Welcome to the RSA Education Blog

Welcome to the RSA Education Team's new blog. Let me try to explain why I hope it will be useful.

The point of this blog is to have a more regular conversation about what is on our minds with regards ideas and practice. We don't want to meet you and then be out of touch for months at a time. This blog will keep you posted with what we are thinking about, how our work is developing, and enable you to share your thoughts and opinions. It's only a first step down a road that I hope means we can we can shape each other's work as we go.

Most think tanks worry about being at the cutting edge of thinking, and about shaping government policy. What happens after that is anyone's guess. The RSA is a bit different – for a start I'm not really sure I'd call us a think tank, though some people do. Anyway, while we too worry about being at the cutting edge of thinking, we are preoccupied with the direct connection between ideas and action. That is something that defines our Education programme, and increasingly all of the RSA’s work. So alongside engaging with theory, we worry about classrooms.

The people that influence students' experience of education most are teachers, school leaders, parents and students themselves. Some of the schools that have used Opening Minds (over 150 and counting!) are proof of that. They have taken that core idea, and reshaped the aims, content, and process of learning in their schools pretty dramatically. It is perhaps surprising how little policy has got in the way (and some credit for that must go to the people shaping it every day).

An important theme for the blog over the coming months will be the RSA Future Schools Network. We will be regularly covering our progress towards getting the Network up and running, the ideas that Network members will be thinking about, and some of the practical details. We want to keep people in touch, and help you shape it as we go.

My next blog post will go into a bit more detail about this new phase in RSA Education’s workWhat do you think? Is there anything else you would like the blog to cover?