Education Charter

A vision for education in the 21st century

Our feelings towards young people are mixed. They are, in the eyes of the general public, simultaneously victims to be pitied and a threat to be feared. As victims, they are unhappy and placed under stress as never before: behind the schools gates, they are over-tested, while outside a supervised environment they are subject to the relentless temptations and dangers of modern life such as drugs, risky sexual behaviour, and extreme content available on the internet. And yet the same young people have never been more frightening: terrorising our estates and public transport, bullying fellow students, and intimidating powerless teachers.
 
In the grip of cultural attitudes rooted in fear of (or anxiety for) the young, we have shied away from confident progressive action; public policy responses to young people have tended to be both protective and punitive. Young people live in a culture dominated by concerns for their health and safety; at the same time Britain locks up more young offenders than almost any other European country and was recently castigated by the UN 2008 Rights of the Child report for its use of ASBOs.
 
The risk of such a conservatism of approach is that we fail to tackle – if not to encourage – the very problems we aim to solve. In schooling, we hear constantly of change and initiatives, and yet there is an uneasy sense that we are playing around on the surface of an issue with deeper roots. We have seen a rise in the number of young people who have mastered the mechanics of reading, but the number who read for pleasure fall much more dramatically. In comparison to other nations, while our top students thrive academically, our middle and lower performing students drop out earlier and come away with greater gaps in their knowledge. All the while, young people are voicing their doubts about the usefulness of their learning at school, and – when given the chance – telling us how we can help them better enjoy and engage with learning.

By contrast, the RSA has a proud history of confident, progressive action in education. We will continue to act in this tradition through the Charter for Education in the 21st Century, and its accompanying campaign. Our aim: to help young people become enthusiastic lifelong learners, capable of rising to the challenges of the times, by transforming outmoded models of education.
 
The Charter is a statement of aims and values that we believe should shape the practice of education, if it is to meet our ambitions for the education of young people from this point forward. It is not just the ideas of a small team at RSA HQ; the thoughts of hundreds of Fellows, and a significant group of other organisations working in education, shaped the Charter into what it is.

The Charter is necessarily a broad statement but it is not an empty one. It is a statement of change – practitioners have told us that it is a far cry from the everyday reality of the education young people receive – that we hope many can and will sign up to.
 
The indications are that parents increasingly believe that they must take responsibility for the education of their children but feel unable to do anything about it (an anxiety which a once or twice in a lifetime choice of institution for their child does little to relieve). We know that young people have strong views about the kinds of learning they want more of and, through programmes like Opening Minds, we know that more and more practitioners are realising the power to innovate according to the needs of the young people they work with. In short, we know that real change on the ground is both necessary and possible.
 
The RSA is articulating a vision for education in the Charter, and through the accompanying campaign will present practitioners, parents and students with practical steps they can take to make that vision a reality in their school. We are delighted that other organisations have begun to commit to the Charter and we look forward to working alongside them in future toward this common goal. In reaching out, we want to engage people not as a way of making a point to policymakers, but to empower parents, students, teachers and governors to take on themselves the challenge of creating the education they want to see in their local area.