Blogs from The 21st Century Learning Initiative

It’s Really Very Simple
The solution to England’s education problem
The first of the Party Conferences (the Liberal Democrats) is now over, and soon it will be the turn of Labour and then the Conservatives.  The media is, and will be, full of comment, and counter argument.  Confusion would dominate over-clarity as people try to understand what the different policies actually mean.

Health and Safety
Safeguarding without safeguards
My friend is a remarkably fit and shrewd 85-year-old still able to make most valuable comments at the governing body of a secondary school.  A General Practitioner for more than 40 years he has ‘seen it all’ but is never judgemental yet always full of sound advice, particularly on general health issues such as obesity and mental health.

Knowing Your Way Around
Understanding Maps
We live in a world full of devices which, it is claimed, make life easier. Hardly anyone under the age of 45 can remember what it was like before the invention of hand-held calculators when, if you wanted to keep check of your purchases before you got to the checkout, you had to be pretty good at mental arithmetic. The daily 20 minutes of mental arithmetic tests we did as 11-year-olds did much more than equip us for sensible shopping; it meant that we came to observe things in a mathematical way – we noted relationships and proportions, calculated average speeds on our bikes and became good at accurate approximations.

End of a Partnership
Collapsing democracy
Under the Education Act of 1944 English state education was based on a partnership between central government who defined the structure, and provided most of the funds through national taxation, and the 140 or so Local Education Authorities (LEA) whose responsibility it was to administer this in the most appropriate way on the ground.  Each school was constituted with a governing body made up of representatives of the Authority, local people, parents, and sometimes pupils.  If you didn’t like your school you complained to County Hall, and you voted to remove the councillor whose views you did not approve.

The Lonely Road
Voices from the past
It was in 1987, as we set up Education 2000 (the precursor to the 21^st Century Learning Initiative) that I was facing a tough time in trying to get people to think outside the box.  One day a friend sent me this comment from Edmund Burke (1729-1797):

“Those who carry great public schemes must be proof against the most fatiguing delays, the most mortifying disappoints, the most shocking insults, and the most presumptuous insults of the ignorant upon their designs.”

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