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The Government’s decision to make it compulsory, from 2015, for children to stay in education or training until they reach 18 has not been universally welcomed. However, if raising the school leaving age to 18 means that we can be flexible about what is involved in this compulsory education - so that we can offer greater choice for learners - is it an opportunity to engage more young people in learning?

The thinking behind the Government’s decision was clear: the number of unskilled jobs is shrinking and, if young people are to find jobs, then they need to acquire the appropriate skills to do them. Furthermore, it was considered that the UK will only be able to compete successfully with rapidly growing economies such as India, China and Russia if it has a highly skilled and competent workforce. The 2006 Leitch report, commissioned by the Government, found that one in seven adults are not functionally literate, while nearly half have difficulty with numbers. The report proposed an ambitious target of making the UK a world leader in skills by 2020.

But is making education compulsory the best way of achieving this? As Ann Hodgson, Reader in Education at the Institute of Education, puts it: “Successful learning doesn’t take place in situations where people are forced into learning. The idea of having sanctions against young people who are unwilling to undertake training is a thing that most educators would baulk at.”

However, viewed from an alternative perspective, educationists may feel differently. If, for example, the change in 2015 could result in two years of free study chosen and directed by the learner, and if that study was not necessarily based inside a school building, then raising the school leaving age might be viewed as an exciting new development. So is there a way that compulsory education and training for 16-18 year-olds can be made to work?

The Government argument is that young people won’t have to stay on at school: they will be able to take jobs, as long as those jobs include some element of training that leads to a qualification – even if that training involves just one day a week at the local further education (FE) college. While some students will carry on doing A-levels, some will study for National Vocational Qualifications (NVQs), and others will enrol in the new 14-19 diplomas.

These diplomas offer the opportunity to study broader topics and are more closely related to the workplace than traditional, perhaps more academic, A-levels. There is, however, a good deal of scepticism about whether students will want to study for the diplomas while A-levels still exist, especially since the Government announced that it still regards A-levels as the “gold standard”. “However world class these new diplomas are going to be, they’re not gold, and who’s going to choose that? That’s why schools aren’t going to go for them,” says Pat Ainley, Professor of Training and Education at Greenwich University.

But alternative approaches that engage learners’ interests more directly are being tried. One example is the Learning and Skills Council’s Increased Flexibility for 14 to 16-Year-Olds programme, in which FE colleges and schools have formed partnerships that allow students to study outside school - at a college or with a training provider - for one or two days a week, to work towards vocational qualifications. Early indications are that the scheme is doing well, with good attendance and low drop-out rates.

Creative Partnerships, which is part of the Arts Council, takes the view that young people need to experience learning in a way that is more ‘real’ to them. It funds partners who can work with school pupils to engage them in learning, and those partners can come from all walks of life, whether it’s the arts, science or business. Paul Collard, National Director of Creative Partnerships, points to one example where a school whose Year 7 students were disinterested in their geography lessons about the rainforest were given one day a week to work in a local firm that produced educational software. Working in teams of three, the children produced interactive learning materials that made the rainforest topic more interesting and relevant to them - and they were expected to work to budgets and deadlines. “The only way they could do it was by learning everything about the rainforest, which they did. But because they were so busy designing their interactive learning materials, that’s what they focused on. By the end, however, their knowledge of the rainforest was fantastic,” Collard enthuses.

The South Downs Learning Centre in Sussex provides self-managed learning programmes for children who do not, as founder and Director Ian Cunningham puts it, find school congenial”. The centre encourages students to work together in groups of six, in which they can support each other. The students set their own goals and design their own programmes of learning. In one recent example, 13 year-old students wrote their own proposal to raise money from the Scarman Trust for sports equipment, cookery materials, gardening materials and suchlike. “They’ve had to do the research, generate the budget, come up with sensible ideas, and make a proposal to a funding body - they’ve done it all themselves,” says Cunningham. The students were praised for how well they had planned their proposal and they gained 100% of what they asked for.

These projects are all small-scale, however. But technology could be the key to enabling a much wider group of students to take control of their own learning. We are already seeing greater use of new digital technologies that enable learners to work together in new ways, forging links with others with similar areas of interest and with experts in their chosen field. Video-conferencing, instant messaging, blogs and wikis are all technologies that enable students to learn at a distance, to collaborate with others and to work more as co-learners with their teachers.

Tim Rudd, Senior Researcher at Futurelab, agrees: “Digital technology could help to facilitate a more diverse way of learning that enables learners to develop skills that are relevant to their lives outside of education, take on responsibility and be active in developing their own learning.”

The Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme has been working with private partners such as Microsoft to address the question of how technology can be used to engage students more effectively, with some success.

“Technology can help you individually personalise the curriculum you’re delivering to reflect individuals’ interests,” says Steve Beswick, Microsoft’s Education Director. “The world is shrinking as a result of technology and people can access each other a lot more quickly and easily.” Instant messaging for example, says Beswick, can enable students in Britain to communicate with other students all over the world and ask them questions about their own country or talk to them in their own language.

An example of how this might work in practice is Wolverhampton’s Virtual Workspace, which has enabled 12,000 secondary school pupils to access learning materials both during and outside school hours. They are able to use instant messaging to communicate with each other and to ask questions online of mentors - mostly teachers, or ex-teachers, from outside the local authority, who are able to support the students and help them with topics they are having difficulty understanding. Students can work where they want, when they want, and those using the Workspace have been more successful in their examination results than those who haven’t used it. “It’s moving away from a didactic approach that says ‘I am the fount of all knowledge and I will give you the facts that you need’, to becoming more facilitative in approach,” says Gerard Stone, BSF Programme Manager in Wolverhampton.

But should we be concerned that offering these alternative approaches to learning to school leavers is throwing them - unprepared for a world of choice - somewhat into the deep end? Donald Clark, a Director of the University for Industry (UfI), argues that it is unreasonable to expect students exposed to traditional teacher-centric methods of learning up to the age of 16 to be able to cope with independent learning from the age of 16 onwards.

Rather than write the idea off because of this, maybe we should take this opportunity for change for post-16 learners to introduce greater choice for younger learners too? So that greater choice and more authentic learning and working experiences can act as a model for those aged 16 and under.

Hodgson agrees: “You need to have a much more engaging general education from 11 onwards, so you don’t encourage so many people to leave the system. So you focus much less on examinations and much more on what people are learning.”

So, it would seem that, if we are brave, we could be at the dawn of a new era - one where a learner-centred approach, facilitated by technology, to offer greater choice becomes the norm not only for 16-18 year-olds, but for all learners. Pockets of good practice, such as Wolverhampton and the South Downs Learning Centre, have shown the way forward. Now we need to take the bull by the horns and universally apply such models of learning.

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