The Opening Minds Conference 2008: letting schools provide the answers

The annual Opening Minds Conference was held at the RSA yesterday. Yet again the event was a sell out, and most of the team spent a lot of time standing or sitting on the floor to listen to the presentations.

Despite the warm day in the packed Great Room, delegates listened and responded to a range of speakers including Michael Gernon, principal of the RSA Academy, Mick Waters, Director of Curriculum at QCA and Paul Hammond, Deputy Head at Oasis Academy.

The conference was themed around assessment and brought together some different perspectives on what is always described as a ‘thorny issue’. How do you assess the Opening Minds competencies and demonstrate progression? How do you measure progress in creativity or relationship skills? What are the links with the QCA’s Personal, Learning and Thinking Skills?

True to the nature of Opening Minds itself, the conference did not try and dictate the answers to these questions to delegates, but provided a starting point by sharing what some schools were trying out for themselves.

This sort of issue is where the new RSA online platform for schools using Opening Minds (due to launch this year) will be useful. It will provide a space into which schools can upload their ideas and their practice around assessment or any other issues and share them with other schools.

We think that it is unlikely that any one person or organisation will come up with the answers to some of the really difficult questions in education and what is right for one school or one community is rarely right for them all. We think Opening Minds represents the RSA at its best, helping inspiring practitioners to share ideas and collaborate with one another to find their own answers.

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.

Tonight: RSA Edge Lecture - Diversity of Provision

Another Edge sponsored lecture will be held at the RSA this evening, this time asking questions about whether the UK needs different types of school to deliver to different types of children. Expect faith schools, special needs schools, academies and specialist schools to come under the spotlight…

Geoff Mulgan, Director of the Young Foundation is speaking, with Anders Hutin of Kunskapsskolan International as respondent, and the BBC’s Kim Catcheside as chair.

Is RSA wrong about Academies…

Matthew Taylor, our chief executive went head to head on the topic of Academies last week with Fiona Millar in a debate chaired by Jonathan Dimbleby.

 It’s out tonight on TeachersTV at 9pm. If you’ve missed it on TV it will be available to view at your convenience from their web site - http://www.teachers.tv/video/25169

 Let us know what you think of the discussion,

 Ian

Shock admissions

There has been a widespread expression of shock at the grave breaches of admissions rules committed by schools in Manchester, Barnet and Northamptonshire. A ‘large minority’ of schools in these areas have been asking banned questions about parental income and marital status, and some have been charging parents fees to secure places, at times for hundreds of pounds per term.

The outrage expressed at yesterday’s revelations goes beyond that prompted by schools breaking the rules – it is an attack on the covert, or not so covert, selection procedures employed by some schools that threaten to favour the advantaged and accentuate social divides. Never mind that until last February the rules preventing voluntary aided and foundation schools from using such means to select their intake did not exist – there has been a policy shift towards fairness in selection procedures and there seems to have been a shift in expectations to match.

However, this particular admissions controversy comes only two weeks after a similar storm over the number of parents who did not get the first choice of school for their children (see the recent post ‘A festival for journos, an unhelpful distraction for everyone else’, February 26, 2008).

The twin expectations implied by these outcries: that parents should be able to exercise choice over which school their child attends, and that schools and parents must submit to ‘fair’ selection procedures do not sit easily together. Choice inevitably leads to competition for the best schools, and competition tends to mean that someone is going to lose out. The practice of throwing one’s hands up in horror over any given admissions story fails to help parents, students and schools understand this very real dilemma.

If you are interested hearing more about these issues and want to have your say, the RSA will host a lecture in partnership with Edge on 31^st March on Diversity of Provision in Education. For more details see http://www.rsa.org.uk/events/detail.asp?eventID=2498

Call me guv’nor…

I’ve been given the opportunity to become a school governor. Volunteering via SGOSS is a slightly odd, relentlessly upbeat process where it’s unclear who is really adopting who. Have I just taken a largish infants school on the edge of a big North London housing estate under my wing (unlikely), or have they agreed to mentor a slightly hapless wonk for a few hours each term in addition to their many pastoral duties in my community (more probable)?

Asides having only escaped the school system a few years ago myself, and being the daughter of two teachers, I’ve no real map to follow. I thought I should ask you all for some advice for when I go and visit the school. What should I be asking? What does the perfect governor look like? What are governing bodies’ most frequent mistakes and how do they need to adapt to a changing education system?

Cheers!

A festival for journos, an unhelpful distraction for everyone else

Education policy has created a number of seasonal events for journalists to get excited about. Christmas comes in August for the hacks, when the release of GCSE and A-level results prompt images of happy middle-class teenagers opening their presents, sorry results letters.

Well, now we seem to have a new one - admissions day.

It plays right into the heart of parents’ anxieties about the education of their kids. Will they get into a ‘good school’ or be held back by not getting their first choice. The fears are being stoked already, with the Conservatives releasing figures that suggest over 100,000 families missed out of their first choice school last year. That information was obtained through Freedom of Information Act. This year the government plan to publish official figures to the obvious delight of some in the media.

However, if you thought the exam rituals were played-out, this new festival of column-inches is in danger of being irrelevant before it even gets going. This week a report was released indicating that where middle-class students attended schools with challenging intakes which performed at below the average, it had little if any effect on their educational outcomes.

This would appear to support to the thinking of the School Admissions Adjudicator, Philip Hunter, who has made attempts to avoid ‘unacceptable segregation’ in regards to admissions between rich and poor students.

My worry is that, like in so many other areas, we again end up with education policy driven by the media. Experience tells us that the truly damaging effect of this can be to channel expenditure into achieving ends which provide no real educational benefit for young people while, for the lack of a quotable stat, short-changing the really important initiatives like the promotion of creativity in all schools.