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 [...]

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 [...]

Stuck in the past

One of the big problems for education in this country was illustrated yet again today with the publication of the report from the Centre for Policy Studies’ on re-training military service people to work as teachers in schools.
 First, for clarity, I am not implying there is any reason that people with a background in the [...]

Knowledge and power

We had Prof. Michael Young in the House last night talking about the question ‘What are schools for?’ This marked the first in a new series of education lectures at the RSA supported by Edge.
It’s the sort of question that, by virtue of being big, broad and endlessly contestible, is always enjoyable to explore and but [...]

Room for subversion

As many will know, this Monday the RSA, in partnership with the Innovation Unit, will host the first event in the life of the Future Schools Network.
 The purpose of the Network is to create schools fit for the 21st Century - by which we broadly mean schools which are responsive to a world which is changing [...]

Risky business

Why do I take some risks and not others? I suppose it’s about how well I can foresee a potential positive outcome against a negative result, and the severity and likelihood of each. But that makes the whole subject sound like an entirely rational calculation, which is not what it feels like in real life. Personally [...]

Networks of knowledgeable people

In the last post I mentioned that we visit schools a lot.This means each of the team are in schools every week and have the opportunity to talk to staff and students (though probably not as often with students as we should, and our conversations with staff aren’t as ongoing as we would like).Being in [...]

Welcome to the RSA Education Blog

Welcome to the RSA Education Team’s new blog. Let me try to explain why I hope it will be useful.
The point of this blog is to have a more regular conversation about what is on our minds with regards ideas and practice. We don’t want to meet you and then be out of touch [...]