Education and Learning programme
Report
This programme supports innovation in improving education and increasing learning. Through open grant themes and special initiatives our aim is to achieve a genuine impact in multiple areas of education, achieving change and fostering the sharing of new practices, experiences and learning between and within schools, local authorities and voluntary organisations.
This year momentum in the Education and Learning programme picked up as planned, with a 59% increase in the number of open grant awards compared to 2006-07,and the introduction of new special initiatives that deepen our engagement with what we believe are fundamental issues facing education today.
We have explored the Foundation’s role in supporting learning and teaching practices and discussed how we could make a significant contribution to their development. This interest stems from our belief that if schools are to improve, there needs to be a new concentration on teaching and learning processes and on how students are engaged in their own learning both in the classroom and outside. We believe that core parts of the conventional model of schooling need to change, such as the places where learning takes place and the dynamics of power between adults and young people, teacher and pupil.
Musical Futures, our special initiative now in its fifth year ,provided the starting point for these debates. Its success led us to ask whether the transformations it encouraged were peculiar to music or whether such dramatic shifts could be achieved in other curriculum areas, indeed across whole schools. This broader area of enquiry has developed into a further initiative, Learning Futures.
The ideas that emerged from Musical Futures and have been articulated in the first phase of Learning Futures are replicated elsewhere in the programme. In funding our open grants for work that tackles school exclusion and truancy or develops supplementary education, we look for strong signs of innovation, and proposals with the potential to change teaching and learning practice across a number of schools or an entire sector in the education field.
Some organisations which seek to cut the numbers of young people excluded from school or who persistently fail to attend – like Bridging the Gap, Groundwork Kent and Medway, Hayle Youth Project, Inclusion Trust and the University of the Arts – have emphasised how important it is to create learning programmes which young people see as relevant to their own lives, that offer choice in ways to learn as well as different learning styles and settings. They often seek to put young people, parents and local communities in a position to facilitate their own and others’ learning.
We remain a joint funder with the Department for Children, Schools and Families, of the National Resource Centre for Supplementary Education. The valuable work of this sector highlights the importance of integrating with mainstream education the learning and experiences that young people engage with outside school. Many grants under this theme, such as those to the Pakistan Muslim Centre, Cal-Aaj Education Partnership and Goldsmiths College, London, are designed to improve connections and working relationships between mainstream and supplementary schools.
Speaking and listening skills, we believe, are fundamental to the development of effective, contributing members of society. We have been struck by the lack of attention given to developing these skills at secondary school level and teachers’ widespread lack of confidence in promoting them. We have devoted particular effort to understanding this issue this year and now plan to introduce a new open grants theme that we hope will address it. We will seek to support innovative and practical models of learning that explicitly develop oral communications skills in young people.
And in the coming year, taking our interest in teaching and learning practice a stage further, we will also seek to foster much greater commitment from schools to high quality residential learning experiences for pupils.
In the higher education sector we have been concerned about the variation in retention rates at different institutions despite broadly similar intake by student background. In response we have set up a joint scheme with the Higher Education Funding Council for England which will fund higher education institutions to evaluate practices that succeed in retaining students, particularly those from more disadvantaged or non-traditional backgrounds, and to share resulting knowledge. In addition to making grants, we will be commissioning consultants and researchers to help participating institutions share emerging understanding, and to draw together the learning from each evaluation. An advisory board chaired by Patricia Broadfoot, Vice-Chancellor of the University of Gloucestershire, is contributing to the initiative.
Special Initiatives
Learning through Residential Experiences
New action research programme in schools
£3,323 awarded in 2007-08 (support costs)
High quality residential experiences can provide a wide range of desired outcomes for children and young people. Despite this many schools do not exploit sufficiently the extremely powerful learning opportunities that we believe them to be. Where young people do go on a residential visit or course, these are often unconnected to their everyday learning and schools do not build on or sustain their benefits.
Given that less than one fifth of young people’s waking hours are spent in school, the opportunity to engage them with the much more intensive, rich and deep learning experiences that residentials can offer should be a compelling one. Residential experiences can offer real challenges, opportunities to explore and take on new and different roles, responsibilities and ways of being and develop a myriad of skills and personal qualities through real-world experiences.
During the coming year we will be inviting applications from groups of schools, both primary and secondary, to develop, pilot and embed innovative residential learning experiences as part of their curricula and in support of their whole school aspirations. Through close work with these schools over a five-year period we aim to gather, document and disseminate evidence of positive impact as part of a wider strategy that we hope can ultimately achieve significant national shifts in schools’ commitment to, and active engagement with, residential learning experiences for their pupils.
The formal launch of this ambitious new initiative is scheduled for 2008-09 following development during 2007-08.
Creative Apprenticeships
Developing a new workforce in the cultural sector
£145,000 over two years
We provided further funds to implement a unique training scheme which we initiated with the Tate Gallery and a consortium of other Liverpool cultural organisations. This pilot is part of the national Creative Apprenticeship scheme. Ten apprentices will be recruited and in time we hope many others will also be able to access previously out of reach careers in the creative and cultural sector.
Musical Futures
Transformational music education project
£211,205 awarded in 2007-08 (including support costs)
Musical Futures continues to demonstrate innovative ways to make music learning as exciting inside the classroom as it usually is outside. By integrating learning opportunities and styles that are more typically found where young people pick up music informally, students’ motivation has been transformed since the initiative began working in schools in 2004.
