FUTURE GENERATIONS OF PUPILS WILL BE DRIVERS AND NOT PASSENGERS.
Pupils learning at the pace most appropriate to their ability can be seen as the second dimension of blended learning. This is what we largely refer to as differentiation. And we are good at it, too. Fundamentally though, pupils’ access to information and ideas is dependent on their age i.e. their school year, a consequence of the industrial revolution’s influence on our education system. Two hundred years on however, and it is becoming increasingly clear that this no longer has to be the case. How exciting! Future generations of pupils will be drivers and not passengers, caressing the accelerator as and when they – as opposed to the system – see fit, consolidating their journey on the inside lane or consciously gliding into the outside lane in order to get further, faster. Again, how exciting!
AND THE TEACHERS IN ALL THIS…? AS EVER, THEY ARE CRUCIAL.
Dimension Three focuses on what pupils will study. To extend the metaphor above, pupils will have more opportunity than ever to travel on different highways, and highways that link and intersect too. And the teachers in all this…? As ever, they are crucial. They will inspire and enthuse, guide and facilitate but as Bradfield looks to harness the power of IT, the idea that courses or aspects of courses are delivered by others outside the organisation, across the globe or by artificial intelligence is no longer the stuff of science fiction. Indeed, regardless of whether or not we can picture Winston Churchill ‘working from home’, AirPods in, his words remain visionary and perfectly capture where Education is on its own digital journey: “…this is not the end. It is not even the beginning of the end. But it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”.
How exciting!
