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.