RSA’s Future Schools workshop

Julia attended an exciting Future Schools workshop at the RSA facilitated by our colleagues at live|work. The workshop is part of a series of events that seek to bring together a variety of school and education experts to explore new concepts of our future schools. The focus of this session was to further examine what a ‘school without boundaries’ and a network of future schools cross-pollinating knowledge and expertise might look like.

Thinking about the idea of schools without boundaries, it became clear we had to define what the current boundaries are first. Having conducted some pre-event surveys, the RSA team had already identified a number of problem areas - inhibiting issues within the present system. These included ‘learning’ being genuinely confined by classroom, age, time and place. Some of the more high-level system challenges addressed rigid assessment frameworks organised around student ‘failures’ rather than ‘successes’ and overly directive leadership.

The facilitators consequently introduced an idea brainstorm exercise around some of the barriers. Generating ideas for ‘Personalisation’, ‘Community’ and ‘Leadership’, the group came up with many exciting suggestions of what a school without boundaries might be like. For instance, the notion of a teacher becoming a ‘learning consultant’ - advising and coaching the student along his learning journey to make the right professional connections and develop an individual learning pathway.

The session was also a good opportunity for people to share best practice and learn from each other’s experience. In order to create greater awareness around the notion of ‘Leadership across all levels’, one school had distributed an ‘I know I’m a leader because.... (I had a go on my own today)’ card. This simple intervention helped the school community to embrace new ideas about how they could organise themselves and what roles and responsibilities people should be taking on.

The RSA team will soon be working up the outputs of the session which will set the direction for the continuation of the project. It’s a really exciting programme, and we’ll surely keep you updated. In the meantime, more information can be found here.