Last week I was lucky to be invited to join a conference on skills development for the voluntary sector (Our People. Our Skills. Our Future.) at the CBI Centre here in London.
Last week I visited New York. Walking around Manhattan, the only visible signs of the chaos wrought by hurricane Sandy were the piles of neatly stacked sacks of belongings from homes and products from shops that the water destroyed.
The following blog sums up a presentation I gave at the Whole Education conference this week:
It has been claimed that the history of technology and education is one of overselling and underuse. Which feels about right to me, but, given that I am an optimist about what technology can do for learning, I owe an explanation of what has gone wrong in the past.
Wales 2025 Public Services has been established with a view to asking long-term, ambitious and critical questions about the future of public services in Wales. Laura Bunt shares some reflections from their recent workshop in Cardiff on the Art of Exit, Nesta's report on the challenge of decommissioning public services.
The UK's comparative advantage in developing the impact investment market, together with the relatively small size of supply relative to present and future demand, provides an opportunity for the UK to lead the world in investing in public and social innovation, and in developing innovations in ways of financing for impact. The Impact Investment industry could be a great British success story.
The impact investment market is increasing its focus on defining, evidencing and measuring the impact of organisations receiving finance and of the organisations providing it.
The recent Obama campaign has been heralded as one of the greatest community organising efforts of all time. Now that we are seeing the benefits of involving citizens more in services and decision making that affects them, what can we learn from what Obama has done to galvanise individuals and communities?
In our last blog post we looked at how the shift to outcomes based purchasing in the public sector is changing the nature of demand for impact investment, and how investors are responding to that.
In a world where people are making informed choices about almost every aspect of their life in a way that is convenient for them and often aided and assisted by new technology, public services need to be equally responsive to these demands.
The Studio Schools Annual Conference in Southampton was a good showcase of a rapidly scaling innovation. 16 studio schools are now open, 32 will be open by this time next year and at least as many again are preparing detailed plans.
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