The number of 14 to 16 year olds in Musical Futures schools now choosing to pursue music at Key Stage 4 has more than tripled. Teachers are highly enthusiastic about a radically different approach to learning and teaching, as evidenced in the uptake of Musical Futures practice by an estimated 700 schools compared to just 20 in 2005.The Foundation has committed to continue supporting this initiative over the coming years to ensure that its innovative methods can be extended and embedded in schools.
Learning Futures
Next practice in learning and teaching
£38,132 awarded in 2007-08 (support costs)
Learning Futures has grown out of the success of Musical Futures, as the relevance and much wider potential of the principles and ethos that underpinned our work with music education became apparent .In considering this new strand of work, we have greatly valued a close partnership with the Innovation Unit. We have distilled what seemed to be the most significant aspects of the Musical Futures approach into a set of interlinked principles that we hope will help schools to reframe their approach to teaching and learning. Our research so far has indicated that engagement and integration are critical for learning that is deep, authentic and motivational. To engage young people, learning programmes must be relevant to their lives and interests and constructed jointly with them. We have received enthusiastic support from head teachers, teachers and leading education thinkers to our ideas for Learning Futures. With them, we are assessinghow these changes to teaching and learning practice could be taken forward in schools.
Open grants scheme
Grants awarded in 2007-08
Bridging the Gap Greater achievement through peer tutoring
£73,632 awarded over three years
Bridging the Gap is reaching out to additional schools in new areas of Glasgow with a peer tutoring scheme that has been shown to boost young people’s attainment and attendance.
Having worked with 70 pupils over four years in the Gorbals area, Bridging the Gap is now catering for 100pupils by including schools in neighbouring Govan hill and Toryglen. Young people like the experience of not being taught by regular staff teachers and Bridging the Gap believes tutoring by others like them can improve motivation and behaviour. The project provides opportunities to build confidence and new skills in setting goals, developing positive thinking and building good relationships with peers and adults.
Cal-Aaj Education Partnership
Developing Muslim supplementary schools
£132,394 awarded over two years
Cal-Aaj Education Partnership (CAEP) plans to put in place a comprehensive strategy for educating Muslim pupils in Walsall, West Midlands, which will include a new partnership with mosques who will add national curriculum subjects to their existing religious teaching. More than 10 supplementary schools are expected to open over two years, catering for more than 500 pupils. Other activities in the strategy will include training religious leaders in teaching and classroom management techniques and helping them work towards national accreditation for supplementary education. CAEP plans to train more Muslim school governors, recruited from among parents and the wider community. It will encourage greater involvement of Muslim parents in mainstream schools by setting up four as beacons for best practice where the parents can take an active role in communicating their families’ needs to schools. It will also set up a mentoring programme and youth forum.
Combating Obesity
Focus on personal potential for the overweight
£38,000 awarded over two years
Many obese young people are at risk of truancy or exclusion from school. A common approach to helping them focuses on prescribing weight-reducing diets or exercise but often does not explore their underlying feelings or deal with their social isolation. Combating Obesity offers educational and social activities that tackle the psychological impact of being severely overweight. This grant is funding a part-time training officer for two years to raise awareness and train schools in Huddersfield, Yorkshire, to help them meet obese pupils needs better. The programme focuses on wellbeing and potential, helping young people see beyond the size of their bodies and adopt a positive outlook. Evaluation will include an assessment of the project’s potential to accredit the training programme for school staff and to scale up and replicate the work elsewhere.
Goldsmiths, University of London New approaches to bilingual learning
£73,158 awarded over two years
Goldsmiths will develop and test a new model of partnership between mainstream primary schools and local supplementary schools to enhance pupils learning and help them to develop strong bilingual identities that can underpin their attainment. Teachers from primary schools and schools that teach community languages in the London Borough of Tower Hamlets will together create bilingual materials for each setting. The aim is for mainstream teachers to see first hand how supplementary schools help children learn in areas including literacy, numeracy, geography, history and cultural awareness. The 24 participating teachers will involve parents or grandparents in classwork as they try out materials with pupils. The new model of partnership between the two types of school will run for two years and has been planned with sustainability and wider impact in mind. Goldsmiths hopes to influence practice across the borough and nationally.
Inclusion Trust
Choices in learning for poor attenders
£75,000 awarded over one year
Inclusion Trust is piloting a new approach to encouraging young people with poor school attendance to engage positively with learning. ‘In2ition’ will be tested in several schools with about 50 young people who will decide for themselves what they want to study and whether to do it at school or outside. In a bespoke learning programme students will be able to negotiate with their school to choose timetabled subjects and will opt to study at school or college or to learn through work experience, community service or by helping younger students at another place of education. Each individual will be able to study their chosen subjects online as well. If the pilot is successful Inclusion Trust will assess how to scale it up and expand it more widely.
“In2ition has played a valuable part in re-engaging Christie. She actually said she now quite likes school! I think this is a true accolade to the success of the programme, given Christie’s absolute rejection of school at one point.”
– Christie’s Education Welfare Officer
Ongoing Grant
The Baytree Centre
Personal learning support for young women
£38,650 awarded over two years
Weekly tutoring for young women in south London is expected to help increase the academic performance of black and minority ethnic young people in this socially disadvantaged area. The Baytree Centre’s mentoring programme stimulates and challenges 40 girls to improve their motivation and attainment. Weekly sessions give them individual attention, one-to-one tutoring, character education and arts classes. The centre, based in Brixton, emphasises the primary role of parents as educators and includes them in a parallel programme so they can support their children and cement its results for the long-term.