We do

We supported The Innovation Unit in the launch of this new publication on 10 July at the Guardian Newsroom. Charles Leadbeater argues that the current approach to educational reform is running out of steam. Improvements in results have reached a plateau. Educational inequality remains stubbornly high.

What’s Next? Makes 21 recommendations to create an approach centred on children learning with as well as from teachers at schools that would feel smaller and offer more personalised learning. But just as important, Leadbeater’s vision of relationships for learning embraces the family, workplace and community as well as the school as centres for learning.

A summary of some of the 21 ideas Charlie sets out...

• A national peer-learner programme, akin to The Expert Patients Programme in health, should allow children to become learning mentors to other children and in the process gain credits towards their qualifications.

• Monolithic, mass secondary schools should be broken up – if not physically then at least organisationally, into units of no more than 450, so that even large schools feel small. That would allow more different learning environments – vocational, specialist, academic, catch-up – to co-exist within a single school.

• Families in which children are at significant risk of early drop out from learning, school exclusion, teenage conception, drug and alcohol abuse should be allocated personal support workers with an integrated ‘family support budget’ to devise self-directed support plans. These plans would re-engage children in learning, stabilise families and avoid the long term, wider social costs associated with low educational attainment.

• Young people clearly at serious risk of leaving school with no qualifications should be given an individual learning mentor and an individual budget to devise learning programmes in Years 10 and 11, to maximise their chances of getting qualifications that could support them in work.

• All young people should have an electronic Personal Learning Plan and Portfolio which would record their work, achievements and set targets and goals.

• All pupils in Years 7, 8 and 9 should spend at least part of the summer term engaged in a personal challenge which they choose, collaborate with others to undertake and gives them the opportunity to learn outside school.

• The standard school day should become a thing of the past: children should be able to opt to learn early – 7.30 am till 1 pm – or late 1 pm till 6.30 pm – so they are better able to make learning part of their lifestyle rather than something imposed upon them.

• All children at age 11 should be given the opportunity to acquire skills of emotional resilience that will support their ability to learn with others.

• All schools should be the base for a productive, social enterprise – such as a recycling centre – so that children associate learning with work, get pleasure from working productively together and contributing to a business.

Download Charlie's presentation from the day at www.charlesleadbeater.net

Read What's next? 21 ideas for 21st Century learning