Are you a P-route or T-route future school?

Mr Dan Buckley Cambridge Education Plymouth, UK

This is the largest single investment in education in the history of the UK and will allow all secondary schools to be rebuilt or remodelled … In the UK, the government has launched a programme called BSF (Building Schools for the Future). This is the largest single investment in education in the history of the UK and will allow all secondary schools to be rebuilt or remodelled to make them suitable for new pedagogies around personalised learning in a knowledge economy.

Exemplar school designs have been commissioned and the first wave of local authorities has chosen their first schools. These first schools have had unprecedented input from a range of sources in the knowledge that the headteacher will effectively be in the driving seat in terms of the school’s final design. But, how do you prepare headteachers for designing the future school, and would a headteacher from an inner city school in ‘wave one’ feel confident enough to redesign educational pedagogy, knowing the world is watching?

In February last year, I was commissioned by Microsoft UK to come up with a range of strategies to help headteachers in this position envision their new school. Together with Naser Ziadeh from the Microsoft team, we discussed what possible approach could be most helpful and decided that we needed to define a set of routes along which schools could travel towards transformation. Such a concept would place the new school as a point on this journey and would mean that it would need to be built with future evolution designed in. The new school would require a ‘Near Vision’ for how the school would operate when it first opened and a ‘Far Vision’ for how, in the much longer term, it would function when new pedagogy, based on learning research and new technologies, had developed. The logical step was to envision these ‘Far vision’ schools and then work backwards to what their ‘Near Vision’ counterparts would look like. This clarity of route map would allow for the focused use of resources, as all projects would be pulling in the same direction within a clear future rationale.

The theory was excellent but, when I came to write such far visions, I realised there was potentially a problem. It wasn’t that there were infinite future possible schools but, rather, the opposite; all models seemed to condense down to just three. One of these three was the ‘no physical school at all’ model. I decided this might not be appropriate to discuss, considering the planned investment in buildings! We invited challenge from key organisations and added increasing detail to the models to determine the point of breakdown, but even after this process, the two models remained.

The T-route school is defined as the school that, for the most part, (but not exclusively) placed the learning tools in the hands of the Teacher. Such schools would invest in electronic whiteboards, VLEs and systems that would allow the teacher to have considerable data analysis at his or her fingertips, to could effectively personalise the learning for the learner.  This would be the logical progression of differentiation and teacher excellence.

The P-route school is defined as the school that, for the most part, (but not exclusively) placed the learning tools in the hands of the Pupil. Such schools would invest in personal devices and would value skills, capabilities and aptitudes over subject content such that learners could have greater choice over the content and contexts for their learning. Such diversity of possible routes around a common skills framework would allow the learner to personalise his or her own educational pathway.

We have found that headteachers and local authority officials very readily aligned their future aspirations around one of these two routes. We have observed that there are fewer headteachers subscribing to the T route but those that do, feel passionately that this model is, and will be, the best way of improving the life chances of individuals. It is the T route that has dominated across the world for many years and there are some that state that, even though they aspire to the P-route, they need to be convinced that new technologies and pedagogy can succeed in delivering this where so many other approaches have failed in the past. 

Over the last 10 years I have been one of many professionals demonstrating that the emergence of new technology and pedagogy really can make the P-route work.  In 1996, I broke up the science curriculum into targeted levels in language that children could understand and asked students to challenge themselves as to ‘how high’ they could go. The resulting increase in examination results from 35% to 67% led to national recognition. In 2001, in Eggbuckland Community College, I placed the tools in the hands of learners by setting up groups with 1:1 permanent access to a wireless laptop connected to the internet and provided the tools for creative digital expression.  As well as the technological tools, we went further and provided them with teacher training so that they could collaboratively deliver the learning objectives in the curriculum across subjects and peer assess their effectiveness as teachers. Once again, this empowerment model led to considerable learning gains that were well documented through numerous case studies. 

The latest version of this approach, the ‘Personalisation by Pieces Framework’ (PbP) is currently being trialled in eight schools across the UK and the supporting web tools will be available in January. Within this PbP toolkit, the learner can use a handheld device to independently set his or her current learning goals, receive guidance, book themselves into experiences within the school that could allow them to achieve these goals and then submit the evidence securely to their online community for peer assessment. This basic ‘learning cycle’ is provided through a set of ‘skills ladders’ and peer assessment tools. Learners have an ebay-style assessor rating for how well they have assessed others and can progress to become mentors for other learners. In our experience, learners are motivated by the responsibility, variety and empowerment this model delivers and begin to invest status in the approach, such that a reduction in responsibility takes on real significance.

If learners are free to choose their learning approach … then more challenging … activities can be made available to them … If learners are free to choose their learning approach, as long as they continue to progress and if this progress is measured in terms of skills development, then increasingly more challenging and responsible activities can be made available to them as learning opportunities. Such schools could operate more as small towns, as in the Grange School, near Nottingham, in the UK.  Running school services provides considerable and appropriate challenges for young people, as do the ‘employment’ of learners and young leaders within a community that contains banks, radio, TV, museums and entertainment services. This learning community would still contain training and ‘schools’ as many young people enjoy the challenge of teaching and the joy of collective and group-based peer learning.  The key to unlocking this potential lies in the ability to monitor the progress of every individual engaged in such diverse routes. If this monitoring is reliable and evidential, it will ensure direct support and challenge in appropriate measure can be an entitlement to all learners. 

At the start of this piece, I discussed P-route and T-route schools and considered which model headteachers might align themselves to; but what about the learners (the clients/consumers). If they had the choice, and we could demonstrate that even equal progress was made within both models, which would they choose? One very clear message derives from such discussions; it is clearly the curriculum and assessment that must be redesigned first, student democratic representation second, buildings a very important third.

Further information and detailed descriptions of the models described can be found in the following documents: The Microsoft BSF envisioning guide for school transformation, Buckley, D & Ziadeh, N, 2006 and The personalisation by pieces framework, Buckley, D, 2006.