Creativity Money Love - Introduction
November 2011
The revolution is being televised: every day in the news we see radical changes being enacted around the world. It is also being digitised, and people are finding new ways of doing things for themselves. Two areas where change is happening at a frenetic pace are in the education system...
Piloting chaos with integrity and inspiration
November 2011
What did you and your colleagues want to achieve with this education? We have often considered the KaosPilots as a positive answer to youth unemployment but, to many, it has meant more than that: influenced human potential, moved boundaries etc. The KaosPilots was our vision of a fantasy education, one...
Creativity Money Love
November 2011
In his recent MacTaggart lecture the CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, spoke of the energy and inventiveness of Victorian Britain as ‘… a time when the same people wrote poetry and built bridges’. Most of us want that kind of richness and diversity to run through our communities. We all...
Another way in
November 2011
I don’t think many people in the cultural sector expected the newly-formed Creative & Cultural Skills to make apprenticeships a key skills priority in 2006. Employers weren’t crying out for them; most said that they’d like to have apprenticeships for graduates rather than engage with younger people. However, as we...
Schmidt, Leonardo and video games
November 2011
When Eric Schmidt delivered the MacTaggart lecture at this year’s Edinburgh International Television Festival, his views regarding UK education were widely publicised. Whilst most of the 560 comments on the BBC Technology pages subsequently focused on his surprise about computer science not being part of the UK schools curriculum, he...
The case for creative learning in hard times
November 2011
In 1981, I was in high school in America, immersed in a curriculum scheme called ‘college prep’. This is roughly equivalent to A-level work in Britain, albeit with less flexibility: back then, if you wanted to be positioned for university consideration, you took courses x, y and z, no questions...
Don't set yourself to formula
November 2011
Imagine being constantly labelled and identified with limiting stereotypes. Well, that was my experience, as it is for many young black males, during most of my youth, which is the time when, like everyone else, I developed my identity and character. It was during this time that I created B.R.A.T...
Reading, Wroughting, Arithmetic
November 2011
The Russell Group of universities has recently announced that the more practical subjects at A-level and GCSE will not in future be considered ‘challenging’ enough to count as prerequisites for entry to the top institutions of higher education. Meanwhile, the Secretary of State has publicly differentiated between the serious subjects...
Creative learning through technology
November 2011
For the past few years, I’ve argued that, unless we’re prepared to become significantly more creative and imaginative in the way in which educate young people, the likelihood of them grasping the opportunity to fulfil their potential can only be enormously diminished. I’ve tried to promote the concept of innovation...
From an EBacc to a MeBacc
November 2011
Whatever our worries about coalition policies, let’s be grateful to Mr Gove for one thing: his General Motors approach to education (‘what was good for me is good for everyone’) has mobilised a national debate about the purpose of learning. The previous government, despite the rainbows and manic policymaking, never...
A new renaissance in learning
November 2011
I graduated in the early ‘70s. It should have been an era of mass factory education, following the post-war baby boom. At one stage, that era saw a new school opening daily in the UK. Every school had near identical galvanized steel windows. Yet when my partner was in the...
The twelve Cs for learning in the 21st century - beyond the three Rs
November 2011
How do we prepare children for their future – not our past? How are we to be 'hospice workers for the dying culture and midwives for the new one'? How are we to help our young people to prepare for a world which we are unable to even begin to...