Peter Evans will retire at Christmas after more than a decade as headteacher at Brighton and Hove's most successful state school.

But he believes he is leaving at a time when education is more exciting than ever before and when the ever-developing use of technology has led to significant changes and challenges for our teachers and schools.

So is it time to tear up the national curriculum and rethink the way we educate our children?

Change surrounds us. It is a constant in our lives and its capacity to excite or frustrate us depends upon our perception of a particular change as "progress" or not.

Theories and strategies come and go with troubling familiarity and we can be forgiven for living with the cliché that if one stands still long enough in education one will be seen as an innovaton - a situation that fosters the cynic and allows the dinosaur to live in a "been there, done that" world.

Our current position, however, is genuinely new and, as such, creates genuine challenge for teachers and leaders.

The novelty is created by the world our pupils come from and the future into which they will move - with the school nestled in between.

The single word that encapsulates the change is "technology".

Formal education in school is a journey of development and, until now, we had a professionally sound idea about its destination. Given that certainty, we planned the experiences that equipped our young people with appropriate qualifications.

The ability to predict the largely knowledge-based future put the teacher at the centre of planning, and planning was often expressed in terms of teacher activity.

Thankfully, the national strategy has shifted the emphasis to the learner and planning must now focus on the benefits each activity will bring to the individual child - clear learning outcomes shared with the class at the start of each lesson or short course of lessons.

But haven't we always looked to education to support children through their academic and personal adolescence? Of course, and schools have been very successful in this undertaking.

However, a fundamental shift has begun and will accelerate in the coming years. It will take a brave person to predict the nature of work and the shape of society that await the children currently enjoying life as eight-year-olds in our city's schools.

The rate of technological change and its impact on our lives challenges virtually everything we currently do in schools.

The information revolution guarantees that any knowledgebased, content-driven curriculum will no longer serve the needs of our children. And schools, especially secondary schools, must respond to this situation.

The examination system with its subject-focused assessment process will become either redundant or obsolete because it will neither provide, nor measure, the skills that school leavers in 2017 will need.

To sustain such thinking condemns us to a system built for our past, not for our children's future.

Future watchers tell us that the job-for-life concept is already a myth, that the majority of jobs that exist will be fixed term and outsourced.

Regular retraining will be essential and workers will require the ability to mix lone working with the productive membership of a variety of project groups.

Remember, these thoughts are merely the backcloth to many areas of work that we cannot currently conceptualise.

Teachers are used to managing change. They have accumulated years of expertise and have earned our respect.

Skin-deep fashion swings notwithstanding, however, that store of practice has been built on a predictable clientele entering their classrooms each year and that certainty has gone.

Of course, young people look and act largely as they always have but now they bring into secondary schools an advanced level of intuitive skill unknown ten years ago.

Their understanding and use of technology is second nature. They reside in an interactive world with expectations to match.

Education is built on relationships and communication, and teachers must move into this world if they wish to work alongside their pupils.

The point of transfer offers secondary schools the chance really to focus on the individual child, but to create that personalised learning agenda they must first remove the shackles of the content-driven national curriculum.

Energy currently being targeted at new programmes for 14 to 19-year-olds designed to counter pupil disengagement should shift to when they are 11, and earlier, to foster in our young people a greater sense of personal success.

Let's predict and prevent, not simply identify and correct, problems.

Schools, as institutions, will not be exempt from the changing future and teachers will also need to reassess their role in the young person's learning journey.

Information is all around us and access to knowledge has never been easier.

As we have noted, however, knowledge is not the main key to the future and the teacher, that human guide, will need to instill those essential skills that will enable the eight-year-old to flourish in ten years' time.

Learning how to learn, developing a strong sense of self, a capacity and desire to contribute, personal confidence - in short, emotional intelligence.

The EQ will certainly be more important than the IQ.

As ever, education will excite us and where schools are involved in the future, we will be successful.

We must change now - and I hope to play a part.

  • Peter Evans is headteacher at Cardinal Newman Catholic School, Hove