A few years ago I was lucky enough to share a platform with Larry Summers the now Chief Economic Adviser to Barack Obama who said to a packed conference of education professionals:
“if we had the same commitment to evaluation in medicine that we have traditionally had in education, we would still be leeching people to make them better”.
That’s a pretty challenging view but how many expensive initiatives, programmes and policies in the fields of education as well as the worlds of design and school architecture are properly tested? How many have shown that they can actually do what they promised to do?
In the kind of downswing that we find ourselves in at the moment, we need to be able to show everybody that this is worthwhile. And rethinking education and redesigning our understanding of what schools are, is very worthwhile.
In the technical world, we’ve seen the emergence of open-source software – great applications shared in an open-handed way to outpace closed proprietary applications. We’ve seen the way that an open release of government data can shake out great talent that we didn’t even know was there – taking that data, mashing it up and using it to describe problems in ways that we would never have thought to do.
Yet, like most policy areas, this has often been conducted in silos. Unbreakable circles monopolised by the few not the many, commissioning ‘new thinking’ from each other. But new thinking is expensive and the vast majority of good practice from across the field remains untapped
Open-source thinking changes the game and results in better, smarter outcomes. We want to do the same for the thinking around innovation in education. This is not about hierarchies or closed ‘expert’ forums. This is not a managerial approach designed to ‘empower stakeholders’ and apply political benchmarks in a mechanistic way.
The web allows us to share ideas, sign post them and crowdsource improvements to them in ever more simple ways. Today, we’re launching The Centre for School Design to help build the community of people that can make that work. We’re here to signpost great schools, to flush out the thinking behind them and putting it somewhere that we can all get at it. We want to make it easier for the people who have worked in education, design and the built environment to share their experience with the rest of us.
We want to look at more than just the way that schools are designed, built and delivered. There is also the question of the design of the education system itself, the use of design thinking to solve intractable social problems and the harnessing of the power of the built environment for good.
There has been a lot of talk recently of using the ‘wisdom of crowds’ to inform policy and practice on the ground. We hope that The Centre for School Design will make that a reality in the worlds that we work in. In the coming weeks we will share some of the projects that we have already developed and we look forward to working with you to develop new partnerships and collaborations.
We’re only here as the hosts for this. It’s your party really though. I hope you’ll join in.
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