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Making the most of the Building Schools for the Future programme

Steve Sayers, Futurelab

This article was first published in Education Executive, June 2006

Over two billion pounds is the sort of figure that makes most people sit up and take notice. When a government promises to spend that much money every year for the next 10 to 15 years on schools - as they have done with the Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme - there can be little doubt that we are at the beginning of something that has the potential to have a huge impact on the future of education.

The BSF programme funding is giving schools and local authorities the funds to improve their school buildings and infrastructure. However, BSF must also be seen as a chance to take a wider view and to examine what we want our schools to be in the future. If we fail to do that, we will have wasted the greatest investment we've seen in schools for decades.

With many schools suffering from underinvestment in their buildings for far too long, there is a danger that BSF could be seen as a way of acquiring the items that have been on their facilities wishlist for so long; CCTV, a decent library, a new roof or an improved ICT suite. Excitement at receiving so much money and the speed with which the BSF funds are being distributed could mean that schools may be tempted to work their way down the list without thinking hard about future-proof uses for the capital that could truly transform education in the UK. The trouble with this approach is that, after all the money is invested, we end up with the same school, just better equipped with nicer toilets, classrooms and security systems. The improvements made would simply meet the demands of the school today rather than create a school ready to deliver learning for the future.

We could miss a staggering opportunity to challenge the way education is organised in schools or, at least, to examine the possibilities available to us before deciding where to focus any investment. We need to ensure that any new setup, in terms of both buildings and infrastructure, will fulfil learners' needs, both now and in the future.

Fundamentally, we need to first ask ourselves whether it is necessary to change more than the basic fabric of the school. It is true that there have been improvements in education in the last 20 years and more students are going further with their education than ever before, but there seems to be a mismatch between what students want and what schools deliver. This has meant that many pupils are becoming disengaged with their learning. The developments of gaming, mobile technology and computers have changed the way young people spend their leisure time, but these changes have not been reflected in schools.

In reality, our schools have not altered fundamentally since the Industrial Revolution. The principles of education have remained the same since that time. One person - the teacher - imparts knowledge to students. This stored knowledge is what we, as a society, decided was needed to work and progress in an industrial economy. However Britain has moved away from being an industrial economy towards being a 'knowledge economy', where transferable skills are more relevant than the ability to act as a repository of facts - indeed, we now have technology to do that for us.

Outside of schools, homes, workplaces and communities have experienced wholesale change thanks to the internet, mobile and other technology. Inside schools, developments have not matched this rate of change. We need to ask ourselves whether the current education system is delivering well-rounded young people that are keen to learn throughout their lives, or those better suited to a world of the past. Does society need young people that know about certain historical events or biological facts, or does it need those that have developed problem-solving and thinking skills that can be applied to any situation? Should we be looking at the role of the teacher as a facilitator; guiding pupils to study items of particular interest to them as individuals, and helping them collaborate as teams to discover knowledge for themselves?

Arguments for this approach are becoming stronger as traditional teaching methods become less effective. This is particularly evident in secondary school when an essay on Napoleon is no longer challenging pupils or developing their learning, as it can be created fairly easily using an internet search and some cutting and pasting from websites.

A new approach, one which challenges and engages learners, would require an entire rethink of the current education system. We would need to move away from a system that judges performance based purely on acquiring knowledge, to one which values self-discovery in learning and embraces new technologies and innovative practice as a facilitator to this. The approach may require some current thinking to be turned on its head and that will surely have implications for the BSF programme.

For example, within the Government's White Paper, one proposal is for powers to be given to schools to ban mobile phones. Many believe that this would remove an annoying distraction for many students. On the other hand, with approximately 85% of secondary school students owning a mobile, should we not consider using this readily available technology to enable learning? Rather than saying it does not fit the current system of learning and therefore banning it, why don't we use mobile technology in the new schools of the future to enliven the learning experience?

The results are impressive when self-directed learning and new technology is coupled together. A recent initiative by Futurelab, Mudlarking in Deptford, examined the potential of mobile learning technologies to revolutionise the traditional 'school trip'. Students use PDAs (palmtop computers) to design, produce and enhance their own guided tour of Deptford with video, photos and audio as well as text. Initial trials showed that mobile technology helps them to look differently at the modern landscape and to become truly engaged in the learning experience.

Savannah, another project in which Futurelab has been involved, has also produced impressive results. This time PDAs are used to 'transform' real space into a completely different virtual environment - and so a school playground becomes the plains of Africa. Pupils become lions and 'survive' by learning the skills that enable lions to thrive in the wild. It aims to support Year 7 children to become reflective and imaginative learners, by collaborating with their 'pride' of classmates and learning about ecosystems. The project uses mobile technologies to create an engaging world where children learn through a cycle of experience and reflection. The project has demonstrated that mobile technology games can generate high degrees of enthusiasm in children - with pupils consistently rating the experience above traditional school activities.

But it's not just mobile technology that should be considered - there are a huge number of possibilities just waiting to be applied to learning. Examining these experiments enables us to consider what is possible from learning environments when we start with a fresh viewpoint. The enthusiasm and understanding of the subject matter that children involved in such projects displayed has convinced many that there is a strong argument for self-directed learning, mixed with the excitement that new technology can inject into the process.

Our role at Futurelab is to help to show schools and educational organisations including the DfES what the possibilities are and how they might make best use of them. With BSF we have an opportunity to think about significant transformation of our education system, not just the size of the classrooms and the technology available. Therefore it is crucial that we take the time to reflect on all the possibilities available to us before we spend the money.