A short intro to the Studio School Geoff Mulgan
what I want to talk about today is is
one idea it’s an idea for a new kind of
school which turns on its head much of
our conventional thinking about what
schools are for and how they work and it
might just be coming to a neighborhood
near you soon where it comes from is an
organization called a young foundation
which over many decades has come up with
new innovations in education like the
Open University and things like extended
schools schools for social entrepreneurs
summer universities and the school of
everything and about five years ago we
asked what was the most important need
for innovation in schooling here in the
UK and we felt the most important
priority was to bring together two sets
of problems one was large numbers of
bored teenagers who just didn’t like
school couldn’t see any relationship
between what they learnt in school and
future jobs and employers who kept
complaining that the kids coming out of
school weren’t actually ready for real
work didn’t have the right attitudes and
experience and so we try to ask what
kind of school would have the teenagers
fighting to get in not fighting to stay
out and after hundreds of conversations
with teenagers and teachers and parents
and employers and schools from Paraguay
to Australia and looking at some of the
academic research which showed the
importance of what’s now called non
cognitive skills the skills of
motivation resilience and that these are
as important as the cognitive skills
formal academic skills we came up with
an answer very simple answer in a way
which we called the studio school and we
called it a studio school to go back to
the original idea of a studio in the
Renaissance where work and learning are
integrated you work by learning and you
learn by working and the design we came
up with had the following
characteristics first of all we wanted
small schools about three four hundred
pupils 14 to 19 year olds and critically
about 80% of the curriculum done not
through sitting in classrooms but
through real-life practical projects
working on Commission to businesses NGOs
and others that every pupil would have a
coach as well as teachers there would
have timetables much more like a work
environment in a business and
this will be done within the public
system funded by public money but
independently run and all at no extra
costs no selection and allowing the
pupils the route into university even if
many of them would want to become
entrepreneurs and have manual jobs as
well underlying it was at some very
simple ideas that large numbers of
teenagers learn best by doing things
they learn best in teams and they learn
best by doing things for real all the
opposite of what mainstream schooling
actually does now that was a nice idea
so we moved into the rapid prototyping
phase we tried it out first in luton
famous for its airport and not much else
I fear and in Blackpool famous for its
beaches and leisure and what we found we
got a quite a lot of things wrong and
then improved them but we found that the
young people loved it they found it much
more motivational much more exciting
than traditional education and perhaps
most important of all two years later
when the exam results came through the
pupils who had been put on these field
trials who were in the lowest performing
groups had jumped right to the top in
fact at the top pretty much top decile
of performance in terms of GCSEs which
is the British it sort of marking system
now not surprisingly that influenced
some people to think we were onto
something the Minister of Education down
south in London described himself as a
big fan and the business organizations
thought we were onto something in terms
of way of preparing children much better
for real life work today and indeed the
head of the chambers of commerce is now
the chairman of the studio Schools Trust
and helping it work not just with big
businesses but small businesses all over
the country
we started with two schools that’s
growing this year to about ten and next
year we’re expecting about 35 schools
open across England and another 40 areas
want to have their own schools opening a
pretty rapid spread of this idea
interestingly it’s happened almost
entirely without media coverage it’s
happened almost entirely without big
money behind it it’s spread was entirely
through word-of-mouth virally a
Crosse teachers parents people involved
in education and it spread because of
the power of idea so the very very
simple idea about turning education on
its head and putting the things which
were marginal things like working in
teams doing practical projects and
putting them right at the heart of
learning rather than on the edges now
there’s a whole set of new schools
opening up this autumn this is one from
Yorkshire where in fact my nephew I hope
will be able to attend it and this one
is focused on creative and media
industries other ones have a focus on
healthcare tourism engineering and other
fields we think we’re onto something is
not perfect yet but we think this is one
idea which can transform the lives of
thousands possibly millions of teenagers
who are really bored by schooling it
doesn’t animate them they’re not like
all of you who can sit in rows and hear
things you know said to you for hour
after hour they want to do things they
want to get their hands dirty they want
education to be for real and my hope is
that some of you out there may be able
to help us we feel we’re on the
beginning of a journey of experiment and
improvement to turn the studio school
idea into something which is present not
as a universal answer for every child
but at least for an answer for some
children in every part of the world and
I hope that a few of you at least can
help us make that happen thank you very
much
you