An Education Campaign – bringing parents, students and teachers into the conversation
The RSA is considering a new campaign about schooling. There is currently a lot of talk about change in schools, and more importantly a lot of action. The campaign, currently in the feasibility stages, would aim to open up the conversation going on amongst educationalists about schooling to a much wider audience.
The idea is to draft a ‘charter’ for education in the 21st century that sythesises what we and many others have been thinking and doing, and to promote that vision to parents, students and teachers.
If people are excited by the vision in the charter, we would then hope to show them what can be done about it. By sharing accounts of exciting work already being done in schools, we would demonstrate what is already possible within the current policy framework. For people who get the vision and have read about the practice, we would then help them take action by creating connections between people who sign up to the charter at a local level.
And you never know – it might shift the media debate away from the tired round of negative headlines about behaviour, admissions, standards and results that currently dominate at the expense of the positive change many people naturally don’t believe is possible.
The below is a summary of the first draft of the charter. It is still being worked on. Once this is complete, it will be completely rewritten again to express the points so as to appeal to a broader audience if the campaign goes ahead. But this is where we are at so far.
We’d welcome any comments about the idea of an education campaign, the content of the charter or – even more valuable to us – examples of things that it might inspire you to do with your local schools.
A Charter for Education in the 21st Century
1. The primary responsibility of a school should shift from achieving exam
results to making sure that young people enjoy learning and exploring ideas,
and are capable of carrying on learning throughout life
2. Schooling is not just about transmitting subject knowledge. Education in
schools should seek to foster the emergence of wisdom in young people
3. No child’s experience of school should be defined by failure. Every child
must enjoy success at school and schools have a responsibility to actively
support all young people to fulfil their potential however they are
intelligent or talented
4. Schools should reduce the attainment gap between rich and poor students
through working alongside other local services and the wider community
5. Schools should not be sites of conflict, but be intelligent communities
where young people can learn to be happy and build relationships with
peers and adults that are characterised by respect
6. Students should work in partnership with their school to design their own
learning and shape the way their school community operates
7. Schools should engage parents in children’s schooling
8. Schooling should be made relevant and disengagement prevented through
the use of practical, real-life learning
9. Teachers should not be ‘deliverers’ of a set curriculum, but instead act as
creative professionals and curriculum developers
We’d love to receive your comments.
Why I increasingly want to be Welsh
And it’s only partly because the Welsh rugby team is so much more successful than my native Ireland’s.
Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland have all used devolution to make significant changes to their curricula. The potentially far reaching impacts were brought home to me when I attended a meeting of the Nuffield Review of 14-19’s Core Group last Friday – a fascinating event from which I learned a huge amount, and certainly much more than I contributed (sorry!).
In particular, a really informative presentation by Richard Daugherty on developments in the Welsh education system since devolution touched on the increasingly popular Welsh Baccalaureate (WBQ). This and subsequent conversations highlighted the importance of a distinction between subject and qualifications led systems (as it seems will still largely be pursued in England even taking Diplomas into account), and the idea of an truly encompassing programme of study which the WBQ comes closer to.
From an RSA Opening Minds standpoint, such a coherent programme could ensure a broader curriculum for all even after Key Stage 3. Students could specialise in science, but not completely lose humanities or the arts. Crucially, however, such a programme of study could enable schools to carry forward something like the Opening Minds framework beyond Key Stage 3, where it normally stops when students pick their GCSE’s.
It’s early days, but devolution seems to mean that these are exciting times for young people going to school in Wales.
Opening Minds Conference 2008
Just a quick note to say that the 2008 Opening Minds Conference will be held at the RSA on 13 May.
Last year’s conference was a great success, bringing together teachers and heads from schools that already use Opening Minds with interested schools and other educators who are looking for alternatives or are in the planning stages.
For more information about the conference and booking details click here.
Diversity and choice
Monday’s Edge sponsored lecture on diversity of provision in education provided both a compelling argument for diversity in educational provision and some pertinent concerns about the impact on equality, and the reality of choice in a diverse school system.
Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation made a compelling argument for diversity in education, and Anders Hultin, founder of Kunskapsskolan International gave a fascinating account of the voucher system used in Sweden. You can hear both speeches as well as the Q&A session in full in the audio file located here.
For me, the argument was made useful by the helpful distinction made between diversity of types of school, and diversity in the content of schooling.
Most people would agree that diversity in the content of schooling is desirable if we are to allow every young person to fulfil their potential.
However, more controversy surrounds diversity in types of school, and this was reflected in the concerns expressed by the audience during the Q&A session. Members of the audience expressed fear that structures which enabled diversity or quasi-markets in education would accentuate existing social divisions by providing opportunities for the well-informed, the educated and the confident, leaving the remainder with the poorest schools.
Interestingly, Anders Hultin countered these concerns saying that in the Swedish system while it was the middle class parents who were first to take advantage of more choice, other groups – particularly immigrant groups – were increasingly beginning to exercise informed choice and to take advantage of the system.
The question is whether Britain, which by some measures has the highest child poverty rate in the developed world, can afford to use Sweden as a model, when the latter has long had among the world’s lowest rates of inequality and deprivation. Do we want to risk embedding greater inequality in another generation, whose parents were divided in their ability to choose?
Geoff Mulgan argues that real diversity of provision within a single school will never be possible and that the school system needs new players in order for real change to occur. Even if there are risks, do we in fact have a choice?
If you would like to comment, please do so here, or visit the comments page for the lecture here.
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