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Well there we are. The programme of work outlined last year for Beyond Current Horizons is complete. Addressing the questions we started with has been as complex, difficult and stimulating as we guessed it might be, but it’s been a hugely valuable exercise — not only as an opportunity to explore the ways in which education can engage with and produce futures work, but also as a chance to work in a truly interdisciplinary way with an incredible range of expertise. From the work of the last year we’ve built a sense of the ways in which education can benefit from engaging with a futures perspective: we’ve also, I think, gained a much more detailed picture of the present landscape, and the pressures and ideas that shape it.

Outputs from the past year are on the website: context and information on the programme, the research generated over the course of the programme to date, and the scenarios developed from the work of the past year. Our next task is to begin using these possible futures to work with educators, local authorities and other people who have a practical concern with the future and the place of education within it.

All of this was only possible with the insight, expertise and support of a vast number of people: our Expert Advisory Group, the authors of the reviews, the many interviewees and workshop attendees who contributed to the programme, and of course the BCH team at Futurelab. In particular, though, we’d like to acknowledge the huge role played by the following people. Professor Keri Facer was at the heart of the project, shaping the aims and principles of the programme, fostering a genuinely interdisciplinary approach and inspiring the rest of us to think beyond the obvious or easy. The leaders of our research challenges — Professor Sarah Harper, Professor Helen Haste, Dr Carey Jewitt and Professor Rob Wilson — all brought together a staggering range of major thinkers with international reputations in their fields, and worked beyond their original brief to synthesise and communicate a huge amount of work. Helen Beetham’s experience and creativity were vital to the completion of the final scenarios. It was an immense privilege to work with the members of our Expert Advisory Group: Sarah-Jayne Blakemore, Professor David Buckingham, Professor Dave Cliff, Professor Danny Dorling, Dr Patrick Hazlewood, Professor Gunther Kress, Professor Nick Lee, Professor Claire O’Malley, Professor Dr Audrey Osler, Vanessa Pittard, Professor Alan Prout, Suzanne Stein, Professor Josie Taylor, Professor Rupert Wegerif, Robin Widdowson, Professor Colin Williams and Robert Wood. Between them they represent experience and insight from education policy, philosophy, neuroscience, computer science, cognitive psychology, economics, education and demographics, and without their contribution the program would be unimaginably poorer. And absolutely none of this would have happened at all without the imagination, commitment and support of Dominic Flitcroft from the DCSF, supported by Oona Hickie.

This is the last post on this blog, which will be archived. We’re not done with the future yet, though. Keep an eye on @futurelabedu for information on our upcoming futures projects and events.

Thanks all. See you in 2030.

We’re still editing the draft scenarios, which is stimulating and tricky, like all the best tasks. We’ll be talking about them here very soon: in the meantime, here’s a tiny injection of the sort of thing we won’t be talking about (at least, not right now):

Today for lunch we had Cream of Itself Soup. It tasted like…

Okay, imagine all of the flavors that could be described by a person who specializes in describing flavors, using a thousand words or less. Take the most difficult flavor of all of them to describe.

Then add cream and salt. That´s what it tasted like.

“We have a special recipe for it,” the waitress said, “We travel into the future where the soup is already made and bring the soup back, then distill it down to its essence, then add cream and spices.”

“But wouldn´t that cause a paradox?” I asked nervously.

“That´s where it gets that delicious flavor,” the waitress replied proudly.

“But what about the risks? I mean, couldn´t you accidentally destroy the universe or something, making a soup like that?”

“Well, yes,” she said, visibly unworried, “but it´s the kind of thing that risky and terrifying the first time you do it, but after a while you´ve done it so many times that you don´t even think about it. So we just travelled to the distant future and did it the first time then.”

All credit and thanks due to the author merovingian.

While we’re putting together the scenarios from the last meeting of the BCH Advisory Group, here’s a more involved future world: JG Ballard’s Drowned World on BBC7 (UK only, available till Sunday). Published in 1962, it’s worth attention as a source for another mythic strand to draw on in response to a warming climate: it’s quite a departure from our more contemporary hair-shirt discussions of a flooded Europe.