The Unique Child (UQC) Network unites people worldwide who are concerned about the nature of current educational systems and their lack of focus on the wellbeing and innate potential of each child. It promotes the idea that learning models should serve the healthy and sustainable development of the communities within which they exist - and that diversity of interest and ability is the natural expression of any organic system. It also suggests that creativity, risk-taking and innovation are essential elements for any healthy system.

It acknowledges how technology is rapidly and profoundly changing the world of learning and highlights some of the emergent possibilities. It also highlights the urgent need for more research and understanding re the cognitive and emotional impact of such technology, especially on young minds.

It pays particular attention to the vital foundational importance of the early years and the need to protect the rights of each child as a joyful and uniquely predisposed learner.

It invites dialogue, debate and contributions from those who wish to be part of the current re-visioning of approach being suggested by key thinkers of all disciplines. It also encourages the development of an evidence-based 'Science of Learning' that can challenge traditional models and better underpin our understanding of the child as a dynamic natural learner.

'The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write but those who cannot learn, unlearn and relearn.'

A. Toffler
 

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In April 2006 the employers’ organisation, the CBI, published a report on the skills that employers were looking for among school leavers and graduates. As well as basic skills in literacy, numeracy and specialist skills in area of science and technology the CBI research also highlighted the eight ‘employability skills valued by prospective employers:

• Self management
• Team working
• Problem solving
• Communication – application of literacy
• Business awareness
• Customer care
• Application of numeracy
• Application of ICT

With this in mind the RSA www.rsa.org.uk has now developed a 'Competence Framework' that promotes innovative and integrated ways of thinking about education and the curriculum. Teachers design and develop a curriculum for their own schools based round the development of five key competences:

1. Citizenship
2. Learning
3. Managing Information
4. Relating to people
5. Managing Situations

A competence based approach enables students not just to acquire subject knowledge but to understand, use and apply it in the within the context of their wider learning and life. It also offers students a more holistic and coherent way of learning which allows them to make connections and apply knowledge across different subject areas.

This framework, that is known as Opening Minds, is now being used in over 200 schools across the country.

 

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Valerie Hannon produced the paper 'Only Connect' for the Centre for Strategic Education in 2009.

"A successful system, in 20th Century terms, knows it must become radically innovative for the changed conditions of the 21st Century. This agenda is not a merely technical one. The imperative to transform our education systems needs to engage the passions of educators, connecting with all their intelligences, just as we are seeking to engage young people."

'Do not confine your children to your own learning, for they were born in another time.' - Hebrew proverb -

This booklet, produced as a joint venture between the Paul Hamlyn Foundation and The Innovation Unit, explores some of the educational needs of the future. It argues that some key emergent (and some well-known) practices, taken together, might transform learners' (and teachers') experience of schooling.

Download Learning Futures: Next Practice in Learning and Teaching

"One had to cram all this stuff into one's mind, whether one liked it or not. This coercion had such a deterring effect that, after I had passed the final examination, I found the consideration of any scientific problems distasteful to me for an entire year... It is in fact nothing short of a miracle that the modern methods of instruction have not yet entirely strangled the holy curiosity of inquiry; for this delicate little plant, aside from stimulation, stands mainly in need of freedom; without this it goes to wrack and ruin without fail. It is a very grave mistake to think that the enjoyment of seeing and searching can be promoted by means of coercion and a sense of duty."
Albert Einstein

"Some day, maybe, there will exist a well-informed, well-considered, and yet fervent public conviction that the most deadly of all possible sins is the mutilation of a child's spirit; for such mutilation undercuts the life principle of trust, without which every human act, may it feel ever so good and seem ever so right, is prone to perversion by destructive forms of conscientiousness."
- Erik Erikson

"Students sit passively in separate classrooms. Everything is coordinated by a predetermined plan... with rules to keep things moving like one giant assembly line throughout each hour, day, and year. Indeed, it was the assembly line that inspired the industrial age school design, with the aim of producing a uniform, standardized product as efficiently as possible.

Though the need to encourage thoughtful, knowledgeable, compassionate global citizens in the twenty-first century differs profoundly from the need to train factory workers in the nineteenth century, the industrial age school continues to expand, largely unaffected by the realities of children growing up in the present day."

Presence: Human purpose and the field of the future co-authored by Peter Senge, Otto Scharmer, Joseph Jaworski and Betty Sue Flowers