Laying the foundations for a 21st Century education system

The Innovation Unit is finding that nurturing innovation in the education system is complex, but that the approaches being used in its Next Practice programme are producing some valuable insights.

Stimulating, incubating and accelerating innovation

"We exist as a kind of intermediary, to enable potential innovators to accelerate the speed at which they travel and the direction in which they want to go", says Valerie Hannon, Director of strategy at The Innovation Unit, the small body set up in 2002 by the Department for Education and Skills (DfES) to help foster and encourage innovation in education.

"We're about stimulating, incubating and accelerating innovation," says Hannon. "We're not really interested in investing in just incremental improvements. We're looking to support the most radical forms of innovation we can find."

Initially an arm of the DfES, the Innovation Unit is now an independent company limited by guarantee (given by the secretary of state).

It's headed up by a chief executive and four directors, including Hannon. A small team — but one which, instead of imposing policy from on high, works with a wide circle of associates to facilitate and mediate change.

The idea of the Unit is not to enforce or decide change theoretically: it's to bring experts and practitioners (teachers) together, to see what happens in practice.

An instinct for innovation

It's in practice that innovation really happens. Time and again, the Unit has watched innovative ways of organising education begin to take root in schools. But too often, the full potential of these innovations gets stifled when it comes to the follow-up stages. The desire for changes gets hindered by practical obstacles and by the limits of traditional thinking.

"One challenge is to really enable practitioners to be as radical as they want to be, and to really enable them to remain true to their initial objectives," says Hannon.

"We've found that in the early stages where people start pitching ideas, there's a lot of group radicalism and ambition there, but in the end, when it gets to the point of actually moving towards changing practice within communities and schools, there's a kind of regression to the mean, to how you overcome practical obstacles and the difficulty of getting community approval."

To overcome this, the Unit also advises on The Power to Innovate, a piece of legislation which enables schools and colleges to be freed up from regulation if ministers agree that what's being proposed could raise standards in the school.

The Innovation Unit's job is to give teachers and school leaders the support, guidance and expertise they need in order to let their instincts for innovation reach their natural conclusion.

This can take the form of customised leadership development, development of how teachers organise themselves, assigning dedicated consultants to them, or taking them on illuminating visits to other similar services.

A new schooling environment

Increasingly, teachers are moving away from the idea of knowledge being something they 'download' to pupils — and towards the idea of school as somewhere teachers work with other professionals to choreograph a whole range of learning 'services'.

When Estelle Morris, the then secretary of state, set up the Innovation Unit In 2002, her intention was to nurture precisely this kind of environment — an education culture in which teachers themselves felt able to take a lead in innovation.

This is why The Innovation Unit's principal role is as intermediary and facilitator, not as policy-maker or think tank.

"We always work in partnership with national agencies, because we are a very small organisation," Hannon explains. "We try to work with those organisations for which this is their core business."

The Unit's job, as she sees it, is to give educational professionals the encouragement and incubation they need. And that means putting them in touch with the right people, which isn't always easy.

"Finding people who are really expert in changing processes and getting them to work with schools has been something of a challenge," Hannon admits.

But the Unit is managing it. It currently has four 'Next Practice' projects on the go, all run in field trials at 10 to 20 schools, and all run in collaboration with agencies who specialise in each project's domain.

Their project on leadership, for example, is partnered and co-sponsored by the National College for School Leadership. Their personalised learning project (getting pupils to participate in developing their own curriculum and education arrangements) is run in partnership with the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust. And their Communities for Learning project, which is exploring how to engage the whole school community in teaching and learning - for example, through workforce remodelling - is partnered by the Training and Development Agency.

"Everything we know about innovation points to the need for collaboration," Hannon asserts.

21st Century learning

Collaboration and mediation are two of the key directions pinpointed by NESTA's Hidden Innovation report.

"One of the major findings of the report," Hannon points out, "is the need for intermediaries. It's also put on the agenda the need for alternative metrics to assess the relative health of innovation."

By running on-the-ground projects at a range of schools, the Innovation Unit is hoping to develop 21st-century models of learning that can be transferred to schools across the UK.

But to achieve this also means ultimately bringing policy and practitioners closer together.

"There needs to be something more of a strategic approach to innovation," says Hannon. "But I think a slightly more joined-up approach between government and practitioners might possibly be beneficial."