This report considers the relationships between the state, the private sector and the third sector in the provision of education. It looks at the some of the factors that influence these elements and the relationships between them – in particular, digital technologies – and explores some of the ways changes in these factors might influence the way education delivery is structured over the coming decades to 2025 and beyond. In doing so, it draws largely on a set of reviews written for the Beyond Current Horizons programme, expert interviews and discussions from a workshop event. A summary of these reviews and activities can be found in the appendices.

The primary questions within this report centre on the actors whose actions constitute the educational landscape: who determines educational content, who is managing educational institutions, who is providing educational experiences, who is developing educational resources, what the funding mechanisms are that pay for this, and who is responsible for ensuring access to education. These address educational provision in its broadest sense, touching on independent, supplementary and alternative education, work-based learning, and paying particular attention to emerging forms of educational provision that have been enabled through new forms of technology.

It was noted by a number of review authors and interviewees that the lack of data that would support a comprehensive investigation into the relationships between state and non-state actors in the education arena was surprising, given the centrality of these questions to debates on education and its future direction. In part, this appeared to be due to the commercially sensitive nature of data on factors within the education market (though it should be noted that interviewees working for educational suppliers were extremely generous in sharing the information available to them). This sensitivity is recognised here in leaving interviewees’ views and comments unattributed. To some degree, however, this absence appears to reflect a genuine lack of investigation, rather than a lack of transparency. There are a number of possible factors that might contribute to this state of affairs. Within some research communities there are dominant narratives of state responsibility and corporate activity that are easily left untroubled. There are other actors within the public sector who may not feel that it is in their remit or their interest to trouble these narratives, or to reveal complex relationships within the market that may be misunderstood as a result. Information that would be necessary for a full understanding of the area may be held within organisations and sectors which lack a tradition of engagement with academic research or cultures of openness. Any thorough academic investigation would require a genuinely interdisciplinary effort, as relevant topics are addressed by a range of disciplines that may not have a history of collaboration. These factors are presented speculatively and are of course not exhaustive.

This report offers:

• An overview of the contemporary educational landscape in England, examining responsibility for access, curriculum authorship, production of educational materials, management of educational institutions, assessment and funding.
• An exploration of those features of the landscape considered likely to persist over the relevant timescale.
• An outline of some emerging trends within the provision of education whose direction of travel seems relatively clear.
• A set of related uncertainties, examining the different ways in which these emerging trends might plausibly develop.

• A short selection of implications arising from the trends and uncertainties discussed in this report, and some possible actions that might be considered as responses to the challenges they offer.

Some of the emerging trends identified here arose from discussions during the workshop event and have been drawn from a summary report written by Helen Beetham, to whom thanks and acknowledgement are due.

The various trends and uncertainties described here should be understood as factors that the work of the review authors suggests are worth continuing to pay attention to over the coming decades, rather than a comprehensive or exhaustive account of all factors that act within education or that will shape its future. As with any attempt to discuss future events and developments that have yet to occur, these trends and uncertainties are not certain to play out in the directions suggested here, nor is it impossible that other developments not addressed within this report will play a greater role in the future of education than currently seems likely. There are no predictions here, only likelihoods or possibilities.

It is worth briefly marking a couple of points regarding language. First, the distinction between learning and education, where learning can be considered a personal process of change and development, and education can be seen as an intentional social project executed with specific goals. As a social project, the practices of education are subject to the forces that shape all of society and will change as they change; learning processes, in contrast, change over a much longer timescale. While these two terms are often used interchangeably today, when considering the longer term future it is more likely that we will see changes in the ways we educate rather than in the ways we learn.

Second, throughout this discussion the terms “delivery” and “provision” are employed: these are terms used to describe the institutional organisation of education rather than to imply a particular method of education. In other words, it is not suggested that it is possible to ‘deliver learning’, nor that learners are best thought of solely as “end users” of what is delivered.

Section 1: The contemporary landscape of relationships between state, private and third sector provision in education

The purpose of this section is to offer a broad outline of the contemporary education landscape, and to begin to chart some of the interactions between the state, private and third sector organisations that take place within it. It is clear from the work of the review authors that the divisions between the state and other actors are far from distinct. The notion of an education system wholly defined and provided by the state alone, or of privately-funded schooling that exists entirely independently, are each belied by the complex interchanges that constitute the operation of the various education markets as currently seen. The material produced through the reviews and interviews that addresses these interactions is examined below, under the following areas: responsibility for access, curriculum authorship, production of educational materials, and management of educational institutions, assessment and funding.

Responsibility for ensuring access to basic educational needs

There are strong cultural and legal frameworks that define schooling, including the individual child’s entitlement to schooling, and the responsibility of the state to provide it. These frameworks are now firmly embedded in European law and international charters. One’s identity as a subject of the state is recognised as being established in part through schooling, and the frameworks that support this are likely to remain in place. From a policy perspective, an important context for examining the current landscape is the 2006 Education and Inspections Act. There are a few key features of the Act that are worth highlighting: the emphasis on “empowering” schools by “devolving as much decision-making to them as possible”, the conception of Local Authorities (LAs) as ‘commissioners’ rather than ‘providers’ of education services with a duty to promote “choice and diversity”, and the efforts to make “links with external partners” available to all schools, all support the notion that responsibility for the delivery and constitution of education is not located within the duties of the national government but is being moved towards schools. Acknowledging, or encouraging, the contribution of external partners is something that creates room within policy for the various interactions between schools and other groups described below. Responsibility is still acknowledged, however: the state still has a role in ensuring “fair access” and moderating covert selection processes. It is the practical considerations of providing education that have moved, rather than the duty to ensure access to education: the state acts as regulator and mediator of education provision, ensuring basic motivations for a national education settlement are met, but aims to do this through working with other agencies, whether for-profit (or other) groups from the private sector or third sector organisations (faith, social and parent groups). In particular, the state has an obligation to employers to ensure that they are able to contribute towards the provision of “skills” amongst the workforce: the Leitch review also gives the government an opportunity to cast those within education as “customers” , a relationship between learner and provider that draws on the language of the private sector.

Within the reviews and discussions that took place, some basic principles underpinning the provision of education were identified. Most fundamentally, contributors identified a moral right of an individual to education, and a moral obligation on the part of the state to provide access to education. In addition to this moral contract between citizen and state, there are societal needs served by a national educational settlement: the need for individuals to form an identity as a citizen of the state and the need for the development and establishing of social values and norms. These processes require some form of recognition, in the form of certification and accreditation of individuals who have participated in a process of education, and providing this recognition is another social role fulfilled by education.

There are other groups with an interest in and responsibility for ensuring access to education. Families have a number of well-recognised responsibilities towards children’s learning. Most straightforwardly, they are expected to support their child’s learning in school through provision of a home environment in which homework can be undertaken, and through a wider respect and enthusiasm for learning: the desire to see their children launched on successful life paths is translated into a responsibility to invest in their learning ‘privately’ within the family, as well as publicly through school. Many feel the need to do more to provide access to an education they feel is best, whether by relocating to an area with well-regarded schools, or by funding their children’s education directly themselves, and this reflects a more general cultural expectation that families actively support and promote learning for their members. Traditionally this support has been assumed to be for children’s learning, though increasingly families will need to support learning of all their members.

Employers, too, are recognised as having a stake in the provision of education, though it is debateable how much of a responsibility they have to provide educational opportunities directly themselves. As a group their interests are explicitly acknowledged by the government through definitions of education that focus on the eventual ability of learners to contribute to the economic wellbeing of society, and through the provision of vocational education that is responsive to employers’ stated needs. Employers have had a large degree of influence on vocational qualifications, though increasingly the need for training that meets wider social needs rather than solely the needs of employers is recognised by policymakers. This is part of a more general tension between identifying and investing in long-term skills (often transferable and more in employees’ interests), and meeting immediate short-term skills gaps (often specifically related to a particular role). Encouraging companies to invest directly in training staff appropriately, either in-house or through external suppliers, is one approach, though this would make it no easier for those not in employment to gain skills, and it may be difficult to find appropriate training in some regions.

Contributors felt that there is, perhaps more strongly in the UK than in other European countries, a strong discourse of individual responsibility for taking up learning opportunities, what might be thought of ‘capitalising oneself’ with knowledge and capabilities. Schools are becoming sites for the inculcation of personal responsibility as a more general social value, encompassing health and well being, citizenship and political participation in addition to more traditional, subject learning. Some contributors felt that the increasing diversity of supply models across the sectors was likely to strengthen the argument for individual responsibility and self-management. This individual responsibility is most noticeable within the context of membership of the workforce and the concomitant necessity for people to ensure they possess the necessary skills for such membership, but is also resonant with arguments that make a social case for learning and personal development. Many learning activities that seek to further this take place outside formal educational settings, and are often described as constituting “informal” learning by researchers and commentators, though they may still be structured and require a degree of commitment from the learner. These learning experiences are likely to interact in some way with the state, private or third sectors when they occur, perhaps through the simple exchange of capital in exchange for tuition, through the use of a facility funded by one of these sectors, or to expedite the learner’s entry into a more formal learning environment.

Determining the curriculum

Private or independent schools are not obliged to follow the National Curriculum, though the majority work towards recognised national qualifications and so there is a degree of overlap. Little of the material gathered through the reviews and interviews addresses the independent sector specifically, and insofar as these schools are independent their examination might be thought less relevant to describing the relationships between state, private and public sectors.

State-funded schools in England follow the National Curriculum, designed and set by the state through the Qualifications and Curriculum Agency, and assessed through a series of national tests until the age of 16, when learners can sit national examinations. This curriculum is developed in partnership with other government agencies and external groups representing adult learners, vocational training, employers’ needs and other stakeholder priorities. It represents government aspirations for learners and their contribution to society, reflecting wider policy directions, such as a commitment to remaining competitive within the “knowledge economy” or the inculcation of a sense of citizenship, as well as aiming to establish essential skills such as literacy and numeracy. Over the twenty years of its existence the National Curriculum has responded to social changes and attempted to meet new needs, as instanced by the introduction of functional mathematics, the recent focus on scientific literacy and the establishment of technological subjects such as Information and Communications Technology (ICT).

Companies with an interest in the education sector, such as publishers and technology providers, can influence the development of the curriculum in a number of ways. Most directly, there are close links between individuals from education technology companies and policy-makers (for example, through the Intellect group) which allow these representatives of the private sector to offer their perspectives on policy direction, and government to share current thinking. More broadly, the private sector as a whole shapes understandings of the economic context in which education is operating, works to reinforce the notion that the education sector is in the service of the country’s economic wellbeing and often seeks to influence perceptions of appropriate future strategic directions for learning and education through publishing white papers, sponsorship of events and initiatives and funding independent research into learning and technology.

A particularly visible site of interaction between the public, private and third sectors is the academies programme, originally a programme in which publicly-funded schools received sponsorship from private firms or individuals. Intended to raise standards in inner-city areas, the involvement of the sponsor was explicitly intended to enable them to embed their values (assumed to be focussed on success and aspiration) within the ethos of the school, and the injection of private capital was originally intended to offset the “deprivation” of the inner-city locations in which they were based.  Private sector sponsorship has declined since the introduction of the programme, however, and the emphasis is now on attracting sponsorship from universities and the third sector, whose specialist knowledge it is thought will support the development of an academy’s own specialism: the minimum £2million contribution has been waived, and the emphasis is now on sponsors contributing educational expertise and demonstrating a commitment to social mobility, as demonstrated by the engagement of the RSA and the charity ARK with the academies programme. A number of new academies are not the ‘failing’ inner-city schools that were the original target, but are formerly independent schools seeking greater financial stability. Regardless of the nature of sponsors, they are accorded a part in the development of the curriculum each academy follows, provided core elements of the National Curriculum remain.

A small number of early sponsors of academies attracted controversy for their supposed embrace of contested subjects such as ‘intelligent design’, prompting public concern that there were possible tensions with accepted science curricula and mainstream thought. Some academies are explicitly schools with a religious character, or ‘faith schools’: around a third of state-maintained schools have a religious character, and this naturally informs the curriculum they present to their learners.

Private sector organisations directly providing education that focuses on their particular field or practice are in a position to centre curricula on their specific needs, tying learning much more closely to employment within a particular area than under more general learning activities. This might provide learners with an advantage insofar as they can be confident they are learning skills and dispositions that are appropriate for their employer, or eventual employer, but may limit the range of employers for whom they might work if what they learn is tied too closely to a particular company’s practices.

