Memorandum submitted by Magnified Learning
SUSTAINABLE SCHOOLS
Magnified Learning is a consultancy working
in education for sustainable development [ESD] and work- and enterprise-related
learning [WERL]. It is centrally concerned with effective change
management, and provides CPD/INSET and develops and delivers integrated
curriculum activities. The consultancy has played a key role in
the delivery of the Treasury/DfES funded Enterprise Advisor Service
in London Central, South and West, a body charged with embedding
enterprise learning in over 160 secondary schools. Many of these
schools have been either recently, or currently are involved in
BSF initiatives. Magnified Learning is also involved in research
projects looking at policy and practice around sustainable development
in the learning and skills sector.
The following comments are based upon observations
made in both contexts.
1. Will BSF ensure that schools are sustainable—environmentally,
economically and socially?
No. Sustainability should be read as an adaptive
process, not a final destination, and requires the acquisition
and application of a complex suite of knowledge and reflexive
competencies. The BSF programme has potential to contribute to
the development of these, but only in the context of schools and
colleges which develop their capabilities to integrate ESD with
Work and Enterprise Related Learning, Citizenship and other key
strands.
2. How effective is BSF at defining and responding
to learners' current and future needs? What role can and do school
users play in this process?
"Defining [...] future needs" is a
perilous business, a point emphasised by Professor William Scott
in his keynote speech at the UK launch of UNESCO's Decade for
Education for Sustainable Development [http://www.learning2last.org/].
In an era of exponentially changing economic, social and environmental
circumstances, the role of education should not be to play soothsayer,
but to equip learners [and that includes teachers] with the capacity
to make reasonable risk analyses, and to adapt behaviours in response
to unpredictable, emergent circumstances.
2.1 In order to survive businesses are having
to manifest increasing levels of reflexive capability. Design
and construction are good examples of industries which are responding
to this challenge, and BSF provides fertile opportunities for
schools to develop their own capacity through engaging with business
professionals involved in the delivery of their new-build projects.
However, evidence from schools working with the Enterprise Advisor
Service in London Central, South and West suggests that opportunities
to involve these companies in any strand of student learning is
limited.
3. How effectively is BSF working with schools
to develop educational and organisational change that complements
the new buildings?
Within the learning and skills sector responsibility
and concern for new-build is too often confined to finance and
estates departments. A key challenge for senior leaders is to
ensure user groups and other stakeholders are genuinely consulted
and subsequently enabled to share diverse learning from such projects.
To contribute effectively to sustainable development, this will
involve more than implementing enhanced structures of democracy;
it will require institutional capacity to embrace borderless learning,
both in terms of curriculum areas and those defined as learners.
In the absence of this, building initiatives, sustainable or otherwise,
will continue to be interpreted as the province of specialists,
and their full potential to impact upon learning, lost.
4. How successfully does BSF integrate with
other policy and funding areas (such as Every Child Matters and
Extended Schools) to deliver joined up solutions to educational
and community needs?
Integration represents a huge challenge to secondary
schools, where interdisciplinary thinking is far from the norm.
Many are preoccupied with GCSE points and a National Curriculum
that does nothing to address the dogged adherence to reductive
silo mentalities. This fragmentation is reinforced by the apparently
piecemeal process by which initiatives and fresh educational policies
are introduced, and results in many opportunities for joined-up
solutions to be missed by practitioners who already feel overwhelmed
by their day-to-day activities.
June 2006
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