Articles

Personalised Education Now

Big thanks to Josh Gifford and his team for the second edition of P.E.N Journal. The first edition brought together some of the contributions of last years, very successful Alternative Educational Futures conference. We were delighted to be asked to contribute once again. You can download a pdf version of the journal and read our piece looking at the student experience...

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...

Going to the Big School? Choices in secondary education.

SIZE MATTERS The transition from a small primary school into secondary education is an issue for many parents. There are serious choices to be made for children at this age. We know that many children feel nervous about going into a large, more impersonal school where they do not feel known by teachers. In a typical secondary school a teacher...

How young people manage their own learning at SML College

Take yourself back to your schooldays. Did you learn everything that you were taught? Or did you sometimes daydream in class? Perhaps there were subjects that you didn’t like so you paid less attention to them - or you were even disruptive in such lessons. For whatever reason, it’s likely that the teacher ‘covering the syllabus’ did not always...

A better way to educate

Self Managed Learning College is part of a global movement bringing traditional 19th century education into the 21st century by paying attention to solid evidence of better ways of educating young people. The case I will make here is that the role of adults and of schools should be to...

What is a 21st Century Education

Some people have suggested that the only change from Victorian schools to those of today is from black to white – blackboards have changed to whiteboards. We still have classrooms that are not much different from the 19th century with curricula that have progressed little since then and with lessons of standardised times delivered in (increasingly) large institutions. Indeed...