For companies engaging with education in this way, the issue of intellectual property becomes important, as engaging learners with their particular domain and practice might necessarily expose their IP to a greater extent than they would prefer: these firms need to balance the benefit of increasing the pool of employees or potential employees with appropriate skills with the difficulty of protecting their IP. More broadly, education can be seen as a site for the generation of new IP. The materials supporting teaching and learning produced by educational publishers constitute an important source of IP from a business perspective. Longer-term, many universities have defined sites of innovation within their organisations specifically for the generation of intellectual property (for example, Cambridge Enterprise and Imperial Innovations). However, while the materials used to support teaching a particular curriculum might be protected intellectual property, no mention of protecting curricula themselves was made within the research underlying this report.

Producing educational materials

The focus here is on educational materials that rely on or are disseminated through digital technologies, as this was emphasised in the reviews and interviews, but it ought to be noted that educational publishers themselves observe no distinction between “old media” publishers and “new media” publishers, with most offering both paper and digital versions of textbooks and support materials, as well as software. Within the reviews and interviews, no mention was made of toys, physical models or demonstration devices, technical equipment such as environmental sensors, or tangible or haptic technologies, for example: this reflects perhaps a current general conception of technological educational materials that revolves primarily around networked computers and the software that runs on them, though a number of the interviewees represent companies that sell products from several of these categories.

There is a general agreement within policy and industry that educational provision operates within a market, with a choice of providers and competition between suppliers. While in many respects this is a more accurate conception than imagining educational provision to flow from the state, it was noted by some contributors that it might not be recognised as a true market by publishers and technology providers working in sectors outside education. Government policy (for example, efforts to increase the number of computers in schools, or to integrate different data-management systems across institutions) and the injection of capital from a central source (through, for example, the e-learning credits scheme) have a distorting effect on the marketplace, determining needs and objectives, and although the government does not act as a central purchaser it exercises what Sefton-Green describes as monopsony power, shaping the focus and direction of suppliers. Some interviewees suggested that the education sector in the UK has also been used historically to stimulate the growth of technology-related skills across a wider national arena, driving domestic and corporate uptake of computers and related technologies. However, it was also noted that the private sector must necessarily be involved in the provision of technology as there is little government scope for becoming a manufacturer or software developer.

The purpose of the technology which is sold to schools is often to support administrative and management processes (pupil tracking, payroll administration, asset management and so on), rather than directly supporting learning. Rhetoric around the capacity of technology to support learning often emphasises the ways in which it supports individual development and offers the possibility of ‘personalised’ learning: however, information technologies are powerful tools of standardisation and massification, offering a great degree of bureaucratic control. This second, less visible use of information technology accounts for a greater proportion of schools’ software spending than software explicitly focussed on supporting learning (roughly around 13-15% of total technology spend within the schools’ market, as opposed to around 5-7% for learning software: the remainder is largely spent on hardware).

These figures are vague and uncertain, reflecting the difficulty of examining this market and the hidden nature of some associated costs. For example, in some schools technicians are employed in-house (and so feature as staff), while in others technicians are external and their cost is part of services provided by an external supplier. For universities, the cost of contributing to an open source project might be greatly reduced if students carry out the work as part of their course than if a member of staff does the same work. These blurred lines illustrate the muddy nature of the interactions between technology and education, and suggest that viewing “technology” as a separate domain is not always practical.

There are a number of different kinds of private-sector suppliers of educational technologies operating in England at the current time. There are large consumer electronics and software development companies for whom education is a small part of their business (for example, Apple, Oracle or Microsoft) and for whom the motivation for engaging in the education market was reckoned by contributors to be less profit than an opportunity to raise brand awareness, increase the familiarity of future consumers with their products and philosophies and to address issues of corporate social responsibility. As an adjunct to this group, there are some companies who, while not directly concerned with educational provision or technology, may shape its delivery and influence expectations of learners and parents through efforts intended to fulfil corporate social responsibility objectives (for example, Tesco’s Computers for Schools programme, or Morrison’s Let’s Grow scheme). Farook notes that there is often considerable resistance to these programmes if they are perceived as inappropriate. Where the benefit to both school and firm is clear and equal (for example, in the provision of access to branded sports equipment by students) this resistance may be lessened, and it seems clear that this relationship between state and private sector will continue to be developed. More subtly, these efforts can shape wider societal expectations around (for example) access to technology for learners.

There are a small number of large companies whose focus is on the education market, most visibly the international educational publisher Pearson and the UK-based hardware supplier RM. These two organisations have diversified their activities within England in recent years, with RM moving into the supply of software and a greater range of peripherals, and Pearson acquiring one of the national examination boards, Edexcel. In general, educational publishers appear to be moving away from the simple provision of hardware and software into supporting assessment and long-term service provision (particularly with respect to the Building Schools for the Future programme). It was suggested that over the coming years fewer large companies will be operating across a range of what were previously discrete markets, and a range of smaller companies will establish themselves by identifying and actively targeting particular niche areas (the publisher Rising High was cited as a strong example of this approach). For commercial companies, there is greater interest in maintaining their close relationships with schools rather than the FE or HE sectors, as the standardised nature of schools and some FE colleges makes it possible to create content that can be used (or delivered) on a national scale, as opposed to universities which have a tradition of creating their own intellectual resources.

There are concerns around the role played by these large firms and their relationships with local authorities and policy makers, with one interviewee describing them as a “cartel”. Publishers and developers shape learning through the materials and technologies that are made available to educational institutions, influencing expectations of teaching and procurement staff and necessarily shaping teaching practice, notwithstanding their claims to be responding to teaching practice. These claims are genuine and supported by the number of employees coming from local authorities or schools with a more nuanced and sympathetic understanding of education practice than a caricature of the aggressive salesman would imply. Still, the relationship between schools and suppliers has a circular nature, with schools to some extent relying on these firms to inform them of their purchasing options and firms relying on schools to communicate their purchasing needs: this is underlined by the claim of one interviewee that there are many fewer people involved in the education technology community outside schools than might be expected, with the same individuals moving between local authorities, government agencies and private companies.

One contributor suggested that schools are comparatively “unsophisticated” consumers of technology, being used to receiving subsidies and having different procurement patterns and expectations to commercial firms. Schools’ apparent failure to purchase technology in the same way as a commercial business, apart from reflecting the fact that schools have not traditionally been run along the same corporate lines, may also reflect a pre-existing set of attitudes towards technology that arose from the early days of using technology with computers, when a “hobbyist mentality” was more of a pre-requisite for engagement with technology inside or outside schools and a cottage industry of software developers and distributors arose.

Two kinds of ethos towards technology in schools seem to be illustrated from the interviews and reviews.  On the one hand it might be suggested that there is an acceptance of the ready-packaged and quality-assured software and hardware provision from large corporate players such as Pearson and RM, where technology expertise is assumed to be located outside the school and procurement decisions that rely on such expertise are happily passed to representatives or proxies of the market, reflecting the lack of time or enthusiasm within an institution for engaging with such decisions themselves. On the other hand, it could be said that there are still vestiges of a tradition of technological experimentation and development that locates expertise within the school (perhaps within individual teachers), perhaps seeing itself as linked to the university tradition of technological development. Although this second “DIY” tendency is vocal and engaged, and informs much of the aspirational debate amongst researchers and policy-makers, there is doubt over the effectiveness with which teachers are recruited to its standard, and there is little indication within the work examined here that it will become a mainstream attitude within schools.

This hobbyist or DIY attitude might in some ways be seen as part of a wider movement supporting the “open source” creation of computer software. On a practical note, much open source software is significantly cheaper than its commercial equivalents and benefits from the presence of associated user communities. This is mainly relevant to primary and secondary education: HE has a much more familiar relationship with open source software, with HE institutions often acting as centres for the use and production of open source material. The notion of “openness” has been a productive nucleus around which to collect other instances of “open” activity: for some academics, placing limitations of copyright and access on their work slows research and is counter to the spirit of academic endeavour, while for learners there are an increasing number of institutions offering access to content and accreditation, usually using web-based tools.

It is not only “open” approaches to learning that make use of digital technologies that enable remote communication. Many companies offer home tuition to school students via webcam sessions with remote tutors (for example, TutorVista and Global Scholar). The tutoring model is still based around real-time dialogue but the virtual presence technology allows (typically US) learners to take advantage of lower tutoring costs in other parts of the world (for example, in Singapore). There are also a handful of schools that are encouraging their teachers to develop online tutoring skills and are reaching out to a wider population with paid-for online provision. Online tutoring is therefore an opportunity for schools to participate in the digital education marketplace and to redefine their own communities, as well as a source of supplementary or even competing services.

There are a number of sites not affiliated with formal learning institutions that act as places to access materials explicitly intended to support learning. Some are wholly concerned with learning, whether academic or non-academic (for example, the School of Everything, 5min or Instructables), while others, such as YouTube, are more agnostic platforms that have become useful for people wanting to share techniques, advice or coaching. Collaborative opportunities online, such as blogs, message-boards, public wikis and so on, have become established as useful locations for the exchange and construction of knowledge with peers.

Managing educational institutions

The most high-profile interaction between the state and the private sector with respect to the management of schools in recent years is the Private Finance Initiative (PFI), in which the construction and management of public institutions is financed and delivered by consortia of private companies, who receive a revenue stream from the state over a fixed period of time. As an investment mechanism it has been widely employed across the public sector, perhaps most visibly for the provision of health services. PFI projects represent the largest investment of private capital in education currently, though as a procurement approach it has been strongly criticised on both economic and ideological grounds. There are practical difficulties associated with the approach: local authorities have not always had the skill to manage a PFI project successfully, and the recent economic climate has made it hard for consortia to raise capital. However, the same economic pressures make it unlikely that new public projects will be able to go ahead without the support of the private sector, and for now the PFI approach is sufficiently embedded within procurement processes for it to continue to be a favoured approach to funding infrastructure projects.

PFI engagement with education projects tends to extend as far as the provision of services related to the facilities constructed under the contract: this may involve funding staff on site, but their role is usually concerned with maintenance and service provision rather than directly with educational activities. Academies, as described above, are another way of involving the private sector in the provision of publicly-funded education, and the sponsors often make a greater contribution to the management of the school itself, appointing representatives to the governing body, recruiting members of the senior management team, contributing to the design of the curriculum, and directing to a large extent the ethos and vision that underpin the schools’ activities. The engagement of sponsors of academies with the management of the school is much greater than that of PFI consortia members.

Both PFI schemes and academies are established features of the education landscape in England. Less common is the management of maintained schools by for-profit companies, such as GEMS, Edison or Kunskapsskolan. These organisations differ from traditional independent or private schools in that their revenue is derived through district-wide contracts with state agencies for the management of publicly-funded schools. The three named here represent three different ways of engaging with the provision of public-sector education. In Sweden, Kunskapsskolan manages schools for profit through a government voucher scheme: the company is entering England as a non-profit sponsor of several academy schools. Edison Schools in the US originally managed publicly-funded schools on behalf of district authorities, though poor financial and educational results have led to their specialising in service provision rather than whole-school management. In England, Edison (as Edison Learning) have been contracted to provide school improvement services in Essex and North London, providing teaching staff as well as training and management. GEMS is based in Dubai and manages a string of independent schools globally aimed at the expatriate market, including England, teaching local curricula and the National Curriculum.

These for-profit organisations are qualitatively different providers of private education than traditional ‘public schools’, with the latter’s reliance on social networks to provide legacies and donations in addition to tuition fees received from parents. They are also multinational, reflecting the increasingly global nature of the education market. Many domestic education providers are beginning to expand internationally, using an institution’s brand and relationships with locally-based institutions to establish sites of education delivery overseas, either as a profit-making exercise or, more commonly, to support recruitment and intake among domestic institutions. Increasingly HE and FE institutions are competing globally rather than nationally, often against universities with a greater funding base, and awareness of this perhaps encourages a more enterprise-oriented disposition. Currently, international demand is for an ‘Anglo-Saxon model’, though it should be noted that this does not privilege providers from traditionally Anglo-Saxon backgrounds, and global Englishes are often more relevant to consumers than Standard British English. This tendency to equate an international outlook with economic globalisation is filtering down to school level: the Specialist Schools and Academies Trust runs an International Business Partnership Network encouraging financial partnerships between schools in different countries that are supported by local businesses, while some schools are keen to promote the development of skills supposedly demanded by a technologically-enabled global economy.

