Innovative school system

Charles Leadbeater has produced this report, having examined activities undertaken by schools supported by the DCSF Innovation Unit.

Key points:
- A national peer-learner programme should allow children to become learning mentors to other children and in the process gain credits towards their qualifications.
- 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 allowing more different learning environments – vocational, specialist, academic, catch-up – to co-exist.
- Families in which children are at significant risk of early drop out, 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- All children at age 11 should be given the opportunity to acquire skills of emotional resilience.
- 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.
- Instead of seeing schooling as a system of years and grades, with key stages and examinations, it should be seen as a set of relationships between teachers, pupils, parents and the wider community. Children need to be able to rely on ‘relationships for learning’ at school, home and in the community.