We’ll be hidden in deepest, darkest Oxfordshire building these scenarios, but in the meantime, a link to the first TeachMeet video (from BETT 09)  – an unconference that brings teachers together to share practices and ideas and relates to work around informal communities of practice and ‘bottom-up’ innovations.

It’s been quiet on the BCH blog as we’re preparing for a three day event to develop the scenarios that build from the evidence collated as part of the programme so far.  Whilst that is going on, below is an overview of the responses from the Citizens Panel.

As part of the Public and Stakeholder Engagement of beyond Current Horizons a Citizens Panel was established to ask members of the public questions about the future of education. The Citizen’s Panel was sent a ten question survey that included both ordering questions and free text entry. Questions included asking about the immediate goals of education, as well as hopes, fears and expectations for future education. An additional seven questions were included to gather demographic characteristics of the respondents.  Over 500 responses were made to these questions.

The response from the Citizen’s Panel is that having the most appropriate skills for work is the most important job of the education system. This emerges from the qualitative and quantitative questions and is felt strongly across the demographic groups. People have a real worry that an education system out of step with economic reality will leave young people disillusioned and out of work and Britain lagging behind the rest of the world. It is likely that the strength of feeling about this has been influenced by the current economic climate

A number of questions ask the panel to try to look into the future. Perhaps unsurprisingly, age is the most important factor influencing the results. Younger people are more likely to look at current trends and project them into the future, whereas older people are more likely to draw inspiration from the past. The generation gap is very apparent with lots of negative views about children and young people expressed throughout the responses.

The Citizen’s Panel believe that the education system is likely to be very different in 2025, especially in terms of technological developments, but they are keen to stress that certain academic standards are timeless. There is a perception that too many people leave education without basic numeracy, literacy and communication skills and this needs to be addressed (though not, they hasten to add, with too great a reliance on bureaucratic testing.)

The Panel want the current gap in educational achievement between advantaged and disadvantaged children to be closed. There is a significant ‘Bristol effect’ here as state schools in the region are known to be struggling. The Panel do not want to see a two-tier system based on the ability to pay developing further in Bristol or elsewhere.

Finally, the panel want to see better quality teaching in the classroom. They want teachers and future teachers to have more control in the classroom, a more engaging teaching style and to rely less on boring self-directed study for pupils. They think that this could be achieved in a number of ways such as attracting a higher calibre of staff through higher pay, reducing workloads and better training and support.

Jessica Charlesworth and Michael Burton showed some work around futures and obesity during the workshop and here are some of their reflections.  They make for interesting reading, both for the comments Jessica and Michael make, but also for the articles and links they show.

Their reflections can be found here.

The results of those conversations are a couple of programmes being broadcast on Teachers TV. A half hour documentary – ‘School Matters: Tomorrow’s Teacher, Tomorrow’s School’ – will be broadcast for the first time at 7am on February 2.  A programme about a secondary school lesson – ‘Secondary Cross Curricular – Tomorrow’s Teacher’ – will first be aired at 7.30am on February 3.  The lesson uses both Million Futures and Power League to help the students think about the future.

Teachers TV are also running a competition about Future Teachers – more info can be found here.

And finally, a link to a BETT ‘09 presentation on the DCSF stand under the theme ‘Policy in Practice’.

Alex Hall/Atmos‘ developed presentation shows a variety of installations, presentations and projects – all of which can be used to reflect upon the use of space, and how both form and function of spaces/lighting can be different in relation to social and technological changes.  It’s also just beautiful to enjoy.

The Vision 2020 asks 9 influential speakers to talk about both short and long term changes for education and learning.

Both useful, especially if you’re looking for something for journeys to BETT …

A quick Friday post then to point to the Chicago Tribune’s images of past ‘high tech’ gadets.  The weekend homework that accompanies the images – think about stories from science fiction, predictions and forecasts you have heard and look for where parts of them have been realised.

A light-hearted review of some of those are answered in Where’s my jetpack?.

Education is a future-building enterprise.  One of the education system’s key roles is in preparing young people for the future world that they will inhabit and help shape when they leave formal education, whilst ensuring they are supported in making sense of the world in which they live now.  But in building learners’ capacity to live and work in this future world, it is vital to be mindful of the social and technological changes that have implications for the sorts of jobs, communities and relationships that will develop in the near future.   A child starting primary school this year will be leaving compulsory education in 2022.  So if we are to prepare these learners for this world, how can we begin to understand what they are being prepared for?

