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.

The Citizens Panel is made up of members of the public who have been sampled against a number of different demographic characteristics.  Their views, along with those of the Citizens Council, will be used to reflect (not represent) a public perception of the possible futures described elsewhere within BCH and to comment upon how ‘education’ should respond.  The responses have only come into the lab this week – so a first view of the overall comments through TagCrowd.  These are the words most commonly used.  Make of it what you will.  We’ll be doing detailed analysis over the next few weeks in order to inform the scenarios, but a flavour for you to mull over the weekend.

As with many tag clouds, the larger the word, the more it is used – so in this case, the larger the word, the more times the word has been used by the Citizen’s Panel.  Some of the key words are expected, relating to the question prompts – these are simply contextual words.  It is interesting to look at the words used at second/third level of frequency.  To see what terms are being used, what issues are raised regularly.   The warning, of course, is that this is not research analysis; this is not providing any context for the word use, but that by looking at the span of words and the regularity, it provokes some thought about the issues being raised.

Some interesting words to look out for with the Children’s Plan in mind: parents, health, happiness, safety, success and jobs.

Just worth a browse before we get into the detail of reflecting the Citizens Panel’s perceptions about educational futures.

Although the deadline is not until some time in 2009 I have been having a look at responses and thinking about how they can be meaningfully analysed. So is it worth relating to the research challenges and cross-challenge activities – as an aside there’s already a strong focus on the environment? However, this does not work with those questions relating to education so does it make sense to use the educational implementations (goals, personnel, institutions, methods, tools, outcomes and beliefs) instead? My hope is that we’ll be able to see what concerns you as stakeholders most about the future and education systems in particular.

I haven’t got very far but thought I would share a couple of first impressions – neither having anything to do with content. Of the 1149 responses by the 11^th November 470 related to the first question: “What are your hopes for the future?”. This could be a) because it is the most interesting of the 6 questions presented, b) because you had to press another button to see all six questions. I am tending towards the order of presentation being vital. My reasoning being when the first (and only) question initially seen was switched at the end of September to: “What would you not want to see in any future education system?” nobody answered the question about hopes and there were 171 responses (of the 173 in total) around the future education system. It’s changed again, so am looking to see the number of responses for the new question “What of today’s education do you want to see in 2025?” – see Continuity for the sake of continuity for the reasoning behind this question. Lessons learnt: if you ever design something similar constantly rotate the first question seen in order to get a similar number of responses to each question.

The second thought is that there has been a slow down in responses. In October 453 planes were added, which means that there ought to have been a 150 in the first third of November if the rate held – or more if it followed the trend from August and increased by around 150 each month. Except so far there has been 42. My own pet theory is that people are more worried about Christmas now so haven’t been making planes, but more seriously there are issues about how frequently people return to the site or stumble across it. Possibly all those interested have already visited and added all their ideas, perhaps it isn’t easy to find unless you already know about Beyond Current Horizons…

And to finish on, I really like the person who wants their community to be: “safe, clean, caring and ideally with a small local post office and school” – so do I.

Over the coming week I will write a summary of the findings as the conversations were really rich and included the views of wide range of experts.  One group was investigating some of the possible implications of a mobile workforce set within an aging society where the development of smart drugs provided new opportunities (and concerns) for the aims, methods and roles of education.

A summary is here – and thanks to Steve Wells, the Director of Informing Choices for his facilitation and for the steve-wells-cosmetic-psycopharmacology-workshop-notes.

As I said in my last blog the creation of scenarios is probably unachievable given the limited time, resources and expertise available – although if you’re interested there are toolkits out there – for example the Foresight Toolkit, scenarios for sustainability, and designing learning spaces. Surely something to inspire teachers about the benefits of creating a longer term vision that would influence their current planning would be of more use. But what tools would this contain? And what would you call such a set of materials? Would you seek out a “long term planning toolkit” when trying to find stuff to help you create a vision and an action plan to get you there?

Then what should go into such, for want of a better word, toolkit? There are sites out there that try and structure the planning – the TDA has a framework to help plan extended school, there are tools for managing change, the Carnegie UK trust has a toolkit to use its scenarios, and Futurelab has given various techniques for talking, exploring, capturing etc.