Independent education provision is under pressure from the redirection of some parents’ resources towards supplementary private tuition. The cost of such tuition is decreasing, with low-cost providers often following a model established overseas and offering affordable tuition in supermarkets and shopping malls following the pattern established in Singapore, Hong Kong and the US. Supplementing state education with private tuition is an increasingly legitimate part of mainstream provision, with tutoring for failing pupils offered by the government and Aimhigher funding used by some schools to provide tuition for pupils applying to Oxbridge.

There are a number of other minority approaches to school management. Most visible are state-funded schools run by organisations with a religious character, or faith schools. These are maintained by local authorities, with infrastructure owned and managed by a group – often a charity – with a religious focus, who have representation on the governing body. Staff and admissions may be appointed by the local authority or by the governing body, depending on the school’s voluntary controlled or voluntary aided status. Faith schools are valued by some outside the faith community for their supposed emphasis on broad social values and high levels of achievement, though public and political concerns regarding ethnic or secular segregation, religious extremism, social integration and the possible lack of accountability remain, possibly leading to greater scrutiny and regulation in future.

Foundation schools place a similar emphasis on the contribution of the governing body to the management of the school, with the local authority funding the school and the governing body owning the infrastructure and employing staff. Foundation schools may be faith schools, though in practice few are: the primary advantages for schools in having foundation status are greater control over management and admissions policies, and a more equal relationship with local authorities. The structure also allows groups traditionally not involved in the direct provision of formal education to manage a school, and there are examples of parents and community groups taking this opportunity, allowing a greater focus on issues of local concern, perhaps responding to a lack of school places, or a desire for stronger ties between home and school.

Foundation schools and academies represent two ways in which the third sector can manage and direct the provision of education. Another approach has been developed by the Young Foundation with the Studio Schools scheme, which departs from the usual way in which 14-19 education is structured by conceptualising the institution as a cluster of student-led businesses, employing students, teachers and non-teaching staff with expertise in business: the focus is on developing general skills and dispositions that support entry into the workplace and an entrepreneurial attitude.  The scheme has been recognised by the present government as an example of the middle way between full privatisation of education on one hand and centralised state delivery on the other that it believes best promotes the conditions for “innovation”.

Education does not necessarily have to happen in a school or formal institution: there has always been a minority of children who are educated outside the formal system, most often at their home. Home schooling presents a direct challenge to the state’s ability to deliver its responsibilities and commitments as outlined above, particularly in light of the growing emphasis on schools as part of a system of care for children in England and Wales. This is illustrated by the aims of ongoing Elective Home Education Review chaired by Graham Badman (to be published spring 2009), which is investigating whether councils are able to discharge their duties of care to children outside the school system, whether home schooling can account for the level of education children receive, and to what extent the curricula addressed within home learning environments is aligned with government policy such as Every Child Matters.

While it is difficult to provide an exact figure for the number of children schooled at home (estimates vary from fewer than 10000 to over 50000), there seems to be general agreement that numbers are gradually increasing. One possible factor in this growth is widely reckoned to be the increasing availability of learning tools and materials accessible online. Indeed, there are a small number of independent schools existing entirely online, offering timetabled lessons where interaction with teachers and classmates is through messageboard, voice over IP and video-conferencing software. While the mechanism of interaction may be novel, an emphasis on the traditional nature of the underlying pedagogic approach seems to be common to many. Some online schools claim that they are particularly appealing for students whose parents desire a higher degree of control over diet and environment during the day, or who currently have difficulty relating to other students. Online schooling also appeals to some expatriates who presumably feel that their local schooling options are not appropriate: they are also a cheaper option the Within the UK there are three wholly-online schools, with around 200 pupils between them. First College and Briteschool are smaller organisations, while Interhigh is supported by Tutors International, a private firm supplying tutors to families around the world. All offer online tuition for GCSE and A-level students, with Briteschool additionally offering primary tuition.

As noted above, much online HE material likely to be administered by the relevant institution (so, far example, MIT’s Open Courseware programme is part of the offline institution of MIT rather than being an online university). However, there are a growing number of universities that exist entirely online. The UN’s Global Alliance for Information and Communication Technology and Development (GAID) recently announced the formation of an online university, the University of the People, offering tuition-free, currently unaccredited courses in business administration and computer science: its focus is on providing access to university-level education in developing countries. Other entirely virtual universities, such as the US Army’s “eARMYU” and Jones International University, exist, addressing different sectors. Currently, a more usual approach currently within HE is to offer a blend of online and offline access to learning materials.

Assessment

Three purposes of accreditation were identified by contributors to the research, all social and/or political in origin but acting at different levels of stakeholder interest: legitimation (demonstrating that the national project of schooling young people ‘works’); differentiation (organising people into the kind of life paths and educational streams that are felt to be appropriate for them), and providing a personal record of achievement, to support life choices and goals. Arguably, the focus of political debate about education has moved from the second purpose to the first. No mention was made within the research of the role of assessment in the learning process, reflecting the emphasis on external structures of education rather than pedagogy. This resonates well with the findings of the DCSF Expert Group on Assessment who suggest that the government has four purposes in undertaking the assessment of young people: to optimise the effectiveness of pupils’ learning and teachers’ teaching; to hold individual schools accountable for their performance; to provide parents with information about their child’s progress; and to provide reliable information about national standards over time.

National high-stakes examinations are the form of assessment most often discussed in public fora: despite a popular conception that these are devised and administered entirely by the state, they are part of what Ofqual describe as “a market for qualifications”, provided by “qualification buyers” and “qualification sellers”. These examinations – most notably GCSEs and A-levels – are managed and assessed by independent examination boards, primarily AQA, OCR (part of Cambridge Assessment), Edexcel, and the City and Guilds Group. The City and Guilds Group and AQA are independent charities, while Cambridge Assessment is a non-profit. Edexcel, as noted above, is a private company owned by the publishing company Pearson, and has an income significantly in excess of the other major exam boards (over £200m in 2007 compared to AQA’s 2007 income of nearly £150m).

There are other qualifications providers not recognised by Ofqual, providing qualifications recognised within particular domains and sector. Accreditation from Ofqual recognises the qualifications offered by a particular awarding body as being within the the National Qualifications Framework, giving them greater national currency and providing a level of quality assurance. The number of recognised qualifications has grown from 2771 in 2001 to 8379 in 2008, a 26% increase, and the number of accredited awarding bodies has grown similarly to 140. The majority of providers and increases exist in the vocational sphere, with some specialist organisations (for example, the Associated Board of the Royal Schools of Music) and others that offer a wide range of qualifications (for example, the City and Guilds Group). Employers recognised as awarding bodies – for example, FlyBe and McDonalds – make up 2% of UK awarding bodies, though this proportion is expected to grow over the coming years as employers recognise the value of their qualifications having wider currency.

E-assessment, or the use of ICT to administer, evaluate and present the results of examinations, is a well-established part of the landscape, though not yet mainstream. There are a wide number of different approaches that fall under the term “e-assessment”, and some have met with more success than others. There are a complex set of cultural and logistical issues that vary across educational settings: security, reliability, trust and accuracy are all paramount. Against these constraints, e-assessment has the potential to save costs for institutions and to better support standardisation, making it easier to link assessment to other ICT-supported areas of education such as e-portfolios, detect plagiarism and provide students with timely feedback. While at present e-assessment schemes often require champions and technical intermediaries, a recent JISC report suggest that usability is improving, enabling teachers and non-technical staff to prepare their own assessment procedures.

Automation of existing tasks is perhaps the most readily-observed element of e-assessment, using technology to deliver tests online, and increasingly to mark students’ responses: multiple choice or short text answers are more amenable to processing by computer than longer texts, though these are still often sorted using computer software prior to being marked by a human, and text analysis techniques are improving, enabling programmes to offer evaluation on the quality of language and judge the content. This raises the possibility of e-assessment making more of a contribution to formative assessment practices in future, with the field developing from being a set of techniques for easing the administrative burdens of delivering tests to becoming a more central part of the learning process. Educational publishers, notably Pearson, are investing in e-assessment, which may make it possible for such firms to offer linked curriculum, assessment and qualification practices to educational institutions and individual learners. Some contributors noted, however, that developments in e-assessment techniques and the possibility of the easy movement of educational data more generally suggest that a modular approach to assessment is possible, with accreditation being offered as a standalone service, perhaps as a way of validating time spent engaging with course materials available on the MIT OpenCourseWare model.

Funding education

The primary source of funding for education is currently central government. State schools receive funds for running expenses from local authorities , who receive a Dedicated Schools Grant from central government intended to cover each schools’ three-year budget and the costs of other educational provision (such as providing for special educational needs). Local authorities also have responsibility for FE, ensuring young people and adults have access to work-based learning through the provision of diplomas and apprenticeships, and for commissioning education providers to offer work-based learning. Higher education is paid for directly from the Higher Education Funding Council of England (HEFCE), a non-departmental public body. The primary source of funding for education in England, then, is the taxpayer.

Within pre-14 education there are few current alternatives to this model. One way of structuring the disbursement of taxpayer -derived funds differently would be through a voucher system, in which vouchers representing the state’s investment in learners can be exchanged for educational provision of the learner’s or family’s choice. There are concerns over the ways in which implementing this approach may affect local inequalities, with different impacts imagined depending on whether private schools as well as publicly-funded schools may be chosen, the degree to which quality of educational provision varies within a region, or whether or not parents are allowed to top-up their voucher allowances from their own funds. In practice, within England pilot voucher schemes have not been as successful as their supporters might have liked, and although vouchers are a mechanism that supports parental choice and as such might be expected to remain a feature of educational debate, there are currently no plans to introduce voucher schemes on a national scale for children’s education.

The resources represented by vouchers still originate from the taxpayer. At present there appear to be few other sources of revenue for schools or institutions. Parents can fund their children’s education directly through private or independent schools, or supplement state provision of education through paying for private tuition as noted above. Farook notes that more than a quarter of children aged between 11 and 18 years old have had private tuition at some point in their lives, and although there is no consensus on the degree to which such tuition impacts academic achievement, and concern that it may increase disparities in educational attainment, private tuition is still a popular choice for many parents, particularly at levels where new examinations have been introduced, such as SATS in key stage 3. Tuition is frequently focussed on passing high-stakes examinations but might also focus on extra-curricular activities regarded as desirable by parents (such as music or sport). In recent years two major developments within the private tuition market have taken place. First, the emergence of low-cost providers has lowered the financial barriers to entry, with many also based outside traditional learning environments and located within shopping malls or supermarkets, perhaps giving them access to new markets. Second, families who might have sent their children to an independent school are increasingly choosing to invest in private tuition for their children as a cheaper option, increasing the number of children in state school (and in some areas putting more pressure on limited school places).  For some learners, private tuition can be a mark of inadequacy or a source of social embarrassment, and Farook suggests that peer-to-peer learning approaches facilitated by ICTs may provide a cheaper and more acceptable alternative to paid tuition.

Following the lead of policy in embracing the language of the private sector, some schools are adopting an entrepreneurial approach to supplementing the funding they receive from central government. Some are able to generate revenue from the use of their facilities, charging for the use of athletic resources for example. In others, pupils contribute to fundraising efforts. At its most direct, this entrepreneurial attitude manifests itself in the opening of for-profit branches of schools overseas, as Harrow and Dulwich College have, and Bristol Academy plans to. Many higher education institutions have taken advantage of their brand to expand overseas in a similar way, though their motivations are often more to do with supporting the domestic institution through encouraging take-up from overseas students than with profit, and it is unclear whether the factors supporting an entrepreneurial attitude within HE, such as an emphasis on innovation for economic benefit, will act in the same way for schools.

HE has explored many ways to supplement central funding. As universities and other HE institutions continue to be pressured by the global market in higher education, in particular from well-funded US institutions, one possibility is for HE institutions to become private institutions, thought this would be controversial and some academic disciplines may suffer if universities are able to offer courses that are in their own interest rather than in the national interest. While a full marketisation of the HE sector is unlikely, the perception that higher education primarily benefits the individual may support the removal of the current cap on tuition fees, and more widely mark a shift in student expectations, seeing themselves more as consumers of a service and demanding appropriate levels of care and provision with a greater emphasis on value for money.

Becoming private institutions themselves may be unlikely. However, universities have had close relationships with external private sector organisations throughout their history: most obviously, through philanthropic donations, funding scholarships and departments. More specific interactions are observed between commercial organisations and research groups working in areas with industrial application, with funds for specific research being made available by private sector groups. In recent years direct partnerships between departments and related organisations have begun to emerge, in which the commercial partners might shape the direction of the department and provide links and opportunities to students within their sector. In general, policy supports the notion of private enterprise taking a larger role in funding and supporting university expansion: it is not yet clear what effect this might have on the focus and nature of research and teaching within HE institutions, nor whether work with no immediate application within an industry will suffer as a result.

