Geoff's blog

Some interesting work on education and health

Geoff Mulgan - 09.11.2012

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.

It's now a very dynamic movement with schools all over England, covering sectors ranging from games and care to marine and creative industries. The schools minister (Lord Hill) and shadow secretary of state (Stephen Twigg) both gave very supportive speeches.  I sat through impressive sessions: one on shaping the randomised trial to assess studio schools, and another on how to do project based learning (I liked the example of 9 year olds doing air quality testing all over a town, and then seeing the effect their data had on property prices).   Given how well the early ones are doing, and how much momentum there is, it's amazing how little they've been covered in the mainstream media.  Part of the answer is that most are in relatively poor places, far from the metropolitan London media.

The Conversation

At Nesta, we hosted a lunch for Andrew Jaspan and the team from The Conversation. He has hit on an excellent model that provides authoritative and accessible material drawing on universities - essentially seeing universities more like newsrooms, full of experts with lots to communicate, who tend to get misreported by the mainstream media.   The website launched in Australia backed by a group of universities, and now pushes out a remarkable stream of articles, with a rapidly growing audience, of which the great majority are non-academics.  Nesta has supported a feasibility study to see if it can be launched in the UK - alongside parallel ones in the US and India.  It seems pretty obvious to me that there's a gap to be filled.

Health Knowledge Commons

We recently brought together a group of experts to think about the evolution of the 'health knowledge commons' - what it would take to make the best available health knowledge available to people when and where they need it, whether they are doctors and nurses, or patients and parents. 

It's a simple enough question but the answers are complex and cut across several very separate cultures. One of those is the culture of formal clinical research.  41 per cent of apparently successful medical trials are subsequently shown to have minimal or no effect.  

During the session we heard about the sophisticated ways in which each year's 60,000 serious journal articles are distilled into the 20 each clinician really needs; about newish websites like Patientslikeme that bring together patient experience and data; and about the scope for real time feedback, from tools like myfitnesspal and Jawbone or Nike wristbands.

What's needed is a dynamic system that can cope with multiple types of knowledge, some strongly validated, some much less certain, but with clear tagging to help the user determine what to believe. And we need multiple channels, from SMS to videos.

The session convinced me there is a need for a much more structured health knowledge commons, but also that it will take leadership. The UK should be well placed - we have an integrated health system, and great strengths in research and in bodies like the BBC. Even quite modest steps in this direction could save a great deal of waste from misdiagnosis, mistreatment and mistaken everyday choices.