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There are many possible futures, some of which are more probable than others. A key challenge for those concerned with education is to identify, and influence, which path the future will take, and to plan and manage effectively so that they are well prepared for this future. So how, in this world of rapid social and technological change, can schools best do this and what tools are available to support them?

Beyond Current Horizons (BCH) – a joint research project between Futurelab and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF) – is one way of successfully planning for the future. The tools that will result from the project – available in spring 2009 - will improve understanding of what the world will be like after 2025, assisting the planning not only of curricula, but also of teacher training and even school design.

BCH has commissioned a number of research papers that consider the challenges facing the future planning of education. The first of those research papers – ‘Future Issues in Socio-Technical Change for UK Education’ – suggests that some future trends are very likely, even if others are as yet unclear. For instance, Moore's Law – that computing power doubles about every two years – will continue. Another assumption is that we will continue to see a major ‘disruptive’ technological development once every decade that transforms the IT-related industries. Other suggestions are that computing and biosciences will move closer together, with the possibility that a computing system could be built from networks of living neurons. It is also very likely that 'smart drugs' will be widely available to improve cognitive abilities.

From these examples it becomes clear that both science and technology will become even more important to society, and that a wider general understanding of related basic principles is essential if the UK is to remain a major economic nation. Schools will consequently need to provide all students with a higher general understanding of science than is presently the case. There will also need to be improved comprehension of 'systems thinking', which will only be possible if pupils also attain a higher level of scientific literacy and mathematical competence than they do today.

Stephen Heppell - Visiting Professor of New Media Environments at Bournemouth University and an advisor to education authorities on future planning – believes that, in general, insufficient thought is currently being given within education institutions to social and technological development, and, consequently, how that should influence planning.

Heppell suggests that it is important to go beyond envisioning how technologies will interact with society, to consider how we want them to interact and what preferred objectives can be achieved. “What has happened in the past is that people have harnessed technology to do the things they always did – for example, using technology to pass exams a little better, without criticising what the exams were testing,” says Heppell, “or to teach more students at a time.” Too often schools try to carry on doing what they always did, merely using technology to be more productive in doing so. “Existing practice is not questioned enough,” he argues.

Planning should become more strongly values-based, argues Barry Sheerman, Chairman of the House of Commons Children, Schools and Families Committee. Sheerman wants schools to think more about producing well-rounded citizens with the skills and outlook to thrive in a future society: people who are interested in the world around them.

School planning that takes a 50-year perspective particularly impresses Sheerman and his select committee – he mentions Knowsley as an education authority that has done this. Sheerman urges schools to think seriously about what competencies they want to produce amongst their students – and not merely to rely on past experience of what was done and how.

In Sheerman's view, schools and education authorities should consider more than the needs of the UK economy and how they can help produce workers for the future. It is equally important to plan for the desired social outcomes in terms of the personality of those citizens and to help them shape their place in tomorrow's world. “You have to navigate your future,” stresses Sheerman. “You have got to have that imagination to know what you aspire to. When he was Education Secretary, David Miliband always talked about transformation – about the capacity to transform the lives of children attending the schools, to transform the community and the capacity to transform the environment, through sustainability. Transformation has to be the key concept.”

Many of the principles stressed by Sheerman and Heppell can and should be applied more widely today, says Lord Mawson. He was a founder of the highly regarded Bromley-by-Bow Community Health Centre and set up Andrew Mawson Partnerships to promote more coordinated development of schools and other community resources. Mawson believes that moving schools forward, particularly failing schools, must involve rooting them more firmly within their communities. “It’s about people and relationships, if you want to change those very difficult schools,” says Mawson. “It's not just about structures. [It's about] the relationships within schools and with key players in the surrounding areas.”

This view is echoed by Andrew Cozens, Strategic Adviser for Adults' and Children's Services for the Improvement and Development Agency. Cozens says that making schools a part of their community with shared use of facilities is a fundamental aspect of the purpose of a school, and so must be a core consideration when designing new schools. “You go to a totally new facility, which looks wonderful and as soon as you get people in, you realise it doesn't work,” warns Cozens, thinking of some of the newly-built schools he has walked into. Speaking as somebody who was involved in one of the first phases of Building Schools for the Future, he is making the point that, without thinking about the people who will use the school – pupils, staff and the local community – and the type of education they want, the vision will simply not become a positive reality. “One of our programmes involved getting architects to spend a lot of time speaking to children, parents, teachers and heads, thinking about how schools work and how they might work in the future,” says Cozens.

So, it would seem that planning for the if values-based and in partnership with a variety of people - can also help us to address more short-term issues, such as designing a school under the Building Schools for the Future programme. However, it is important that the debate around what the future should look like goes beyond the boundaries of education. As part of Beyond Current Horizons, a website called Million Futures (www.millionfutures.org.uk) has been set up to invite comments from the general public outlining their hopes, fears and dreams for the future. Then there’s the 'Horizon Scanning Centre' on the Foresight website - developed and funded by the Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills (DIUS) - which contains a toolkit to help with developing a clearer concept of what the future looks like, and a European Union Foresight website which provides assistance with future visioning, including an example of the planning of Manchester as a knowledge city. All of this much wider thinking can then be taken into consideration when planning the future of education – whether it be ‘what should education look like and what form should it take in 2025?’ or ‘how should I
design my new school next year?’.

The writer LP Hartley famously observed that the past is a foreign country where they do things differently, and there is a danger that the same can be said of the future. If the future is to be made less foreign, and less daunting, then we need the tools to help us to tread the path that we want to take. Happily, many of those tools and support already exist – we just need to make time in our day-to-day lives to use them.

Further reading

‘Future Issues in Socio-Technical Change for UK Education' by Dave Cliff, Claire O'Malley and Josie Taylor is available at www.beyondcurrenthorizons.org.uk/findings/research-challenges/crosschallenge-papers

The Foresight website, which includes the 'Horizon Scanning Centre' is at hsctoolkit.tribalctad.co.uk/content/view/136/2/

Million Futures is at www.millionfutures.org.uk

A Foresight exercise in planning for Manchester as a knowledge city can be studied at forlearn.jrc.ec.europa.eu/guide/7_cases/manchester.htm

Stephen Heppell's blog and information on his consultancy work on schools is published at rubble.heppell.net/places and www.heppell.net

'Future schooling in Knowsley' is accessed at www.knowsley.gov.uk/education/future_schooling

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