Links between industry and education are a more obvious feature of work-based learning initiatives. Local authorities have responsibility for ensuring young people and adults have access to work-based learning, through the provision of diplomas and apprenticeships, and for commissioning education providers to offer work-based learning: work-based learning can refer to learning activities that take place within a work environment, or (when used in a UK policy context) to vocational training for young people. Increasingly, post-Leitch, FE providers are being asked to focus on meeting the perceived skills needs of employers, and this creates a role for employers in shaping and supporting the design of FE courses. Employers frequently fund training for their own workforce themselves, though there is a tension between an organisation’s short-term needs and employees’ longer-term training and learning needs, as employers often prefer to fund short courses addressing specific, often role-related, skills, while employees require transferable qualifications that may not ultimately benefit their employer.

Section 2: What features of the contemporary landscape will persist?

There are a number of features of the contemporary landscape that we can assume will remain relevant to a discussion of the relationship between private and public spheres as far as it affects education in twenty years’ time: these might promote or work against the development of some or all of those features described above.

Taking a broad perspective to begin with, we might say that the following list of factors will continue to operate, providing a context for future education. There are of course still many uncertainties associated with each of these.

• Diversity of provision.

o    There will continue to be a range of approaches towards the delivery and provision of education. In part this will reflect the diversity of requirements on the part of learners through population change and a greater emphasis on lifelong learning. Other factors influencing this diversity of provision include changing attitudes towards workplace and informal learning, the effects of a marketised education sector, and a greater range of possible technological affordances. The customer base for educational products and services is likely to diversify as schooling extends to homes, workplaces, supermarkets and community learning centres.

o    Ofqual expect to see more employers seeking recognition as awarding bodies in order to gain currency for their training beyond the limits of their organisation (Ofqual, 2009)

• The global marketplace will continue to shape higher education provision.

o    This is a consequence of many larger global economic currents: some are described here. Economic growth has created a demand for educational provision perceived as high-quality for cultural and historical reasons (for example, the current demand in China and South-East Asia for accreditation from ‘European’ or ‘Anglo-Saxon’ HE institutions), as well as offering HE institutions the opportunity to pursue more commercial relationships that would impact their brand in their home countries. Increased mobility has made it easier for academics and researchers to travel between institutions, while existing relationships with multinational commercial and industrial partners may give institutions access to other organisations and partners in different countries. Many UK universities actively market their courses to students from other countries. Pressure to compete as global research institutions has already driven some UK universities to merge.

• There will continue to be an arm’s length relationship between private sector and direct educational provision.

o    While the number of ways in which the state may devolve educational provision to the private sector have grown in recent years, widespread political and cultural commitment to the idea that the state has responsibility for the education of its citizens is likely to ensure that the private sector is not handed direct responsibility for the maintenance of state-owned schools without the state retaining some kind of an intermediary role between third-party providers and learners, or at least retaining an oversight role that addresses accountability.

• State involvement in early years educational provision will remain central to conception of a national educational settlement.

o    Similarly, there is an equally widespread commitment to the notion of a minimum educational entitlement and a common educational experience: the use of schools as a site for socialisation and the inculcation of shared values, together with the economic benefits of allowing parents to work rather than care for children during the day, suggests that the most appropriate age for the provision of a minimal educational entitlement is likely to be during a learner’s early years. Some contributors suggested that the specific ages intended for this provision may change, perhaps starting at age 3 and ceasing at 14, or not starting until age 7 and continuing till age 21, depending perhaps on the perception of the role of education or developmental effects of formal schooling.

o    The government will continue to create markets for educational services through its own targeted investment in and regulation of education, but contributors felt that ‘the stakes are too high’ for this stage to be left entirely to market forces. State involvement in this stage is likely to be seen as providing an initial investment in ‘learning to learn’ skills that should enable individuals to take responsibility for their learning throughout life.

• The influence of private sector on curriculum and policy will continue.

o    The private sector is likely to continue to influence policy directly and indirectly, through its commercial activities within the education market and through its contributions to wider debates on the appropriate aims and outcomes of education. Market offerings from private-sector learning providers may influence policy indirectly through competition, with the state under pressure to respond to successful private-sector courses by making similar learning programmes available.

• There will continue to be a requirement for lifelong learning.

o    Demographic changes (most visibly an aging society) and changing workplace requirements are likely to maintain the importance of lifelong learning, both as a route to ensuring minimal skill levels and, for some, as a path to further development, whether professional or personal. There is already a trend towards colleges becoming centres of learning for the wider community, collating services that include vocational, work-based, adult and leisure learning, as well as delivery of 14-19 qualifications. However, some contributors felt that the government’s vision of lifelong learning remained fragmented, unconvincing and unstructured. Much investment in ‘lifelong learning’ has in practice been remedial in relation to core provision, rather than an attempt to build or develop new learning.

• Social practices of institutions and learners will continue to shape learning.

o    Several contributors identified the importance of recognising inertia and the durability of established social relationships in discussing educational change. Policy statements, technological opportunities, social changes from outside the sector and market forces will each or together effect change only when they are able to overcome established expectations around educational practice, or when these expectations are no longer part of practitioners’ and learners’ understandings of education,

More specifically, there are a number of present-day features of the education landscape that authors and interviewees have identified within the Challenge as likely to persist:

• Assessment will continue to move towards technologically-supported automation.

o    This might be an example of technology being embraced primarily as a labour-saving tool to increase perceived efficiency, rather than being driven by a particular pedagogic commitment to using technology in a certain way (although of course any automation of assessment will carry with it an implicit pedagogy). However, there is currently within the education community an awareness that new technologies allow the possibility of logging data from learners’ behaviour that might well support the exploration of different approaches to assessment. The recent high-profile difficulties surrounding national SAT examinations both support and challenge this move towards automation, creating a demand for more reliable and trustworthy assessment while at the same time reducing the appetite for risk-taking.

o    As more of learners’ practice takes place with technological devices capable of recording data, more classroom activity will be available for evaluation and technological assessment will be able to play a greater role in formative assessment.

• Peer production and ‘web 2.0′ approaches to the collaborative generation of formal educational materials and activities will continue to be marginal in the face of institutional and cultural barriers.

o    Despite the enthusiasm for and fascination with recent innovations in web-based communication and data-sharing techniques (often referred to with terms such as ‘crowdsourcing’ or ‘mash-ups’), there is little evidence to date that anybody beyond a small and accomplished minority is able to create materials in this way, or to show how these attitudes towards the creation of educational resources might be embedded meaningfully within existing approaches towards teaching and learning. This is not to deny their potential or the support that can be found within contemporary theories of learning for the exploration and development of such approaches: rather, it is an acknowledgement that the history of digital technology in schools suggests that potential alone, however genuine or widely-acknowledged, is not sufficient to overcome wider cultural barriers to the introduction of new paradigms, and that it has historically taken decades rather than years for new technologies to find a place within education. Not all teachers or learners will want to be producers.

o    Learners may be unlikely to make these sorts of applications directly themselves: however, third-party developers may be able to take advantage of new approaches towards the repurposing and redistribution of data and information. Similarly, HE institutions are likely to continue to use their role as contributors to open-source projects and as sites of technological innovation to take advantage of and develop the affordances of new collaborative technologies.

• Investment in and exploration of location-aware technologies will continue.

o    The inherited discourse of the web as an alternative space (cyberspace) also needed to be set alongside trends in location-aware technologies (GPS, geotagging etc) which support an information-enhanced experience of real-world locations. Soon, all locations will be virtual as well as real, and virtual locations will be increasingly differentiated (including by geographical locale, particularly where governments control what is available on local networks). More mobile devices and better access to networks on the move will continue to enrich locations for learning, including remote communities and field sites. Cyberspace and real space will interpenetrate one another, with the result that without a conscious effort to disconnect, all learning is likely to take place in this new hybrid space.

• Teaching will continue to be a distinctive professional activity with its own values and skills.

o    However, educational staff will continue to need the support of content creators and service providers. As third-party providers continue to play a role in day-to-day teaching and learning, there will continue to be a demand for technical and product support to assist in the use of tools and content, both in their practical use and more broadly in understanding how new tools might impact well-established approaches to teaching and learning.

o    A wider range of people may undertake teaching and support of learning as part of their professional role, particularly at the post-foundational stages, whether after or as part of an established career in a different sector.

• The nature of knowledge will continue to be contested in the face of debates around authenticity and authority.

o    Although the area of knowledge is more directly addressed by other areas of the BCH programme, there are a number of ways in which developments in digital technology and their associated social practices make this a relevant consideration for this research area. In particular, the need to be confident of the provenance and authority of digitally-gained knowledge will become pressing: not only will people need to be sure of the source and authenticity of information they encounter, but will also need to ensure that they produce information whose authenticity is sufficiently beyond question, in particular when identifying themselves online. Most visibly, there will remain a tension between policy (and associated providers’) views of education and emerging student practices and strategies,

• Understandings of information rights and intellectual property will be reconfigured in the light of technologically-informed expectations.

o    It is already the case that there exists a tension between the established legal and orthodox attitudes towards ownership and re-use of information, and those more aligned with the affordances of digital technology. It is also highly likely that retaining these established societal norms will incur an increasingly heavy regulatory cost, making it more probable that they will be restructured in some way. The widespread sharing and redistribution of content – legal, illegal and unlegislated – will remain a feature of this landscape. However, there is high uncertainty over the form they will take: will the current ‘wild west’ succumb to legal normalisation? Or will a tiered system of information and content evolve as different creators and distributors choose different approaches?

• Tutorship and supplementary learning will become increasingly important elements of the education landscape.

o    The middle classes will continue to use their household resources to secure access to these additional educational opportunities. However, competition between new providers making use of web technologies and novel learning locations is currently lowering the costs of such learning: additionally, independent schools membership is likely to decline at least in the short term as the global economic environment remains depressed, and tuition coupled with state school attendance may be seen to be an adequate alternative to private education for many middle-class parents.

• Marketing through schools by companies not directly related to education (for example, Morrisons’ Let’s Grow campaign, Tesco’s Computers for Schools project) will remain at the current level.

o    While it is true that there is little public appetite for overt branding of any part of the educational experience, there is an appeal for companies in visibly addressing their social responsibilities: this, coupled with the professed desire for stronger links between schools and local communities and a greater acceptance of corporate involvement in the public sphere, will ensure that schemes for the provision of equipment or infrastructure from non-education organisations remain worth individual companies’ investment.

• Workplaces will continue to ensure their own training and learning requirements are met, whether by lobbying for the inclusion of certain skills and competencies in curricula, or by providing them directly.

o    Workplaces already form a large marketplace for training and development activities, with individual organisations sometimes able to embrace innovation in ways that traditional learning institutions are not (for example, using videogame technology in simulating not only technical procedures but also interpersonal workplace relationships). This flexibility, coupled with the growing prominence of the private sector in the public sphere and the emphasis on the need for schools and HE institutions to serve the economy, might see techniques and approaches developed in the private sector being more frequently seen in traditional education and lifelong learning.

• Private firms will continue to be used to effect state education provision.

o    While the current economic climate may dampen the recent enthusiasm for the practices of the private sector, the general principle of contracting individual services to third parties is sufficiently established, and the relationships between some private firms and public service agencies sufficiently entangled (as noted by Sefton-Green), that it seems unlikely this will change significantly over the next two decades, even if an adequately practical and compelling case were made (short, perhaps of incontrovertible evidence of widespread and systemic fraud, which at the present moment might provoke state action and a recapturing of the public space: this is unlikely). One practical outcome of this might be that uptake of open source tools in mainstream education meets strong opposition.

o    Alternatively, more educational suppliers may move into the provision of qualifications and accreditation, making their content more accessible but charging more for participation in their assessment programmes.

o    Managerial approaches to education are likely to continue to be seen within the culture of educational institutions, further legitimising the engagement of the private sector.

• There will continue to be widespread online provision of learning opportunities.

o    While there are currently many technical and cultural barriers within mainstream schools that prevent full access to web materials, there are a growing number of instances of online provision that support formal and informal learning, originating from both geographically-located and virtual institutions. Experiences of MIT OpenCourseware, VideoJug, Second Life, 5mins and Instructables are evolving the norms and expectations that will be more widely adopted over the coming years.

