No school at Knowsley – I don’t buy it

From The Independent, 14th May 2007, No more school as council opens ‘learning centres’ via Tony Hirst:

Knowsley Council in Merseyside, which – for years – has languished near or at the bottom of exam league tables, has abolished the use of the word [school] to describe secondary education in the borough.

It is taking the dramatic step of closing all of its eleven existing secondary schools by 2009. As part of a £150m government-backed rebuilding programme, they will reopen as seven state-of-the-art, round-the-clock, learning centres with the aid of Microsoft – which has already developed links with one school in the borough, Bowring.

The style of learning will be completely different. The new centres will open from 7am until 10pm in both term-time and what used to be known as the school holidays. At weekends, they will open from 9am to 8pm.

Youngsters will not be taught in formal classes, nor will they stick to a rigid timetable; instead they will work online at their own speeds on programmes that are tailor-made to match their interests.

Children will be able to study haircare, beauty therapy, leisure and tourism, and engineering as well as the more traditional academic subjects.

They will be given their day’s assignments in groups of 120 in the morning before dispersing to internet cafe-style zones in the learning centres to carry them out.

The 21,000 youngsters of secondary education age in Knowsley will also be able to access their learning programmes from home.

I don’t buy it. There are only two possibilities, IMHO:

(a) neo-Summerhill, way too unstructured… I don’t like Hi-Tech Summerhills any more than I liked the original… but of course ‘it depends’: for some (rare) kids it is great, and they can thrive

(b) assembly-line Computer Assisted Instruction… I like this route even less. I know Microsoft Research, which must be partly behind this, has no intention of fostering either (a) or (b), since they have some great ideas about radical new learning environments.

So again, ‘it depends’. They might get lucky, but I doubt it. I predict that within 5 years of the scheme launching there will be a backlash against it and it will be dismantled. Naturally, I should be more positive and try to make some constructive suggestions rather than just whining about it. So that’s what I’ll aim to do in an upcoming posting.

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