Blogs

Published in The Argus newspaper

I’m glad that your correspondent Pauline Hunter (Japan can teach us a lesson, i, 22 June) is in favour of school children cleaning their classrooms. Our students do that and more. Every day they vacuum all areas, dust, mop the floors in the toilets, wash up in the kitchen and so on. They do this...

Learning without classrooms

200 people gathered at the Freedom to Learn conference at Summerhill School on 6th, 7th and 8th of May. I ran a workshop on different ways of learning particularly focused on learning without using classrooms. I generally find when talking with many people about learning that they have a bit of a blank in thinking of alternative ways of...

Shakespeare would have been proud

On the evening of 27 April, a full house was treated to the SML College production of Romeo and Juliet.   Looking at the programme, all of the students of the College were involved in some way, and,  It was evident that a lot of work had gone into bringing the play to the audience. In many ways, it was a...

Spring term review by SML College student, Ro Frederick

This term has been very busy for us and lots of interesting things have happened over the last few weeks.   At the beginning of term James held a rhetoric speech workshop where we learnt about how to use different types of language features and we wrote...

My internship at SML College

by Hannah Laura Bernard, our colleague from Germany who spent time with us earlier this term   In the context of my bachelor in pedagogy and educational science, I made a five-week-long internship at SML College this autumn. I wanted to know what school might look like when there is no curriculum, no classroom structure and no one who tells students what...

Learning, not education

This title may seem a bit bizarre. After all, most people in authority believe education is a good thing and there are organisations attempting to create compulsory education worldwide. The basis for this is the idea that there is an entitlement to education for young people. So I have to explain what I mean by ‘learning, not education’. My...

Excellent outcome from Ofsted visit

One morning last October we had an impromptu visit from two Ofsted inspectors at  SML College, Brighton. The lead inspector spent some time quizzing most of the students on an individual basis. He asked about what they did and how the college ran including the times which they attended. The Chair of Governors in the College, Dr Ian Cunningham, explained...

Career direction

It’s best to know where you’re going - and why Some years ago I was working in a school running a Self Managed Learning project. In the group with which I was working there was a talented 13-year-old girl musician. She said that she would like to have a career as an orchestra musician. We looked at the life of...