Digital Education

The school I want for my son

Mark Griffiths - 11.01.2013

Like most parents with young children, I get a lot of joy from imagining what type of boy my young son will turn out to be (here's my best guess: sporty, intrigued by the world, cheeky, and a giggler).

He's not yet a year old, but the other day a friend asked me what type of school I would like him to go to - a good question, as for all of us who work in education the tyre hits the curb when it comes to your own child. 

So, here, unadorned by theory or footnotes, and guided by emotion as well as evidence, are some of the things I do, and don't want, from my son's school.

Things that would fill me with delight:

• If the children grew, raised and prepared their own food.
• If the school was packed with adults who offer kind guidance, and informed mentorship, of the type I have been very lucky to have seen from the likes of Dawn Hallybone , Emma Mulqueeny of Young Rewired State, David Smith of St. Paul's, Gavin Dykes and the great Howard Gardner.
• If it looked anything like this.  The Building Schools for the Future programme had its flaws, but we shouldn't shy away from wanting a school's physical environment to be a place that supports creativity (for inspiration, look at Frank Gehry's Stata building), calm thinking (Wellington College has a dedicated mindfulness space) and the sharing of the results of learning.  Good architecture need not be a rip off.

Things that I think we should all expect as a minimum:

• That all students get serious exposure to coding.  But you would expect a Nesta-ite to say that, so I'll move on.
• Support and space for students to discover and nurture their own interests, rather than a diet solely of exam content - although I recognise that he does need to get his qualifications.  To do this, it should allow student choice, exploration, and the nurturing of connections between themes.  (Nesta used to stand for the National Endowment of Science Technology and the Arts, and linking these topics together in cross-cutting projects would be a good place to start.)
• That schools use a variety of teaching techniques that support more than knowledge acquisition - School21 look to me to be doing a great job of making this real.  
• That students are able to make sensible use of their own smart phones during lessons - to put it mildly, having a browser is surely a useful tool for learning, and having blanket bans on children using their own devices strikes me as silly and wasteful.

Things that would make me want to move house to avoid:

• Any school that proudly uses a gold star rewards scheme.  Ok, one reference here, Alfie Kohn's Punished by Rewards which eloquently sets out the (many) reasons why reward schemes are based on an uncomfortable view of human nature. 
• Dusty ICT suites, with posters showing word shortcuts: CTRL-C for copy etc.  I have seen this, and it's depressing - kids can do so much more; and it implies that technology is something that shouldn't leak outside of the ICT suite.
• A grammar school, or its non-selective peer.  I have seen what the grammar school system does to those students who don't 'pass' the 11+, and it is not right.

So, a reasonably defined set of hopes, none beyond the realms of do-ability and I can point to examples of all the great things I want to see being done.  The challenge, of course, is to make these examples more typical, hum-drum even.  In the meantime, if anyone is planning to set-up a free school in the N1 area, and shares some of my beliefs, then I can be reached at Nesta!