent Career Ready report uses it more than once, and its data is sobering: almost nine in ten secondary teachers agree that performance and creative education builds teamwork and communication, and 92% say schools should do more in this area. My quarrel isn’t with the report or its authors. It’s with what the word now does in the wider conversation. ‘Resilience’ codifies individual responsibility as the sole arbiter of survival in a system. By extension, those who don’t make it are taken to have failed because they weren’t resilient enough. That framing ignores the structural factors that exclude young people from creative careers – wealth, class, race, gender, disability, geography, accent, religious upbringing and a dozen besides – none of which are overcome by an act of personal grit.

I am in favour of discipline. I am in favour of practice, repetition and the slow work of getting better. What I am not in favour of is asking 16-year-olds to absorb a broken system as a test of character.

The twentieth century was, historically, a strange blip. The sole-income, single-career creative life – the playwright, novelist or composer doing only that – belongs to a narrow window. Most creative lives, before and almost certainly after, were and will be mixed: teaching alongside making, freelance alongside salaried, several disciplines rather than one. That isn’t failure. It is the norm.

Which is why I want to add a careful note about technical certification. These qualifications matter. AI-tool proficiency is already appearing on graduate job specifications. Dismissing assessment wholesale would be a mistake. The point is not to abolish measurement. It is to stop pretending that one set of measurements, taken at 16, 18 and even 21, captures what young people are or what they can do.

Equal status for creative GCSEs, as the Curriculum and Assessment Review proposes, is welcome. It is also the easy bit. The harder question is what universities, employers and parents read from the combination of an academic A-level and a creative qualification taken alongside it. At present, most read very little: the history grade counts, the arts award is treated as an extra, barely registering on a UCAS form.

Universities are part of this problem, and any solution has to involve us. We could read those combinations more attentively. We could weight them more honestly in admissions. We could say plainly to applicants and their teachers that we want academic depth and creative practice in the same person, and that we know what to do with both when they arrive.

There is a harder truth underneath all this. The Range Students don’t arrive ready because the mix of academic and creative study handed them a sturdier character. They arrive ready because someone gave them the rehearsal room, the ensemble, the unhurried evenings, the freedom to get things wrong before it counted. The disposition I admire is not innate. It is built. And it is built out of access, which is not shared evenly.

So if we want young people who can adapt, take feedback, work in teams and walk into the workplaces of 2030 ready to contribute, the answer is not to tell more 16-year-olds to be resilient, or even to be like the Range Students. It is to build, for many more of them, the conditions those students happened to have. The time, the room and the permission to fail. And then, alongside academic subjects taken seriously, the chance to act, sing, draw, play.

Language matters here too. The word we need is not resilience.

Its range.