We found love.................

..........................................in a hopeless place

A hopeless place? • Michael Gove morphs into Dr Emmet

“Doc” Brown - we are all going Back to the Future

•  A culture of exposure and threat based on Orwellian double speak

• Where challenge is equated with extraneous difficulty rather than raising standards

and................ •  An obsession with governance

•  A compulsive relationship with knowledge

•  Assessment for categorisation and qualification

•  An assault on intermediate agencies

•  Centralisation masquerading as empowerment

•  Genuinely aiming to increase social mobility while failing to understand the complexity of modern poverty

Meet Jamie

Mental Health

Family Life

Peer Pressure

Drug Exposure

Behavioural Issues

Legal Problems

The Present

Getting it Right for Every Child

But remember.........

•  if you look backwards, especially with regret, “you will have a 1000 pasts and no future”. That reminded me that our task is to give our young people 1000 futures regardless of their past

•  we have children who do not have a future, they have a destiny and that destiny is a bleak one. Our task, if we are educators, in whatever sense, or if we are simply committed citizens, is to rewrite the narrative of such lives. Ideally, it is to enable those who face a destiny to create a future.

Changes and Challenges

• The massive challenges that we face require innovative responses

•  Globalisation changes everything for us – we need to be competitive

•  The massive challenges that we face require innovative responses

•  Unpredictability demands creativity

•  Clear links between creativity and well-being

•  We need to do better

• ity

• Clear links between creativity and well-being

• We need to do beGlobalisation changes everything for us – we need to be competitive

• The massive challenges that we face require innovative responses

• Unpredictability demands creativity

• Clear links between creativity and well-being

What do employers want?

•  More workers with more education

•  Skills that allow movement between jobs

•  Broader competencies – numerical skills, problem-solving, communication skills, team working

•  Facility with ICT

•  Ability to learn

•  The potential to add to the business, not just fulfill a role

Eric Hoffer

•  In times of change, the learners shall inherit the earth while the learned will remain beautifully equipped for a world that no longer exists

David Cameron •  And the learners who can manage

complexity, innovate and create will shape that inheritance and define the future

•  our ambition must not simply be to enable our learners to adapt to the circumstances that they find themselves in, it must be to enable them to change and improve those circumstances.

•  Change is not reinventing a better past. It is shaping a better future

• Our greatest debts are not those we have accrued to the past, they are those that we are due to the future

So.............

•  This ain’t no party

•  This ain’t no disco

•  This ain’t no foolin’ around

• No time for dancin’

•  or lovey dovin’

•  I ain’t got time for that now…………..

So, what do learners need?

•  Basic skills – literacy, numeracy

•  The specific skills required by disciplines or vocational choices

•  The skills to access knowledge including the skill of questioning

•  The capacity to think, learn and adapt

•  The ability to innovate and create

•  The commitment to sustained enquiry or task

•  The ability to choose, and use, the tools for learning, life and work

What sort of learning? •  It has to be active

•  It has to involve the quest for meaning

•  It has to be varied

•  It needs motivation

•  It should respect disciplines but not be dominated by them

•  It must be assessed in terms of breadth, depth and application

What does this mean for planning?

•  Clarity of purposes

•  Common recognition of the elements – skills, concepts, knowledge, activities

•  Analysis of what we offer now

•  Identifying the gaps/shortcomings

•  Thinking about what we do and how we do it?

•  Discussing and agreeing standards

What are the learning pathways?

•  Knowledge and information •  Involves recognising or recalling information. When encountering a new

piece of information, recalling existing knowledge and seeing how they fit

together is often a vital step towards understanding. 

•  Understanding •  Understanding goes well beyond recall. It involves absorbing ideas and

information in a way that makes them meaningful, memorable and usable. 

•  Application •  In many ways this is an extension of understanding where learners put what

they understand into practice

•  Analysis •  Analysis builds on understanding. Sound procedures are used to examine

knowledge critically. The outcome is new ideas  

•  Synthesis •  The ability to put information and ideas together and reconcile

contradictions

•  Evaluation •  Evaluation goes beyond analysis by subjecting whole processes and systems

to objective examination. This often entails applying values and belief as well as cognitive skills. 

•  Systems thinking •  Breadth of vision is combined with deep knowledge and understanding in

order to appreciate the workings of complex real world systems and anticipate the impact on the whole of alterations in the parts.

•  Creation •  Creation is the stage beyond evaluation. The outcomes of evaluation are

used to create new processes and systems.

Therefore.......... •  Be informed by the big picture

•  Keep the breadth

•  Understand the importance of what you do

•  Set the right standards and make sure that they are focussed on outcomes

•  Be brave – it is better to fail in doing something worthwhile than to succeed in ticking the boxes of mediocrity

Ask the Whole Education questions

questions.......... • What does this mean for learning and

young people’s lives

•  and............

• What have you done today to make you feel proud?

And some questions for �Mr Gove

and if you want to�continue the discussion,�

•  therealdavidcameron@gmail.com

• @realdcameron

•  0782 565 4326