Thus my life currently revolves around what should go into this “toolkit”? Would it be something as simple as a checklist? Would examples, case studies, and testimonials cause reflection? Could we use pictures or artefacts to inspire people create stories about their possible futures? Should we raid business for examples of generating action plans? Oh the decisions.

And if you do think of a better name than “toolkit” please let me know.

The reason for this is because the Research into Action part of the Beyond Current Horizons project is trying to support all those in education involved in such thinking, be it around designing curricula, building schools for the future, becoming an extended school and perhaps even planning careers. So far my main conclusion is that this type of planning is not easy given, as Peter Schwartz puts it, the “impossibly complex array of factors that affect any decision”.

So what could be done to make it easier? How can all those involved in education be inspired enough not only to create a vision but to make it a viable one? One solution that I’ve been investigating is to use scenarios – as the Carnegie UK Trust report says they can:

• Help define future vision and strategic priorities
• Rehearse different policy or strategy options to and weaknesses, or unintended consequences
• Future-proof a decision that is on the table.

Moreover, scenarios should be engaging, memorable and thought provoking – which ought to be ideal given the various backgrounds of those involved either working alone or in groups when doing the required educational long term planning.

However, the tricky thing is creating them. To VERY briefly summarise the process you decide your area of concern, you list all the possible factors that may impact, by some black art you select the most important and divergent factors around which to develop your scenarios, you create these plausible, coherent and possible futures, and then you plan with them. And this leaves out the consulting of experts to ensure the factors are accurate, commissioning of research as necessary, agreeing and sharing definitions, the critiquing of the proposed scenarios, the refinement, workshops possibly at every stage of the process, and how to create an action plan once you’ve got the final scenarios…

Would this creation process be useful to the education leaders, Local Authorities, consultants, architects, IT suppliers out there that may be involved in long term planning in schools? It would after all require investigating possible changes in the role of childhood, employment, technology, assessment and all the other research challenges which will influence plans. In my opinion, though I’m willing to change my mind on the basis of reasoned argument, is no. There doesn’t seem to be a lot of time in the world of planning in schools and surely what time is there should be spent doing the visioning and planning and not creating a set of plausible coherent possible futures in which these visions can be tested. The more interesting question is how can scenarios be used by education leaders? Which I may blog about in the future – but until then am looking forward to others thoughts on whether scenario creation would be useful in long term planning.

Element 1. Different ways of organising social groups that (potentially) move away from hierarchical organisation to more collective approaches in making the most of the cultural capital of the group. Particularly, I’m thinking here about the way in which organisations share knowledge, expertise and ideas – not just schools and ‘learning organisations’, but workplaces within the knowledge economy. The three necessary categories for harnessing collective wisdom, according to Surowiecki, are: aggregation, diversity and independence – mechanisms must be in place to bring together the views and opinions of the group; the group needs to be diverse in experience and knowledge, and their views must be able to be shared independently (not altered through peer pressure etc). This relates to BCH’s Challenge 3, which is looking at trends in the production and definition of knowledge. It also relates to BCH’s Challenge 4, which is aiming to understand trends in work and employment.

Element 2. Democracy and citizenship become important topics for discussion in relation to understanding how groups can interact differently in making decisions. Those who advocate developing current democratic practices (based upon majority-rule) to more participatory forms of governance suggest that current democratic practices are more closely tied to oligarchical practices (claiming, for example participation stops when leaving the voting booth). Challenge 5 is looking that the trends in the relationships between state, private and third sector provision of public services – and in relation to this is it interesting to think about the demands from communities and citizens if they become or demand greater participation. Challenge 2 is looking at Identities, Citizenship and Communities and may provide interesting reading in this area.

