Schools of the future - Stephen Heppell
Of course, teachers worry sometimes that kids aren’t going to be better. But my brother was a physics teacher in Glasgow. He couldn’t skateboard any better than I could skateboard, but he couldn’t half teach the physics of skateboarding. The thing is, we are learning professionals. In all this we are here to help the students unpack where they are and what their knowledge is and what they are learning. We don’t have to be better than them. The guy that coaches Schumacher can’t drive as well as he can; Tim Henman’s coach can’t play… well he probably can play tennis as well as Tim - to be fair, but typically a great golf player's coach is not as good at playing golf as they are. They are there to stand back; to analyse; to guide and to point this is a coaching role. Teachers don’t have to be … there is no hope that teachers will ever be as good at technology as the kids are, kids are always going to be a little better because it’s cool; it's what they do and they have got time. It doesn’t mean that we haven’t got something to contribute and we needed more and not less in the 21st century.
The school of the future everybody asks about and the really simple answer is 'What will they be like?' Different! I don’t think they will still be the same. I am going to schools all around the world where some of them, they haven’t even built a staffroom because they are saying 'Everybody who comes through the front door here is a learner so why should we have special rooms for the teachers and children'. I am working in a school in Surrey that opened with three children, now it's got four. It will probably never have 20 but it won’t even have 10. Working in a school in Singapore with 3500 children - it’s fabulous. I am working in schools where the children spend less than half the week in schools and working in schools where they are doing one subject a month and doing an exam at the end of it.
Every school has got its own solution and the schools of the future, they will all be different; they will all be swapping ideas and exchanging what worked and what didn’t work and the staff will be learners just like the children are learners; and the parents will be coming through the door and they will be excited about what is going on and the thing that you will notice most of all is that right the way around the school it will be like a campus. You will not be able to get in within the force field of the school without starting to think about learning like you know learning is not going to be compartmentalised in the school, its going to spread out across the whole district. I have seen districts transformed by the catalyst of plunging a school into them - and for me I think the school of the future, in the end, is the planet really.