• Public awareness and conceptions of the science of learning will continue to have an impact on views about education.

o    These understandings, whether shared by professional or academic practitioners, will have an effect on what is politically possible in and through education. Reductive accounts of learning in terms of genetic capability or brain chemistry might have more purchase on public consciousness than social and cultural accounts, particularly in light of discussion on cognitive enhancements or genetic technologies. As parents and students invest more directly in education, scientific and pseudo-scientific discourses about learning may be employed more overtly in support of particular private services or public approaches.

Section 3: What changes of direction in state/market/third sector provision of education do we see emerging?

Here we list movements that are sufficiently high-level to be considered as trends in one direction or another. All of these operate under larger changes in the relationship between the public and private sectors: some are specific to education, but many are education-specific instances of wider trends, for example towards greater responsibility for one’s own good and wellbeing. And all are written with an understanding that the notion of a simple binary between “public” and “private” is illusory, as illustrated by the recent series of government interventions within the heart of the free market.

• Increasing responsibility for provision of individual education moves from the state towards the individual and their family groups.

o    This could lead to significant levels of exclusion amongst those lacking the capital to ensure appropriate, or any, provision. However, it might also make it possible for some groups to meet the requirements and needs of some learners in a tailored fashion, perhaps through locally-focussed small schools, which might be the product of genuine community effort, or a carefully-branded offering from educational multinationals.

o    This move suggests a recasting of, or at least a greater emphasis on, the relationship between learner and institution as one of customer and provider.

• Increasing emphasis on health, wellbeing, social skills, citizenship and civil participation as things to be fostered within formal education

o    A wider and more speculative movement might be towards the re-imagining of learning as an essential part of general health and wellbeing.

• Increasing direct investment by middle-class families in extranormal provision of education

o    This might also lead to increasing interest in and respect given to ‘learning science’ discourses centred around psuedo-neurological accounts of learning.

• Increasing diversity of education market

o    Greater choice and competition, or a greater number of groups identifying themselves as possible markets with specific learning requirements, could lead to a plethora of ways of addressing all parts of education, from assessment and accreditation to post-education learning and childcare.

o    Educational publishers that currently receive more benefit from ‘off-the-shelf’ approaches to education may become more able to provide granularised, modular products that are more easily integrated with custom learning environments.

• New learning practices facilitated by changes in digital technology

o    Necessarily supporting informal learning to begin with as these appear outside a formal learning context (possible uncertainty: gap between innovation inside and outside schools decreases?)

o    In a formal context, developers of education management software are working to make it easier use and gather information on learners to build a more comprehensive picture of their behaviours, preferences, abilities and achievements, with the intention of supporting learning rather than merely facilitating pupil management. Using this data effectively would require new forms of pedagogy, which in addition to having to recognise the ethical and legal issues involved in using data in this way are likely to based on a quantitative, process-driven approach to learning, given the present-day philosophies apparently underpinning work in this area.

o    Another possible direction might be for educational technology suppliers to concentrate on equipping learning institutions to enable learners to use their own personal devices, so focussing on providing robust network access, appropriate data sharing and protection systems, device-agnostic authentication systems and other necessary infrastructure features.

• Disaggregation of education into content, teaching and accreditation in some areas

o    This might happen as a likely consequence of the ready availability of content and open learning materials. In addition to high profile projects in the US several EU universities are now offering their course content for open access, but with potential students applying and paying for accreditation. The funding models are still emergent and the outcomes by no means certain. One envisaged future has poor, low-status universities bowing out of content and curriculum altogether, offering instead a tutoring service to help people gain accreditation (in-house or external), or brokerage of opportunities on an information, advice and guidance model. Franchising by high status universities and colleges might then become the norm, with a corresponding loss of diversity in the HE and FE sectors. This might impact lower down the age range not only because a re-stratification of post-school institutions would create new pressures at the point of transition, but indirectly through the concentration of power in the hands of accrediting bodies across the sectors. As the technologies of content became virtually ubiquitous, technologies for accreditation, certification, management of learning records, and assessment, will become critical to the sector and potentially highly profitable.

o    This separation between content and accreditation may act as a motivator for commercial companies to open access to the materials they currently charge for. For example, Pearson might see more people engaging with learning material for Edexcel qualifications if the costs were reduced, building the market for their qualification, which they could then charge more for.

• Internationalisation of more than higher education

o    If this plays itself out among secondary and primary schools, this would be following a recognised path of innovation within education, particularly with respect to digital technology but also in other domains, whereby practices seen first within HE are found later within secondary and then primary schools. Alternatively, and perhaps reflected more visibly in the present, further education and lifelong learning opportunities, alongside supplementary tuition online or in drop-in centres, may be offered by multinational organisations.

• Increasing movement of some education institutions to brand themselves on a global scale

o    There is a movement for some schools, largely independent, to open ‘branches’ abroad: Harrow has schools in China and Thailand, while Dulwich College has schools in China, the income from which is intended to support means-tested pupils attendance at the London school.

o    There are likely to be more UK students studying abroad, and more students from traditional overseas markets studying in locations other than the UK, as China, for example, continues to turn itself into a “host” country offering globally competitive education opportunities.

o    This and the previous trend have implications for curriculum design, in particular the need to be aware of culturally-specific aspects of existing curricula that may not be as appropriate for a more global audience.

• Third sector involvement in providing specialist services to schools rather than managing whole institutions themselves.

o    This would sidestep questions of accountability and mechanisms of redress in the event of service failure. However, there would be equally pressing questions raised about the possible use of third sector organisations as a substitute for government-funded provision.

• Increased diversity of locations associated with learning
  • The association of purpose-built buildings with education may be weakened through the locating of for-profit education services within shopping malls and supermarkets, the use of community facilities by educational institutions (for example through partnerships with leisure centres) and the emphasis on libraries and museums as places affording learners opportunities for active educational engagement rather than being only passive repositories of artefacts.

• Tensions between knowledge cultures, primarily along generational lines

o    New information technologies are likely to reconfigure attitudes towards knowledge use and creation, and those groups that are less familiar with their use may find that existing ideas about ownership, authenticity and identity are challenged by the new practices that emerge alongside these new technologies.

Section 4: Major uncertainties

The trends described above have clear directions of travel, but the ways in which they play out in the world and their implications are uncertain. In this section we briefly outline some of the major areas of uncertainty with respect to the ways in which education might be structured and organised in the coming years.

Despite the impetus towards a marketised school system described above, it is far from certain outcome. There are political obstacles: many in society are unwilling to imagine a fully-marketised school system, and the need to keep the private sector at arm’s length noted above is likely to continue to obtain. There are risks that the push towards marketisation originating in discourses of ‘choice’ and ‘personalisation’ may tend more towards segregation and division if given full rein. More practically, there are many changes that would be necessary for the school system to be fully-marketised. Some possible structural changes could include the linking of LA funding to performance, capitation following pupils in addition to funding, the removal of LA control over the funding and organisation of schools, schools given the ability to opt-out of the delivery of a national curriculum and of national staff payment agreements, a robust system for managing school failure, and a national school bus or other transportation system which would enable choice to be meaningful and not constrained geographically as at present.

A related uncertainty is the role played by more affordable private tuition. As noted above, the increase in affordable supplementary provision of education may lead to an increased number of middle-class children in state schools, as their parents conclude that combing state schooling with extra tuition is comparable to a wholly-private education. However, as the affordability of private and supplementary tuition becomes more visible, traditional resistances to private education – a perception that it is too expensive, or only relevant to a higher social elite – may be reduced, encouraging greater uptake. This might be more likely to benefit new entrants into the private sector rather than the traditional ‘public schools’: additionally, the immediate impacts of the economic depression will tend to work against increased uptake of private education in the short term.

There are a number of areas of uncertainty concerning the sites within education where innovation and innovative practices might emerge. Specifically, the marketisation of content designed to support teaching and learning, the development of open-source software in schools and the role of national public service broadcasting are ones with plausible but contrasting possible alternative paths. All of these have at their centre the effect of communications technology on existing knowledge practices.

Currently, material intended to support teaching and learning, or ‘content’, is often assumed to be valuable through its designation as ‘intellectual property’: dissemination relies on its remaining unchanged, and on its being useful to educators. Existing stresses on our notions of IP may lead to an exploration of the value of protecting the design and instruction processes associated with such content, rather than simply the static material. This approach would be counter in spirit to the ‘open source’ attitudes described above: we have already noted, however, that within mainstream schools there are strong forces countering the widespread adoption of open source software and the notion of freely distributing intellectual property. A recent OECD report warned that commercial interests might start patenting content based on the expertise that has gone into its instructional design. This was particularly a concern with respect to educational materials for the US schools market, where content is almost entirely outsourced.

Regarding open source software in education, contributors to the research accepted that operating systems other than those from Microsoft will remain rare in mainstream schools, due in part to teachers’ unfamiliarity with the software. However, it is also accepted that many schools (particularly primary schools) contract third-party suppliers to maintain and manage their technology infrastructure. If it became worthwhile for these firms to supply open source software, perhaps thorough a need to price competitively, or demands from schools for more customised software, then provided they also offered adequate support for its use it might not be unrealistic to imagine a wider range of operating systems in use across the sector. For smaller or more marginal schools, perhaps those at a greater remove from the culture of mainstream schooling, open source might be a more appropriate option for financial or perhaps cultural reasons. One major uncertainty that emerged from the interviews carried out was the effect that the entry into the workplace of students familiar with open source projects will have on the software market, given the argument put forward by some contributors that software companies are keen to establish their product as central to students’ practice in order to maximise the likelihood of those students preferring it in their professional practice.

Of course, information available online may not be open source. Amongst contributors to the event and interviews there appeared to be an assumption that the availability of online information would change profoundly what would be required of the education system, with a related assumption that the teaching of information would give way to coaching in information skills of various kinds and for various settings. Networked information, along with the associated networks and services, would continue to be free, openly available and highly accessible. The question of who would own the networks and data warehouses, and who by extension would control the information being shared and accessed by users, was not raised. However, Jonathan Zittrain’s recent book notes that the Internet is at something of a crossroads, with a proliferation of ’sterile’ devices that give basic access without allowing users to share and generate content. In one possible future, then, the Internet becomes a commercial mass medium, with a large majority of passive consumers having their attention sold to advertisers as the price of access – or having to pay more directly. For the Internet to remain a place of creative interchange, a critical mass of users must continue to use computer-like devices to generate and enrich content. How IP is managed on the internet will also of course have a profound impact on the future of online information. It was noted that everything on the web is owned and commercially mediated, and that norms of usage are becoming framed in legal and commercial terms rather than the open, creative terms on which the web originally evolved. Ultimately, authority might be derived from the strength of the brand providing access to information, raising the possibility of organisations whose core business has traditionally not been education providing courses and access on the strength of their existing relationship with consumers.

Public service broadcasters (PSBs) are acknowledged to have responsibilities towards supporting education, broadly defined, and as their role within the national media landscape changes, so too will the ways in which they support education. The ways in which they do this currently, and the ways in which they might do so in future, are complex when examined in detail, but taking a more general view there are two main visible tendencies, each a reflection of the wider discussions about the future roles of PSBs. One is an explicit commitment to formal institutional education, with a focus on providing ‘learning content’ through profit-making, following a path established by movements such as the BBC Active partnership between Pearson Education and BBC Worldwide. The other follows from a recognition that PSBs are in a unique position to foster innovation and support new ways of engaging with media technology, and that their engagement with education should reflect that, continuing along the direction that elements of Channel 4 and the BBC are exploring. It is not currently clear how the two directions would continue to coexist, although it is equally difficult to say that they are necessarily counter to one another.

PSBs are given a national remit, with the historic exception of the BBC World Service, and engagement with overseas territories tends to be through profit-making arms of the organisations. Similarly, HE institutions are increasingly engaging with other territories for reasons of profit, as noted above. There is an uncertainty here around language. Demand for English language education materials is high, and while English is the basis for global conversations likely to remain so. However, while the BBC, the British Council and others promote their English language materials through associating them with Standard British English and its perceived authoritative nature as the ‘original’ or ‘most correct’ form of English, as global middle classes grow in confidence other Englishes may become more appropriate, reflecting greater national self-confidence.