We can start by investigating a number of technological and social trends that have great implications for the role of formal education and in particular the aim of equipping people for specific vocations and the world of work.  Rapid improvements in digital synchronous communications and the development of virtual worlds are already challenging what it means to be ‘at work’.  In the same way, some of the technological developments that can be forecasted afford a range of new ways of organising learning and teaching: many already being investigated as new models for education.  The use of computer games as engaging activities where learners can play and investigate in different spaces, taking on a range of different roles and solving complex tasks and activities;  digital environments where learners can be immersed, not through graphics and sounds, but through investing their emotions in completing personally relevant challenges.  Computer simulations offer learners the chance to become involved in contexts otherwise inaccessible: dangerous environments (such as high risk laboratories) and remote or inaccessible places.  The opportunities afforded by the use of new and emerging technologies aligned with appropriate pedagogical approaches, offers new ways for learners to experience the work place and particular working practices.

Similarly, developing situated learning approaches that allow young people to learn within a real work context become possible and more realistic through developments in mobile, networked technologies.  Innovative examples of this approach to vocational learning can be seen at Boston College as part of the Learning and Skills Council’s MoLeNET programme, using mobile technologies to gather context appropriate assessments and providing appropriate support to students on a range of apprenticeship schemes.  At the same time, several companies are experimenting with linking their own bespoke training courses to national accreditation and to digital portfolios to support employees in demonstrating transferable skills to support them within a highly dynamic working environment.  These innovative projects may be signposts to wider scale developments in the future.

Other technological developments can support learning in activities that are currently prohibitively expensive. This is evidenced through projects such as the Haptic Cow where learning through manipulation and touch can become possible, but other complex tasks too can be assisted though haptic feedback: the ‘Phantom Haptic‘ is a design tool enabling budding (and experienced) designers to created 3D objects with force-feedback as the digital objects are manipulated and developed.  These technologies could provide ways for vocational learning to be moved virtually, if not physically, closer to the authentic contexts at which the training is aimed.

However, it is easy to imagine any future education as the current system with more technology.  Societal changes have equally great implications for the way in which the aims of education can be articulated and then successfully organised and achieved.  The forecasts of an aging population of 50% of the UK population aged over 50 and 25% over 65 years old is not a picture of a rise in the need for vocational training for nursing and caring.  Radical longevity represents a longer working life; a greater distance between the time of achieving school qualifications and final retirement, and a greater need for reskilling and later life training. The learners on vocational courses in the future may already have tens of years experience in other areas of work, so demand for vocational courses in this context may be job specific or even skill specific given the highly dynamic workforce that will be needed.  If data showing a below-replacement level birth rate and high levels of (inward and outward) migration is then taken into consideration, the requirements of diverse communities also becomes a factor influencing what vocational learning is needed:  Understanding how courses and training can be organised and delivered for a multi-generational, pluralistically financed, highly mobile student groups becomes a key issue for institutions and policy makers.  Does this then suggest a movement away from investment in formative education toward better funded re-skilling for older learners or does retraining become the responsibility of the commercial sectors or the learners themselves?

At school age, vocational learning may focus upon the skills, competences and attitudes of work-readiness.  Coping with change; working in highly diverse teams, and the ability to apply skills and knowledge to a wide range of contexts become the foundation of vocational teaching.  Other descriptors of ‘work’, such as effort, perseverance, dedication and target setting are those currently associated with the the literature on the benefits of playing computer games.  This broad range of skills and competencies may be covered then, by a range of formal and informal learning experiences.  But greater divergence in jobs means the specialism of specific industry may not relate to the expertise of teachers.  The role of the teacher becomes expert pedagogue whilst greater links with subject experts within industry bring the appropriate expertise into the ‘classroom’.

The implications of bringing work and vocational learning closer has obvious educational benefits, but what of other consequences?  Creative ideas generated by young people, as evidenced in projects such as Nuffield’s Young Foresite could be harnessed much more through links between industry and students’ access to 3D fabrication.  For the last 40 years, Moore’s Law has proved to be right and if it continues, as we expect it will, then a 3D printer that costs £0.5m today will cost around £500 in 20 years time.  Certainly affordable for every school and college, if not in most classrooms.  With creative learners producing production quality products as part of their learning experience, one could begin to question who is benefiting from the closer relationships between industry and learner, and the extent to which ‘vocational learning’ and ‘training’ are separated.

