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With schools facing an ever more complex set of demands, Ian McGimpsey believes it’s time to take education outside school buildings and into the wider community

Schools policy in England has been on pretty much the same straight road of investment and accountability for the past 10 years. As it has travelled along, three problems have come inexorably closer.

The first is that, although some impressive progress has been made, results have stopped going up. The second is a growing feeling that the overall strategy is beginning to cause more problems than it solves. Are GCSEs too easy? Are schools educating for life or teaching to tests? Should we be alarmed that more kids can read but markedly fewer want to? Some newer measures have already been put in place in response to these problems: scrapping compulsory SATs at 14; creating more flexibility in parts of the curriculum; establishing Ofqual; and so on. But these measures, though welcome in themselves, have felt more like individual responses to a series of stumbling blocks than stepping stones towards a clear destination. It is getting harder to tell what direction the system is moving in.

The third question is where education is leading young people. It is no longer enough simply to say that we want to raise the standard of educational provision. In a rapidly changing world, we need to ask ourselves what it means to be an educated person today.

Many questions around education are based on what feel like perennial issues – the relative underachievement of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds, for example. However, the challenges we face are constantly changing. In the medium term, there will be less money for public service provision, meaning that both people and the state will have to be more resourceful about solving local problems. The pace of change in technology and the labour market makes more problematic the idea that education ‘prepares’ young people for employment. Future generations of pupils will need to be encouraged to deal with the opportunities, threats and interdependencies of a shrinking world. So important is global awareness, in fact, that it has been argued that all young people should be able to take a gap year for travelling and volunteering.

Education clearly has a key role to play in helping people live well, together, on the planet we have. But should schools have to worry about these kinds of problems? Teachers and headteachers are beginning to feel that schools are being pulled in too many directions. Schools are responsible for raising results – and face the threat of closure if they fail to do so – but are also being asked to take into account social and emotional aspects of learning, healthy eating, sex and relationships, and contemporary issues such as sustainability. Wider wellbeing indicators have also been mooted for introduction in the new school report card.

There is a growing sense that the demands now being made on schools stretch beyond their capacity to act – a problem for which the efforts of school leaders and staff cannot compensate. However, school remains the greatest educational investment in most young people’s lives. How can it not take account of the major issues of our day? This tension, with an election looming, has led us to a crossroads that offers two sharply different directions.

One direction reasserts a notion of the traditional school: schools should be institutions primarily concerned with teaching a canon of knowledge based on established academic principles; they should not be distracted from doing so by teaching skills that are not contained within those subjects, nor by supporting the delivery of wider children’s services.

The other direction might lead from the observation that social and economic disadvantage is a key factor in dictating educational performance and participation. Successful learners tend to have access to strong communities of learning – not only within a school, but also beyond its walls. Few would dispute that strong families and communities provide a foundation and continual support for schools’ work: they value learning; they shape the values and character of their children; and they provide access to rich resources and learning opportunities such as museums, libraries, volunteering and work experience. 

In other words, the alternative to our stretched and strained schools is not to narrow their outlook by building walls around them but to tear down these walls – to create a school without boundaries.

A school without boundaries

A school without boundaries is an institution that takes on the local leadership of a broad vision of education for citizenship in the 21st century. That vision starts from the question ‘What kind of people does this place need to thrive in future?’ and is rooted in the idea that these citizens will be engaged, other-regarding and self-reliant.

A school without boundaries would encourage the wider community to recognise its responsibility in the education of young people and would engage them in its provision. It would seek to mobilise resources within its locality and engage families, employers, local public services, culture and heritage organisations and the voluntary and community sector. School would be a site of reciprocal relationships whereby families and local institutions grow in their sense of ownership over the content, process and outcomes of learning. By founding itself on an inclusive community of learning, a school without boundaries could provide new opportunities for learning in school and within the wider community. It would enable young people to connect learning with their experience of the outside world and show them that their participation matters.

I hope the notion of a school without boundaries will prove useful as a direction of travel towards the changes we need, but the challenges are sobering. In particular, it calls for a broader social settlement around education and requires us to exploit the range of models available for local collaboration.

