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Merlin John

It’s one thing to analyse and identify the failings and challenges that education faces, but it’s another to engage in the solution. Unusually for a journalist, Charles Leadbeater appears unafraid.

So if the theorists behind Every Child Matters and personalisation of learning wanted to set their reforms ablaze, and were handed a box of matches, where would they start?

“I would set the fire in Years 7, 8 and 9,” he replies. “And I would focus on trying to develop a new approach to a capabilities-based curriculum in the areas that create a different bridge from primary into secondary. I would really develop that and establish a different ethos.

“That is a place from which to start. Then you could work backwards to primary and forwards through secondary. But I think it’s very difficult to do it all at once so if you go to Cramlington [Cramlington Learning Village, Northumberland], you’ll find that Derek Wise started to do this, using ‘learning to learn’ as part of ICT 10 years ago. Then they started to do it in humanities and then they came together and started feeding it out across the curriculum from there.

“I think you have to establish a bridgehead where you can establish some credibility for what you are doing - and establish some practice and some skills and a cadre of people - and then work up from there.”

The list of ‘innovation’ clients is impressive

Charles Leadbeater was a national newspaper journalist who stepped off the pages of The Independent newspaper in 1996 for a taste of the decision-making action. Rather than observing, analysing and writing from the distance of a national newspaper, he worked closely with the policy makers as an independent author and consultant. The list of clients he has advised on innovation is impressive: the BBC, Channel 4, Vodafone, Ericsson, Microsoft, Tony Blair, the Innovation Unit, the Department for Trade and Industry, the European Commission and the government of Shanghai.

But education is where he has made a lasting mark on theories of personalised learning. While his thoughts are well known to policy makers, they are not so familiar to the workforce, which is a pity. Why should the politicos and bureaucrats get the best ideas to play with when they are needed at the chalkface?

Fortunately, school leaders have been interested in his ideas, and he in theirs, especially the increasingly influential UK pioneers whose ideas he promulgates in his work for the Innovation Unit - ‘What’s Next? 21 Ideas for 21st Century Learning’ (see links, right).

Learning as ‘an egg on a plate’

Learning and Teaching Scotland, committed to bringing the most challenging contemporary ideas to its teachers and school leaders, treated them to his most current analyses by booking him as a keynote speaker at the recent Scottish Learning Festival in Glasgow. He did not disappoint. The 21 Ideas he shared were based in the context of a visual model of concentric circles “like an egg on a plate”.

With school reform as the yolk, and family and neighbourhood learning as the white, he explored some of the key ideas he identified as being behind the most promising developments in the schools he visited for his Innovation Unit work, part of its Next Practice in Education programme.

He has spent quality time with some of the most purposeful, challenging educators in England, schools that include Bridgemary, Cramlington Learning Village, Darlington Education Village, Eastfeast, Winsford Education Partnership and Yewlands.

The 21 ideas are in the publication (pdf) that is freely downloadable from the Innovation Unit’s and the author’s websites. They include some of the key elements that appear to be proliferating across schools in the UK and elsewhere without any top-down guidance. For example ‘schools within schools’, peer learning, personal learning plans and portfolios and ‘leadership teams not headteachers’. There’s even wanton provocation, albeit in a good cause: ‘Scrap the Six Week Summer Holiday’.

Learning is something you do ‘with’ people, not ‘to’ them

The sense you get is of desirable shifts in position and culture, for example recognition of the fact that you don’t ‘do’ learning ‘to’ people – ‘with’ is the crucial word. “The importance of this is that the more you learn with, the more able you then are to learn by yourself, on your own, as an independent learner,” he says. “If you are learning from other people, if it’s been delivered to you, if it’s just a transfer of knowledge, then that rarely excites the ability or the appetite to learn on your own. If you want to create learners who are capable of learning by themselves or with other people then you need this much more collaborative approach.”

The Building Schools for the Future programme is also a cause for concern: “One of my big worries about the whole BSF programme is that the hardware led the software. That we build schools to look like a bit better versions of schools we used to have rather than trying to think what they should be like or could be like - led by the software. And the software is a philosophy of learning that has values at its root.”

How do we fire up teachers?

So back to Charles Leadbeater with the box of matches in his hands. How could he light up a workforce of teachers? Especially as they appear somewhat bruised after virtually a generation as a political football for politicians, with a content curriculum to ‘deliver’ and reluctantly subjecting their learners to a regime of over-testing that is only now being recognised as a major obstacle to learning and learner engagement?

“The way you fire up teachers is to demonstrate that these changes allow them to do a more satisfying teaching job,” he says. ”Because actually, if you get these kinds of relationships, you get more engaged children, more successful experiences, better outcomes, more latitude for innovation and discretion and judgement of the kind that they want.

“It is absolutely critical that we do create that sort of capacity, and what you see in these schools [featured in ‘What Next?’] is that engagement, but what you also see in schools is caution bordering on conservatism, especially as you get closer to exams and GCSEs. You can’t take risks with this kind of stuff.

“One of the things that happened, but which hasn’t been taken far enough, is that sense of the policy makers learning from progressive practitioners – as in the period of Blunkett, Charles Clark and David Miliband.

“And I think that’s one of the most important things about the system: that there is a whole body of progressive, level-headed, practical but innovative practitioners who can lead the system. That’s where the most important leadership in the system comes from.
“When you talk to them, whether they are directors of children’s services or headteachers or young teachers, what you are hearing is an attempt to square the need for standards with the need for education to have this more personalised and inspirational capacity. We need to get that back, and so much of this agenda is being borne out of that.

“With the personalisation there’s a danger of politicians turning it into policy announcements, and bureaucrats turning it into particular methods or entitlements or what have you when in fact it’s an approach, a way to engage people in learning. That’s what really counts about it for me.”

But at a time when politicians are grappling with the economy, worried about losing political ground before an election, and appear unable to summon sufficient drive to create a public profile for their multi-million pound attempt to bridge the digital divide – with the Home Access Taskforce – what hope is there of fanning the flames of change? “Political courage” is what’s required, says Charles Leadbeater.

“There is no line between innovation and social justice. The people who will lose most from the status quo being continued will be the people who are getting least out of the current system now. That is why I think we need to be brave.”

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