There is currently a growing recognition of the importance of vocational learning, not as a second choice to academic routes but as an equal (and even blurred in the case of some academies) route to success.  This developing trend has emerged from a range of campaigns and ties directly to current interest in personalisation: developing appropriate curricular and practices around the needs of the learner.  At the same time the voices of industry, highlighting the skills needed are becoming more clearly collected.  Yet is there a chance then, that as schools begin to take on andragogical approaches: listening to learner voice, providing greater choice and flexibility, an emphasis upon reactive teaching; that vocational learning for more experienced adults moves towards more traditional pedagogical models – where the teacher has far greater control over the aims, approaches and models used?  The focus of vocational learning becomes more strictly about short term responses to market need in a fast moving economy-driven market?

There are many possible long term vocational learning futures.  The important task now is to understand the preferable future and begin putting in place the practices and systems to work towards it.

The three presentations will be made available online (probably through Slideshare) but they are aimed at different audiences – so a quick run down below for those who want to start filling in those new Christmas calendars!

BCH is appearing three times at the BETT show – a free trade show for anyone interested in new technologies for education, held at London’s Olympia. Be great to meet some of you – and there’s also a brilliant freebie for anyone who visits us there!

The first is on Wednesday 14th January (3pm) , which will share some of the early developments of a toolkit to support strategic thinking and planning for educational change. The session will be particularly of use to education leaders involved large scale investments in education, such as Building Schools for the Future and Primary Capital Programmes. The toolkit builds on work from Futurelab and the evidence developed as part of the DCSF/Futurelab  Beyond Current Horizons The presentation will share some of this background before showcasing some of the developments of the toolkit that brings together a number of resources to support educational visioning; collaborative workshop techniques, and that uses a range of evidence to inform strategic planning. A quick 30 minute burst of how BCH may be of use to you in the New Year (on the DCSF’s Policy into Practice stand)

Second is a presentation on Saturday 17th January (12.30), also on the DCSF’s Policy into Practice stand. This presentation will provide more detail about what the programme is trying to achieve and present some of the emerging findings. In particular, it will present some of the current and emerging socio-technological trends and the implications for realising the goals of the Children’s Plan as well as the potential impact on learners, teachers, industry and learning institutions in the future. Particularly of use if you want to understand why long-term futures thinking is of use in education.

The third presentation is also on Saturday 17th January (2pm), in Seminar room C of Olympia. This presentation is more geared for teachers as it will introduce and share the ‘Innovations Handbook‘, the new, free resource from Futurelab that aims to help teachers and school leaders to develop innovative approaches to learning and teaching by offering practical tools, advice and argument to support changing practices. The presentation also talks about Beyond Current Horizons but the focus will be more about how emerging trends challenge current practice. In particular, by presenting both ‘Beyond Current Horizons’ and the ‘Innovations Handbook’, the aim is to offer visions of long-term futures whilst providing the tools for teachers and schools leaders to shape their schools’ near term futures.

And finally – there may be a brief outline of BCH at the BETT TeachMeet – but more importantly that event will provide a great opportunity to hear, first hand, some of the amazing work going on in schools at the moment.

The event was held in the wonderful MAGIC PLAYroom at SMARTlab – which enabled the group to make use of an open creative space as well as a range of computers, non-digital resources, floor and wall projectors, fabrication devices…  The tools were available for all to use and the inspiration was provided by a range of experts.  Jessica Charlesworth and Michael Burton showed some work around futures and obesity.  Alex Hall provided insight into how artefacts  of today can be changed in both form and function by a range of future trends (more of this in the New Year).

During the course of the day we used ‘creative note-taking’ – finding ways to capture converstations and ideas beyond text and mindmaps.  The aim of this is to help ‘reframe’ conversations (changing speech to images, images to stories etc) and also provides a point of reference to further expore issues as they are raised.  Having such a wide range of methods for capturing rich conversations also helps in providing those who weren’t there with an insight into different aspects of the day (and in particular the conversations held and ideas developed).

Three very talented creators helped with this, Dave Clark captured the group’s conversations in images and ’scribles’, Toby Borland captured conversations and scribbles as 3D models and Martin Maudsley brought together conversations, images and models into a story.  Video outputs, designs and images will be shared soon, as will Martin’s summative story.

This Link goes to some of the images captured during the day – be great to see/hear what you make of them without any contextual explanation. Be even more interested in what they make you think about.