From the event and the research it is clear that there is uncertainty about who will support innovation in society and the economy? Employers tend to upskill their workforce in areas relevant to their short-term commercial horizons, but society needs the capacity to respond to change on a wider basis and a longer time frame. Traditionally, providing this capacity has been the role of higher education, both through research and development and through the production of higher order skills. If higher education is to be more closely tied to the requirements of graduate employers, and if research is to be further dissociated from teaching (e.g. through a re-stratification of the sector), universities’ capacity to support innovation on a longer time-scale may be compromised. On the other hand, widening access to higher education, as required by the Government’s current commitments to higher order skills, may mean a larger percentage of the population acquiring such skills.

The question of whether national boundaries will be made irrelevant by networked technology is frequently heard within debates on the relationship between technology and education, and it is certainly true that new global communications infrastructures, combined with corporate branding and positioning, has enabled some education institutions to become less tightly coupled to one particular geographic location. On the other, trends towards a greater emphasis on geolocative and mobile technologies and services within consumer electronics and web use patterns, and towards regional governance and regulation of internet services, might make the notion of ‘cyberspace’ or ‘the virtual’ as being places independent of geography outmoded. Networked life may be much more tightly coupled to physical location than previously imagined, with consequences for educational activities that rely on different models of technologically-mediated communication. Indeed, the increasing diversity of provision, and local variety of needs and requirements, could see educational becoming a regional rather than a national project.

It was suggested that a non-technology-based education might become highly desirable, particularly if technology continued to support massification and diversification of teachers’ roles. Alternatives such as Steiner schools are already proving attractive to middle class parents, and could present a counter-balance to an increasingly technologised schooling system. Related to this idea was the notion of an unmediated intellect becoming a status symbol in a world where performance enhancement through drugs and digital devices/implants/grafts were to become commonplace, or perhaps instead such a mind would be a sign of deviance. Perhaps the ‘conscious effort to disconnect’ might become a counter-cultural movement among groups of parents and young people.

There are a number of uncertainties within formal education that are worth noting in the context of future educational organisation and provision, around the notion of specialisation, accreditation and teaching as a profession. Currently, the majority of young learners in formal education are encouraged to specialise, choosing between ’science’ and ‘arts’ subjects at school and then later a more specialised discipline or area in higher or further education, represented as a choice made in support of an eventual professional career. Discourses of personalisation and ‘learning styles’, as well as pressure on schools to meet attainment targets, may encourage young people to focus on one particular area even earlier than this: alternatively, recognition that longer working lives make it more likely that careers will cover many disciplines and an emphasis on genuine lifelong learning might together remove the need for young people to specialise in initial education. These alternatives act to shape the future role of accreditation: is it most relevant as a badge indicating that compulsory schooling has been completed, as a means of differentiating between young people, as a mark of competence in a given area, or as something else entirely?

Related to this is the question of when and where specialisation might occur in the education system. Diversification of schooling around different types of provision, seen as a likely possibility by some contributors, might entrench social stratification. Vocational training could migrate further down the age range, with large companies or corporate sectors more actively involved in creation of curricula and sponsoring specialised schools. Universities may forge new relationships with schools that focus on particular domains of expertise, allowing schools to offer specialised courses of education that serve as introductions to degree-level learning and induct students into particular knowledge communities earlier than at present. At an extreme this could be seen as a return to a form of guild system for at least a section of the school population. Alternatively (or, in a highly diverse system, relatedly), different communities could take responsibility for supporting different kinds of learning centre, embracing different educational values, and fulfilling social as well as educational needs.

Accreditation and certification through formal education is likely to play a continuing role in ‘organising’ young people into different life paths, but it is unclear how far that process will be driven by the diverse capabilities and goals of learners and how far by external pressures, for example to prioritise access to higher levels of learning or meet the needs of employers. If the move towards competence-based accreditation continues, the trend towards individualisation might well be enhanced, as responsibility is placed on the individual to demonstrate a standard or competence, rather than on the provider to ‘cover’ the relevant knowledge and skills. Different forms of accreditation might be developed to recognise informal know-how and practice-based competences: speculatively these might be technology-supported, e.g. based on video recordings, perhaps with analysis and tagging. This would ensure the further diversification of qualifications and standards of achievement, and might also render much more permeable the boundaries between formal and informal/non-formal learning.

These, and other, possibilities will naturally drive changes in the teaching profession. The trend towards the disaggregation of educational activity into separate domains of ‘content’, ‘delivery’, and ‘assessment’ calls into question the need for a single role of ‘teacher’, though may open up new opportunities for specialists in these three areas. Increasing financial and commercial pressures may lead to greater variation in contract terms within the profession, with more members of the workforce working as temporary or short-term members of educational organisations. Alternatively, these same pressures may lead institutions to consider the members of their teaching workforce as marketable assets, promoting their expertise and experience as qualities that reflect positively on the institution. Finally, if roles within the teaching workforce are to change significantly, it may be that responsibility for training the workforce may need to reflect this, through ‘in-house training’, different levels of professional accreditation, greater emphasis on professional development and possible increased engagement with sectors outside education.

One argument that arose from the event was that the trend of ‘outsourcing authority and control’ to private companies (i.e. transferring public education funds to commercial providers of content and accreditation, rather than paying teachers to provide them in-house) would undermine the profession, and therefore the quality of education. This argument was also expressed in slightly different terms elsewhere in the discussion: the disaggregation of educational provision into content, teaching and accreditation would undermine the integrity (literally) of the teaching profession. Counter to this came the argument that budgetary devolution to schools opens up a market for ‘niche’ learning approaches and areas of specialism. Schools could purchase services to fit their own curriculum model on a piecemeal basis (and there would be new opportunities here for commercial providers, such as Montessori learning materials), but the curriculum would be strongly associated with the school and there would be an investment in teachers as the source of ideas and practices relevant to the school’s particular mission.

An important intersection of the private sector and education occurs in the context of pharmaceutical interventions: drugs intended to address conditions such as ADHD are manufactured and distributed by private companies, and are a feature of many classrooms. The debates around the place of pharmaceutical interventions within education institutions are complex and ongoing, and likely to inform the response of educators and parents to the likely increased availability of drugs intended to enhance cognition and other pharmaceutical and biological enhancements. If such enhancements became the norm in particular workplaces (for example, within engineering, banking or medicine), and if cognitive processes could genuinely be enhanced without cost to the individual, then come contributors felt that their use in higher education would also become the norm. In schools, a competitive assessment regime would make use of enhancements inevitable, whether or not they were regarded as legitimate. Access to such enhancements would probably come to be regarded in the same way as access to books or a balanced diet – possibly unfair, but not ‘cheating’, and accessed more easily by well-resourced middle-class families. Alternatives were proposed, however. After a period of differential access, pressure might grow for an equal entitlement as is beginning to happen with networked computers: schools might even be under pressure to provide medication along the lines of school milk. Drugs might be used as a form of social control, with medicated or enhanced classes being better behaved and more amenable to learning messages: low capacity to learn could become a medicalised issue, like ADHD. It was felt by some that, as part of these practices, diagnostic testing would be an area of likely development, given the existing interest in diagnosing children with particular learning needs. Genetic forms of diagnostic test might become more prevalent in education, by transfer from other sectors such as insurance and medicine. Perhaps such an emphasis on the biological would see education considered more properly an aspect of health and wellbeing in the future, with pharmacological and health providers moving into the provision of education as a natural part of their core business.

Section 5: Implications for educational policy makers today

These trends and movements within and between the private, third and state sectors all have implications for education and educational policy to some degree. In some cases, the patterns described are a consequence of policy or otherwise already acknowledged by it (for example, the increasing presence of a market culture within education). In others, education policy has not yet begun to visibly engage with the implications of some of the trends presented here (for example, the tension between encouraging localisation and decentralisation, and treating education as a national project). Here we briefly outline some of the implications for education policy arising from the foregoing overview of the relationships between the state, the private and the third sectors.

There are large areas of uncertainty associated with these interactions. Will education publishers continue their project of vertical integration? Will grass-roots collaborative technologies subvert commercial interests? To what extent will it be acceptable for the state to fund institutions that represent minority values? As the sector diversifies, questions of this nature will multiply. However, keeping track of sites of challenge and innovation will become increasingly problematic without a deliberate effort to remain informed and receptive. Collaborative technologies make it easier to develop new practices under the radar. New forms of education may emerge in England that developed overseas where their growth may not have been followed. Received ideas about what is and is not ‘education’ may cause individuals to miss the evolution of new forms of learning practice. In developing the capacity to manage uncertainty, it will be helpful to establish practices that enable the sector to monitor activities centred around learning beyond formal state education, including informal learning practices and learning within the workforce.

Three areas that will be of particular relevance to policymakers arising from the reviews and interviews are the nature of schools, the disaggregation of content and accreditation, and the influence of commercial activity on shaping educational provision.

Much of the foregoing discussion draws attention to the possibility of schools no longer being a core organising structure for education, perhaps as a result of the decentralised nature of new learning networks and practices, or the greater role played by employers and corporate groups in ensuring skills provision. Where they continue to exist as a corporate entity, they may well not be exclusively located within a physical building: school infrastructure may be shared with other local groups or partners, or schools might hire appropriate working space from commercial firms as other corporate groups do. Meanwhile the school would still be able to function effectively and ensure its brand remained robust through partnerships with other institutions or through a strong online provision. This is counter to our current conception of schools as a fundamental element of schooling and an appropriate unit around which to structure state interaction with learners. It may be worth examining the assumption that bricks and mortar schools will continue to be at the heart of education, and exploring alternative mechanisms for distributing state support for learning or effecting national policy interventions.

A second theme throughout the research has been the separation of content from teaching or accreditation. In particular, there is a strong trend towards making educational resources freely available online, whether funded by institutions as in the case of the OpenCourseWare consortium or by individuals as in the case of many contributors to (for example) http://5min.com. There is a wealth of educational content available: however, much of it is not necessarily encountered with a teacher, nor is it necessarily able to lead to a qualification. This raises a number of questions, many of which would fall within policy-makers’ sphere of interest. How do learners gain recognition and acknowledgement for their effort in engaging with this content? What is the role of the teacher if they are no longer as able to mediate the content with which learners engage? If there is a rise in paid-for accreditation services, how is accountability ensured and regulation established? These questions will need to have been considered if the effects of this disaggregation are to be managed well.

The third relevant theme arising from the research is effects of horizontal and vertical integration of the education market on the educational landscape. The possibility of a single commercial publisher being in a position to supply a physical learning environment, design the curriculum followed in that environment and award qualifications to learners based on that curriculum is now a reality following Pearson’s investments in schools in China and in Edexcel. This vertical integration raises questions again about the role of the private sector in the provision of a public good, and the ways in which a single provider might eventually be in a position, through providing all aspects of an educational experience, to distort the market in their interest, rather than in the interests of learners or wider society. Horizontal integration within the education market raises different but related questions of accountability and transparency, as areas previously assumed to be unrelated become part of a corporate provider’s portfolio of interests. The private sector has little motivation for making these connections and interests transparent: it would benefit the sector as a whole for policy to be active in monitoring the interconnections between interests within the education market.

The outcomes of this research effort also suggest three considerations for the exploration of educational futures. First, contributors noted that any discussion of technology in education and the role it may play in future developments ought to look both at its impacts at the ‘micro’ level of individual learners’ interactions with technology, and at the ‘macro’ level of the institutions developing or responding to new technologies. Focussing on one or the other would lead to a distorted and unrealistic view of the effects that might be expected from new educational technologies. Second, many interviewees noted that useful educational futures would foreground the likely decrease in public funding and its effect on resources available to education, as this would challenge many of the structures and mechanisms that currently effect educational provision. Finally, and most importantly, discussions on the future of education ought to make every effort to incorporate and acknowledge the values and goals that underpin education, as these ultimately will inform whether or not education is judged to be successful in the future.

Appendix 1: Activities undertaken within the Challenge

The Challenge is intended to help the Beyond Current Horizons programme understand the following overarching question:

• How might education delivery be structured and organised in 2025 in the light of changes in

o    public/private relationships and

o    development of digital and bio technologies?

Specifically, the work commissioned in this challenge aimed to illustrate:

• Key trends in the relationships between state, private and third sector provision of public services
• Key uncertainties and potential discontinuities within this domain
• How these trends potentially intersect with developments in science and technology
• The range of potential futures these trends might point to from the present to 2025-2050

Work was initially intended to be commissioned under this Challenge from July 2008 under the leadership of an external academic, on the same model as the other four Challenges within the BCH programme. However, the original Challenge lead resigned from the role in September 2008 due to pressing professional commitments. Subsequently, Futurelab have undertook the commissioning of papers, under a revised plan that reflected the compressed timescale and enabled this Challenge to meet its milestones at the same point in the programme as the other four Challenges. The revised plan was been approved by the BCH Programme Board and the DCSF.

