The school that scores you on how you iterate
King's School Grantham is ranked first in the town for the percentage of GCSE grades awarded at 9–7, and it selects its intake from the top quarter of 11+ scores. By those measures, it is exactly the kind of school where students are expected — and conditioned — to get things right.
Which makes one line in its GCSE 3D Graphics specification quietly striking. Under the coursework assessment objectives, the Edexcel-aligned document at King's lists 'iterative design — open minded design through discussion, modifying and exploration of concepts and possibilities' as a formal criterion by which students are marked. Not as a learning intention pinned to a noticeboard, and not as a pastoral aspiration tucked into a newsletter. As a thing that counts toward the grade.
The implication is practical rather than philosophical: a student who commits to an idea early and never revisits it may score less well than one who changes direction, tests a version that doesn't work, and adjusts accordingly.
So what actually happens in a school when getting it wrong is treated as a method rather than a mistake — and does building it into the assessment criteria make any difference to how students think?
Where the evidence is sharpest: the Design and Technology workshop
In a workshop, the material tells you immediately when you are wrong. A joint that doesn't hold, a component that won't fit, a print that warps — these are not interpretation problems. They are structural ones, and the only response is to go back and change something.
The King's DT department makes this explicit. Its curriculum page states the aim is for students to 'learn if they fail, turning failure into success' — a statement that reads differently in a room equipped with a laser cutter, 3D printers, SolidWorks CAD software, and benches stocked with wood, metals, plastics, and electronics. The kit is not incidental. It is what makes iteration real rather than rhetorical: a design can be tested against an actual object, not just against a mark scheme or a teacher's comment.
That loop runs from Year 10 through to the sixth form. At GCSE, iterative design is a formal assessment criterion — which is why section one of this article opened with it. At A-Level Product Design, the expectation shifts further: students are asked to 'develop and modify designs, and design and make prototypes that solve real problems.' The phrasing matters. Not 'produce a final design,' but develop, modify, and prototype.
What this amounts to, in educational terms, is constructive alignment: the objectives, the workshop activities, and the assessment criteria are all pointing at the same thing. Iteration is not a style layered onto the syllabus — it is inside the syllabus, from beginning to end.
Courage as a named institutional value, not a classroom habit
Albert Ball attended King's between 1906 and 1907 and was not, by the school's own account, a particularly strong academic. What he was, was curious — drawn to carpentry, mechanical modelling, and photography. By seventeen he had founded his own engineering firm. He later became a First World War flying ace, earning the Victoria Cross. King's cites him not as a war hero but as its canonical exemplar of Perseverance: a pointed choice for a selective grammar school whose intake sits in the top quarter of 11+ scores.
The selection matters. High-achieving students can arrive already oriented toward avoiding mistakes rather than learning from them. Naming a figure who thrived through practical curiosity and iteration — rather than through exceptional academic scores — sends a particular message about what the school thinks results actually come from.
That message is also embedded in the institution's formal values. King's publicly defines 'Courage' to include 'to be open minded and not limit ourselves for fear of failure' — language that appears in the vision statement, not buried in a curriculum document. In 2022–23, senior student leaders carried it further, delivering year-group assemblies on exactly this theme. The transmission here is peer-to-peer, which is meaningfully different from a teacher simply telling a class.
PSHE reinforces this framework through twice-weekly form tutor sessions and weekly year-group assemblies. That reach is wide, though the limits are worth acknowledging: this layer operates through character education and pastoral programming rather than through assessment criteria embedded in specific subjects. Outside the DT workshops, the depth of the approach is harder to measure.
Why a selective school specifically needs this
There is a structural irony at the centre of selective education. The admissions process that fills King's with high-achieving students also, almost inevitably, fills it with students who have learnt that getting things right the first time is how you succeed. An 11+ score in the top quarter of the ability range is not generally achieved by children who are comfortable not knowing the answer. It is achieved by children who are already very good at performing correctly.
