We do need to have a vision for 21st-century education — both because of the advantages we have, which we don't want to lose, and because of the challenges we face, which make it all the more urgent that we seize our advantages.
Our advantages include advances in neuroscience, developments in IT, the fact that we know more about teaching, learning and assessment and about how to improve schools individually and collectively. The challenges include the way the world is accelerating, so that change is ever faster and our lives become more closely interdependent. In a sense, we meet the future more frequently. Youngsters need to grow up confident to work in a multi-disciplinary world, to tackle multi-disciplinary issues (eg Aids, the environment).
A specific social challenge is that although we have many more youngsters on the sunny uplands of confidence that success in school brings, we have about 20 % who are more conscious than ever that they are adrift, who feel a sense of embedded failure.
The 21st Century Learning Alliance is looking at how we can move forward in education in four main areas: in our use of time; our use of space; our use of teaching, learning and assessment methods; and our use of resources and the curriculum. We encourage schools to demonstrate things they are doing in these four areas that are extending the frontiers.
Teachers find it diffi cult to look into the future. If you asked schools what they would ideally want, you would get a whole set of abstracts. But we are never going to reach El Dorado. What we can do — and what the best schools do already — is ask where they would like to be in five years' time and what steps they will take to get there.
It might be something relatively small like increasing the number of times a school council meets and giving it a budget; or building a system, with bursaries, whereby every member of staff takes part in some sort of professional association. The best schools accumulate these small steps and describe themselves as being on a journey.
Schools are deeply conscious of what current skills are needed. What we are not so clever at — and we can't be precise about it — is thinking about future expectations. There is a tendency to deal with the present and the past and not spend enough time on the future.
The aim of the 21st Century Learning Alliance is to encourage schools to shift their plans towards the future. We are trying to provide a forum for those with ideas to share and disseminate them, enabling the debate to multiply. We want to be a catalyst for that debate.
Interview by Diana Hinds
Professor Tim Brighouse is co-chairman of the 21st Century Learning Alliance