Translating ideas into action

The RSA will seek to work with schools, as it has done in the past with Opening Minds, to co-develop practical approaches to realising this vision. Indeed, we have already begun to build on Opening Minds by exploring the idea of an area based curriculum as one way of embedding a school in its wider community. We have been working with three schools in Manchester – North Manchester High School for Boys (NMHSB), Whalley Range 11-18 Girls High School and Parklands High School – to explore how schools can shape positive conceptions of citizenship. The schools have developed a curriculum that connects the opportunities, culture and creativity of the city with the aspirations of the young people who already live there, placing them at the heart of a more distributed and collective education effort.

Their vision is, given time, to help young people develop the motivation, skills and disposition to participate locally and to ensure that they are supported by strong communities of learning both within and outside the school, in order to raise levels of engagement, aspirations and standards of achievement.

The pilot projects took place over a six-week period and are currently being evaluated. Each project seeks to engage young people with their locality in a different way. With media becoming an increasingly important industry in Manchester, NMHSB ran a project called ‘What makes Manchester great?’, which introduced students to significant local places related to history, the arts, sport and industry. About 90 students working in groups of between eight and 10 produced a film on the project theme and then worked with the BBC to edit their piece to professional standards. The films have been displayed in Exchange Square.

Whalley Range also used film-making in its pilot project but put a greater focus on community – both the wider community of Manchester and the local community around Whalley Range. Having researched the past, present and future of Manchester, young people produced images, sketches, poems, songs, interviews and dramas designed to reflect their area in different eras.

Parklands High School explored culture and the arts in Manchester, enabling students not only to learn about the area but also to explore the significance of Manchester in their personal lives. Through this project, students have produced a cultural artefact based on what they have learnt.

Beyond a focus on Manchester, the projects had two important things in common. The first is that they were designed to allow young people to learn practically and develop useful competences and skills as they worked through them. The second is the degree to which the schools engaged in new partnerships with other local organisations, offering new opportunities for learning through these relationships. Manchester United, the BBC, URBIS, Manchester Museum of Science and Industry, the City Learning Centre, Manchester Tour Guides, Manchester Airport and local art galleries were all involved in one way or another.

Going further

Even as we are optimistic about the value of these pilot projects, we must be measured in our expectations about what can realistically  have been achieved during their limited lifespan. As yet, there has been little time to explore new organisational relationships in depth and to mine their full potential. Nevertheless, there are many lessons for us to learn about how to facilitate the sharing of resources, knowledge and relationships appropriately across different school curricula. By learning as much as possible about the process of creating a Manchester Curriculum through its evaluation, the RSA will seek to ensure that the idea continues to develop and that other cities or towns can adopt the process.

The pilot projects are just the start of a long-term project that draws inspiration from existing models of educational practice. One example of what the RSA might achieve is Toynbee Hall’s Aspire programme, which works with students ‘excluded within rather than from school’ in Tower Hamlets. Their volunteer coaches encourage young people to engage with opportunities for learning and life by providing workshops in and out of school, linked by the themes of Think, Express and Achieve.

It will be important to explore further the value of education outside the school walls and to consider how schools can build on the opportunities and benefits brought by educators working informally in the community, notably youth workers. The RSA will release a report on this topic this autumn together with UK Youth, the UK’s largest membership body for youth workers.

And how might we envisage the design of a school without boundaries? We hope to build on the perspectives of system designers and the ideas of the RSA’s own Design & Society team to explore, together with school leaders, the learning environments that could support a school without boundaries.

We have come to a point of decision in the education system in England and Wales. In taking the right path to meet the challenges we face, we should follow this simple principle: the responsibility for the education of future generations lies with us all. The implications for practice are significant and complex. However, this path can lead to the models of education we need in the coming years.

Area based curriculum An area based curriculum combines the following four elements: It uses the social, economic and cultural context of the area in which young people live to bring learning alive. The learning environment should no longer be bounded by the school. Instead, the local area should serve as a gateway to ideas for curriculum content and should provide common ground on which to engage not only young people, but also other local stakeholders. In planning an area based curriculum, schools create rich connections with local employers, public services and civil society. Our goal is that the curriculum – the aims, the content and the processes of teaching and learning – would, over time, be ‘owned’ not just by schools but also by local institutions. It uses the Opening Minds competences as a foundation to foster the skills and commitments related to working well with others in strong communities located both within and beyond the school. It uses the local area context, as well as the Opening Minds competences and skills, to provide a foundation for practical learning that will engage young people.

 

Ian McGimpsey is senior manager of education for the RSA

Find out more

See our project page on Schools without Boundaries and the RSA Education programme, or you can contribute directly to the debate on our blog.