If you could talk with the Oracle at Delphi (or ask questions of the data we’re collecting and generating), what would you want to find out to inform educational policy and practice?
I would like the data to be used to clearly identify most significant obstacles to learning and student engagement so that steps could be taken to remove them and deal with their after-effects. I would want priorities set to ensure desired outcomes were established for learners (ie the kind of citizens we want): that teachers’ professionalism was fully developed, supported and extended; that the curriculum broadly matched the needs of society and enterprise; that the forms of assessments used were apposite to the vision of learning developed and did nothing to alienate or disengage learners, in fact it ensured the opposite; that learning for this education system could take place when and where it was most appropriate, so that learners were present at specific physical places only when it was appropriate; and that learners were fully involved and engaged in all the relevant stages of this process.

In scanning the horizon, we often look for ‘weak signals’ – new developments and ideas that may play out in the future in many different ways.  What current developments (policy, practice, tech etc) have you noted that you think have possibilities for making a big difference to education in the future?
The recent dropping of one of the English Sats tests is a sign that the English education establishment is recognising that the assessment system is seriously out of kilter and causing problems that can only be solved by change. However, it is only a tentative beginning and this is an interpretation – nothing explicit has been expressed (ie, assessment/testing isn’t working). In Scotland the education policy is coherent, from the desired outcomes through the process, so that it is capable of being expressed effectively through a body of expertise, for example at the annual Scottish Learning Festival. However, in England, the radical Every Child Matters and the policy of personalisation of learning are undermined and dissipated by an incoherence in the system caused by elements like the over-use of testing and the perceived contradictions and inequities of the academies programme (even though it originated as a means to address the plight of communities chronically underserved by the education system.

There are signals in those elements of BSF where communities manage to keep pace with the “runaway horse” of BSF (true of so many capital projects where substantial sums of money have to be spend inordinately quickly) and rally their resourcefulness to develop creative visions of learning that can then be wed to a design process capable of producing a school for the future. The successes in this scheme will be important nationally and internationally despite the worries about the failures.

There are also signs of a bottom-up capability in the teaching profession. Blogging among Scottish teachers has been remarkably potent and successful – and the success of TeachMeet, arranged through wikis across the UK, might not be THE model that will emerge for staff development but it is proving a very important point about the kinds of creative grass roots organisation and sharing when teachers are trusted and have the space and resources to organise their own learning rather than have it done to them by people and organisations who are not even convinced by what they are doing.

Finally, we are seeing the emergence of a whole generation of innovative practitioners. There was a time when there was only one Stephen Heppell, and a handful of other innovators; but now a new generation of inspiring practitioners is emerging to support and spread change. While Scotland’s Ewan Macintosh, for example, is now recognised internationally as an innovator, there are plenty of others to support what he and his collaborators have started in Scotland.

Forecasters talk of ‘inflection points’ as a way of identifying big changes to come – they are often highlighted by ‘things that don’t fit’ (for example the mis-match between car crashes and developments in sensing technology).  Can you highlight any real world problems within education, with possible developments/solutions outside of it?
I think the really big mismatch is between what “society” and enterprise say they want from learners – caring responsible citizens who are capable of working creatively, collaboratively and flexibly – and the institutions which are supposed to provide them. The other mismatch, which bolsters and perpetuates the first, is how assessment/examinations fail to provide meaningful evaluations which are helpful elsewhere other than open the door to opportunities along lines that fail to extend opportunities fairly across communities.
The institutions and the curriculum are showing signs of change, but the change is so slow in relation to the changes that have swept through businesses and communities. The importance of vocational education has at last been recognised but the remedies are, as yet, an experiment.

What do you not want to see in any education in 2025?
I want to see a lot less of the top-down policies and projects that inevitably fail to engage the communities they are aimed at. Student voice and teacher voice have to become embedded and integral to the system. I also want to see far less ideology, politics and, it has to be said, religion, in education. For example the annual ritual as the media and politicians score points on exam results, and which then results in the denigration of students’ hard work and achievements has become extremely tedious at the very least.

What are your hopes for education in 2025?
If I was a 12-year-old walking though my school with my friend in 2025 I’d like to be free of dread of what’s coming for me. I’d like to feel that my achievements would be recognised and not thrown to the wind. I’d like to think that whatever decisions I made about the subjects I would be taking would have the same credibility and respect as those being studied by the friends I was walking with. And I’d like to think that wherever and however we studied those subjects, we would not be artificially separated and segregated from one another and that we would have every chance to associate, communicate and collaborate, whether in real space or virtual space.

Read more of Merlin’s writing and observations here