That conditioning does not switch off at the school gate. In an environment ranked first locally for the proportion of top GCSE grades, the implicit norm is accuracy and performance — which makes risk-taking structurally harder, not easier. Perfectionism and fear of failure are not occasional pastoral concerns in schools like this; they are reasonable adaptations to a selection system that has rewarded exactly those traits.
This is the logic behind building explicit counter-structures. Embedding iteration into GCSE assessment criteria, equipping a workshop where materials fail objectively, naming 'fear of failure' directly in the institutional values — none of this happens in a vacuum. It happens because the school recognises that its own admissions process produces the vulnerability it is trying to address. The point is not that King's has resolved the tension. It is that the tension has been named, and the structures built in response are a direct consequence of it.
What research says about productive failure
The scholarly framework that most closely describes what King's is doing in its DT workshops has a precise name: Productive Failure, developed by educational researcher Manu Kapur. The core finding is straightforward — students who struggle with a problem before receiving formal instruction consistently develop deeper understanding than those taught first and tested second. A 2021 meta-analysis of 53 studies put the effect at Hedge's g = 0.36, rising to g = 0.87 after correcting for publication bias: a substantial difference, and one that holds across STEM subjects.
For design and engineering contexts specifically, a 2023 study found that the generic Productive Failure model needed adapting. It only worked well when constructively aligned — when learning objectives, workshop activities, and assessment were designed together rather than treated as separate concerns. That finding gives the King's GCSE structure a particular significance: making iterative design a formal coursework assessment objective, rather than simply encouraging it as a habit, is not administrative tidiness. It is what the evidence says the approach actually requires to work.
Research on design thinking reinforces this from a different angle. Studies suggest that iterative dispositions and more open attitudes towards failure tend to develop as linked competencies, and that the shift in mindset may transfer beyond the design room to other subjects and contexts.
What the research cannot tell us is whether any of this is working at King's specifically. No independent Ofsted report or third-party evaluation has examined the school's approach. The evidence rests on its own published curriculum and values documents. That is not a damning gap — most school-level pedagogy is never independently evaluated — but it is an honest one.
What this means for a school town like Grantham
Grantham is not short of high-achieving secondary schools, and King's is not the only institution in South Kesteven where young people feel the weight of performance expectations. The question of how to build failure-readiness in high-pressure learning environments has local relevance beyond one set of gates.
The most transferable lesson from King's is structural rather than cultural: embedding iteration into how work is assessed, not merely into what teachers say about mindset, creates a different kind of incentive. An assembly about resilience leaves behaviour largely unchanged. A coursework objective that requires demonstrable redesign changes what students actually produce and how they spend their time.
Albert Ball is worth noting here not as a King's possession but as a Grantham resource. A pupil of modest academic ability who built an engineering firm before most of his peers sat their first public examination — and who is buried at Nottingham Road Cemetery less than two miles from his old school — is precisely the kind of specific, local, non-idealised figure that pedagogical exemplars rarely manage to be. Any school in the town could draw on that biography.
The gap between DT, where iterative failure is built into assessment, and most other subjects, where it relies on ethos and assemblies, remains an open question — not only for King's but for any school that wants the approach to be more than departmental. For parents and students navigating a high-achievement culture, the practical implication is modest but clear: structures that formally reward revision tend to produce more resilient learners than those that simply reward being right.
- [1] Productive Failure (Kapur, 2006). (2006). https://doi.org/10.1080/07370000802212669 https://doi.org/10.1080/07370000802212669
- [2] Productive Failure Pedagogy in Engineering Mechanics (2023). (2023). https://doi.org/10.35199/epde.2023.58 https://doi.org/10.35199/epde.2023.58
- [3] When Problem Solving Followed by Instruction Works: Evidence for Productive Failure (2021). (2021). https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211019105 https://doi.org/10.3102/00346543211019105