Education has often struggled to keep up with the fast advances in new technology, but now schools could find themselves setting the pace.
Parents, charities and businesses are being urged by the government to set up new schools with the freedom to do things differently. Michael Gove, the education secretary, says he will strip away the "straightjacket" of the national curriculum and give teachers the freedom to "innovate and inspire".
With all the changes planned by the coalition, what will learning look like as schools progress through the 21st century? What kind of buildings will they need and how will technology be embedded?
In past years these questions have been left largely to designers and architects. Now teachers and governors are likely to be in the driving seat as they are given more say over what and how they teach. "Ask not what schools can do with technology, but what technology can do for schools," says Bruce Wilson, one of the senior education specialists at RM, a provider of information and communications technology (ICT) to schools, colleges and universities.
"Before schools even start building or refurbishment they have to take a step back and think about the way learning will be designed. Teachers can do that beautifully well because that is what they do," he says.
"There has to be a picture of what learning will look like – will there be spaces for whole-class teaching or team teaching across a year group? Will there be quieter areas for groups of students, sound-proofed pods, outdoor open learning zones? What is the technology now and on the horizon that can help us achieve our aims?"
To stimulate debate, RM gutted a 1970s building at its headquarters in Oxfordshire to provide a huge open-plan space with zoned-off areas and pods that can be cut off from the rest. Teachers and governors are invited along to see how they can use the latest technology to support their teaching styles.
Teachers who visit are usually want to shoot for the stars, Wilson says.
"Sadly, what I see sometimes is that all the aspirational ideas get lost because they find it hard to get out of comfort zones. When you visit their schools you see new desks and new computers but they are still in rows with children facing the teacher at the front."
Old buildings are not necessarily a handicap. The new JCB academy in Rocester, Staffordshire – which opened last September as the country's first University Technical College – is housed in a former cotton mill dating from 1789. Needing to prepare its pupils aged 14-18 for industry, the college wanted to install cutting-edge technology.
The first step was to find out what was available, says Jim Wade, the academy principal. "We had 11 companies which wanted to bid for our business, so we got them all together and gave them a presentation of what our vision was for the use of ICT. We asked them to come in and spend an hour with us and they each made a presentation of how we could best achieve our vision.
"We got a lot of innovative solutions and took the best bits to draw up our tender."
Pupils are given laptops and lockers with charging units. There are 70 wireless network points across the campus giving good coverage, plus 20 hard-wired points used for updating software on the laptops.
Opening minds
All 1,100 pupils at the RSA academy in Tipton, West Midlands were able to watch the official opening of their new building by the Duke of Edinburgh last month. Footage from the new building's theatre was fed to teachers' laptops around the academy and projected on to interactive whiteboards. The school spent much of its £1.5m ICT allocation equipping new teaching spaces for its "Opening Minds" skills-based, cross-curricular approach. The teaching areas are made up of four classrooms that can be separated or used together. Each has a smart board and microphone so a teacher in one room can put the same or different work on the board for the other three.
Not all schools benefit from the grants to academies, but the scrapping of Building Schools for the Future investment programme and the emphasis on refurbishment rather than new build need not stand in the way, says Stephen Heppell, professor of new media environments at Bournemouth University.
"Things which can make a tremendous difference are really quite cheap to install. My top tip is not to put desks for computers in straight lines but to curve them in and out. The concave bit gives a more intimate space for concentration and the convex shape encourages pupils to work together and be more aware of what is happening in the rest of the room."
Mirrors on the wall behind a row of desks not only brighten up the room but allow teachers to see both the students' faces and screens. Flat screens on the wall can be viewed in brighter light than whiteboards, avoiding the need to keep window blinds down. Portable visualisers can be used to project images from pupils' mobile phones on to flat panels on the wall.
Historically, education has not got a good record for embracing new technologies. "Mostly we ban things then, if they don't appear to have gone away, we appropriate them by going out and buying a version that fits with what we have already," says Heppell.
Schools starting new build or refurbishment should take a hard look at the sort of technology their pupils are using and incorporate it where possible, he says.
Technology for education is on the cusp of a new era: "Technologies that pupils bring into schools won't be tamed. They cannot be dragged back and appropriated into the old factory model."
Stephen Heppell is hosting the Visual Learning area, sponsored by Impleo, at the Bett show 2011