Element 3. Participation. Within the BCH programme we have various different ways of encouraging engagement with a wide variety of people and organisations. The general model we’re using sees Communication approaches (such as the website, blog, newsletter etc) as a means of sharing information and progress; activities and events (such as workshops, presentations, comments on the blog, Million Futures and BCH Power League) as normative approaches to participation; and finally deliberative engagement with BCH through a Citizens Council, Citizens Panel, expert interviews and facilitated forums. (I’ll return to the Citizens Council and Panel in a later post). Making sense of many different voices and channels of communications is important to this programme both to ensure that it is built upon the values and aspirations of education’s stakeholders (that’s all of you!) and also so that it is informed by the diversity of ideas and expertise that Surowiecki talks about. In an earlier blog post I put a link to a Grupthink question to gather your views – interestingly in his presentation, Surowiecki mentioned this tool. (If you’re interested in participating in any way, get in touch and we can find a suitable approach!)

A fourth element relates to Technological trends. A paper from the Scientific and Technology Subgroup reported on some of the key trends emerging in computing, bioscience and maths that will develop over the next 15 – 50 years. It highlights Birnbaum’s ‘Once-per-decade-disruptions’ with a possible example being ‘large scale socio-technical Systems of Systems’ (page 12 of the paper). The paper is certainly worth grabbing a cuppa and a biscuit and having a read: the possibilities offered by the affordances of systems of systems is worth considering in relation to group dynamics and ways of working together, as is the stark warning about the rate of technological progress in relation to that of our reliance upon and understanding of complex systems.

Although of course, mass participation will not always lead to expected or perhaps desired results. Just ask Mr Splashypants.  (*Update – for more internet memes try this timeline*)

The RSA is currently looking at two important sorts of futures in particular: cognition, and the role of the government. There are some great videos on their website featuring lectures and provocations about how developments may play out in the future in these areas. Yet for a provocative glimpse at the pace of continuity, the RSA’s Journal (Summer ‘08) has a great timeline created – as stimulus rather than prediction – by Richard Watson. Many thanks to the RSA for allowing me to reproduce it here:

RSA Journal Timeline

Spelling and free roads both disappear around 2020, whilst work-free weekends and free public services have gone by 2030. The disappearance of childhood, the family room and free public spaces all have stark consequences for the way we think about the world operating (and of course interesting discussions about definitions of all of them), yet blindness and deafness, physical pain and household chores may all die to thankful applause. ‘Death’ disappears by 2050 but evidentally Cher and Cliff Richard just before.

The timeline is presented ‘with tongue firmly in cheek’ – but an interesting pair of questions are in the preamble – ‘do you disagree with something becoming extinct or merely with the date of the extinction? Do you have any serious evidence for why this might be incorrect or is it just a gut feeling?’

It’s not solely about the quality of the evidence and information that possible futures are based upon (which is a shame considering the incredible challenge leads developing the evidence within BCH!) but about making explicit the values (and artefacts and practices etc) that we want to hold on to. BCH is doing this in many ways – Million Futures is beautiful start to questions of hopes and aspirations. Often preferable futures are based upon the continuation of the values and emotional connections that we currently have, so it is important to consider those things that we wish to hold on to – artefacts, beliefs and relationships – and more than considering them, it is important to make them explicit and actively ensure that they can play a role in the preferable future we’re working towards. If you’d like to share the things you’re hoping will remain – get in touch.

Richard’s book ‘Future Files: The 5 trends that will shape the next 50 years‘ is being launched at an RSA event on Tuesday 23 September. (Views on the timeline are welcomed by the RSA and of course as comments here too). If you can’t wait for that, the first chapter is available for download.

]]> http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/25/28/feed/ 0 http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/21/37/ http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/2008/07/21/37/#comments Mon, 21 Jul 2008 13:43:26 +0000 Dan Sutch http://blog.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/?p=37 As well as using our own engagement tools to elicit people’s views on possible futures, such as the BCH PowerLeague and Million Futures, we’re also looking to use other existing tools and networks to ask questions and to gather different responses.

Grupthink is one such tool.

Grūpthink is a new way to ask and explore open-ended topics with the rest of the world. Anyone can post a topic or open-ended question at Grūpthink. Here’s where it gets even more interesting: Anyone can add new responses to questions and topics, and those answers can be voted on by everyone else.

Interestingly, Grupthink orders the responses based not only on votes, but also on the comments recieved – have a look and explore the page (there are different techniques for fine-graining your votes). So, below is a very open, entirely subjective question – of the factors or events that you think will have a dramatic effect upon the way we live, work and play in the future. Happy voting.