• This revised plan comprised the following activities:
• Commissioning 4 substantive reviews in key thematic areas:

o    Public/private relationships in education

o    Existing educational provision and digital technologies: political economy, new models of delivery and developing markets

o    The digital landscape and new education providers

o    The relationships between health and education providers

• Conducting a series of interviews with leading thinkers and practitioners in industry, academia and policy sectors
• Running an event to bring together research, industry and policy sectors to identify emergent and future trends in public/private/third sector provision.

The industry, academia and policy interviews (Oct – Nov 2008)

In addition to commissioning the reviews described above, this Challenge drew on interviews carried out with individuals working at the intersection of public and private sector education provision: this reflects the comparative lack of academic evidence on the relationship between these sectors with regard to the delivery of education, and furnishes the programme with a selection of current concerns and forward-oriented insights from those shaping and understanding the interactions between these three sectors.

These interviews informed the commissioned reviews. Where the interviewee’s approval has been obtained, the transcripts will also be made available as standalone resources.

The event (November 2008)

On the 19^th November 2008 an event took place at the Institute of Materials, Minerals and Mining (http://www.iom3.org/content/location-map) which brought together a range of attendees from policy, academia and industry to examine the broad questions underpinning this Challenge. How might the education ‘market’ might be changed by the development of new digital education platforms – for example, what ‘new’ education providers might emerge through the development of online offerings? What relationships between commercial providers and mainstream educational institutions might develop? Is there a future for ‘open’ education resources? How might local and global education provision and governance change in the context of online educational resources? What relationship between public and private provision might develop?

Themes and key interactions between private, state and third sectors were identified by participants in this event: these were summarised from notes and transcripts by Helen Beetham and are incorporated in the synoptic report above.

Participating in the event were:

• Richard Sandford (facilitator), Futurelab
• David Istance, OECD, CERI
• Andreia Santos, Open University
• Julian Sefton-Green, Freelance/Futurelab
• Jeremy Silver, outgoing CEO Sibelius
• Tim Tarrant, TDA
• Steve Taylor, Stripey Design
• Ed Tranham, Meissa Limited

Aims and agenda

The Challenge 5 Event was organised with the aim of bringing together key thinkers in the Challenge area and eliciting ideas that might not yet be visible in the published literature of the field, as well as providing an opportunity to cross-check issues emerging from commissioned reviews. The overall aim, as with all Challenge Events, was to support the construction of coherent, robust and relevant scenarios of alternative educational futures.

The agenda followed the two organising themes of the Challenge:

• to describe some of the social and political factors shaping the future delivery of education, particularly shaping the likely balance between public and private sector provision
• to review some of the relevant technological (digital and biological) trends and describe their relationships with the social and political factors shaping the future delivery of education

Appendix 2: Work commissioned under the Challenge

Public/private relationships in education (Faizal Farook)

This review is specifically concerned with understanding the current trends and potential future trajectories of public/private relationships in education, through a review of the existing evidence and current trends centred around the following indicative questions relating to the development of educational provision over the next 10-15 years:

• Who takes responsibility for ensuring access to education – individual/state/ community/workplace?  Where does this responsibility lie today? How might this change over the coming years? What might lead to these changes?
• What types of education provision may be offered by the state and what by other bodies – private sector/individual/community/voluntary?
• What sort of structural institutional relationships pertain today and which might develop in managing and delivering education in different configurations of state/private/third sector relationships?
• What curriculum implications might ensure from any changes in provision?
• What workforce is implied by any changes?
• What financial arrangements might be developed to enable new forms of education delivery – vouchers/ local schemes/ local providers?
• What risks might emerge for which groups from these models of provision?
• How does accreditation and certification play out?

Existing educational provision and digital technologies: political economy, new models of delivery and developing markets (Julian Sefton-Green)

This review is concerned with understanding the way in which developments in digital technologies – both in terms of the technology industry and the resources that it develops – might change the way in which mainstream education is ‘delivered’. It focuses around two inter-related but distinct subthemes: firstly, the relationship between the existing digital technology industry and state education, and secondly, the ways in which digital technology platforms create opportunities for this education ‘industry’ itself to change its mode and purpose of delivery. As before, this is explored through a review of the existing evidence and current trends that relate to the development of educational provision over the next 10-15 years with respect to the following issues:

• What are the relationships between digital technology industries and education provision at present? How might these develop in future?
• How are the design and implementation of digital technologies for education by commercial companies shaping delivery of education?
• To what extent do the commercial companies developing digital tools promote or facilitate particular models and ideas of education?
• How/does the involvement of digital technology industries in education change the relationship between schools and students – to what extent are students seen as a market or potential future consumers?
• How does free, libre, open source software compare with these approaches? Are there characteristic differences between these and proprietary/commercial suppliers?
• What different models of provision are offered by free, libre and open source development approaches? What are the limits or possibilities offered by these?
• How are existing education providers (schools/universities) likely to ‘deliver’ education differently through the use of online resources
• Will online resources enable education providers to identify new markets and extend their existing remit?
• What new models of delivery may be enabled by digital technologies? Might these models allow them to meet the needs of those they already serve differently?
• Might new models of provision enable existing providers to develop new funding streams – what are the implications of this for the ‘public good’ of education?
• What new opportunities do digital technologies offer to voluntary/ informal education sectors?
• Are there going to be different levels of ‘access’ to education for different people using different tools – i.e. those who have access to one sort of platform get one sort of access etc.

The digital landscape and new education providers (Briony Greenhill)

This review is concerned with understanding the role that may be played in educational provision by organisations and sectors who are currently rarely considered part of mainstream educational provision, or by completely new arrangements of educational provision. It is intended to help the BCH programme understand what new providers might enter the education arena and the sorts of institutional, financial, curricular and assessment relationships that might emerge.

• What new ‘providers’ of education are enabled by the development of web and other technologies – e.g. school of everything, 5min, you tube, homeschooling networks, commercial providers providing customer training and support
• What happens to the traditional publishing industry – how might organisations like Pearson, the Guardian and others develop?
• What happens with existing broadcasters with public service remit – what sort of educational provision might they develop?
• How might digital technologies enable workplace training and education providers to offer new models of learning?
• Might open source models of education and communities of learning flourish – and in what ways might these lead to new forms of provision?
• What are the implications of new providers for curriculum and assessment – what new offers might these providers make to learners?
• What forms of accreditation and development currently exist and might be developed in a diverse landscape of provision?
• How might learners navigate these different providers?
• What are the implications for ownership of knowledge and resources of developments in online provision from diverse parties – for example, for educational provision in Second Life, what ownership of IP models may develop?

The relationships between health and education providers (Nick Lee)

This is a broadly speculative piece exploring the potential relationships between health and education sectors in the design and delivery of education, considering in particular how the pharmaceutical industry currently relates to medical professionals and exploring whether there are potential indications there of how similar relationships might develop with education professionals. It should also explore the current relationships between the private sector (including digital technology companies) and education, and examine how the pharmaceutical industry might develop similar relationships. In particular, current attempts to site discourses of ‘wellbeing’ within formal education are be examined in light of developments within cosmetic pharmacology and neuroscience. How might pharmaceutical companies come to be involved in state education – in what roles? And what relationships might develop between pharmaceutical companies and individuals/professionals working in the education sector – what new codes of practice might emerge?

This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation

http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/educationandinspectionsact/docs/Guide%20to%20the%20Education%20and%20Inspections%20Act.pdf

http://www.dius.gov.uk/publications/worldclassskills.pdf

http://www.intellectuk.org/

Futurelab has received funding from Microsoft’s Partners in Learning scheme to support its Enquiring Minds research programme

http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/academies/what_are_academies/?version=1

“Academies, Trusts and Higher Education: Prospectus”: DFES 2007 (http://www.standards.dfes.gov.uk/academies/pdf/AcademiesTrustProspectus.pdf?version=1)

http://www.thersa.org/projects/education-legacy/rsa-academy—tipton

http://www.arkonline.org/

For example, the Open University’s OpenLearn project (http://labspace.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=4341), itself part of a wider European effort (MORIL), or the MIT Open Courseware initiative.

http://www.schoolofeverything.com/

http://www.5min.com/

http://www.instructables.com/

http://www.youtube.com/

http://www.gemseducation.com/

http://www.edisonschools.com/ in the US, http://www.edisonlearning.net/ in the UK

http://www.kunskapsskolan.se/foretaget/inenglish.4.1d32e45f86b8ae04c7fff213.html

See for example, http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB112604287494033169.html, http://www.nytimes.com/2002/07/16/us/complex-calculations-on-academics.html and Saltman , K.(2005), “The Edison Schools: Corporate Schooling and the Assault on Public Education” Routledge (ISBN: 978-0-415-95046-6)

http://www.ssat-inet.net/aboutus/sponsorus/ibpn.aspx

For example, Sir Bernard Lovell School in Bristol: http://www.sirbernardlovell.s-gloucs.sch.uk/v4/internationalism.php

“Pupil characteristics and class sizes in maintained schools in England, January 2008″ DCSF 2008 (http://www.dcsf.gov.uk/rsgateway/DB/SFR/s000786/SFR_09_2008.pdf)

For example, the Bolnore School Group (http://www.bolnoreschoolgroup.org/) and Elmgreen Sceondary School (http://www.elmgreenschool.com/)

http://www.youngfoundation.org/home/themes/studio-schools, http://launchpad.youngfoundation.org/fund/learning-launchpad/events/studio-schools

Speech by Gordon Brown, May 2009 (text at http://www.number10.gov.uk/Page19209)

http://www.govtoday.co.uk/index.php?option=com_content&view=article&id=354:morgan-action-to-ensure-childrens-education-a-welfare&catid=52:sustainable-communities&Itemid=21,  http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2009/jun/05/home-schooling-education-crack-down, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/education/7838783.stm

http://www.firstcollege.co.uk/

http://www.briteschool.co.uk/

http://www.interhigh.co.uk

http://www.tutors-international.com

http://www.un-gaid.org/

http://www.uopeople.org/

Report of the Expert Group on Assessment, DCSF 2009, ref: DCSF-00532-2009 (http://publications.dcsf.gov.uk//DownloadHandler.aspx?ProductId=DCSF-00532-2009&VariantID=Report+of+the+Expert+Group+on+Assessment+PDF&)

“Annual qualifications market report”, Ofqual 2009 ( http://www.ofqual.gov.uk/files/09-4141-annual-qualifications-market-report-april-2009.pdf)

Ofqual 2009

“Review of Advanced E-Assessment Techniques”, JISC 2009 (http://www.jisc.ac.uk/media/documents/projects/raeatfinalreportpdf.pdf)

For example, Wandsworth Council halted their scheme in 1996 (http://www.independent.co.uk/news/councils-pressure-ministers-to-drop-nursery-voucher-scheme-1357165.html)

For example, Explore Learning have a branch in Sainsbury’s supermarket in Hampton

F0r example,  Ideastore (http://www.ideastore.co.uk/)

http://www.itpro.co.uk/603639/becta-open-source-and-education-too-little-too-late

For example, MIT (http://ocw.mit.edu) and Stanford, Utah State (http://ocw.usu.edu/)

See for example the Moril project at http://oer.issuelab.org/sd_clicks/download2/towards_european_wide_quality_and_benchmarking_of_open_educational_resources

http://www.downes.ca/cgi-bin/page.cgi?post=33401

Innovation in the Knowledge Economy, 2004: http://www.oecd.org/LongAbstract/0,3425,en_2649_39263294_31658285_1_1_1_1,00.html

Zittrain, 2008, “The Future of the Internet and how to stop it”, Yale University Press (available at http://futureoftheinternet.org/)

http://www.bbcactive.com/

Channel 4’s commissioning strategy for education content can be seen here: http://www.channel4.com/corporate/4producers/commissioning/4learning_2.html

For example,  http://backstage.bbc.co.uk/news/archives/2009/01/bettr_and_teach_1.html

If we are to understand the possible future of personal learning and working environments, we need to examine not only present trends but also the past development of learning and work. In other words, we need to try to understand why we got to where we are today and what have been the main drivers of the development of our present learning and working environments. This introductory section explores some of the main factors behind the emergence of our present learning and working environments

The rise of the schooling system

Education and work environments were not traditionally separated. Prior to the industrial revolution in the UK in the mid 19th century and the subsequent introduction of mass education, for all but a small elite, the community and work were the main localities of learning. Children tended to follow their parents’ occupation, with on-the job learning to acquire occupational competence.

