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 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.

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.

However, there is a middle way between the demand for change and the need for consistency – and that is simply based upon reflecting upon the most appropriate practices for the aims of education.  If we take the aims of the Children’s Plan as these core educational goals, then a number of different practices are needed to reach the wide range of demands set out.

Some of practices are challenged by possible futures: what does ‘being healthy’ mean in an aging population where advanced pharmaceuticals and treatments challenge our current definition – and what does this mean for the way we educate young people to be healthy?  In the same way, what are the practices that support young people being active citizens in a world of complex multiple identities and diverse and dynamic communities?

Some of the challenges persist; some of them are newly defined, and some of the current practices are made even more important (whilst other new practices are needed to emerge).

There’s a new question posed on Million Futures which asks about this issue.  What are the things that we want to persist: the practices, aims, values and mechanisms that we want to take from today into future educational practices?  Not continuity for the sake of continuity, but continuity in the face of the new and continuing challenges facing education.

There are many ways to think about the broad aims of education: those set out in the Children’s Plan; the broad range of aims set out in the Big Picture Curriculum; the aims of the Every Children Matters agenda, or the detail within the National Curriculum.  All of these set out a mixture of aims of education.

But then there is the nuance of how these different aims are valued to a greater or lesser extent by different parts of the community.  For example, the relationship between the economic drives for education (preparing people for future work etc) and the social/personal drives for education (enabling people to reach their potential).  But this is not an easy seesaw to balance, and the difficulty in articulating the ‘aims’ of education becomes more complex as the detail of the discussion becomes more granular.

One of the Powerleagues we have set up is there to prompt discussion – and capture the outcomes – around this subject.  How do you prioritise the different aims of education? And if not prioritising them, how do you ensure that the education system meets the demands of all of its stakeholders?  An interesting front page of the National Schools Partnership highlights that 45% of the population have a direct relationship with schools:  in 30,000 schools, 1 million people are employed, there are about 10 million pupils and about 15 million parents.  And that is schools alone: the figures increase when other educational institutions are taken into consideration, and they increase again when you consider who else have a direct, yet different, relationship with schools: future employers, those reliant upon the workforce etc.

So the question that emerges jumps up and down to be answered is how can these people, who have a direct relationship with formal education, be involved in articulating what they expect of schools and of the education system.  How can their voices and expectiations be collected, collated and used to inform the development of the education system that is appropriate for the society that we want?

Million Futures and Powerleague are great sites for our programme and ‘engagement’ with a wide range of people.  But where are the vehicles for a wider ‘Public Understanding of Education’ or the methods to create a public debate about education?  Answers on a postcard…

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*)