Resources

Carolyn Gifford

Just as ICT is poised to deliver the greatest revolution in education since the invention of the printing press, the government and local authorities have their eyes fixed on bricks and mortar.

The fabric of our schools is important, of course, and the investment of £2.2 billion in the first year of Building Schools of the Future provides a vitally needed opportunity to repair or replace many schools that are no longer fit for purpose. But what is their purpose, and will the BSF programme provide an education for the future as well as the bricks and mortar? Sadly, it becomes increasingly clear that, in many local authorities, it will not. The schools that are taking shape now will only enable an education that would be familiar to children of the 1950s - and not totally unfamiliar to the Victorian child.

Perhaps we should not be surprised, for there are confused messages coming from the DfES. On the one hand is a forward-looking vision that works towards a learner-centred, personalised curriculum that embraces the inclusive - and pervasive - opportunities offered by ICT. This vision enables learners of all ages to access information and resources from a school-based learning platform, and to communicate with each other, with their teachers and with learners and teachers from anywhere in the world. It enables learners to pursue their learning wherever and whenever they want - not just through e-learning but through mobile learning. ICT gives learners access to a curriculum that matches their individual needs.

The other, backward-looking message from the DfES is rooted in the 'stodgy' educational ingredients of league tables, prescriptive curricula, and chalk-and-talk pedagogy based on the model of one teacher in front of 20-30 pupils. Unfortunately, it is this restrictive and inflexible model that the BSF is perpetuating. The Exemplar Design Briefs emphasise the need for flexibility to enable "developments in ICT" and "innovations in curriculum delivery", yet the bulk of teaching is expected to take place in "standard classrooms" with an allocation of one computer per eight primary pupils, and one per five in secondary.

BSF envisages computer use as predominantly in ICT suites - at a time when most class teachers have finally been convinced of the benefits of ICT and would like to embed it in subject teaching - in their own classroom. But to do this they need sufficient internet-connected computers that pupils can work in twos or threes and carry out a purposeful, information-related activity that is part of the wider learning objectives of the lesson. Accessing a website should not be an end in itself, as it often is if the lesson has been uprooted to an ICT suite.

Most of us now depend on computers to assist our work, but it's only in education that 'using the computer' is the goal rather than merely the tool that enables us to reach it. At a time when the overwhelming majority of homes have a computer (whatever it may be used for), our schools are still assuming that pupils need to be taught, slowly, what a computer is for. Schools are still 'rewarding' pupils who have painfully crafted a paragraph by hand with the chance to 'type it up and print it out' - completely missing out on all the support that word processing could have provided in the crafting process. In the world of work, we don't visit a website as an exercise in itself, we visit it to gain information - and to do that we need to have easy access to ICT, not an ICT suite that needs to be booked days or weeks in advance.

Teachers have always been surprised to discover the depth of knowledge that pupils have about topics that interest them - whether it is football players, celebrities or fossil collecting. Pupils will continue to surprise in this way - only now it may be the most unassuming child who turns out to have set up a website on their favourite author to which hundreds of people have contributed, to have created short videos of life in their street and launched them on YouTube, and to have a blog space that they use in order to keep in contact with their father, from whom they are separated. They may, also, be adept at using the full facilities of a mobile phone and have progressed to dizzy levels in an online fantasy game. These are the pupils that we ask to 'word process a paragraph' during a lesson as though it was a technically demanding feat (granted, it may be on some school computers) and as if it was a worthwhile activity in itself.

Teachers are no longer the source of information and knowledge in the classroom. In using ICT, learners are often the experts, and at last ICT systems in most schools are reliable and robust enough to deliver - so we need a curriculum and learning tasks that match their needs and abilities. We still need teachers, but we need them to inspire, to direct, to facilitate learning using every resource available, and that must include the information and communication features of ICT in all its forms. What we need are classrooms that are flexible enough to enable the use of whichever resource is most appropriate at that moment in the lesson. It may be a worksheet or a textbook, but it might also be a DVD, an interactive CD, a website or an opportunity to ask a question of an online expert, and the 'standard' classroom needs to be able to offer learners access to them all.

Unfortunately, schools tend to look for single solutions that will offer the most cost-effective return, but ICT is both expensive and impermanent. There is no 'perfect solution' of ICT suites, classroom computers, laptop banks and PDAs because the library of information is ever-growing, and with it, the ways of accessing and using it. What is needed is maximum flexibility, so that next year's possibilities can be incorporated in a responsive, learner-centred curriculum.

Which leads fatefully on to what can be seen as two further failings of the BSF programme. The first is the lack of social spaces in those designs considered to be exemplars. The need to maximise the usability of every square foot has been allied to a proper desire to 'design out' hidden areas of playgrounds or corridors that could facilitate bullying and anti-social behaviour but, as a result, many schools have no social spaces at all. Learners are not able to socialise or communicate unless they are on the move, to and from lessons and the dinner queue. If we do not encourage children to interact with each other, how will they develop social skills?

The final failing of BSF is again one of prescription. The users of the schools of the future - teachers, children, parents, the local community - should be involved in the design process because they will be most affected by it. We hear much about learner voice, but we do not hear the voice itself. If children are to be spending most of their waking hours in a classroom, at a desk, should we not ask them which designs and colour schemes they prefer, rather than inflicting on them what we think they will like?

We have the tools for a learner-centred education, and in BSF we have the funding for it. What we need, to ensure that we really are building schools for the future, is clarity in the purposes of education and a new pedagogy. For that to develop, we also need a new, wide-ranging debate that engages learners, educators and the community in which we all live.

Links

Exemplar Design Briefs - www.teachernet.gov.uk/management/resourcesfinanceandbuilding/
schoolbuildings/exemplars