At the same time, in the handicrafts and in a number of other trades, the apprenticeship system, based on the medieval guilds, prevailed, with apprentices following a three or four year period of indenture, before being able to practice as skilled workers.

Although learning and working environments were not separated, it can be argued that at least in the early phase of the Industrial Revolution the level of skills required was limited. Manufacturing depended on the availability of a mass labour force to fuel the factories which resulted in rapid urbanisation. But at the same time there was a growing need for a higher level of education within the workforce (Goody, 1977).

The introduction of compulsory schooling was based on a centrally defined curriculum designed to provide students with the skills and knowledge required for employment in an industrial society. The organization (and often the appearance) of schools was based on that of the factory, with monitors, set work periods, a stream of bells to signal the beginning and end of lessons, etc. (Woodbury, 1991).

In the UK, as in other advanced capitalist countries, there has been an ongoing trend towards raising the school leaving age to deal with perceived needs for higher levels of skills and knowledge within the economy. Despite various programmes to provide more vocational education within the schooling system and the introduction of short periods of work experience, the world of education through schooling and the world of work have remained largely separate.

One major hypothesis to be explored in this paper is the idea that the ‘industrial model’ of schooling is becoming dysfunctional and that personal learning and working environments may converge in the coming decade.

Academic knowledge and vocational skills

It is interesting to note that the divide between learning and working experienced in the rise of schooling systems after the industrial revolution, is also reflected in the earlier post-Renaissance division between academic knowledge (brain work) and vocational skill (hand work) (Rauner, 1998). The use of new technologies may render such distinctions redundant. Indeed, the disciplinary knowledge structure which also evolved from the Renaissance looks increasingly under threat today.

Taylorism and the organization of work

Of course it is not only education structures and institutions which can be traced back to the 19^th century industrial revolution but also forms of work organization. The first industrial revolution was characterized by the development of the factory system of manufacturing, with mass production and a Tayloristic division of labour. In the late 20th century, companies began to adopt new more ‘flexible’ (both internal and external) types of work organisation reflected in new forms of a workforce management strategies, which became known as ‘human resource management’ strategies (Sparrow and Hiltrop, 1994) in response to a decrease in markets for mass-produced goods and a significant increase in demand for more customised goods and the growing globalisation of world trade, According to Nyhan (2001) “These theories of ‘human resource management’ entailed the abandonment of centralized bureaucratic work production strategies (although excluding centralised financial control) according to which everyone had a clearly designed function, suited to an age of sustained mass-production, and the implementation of a new organic workforce model which devolved wider responsibilities (both vertically and horizontally) to employees.” This entailed putting a heavy emphasis on ‘human resource development’ practices such as team building, multi-skilling, work-based learning in order to promote greater degrees of functional flexibility. (OECD, 1999).

Although the term ‘Post-Taylorism’ appeared in management literature, it has been argued that the interest by the management and academic community in these concepts is perhaps more due to their attractive presentation by management gurus rather than solid research evidence (OECD, 1999)

Economic Ideology

At the time of writing, newspapers and other news services are transfixed by the collapse of the world banking system and the slide into global economic recession. The events around the banking collapse have probably signalled the end of the dominant neo-liberal economic ideology of the second half of the 20th century. Neo-liberalism essentially preached the primacy of markets as a mechanism of fostering economic growth and competition, and providing employment. Government intervention should only occur in cases of market failure. The degree to which different countries adopted neo-liberal policies varied. It is notable that in those countries most amenable to free-market liberalism – the USA and the UK – there was a rapid growth in differences in wealth and an increase in working hours.

With the banking crisis and movements towards recession there has been a rapid return to Keynsian economic policies and a seemingly re-found public appetite for regulation, if not nationalization, of key services and industries.

Such changes are important for this paper in a number of respects. Firstly the likelihood of a creeping privatization of education would appear to be unlikely in the foreseeable future. Secondly it is more likely that governments could be persuaded to intervene and to regulate both in economic development and in the organization of work.

Globalisation

Whilst the mantra of globalisation has been invoked by governments and employers to justify all manner of changes in learning and in working, ranging from cuts in pay and employment to the adoption of a common structure for higher level qualifications across Europe, this does not mean that globalization itself is not a very real phenomenon and one which will have an important role in shaping the future of personal learning and working environments. Globalisation refers to the global movements of capital and the associated free movement of manufacturing and services – and hence employment – between different countries and continents. Whilst of course there has been movement of goods and services between countries since the first Industrial Revolution and trading between countries prior to that – today’s economies are increasingly interlocked and interdependent as the present day banking crisis has shown.

A new Industrial Revolution

Unlike a recession, there is no official measure nor indeed definition of what constitutes an industrial revolution. Instead it is a descriptive term used by historians and associated with various phases of economic, technical and social change. I have previously argued that the present period of economic and social development in society should be viewed as a period of industrial revolution (and I have little doubt that it will be by future historians) (Attwell, forthcoming). The industrial revolution is based on the rapid development and deployment of digital technologies, resulting in profound changes in how we learn, how we work and how we live. Whole industries are being created and destroyed; occupations become redundant whilst new occupations are born. The ensuing changes to patterns of employment and of skills demand are leading to large scale population movements.

It is very hard to predict future technology development. So rapid is present development that the seemingly fantastical may become a reality in only a few years. I am sitting writing this at Schipol airport, whilst returning home from a European project meeting in Barcelona. It may well be that in a few years there will be no need for me to physically attend such a meeting, but that instead my avatar will attend to meet with the other avatars of project partners. This paper will focus closely on potential technologies of the future and their possible impact on personal learning and working environments.

Gestalltung (social shaping)

Whilst it may be hard to predict the path of technology emergence, we believe that the implementation and use of technology can be shaped by human agency and that process of what German sociologists call ‘Gestalltung’ or social shaping and the choices in how we choose to use technologies are central to the future of personal learning and working environments.

Of course it is not only technology itself which will shape and in turn be shaped in the future development of personal learning and working environments but also the different economic ideologies and our understanding of the role of institutions in developing knowledge. In this introduction we have tried to look at some of the main influences which have shaped the present configuration of such environments. In the next section we will look at some of the main trends and issues in future development.

2. Work: Integrating personal learning and working environments – main trends and issues

Evidence from a number of European projects would suggest that learning is increasingly being integrated in the work process. However, research in this area can only provide a partial picture of trends.

Within initial vocational education and training in the UK, the move towards competence based qualifications has placed an increased focus on the assessment of authentic work tasks. There is also a trend towards increasing the number of apprenticeship places. In Germany, there have been moves towards integrating the company part of the Dual System of apprenticeship and move training out of training workshops and into the workplace (Grollman and Wittig, 2008). This is both because it is seen as a more effective means of learning and also because it may reduce the cost of apprenticeships through allowing apprentices to undertake more productive work.

Lifelong learning

The European Union and national governments have promoted the idea of lifelong learning. Continued learning is seen as necessary to update skills and knowledge and increase productivity. In some countries, like the UK, this has been linked to a discourse of employability: that individuals are themselves responsible for ensuring they have the competences required for employment by industry. Whilst continuing education and training was traditionally focused on course, seminar and workshop-based programmes, there is some evidence to suggest more learning is now located within the workplace.

In some organizations this is formalised, especially at a team level. In a Romanian cement factory the team leader is responsible for training the team staff and there are regular formal learning sessions in the workplace with individual assessment of workers (Balica, 2007). Other enterprises have established open learning areas to encourage workers to undertake further training and learning (Scottish Office). Some employers have subsidized employee participation in external courses, regardless of subject, in the belief that participation in learning will help in professional development. Many employers have established staff appraisal programmes with regular reviews of personal learning objectives.

It is difficult to assess how wide ranging such initiatives are. A survey of over 100 small and medium enterprises in six European countries found few examples of participation in formal learning – either in or out of the workplace (Attwell, 2007). It may be that sector and occupation are particularly important. For computer programmers continuous updating of knowledge is seen as a requirement. But in low skilled jobs and in workplaces little affected by changing technology, there may be little incentive for learning, either on the part of the worker or the employer. Research also suggests that employers may be reluctant to provide learning opportunities for fear that employees will leave if they achieve higher competences and qualifications and the cost of training is frequently raised as a barrier to the provision of learning opportunities (Attwell, 2003).

Informal learning

One marked trend is towards greater awareness of the potential of informal learning in the workplace and of learning through reflection on practice. This is reflected in a number of different ways. There have been various initiatives to promote accreditation of prior learning although such programmes have met with limited success. However reflection on learning has been incorporated into team meetings and in some – mostly professional occupations such as medicine and teaching – is becoming part of a formal employment requirement. There is also a growing trend towards introducing e-Portfolios as a means of documenting and reflecting on continuing learning – both formal and informal within the workplace (Buchberger, Hilzensauer and Hornung-Prähauser, 2008).

Changing technologies are likely to have a large impact in this area. Firstly, microprocessors are increasingly embedded within machines and tools within the workplace. Such microprocessors can not only provide access to sophisticated documentary information, but will also presumably be context aware and able to provide just in time learning related to work tasks and processes. Secondly mobile devices, including advanced mobile phones, and cheap sub laptop computers provide access to ubiquitous internet-based communication. Google is already probably the world’s number one source of information and learning. In many jobs, the answer to overcoming a problem is to search Google and often there are videos freely available on You Tube providing detailed instructions on how to carry out a particular task.

Communities of Practice and Learning Organisations

If one trend is increasing learning within the workplace and through the work process, another is recourse to informal learning through dispersed communities of practice.

The European study of elearning in SMEs found extensive use of computers in day-to-day business operations and evidence of the extensive use of ICT for informal learning (Attwell, 2007). Most informal learning appeared be learner driven, rather than planned in conjunction with others in the enterprise, and was problem motivated, although some learners were motivated by their own interest rather than in response to any specific problem. In many cases ICT was being used as part of this informal learning. The main means of ICT based learning was Google key word searches. Managers were often unaware of this learning, although they were frequently aware of the problem which inspired it (ibid).

There were considerable differences in the use of ICT for informal learning between different enterprises. It would be tempting to ascribe these differences to age, sector, size or occupation but it is hard to discern such causal factors from the case studies undertaken.

The major causal relationship which appeared was the link between work organisation and the use of ICT for learning. ICT was most frequently used for learning in those enterprises with flatter hierarchies and more devolved decision taking responsibilities and in which employees had greater autonomy in the organisation of their own work. Interestingly, these enterprises also tended to have a more experienced workforce and low turnover of employees (ibid).

Conversely, hierarchical work organisations tended to have the least use of ICT for learning. In some cases only managers and administrative staff in these enterprises had access to computers and the internet. There was no evidence of any organised support or informal learning – either face to face in the workplace or online. However, in some enterprises the learning acquired was discussed with peers as part of everyday collaboration and team work.

Although it could be said that much activity was information seeking the study suggested that activities were:

• Purposeful
• Heavily influenced by context
• Often resulted in changes in behaviour
• Were sequenced in terms of developing a personal knowledge base
• Problem driven or driven by personal interest
• Social – in that they often involved recourse to shared community knowledge bases through the internet and / or shared with others in the workplace.
• Increasing access to internet based technologies are likely to increase such informal learning.

There are important implications of such findings. The study showed learning was more likely to take place in organisations with less hierarchical structures and where workers had more responsibility for their own work. This links to work undertaken by researchers looking at learning organisations. Barry Nyhan (Nyhan et al, 2003) states “one of the keys to promoting learning organisations is to organise work in such a way that it is promotes human development. In other words it is about building workplace environments in which people are motivated to think for themselves so that through their everyday work experiences, they develop new competences and gain new understanding and insights. Thus, people are learning from their work – they are learning as they work.”

He goes on to say: “This entails building organisations in which people have what can be termed ‘developmental work tasks’. These are challenging tasks that ‘compel’ people to stretch their potential and muster up new resources to manage demanding situations. In carrying out ‘developmental work tasks’ people are ‘developing themselves’ and are thus engaged in what can be termed ‘developmental learning’.”

In other words integrating personal learning and working will require both the conscious design of the working environment for learning and the design of developmental tasks. Research tends to suggest this is more likely to take place in organisations with a strong project culture.

Occupational profiles

Whilst occupational profiles have previously tended to be designed from a viewpoint of occupational tasks, it may be that learning potential will be an important future focus. A number of projects in Germany have redesigned broader occupational profiles with both the potential for enhanced work based learning but also increased flexibility to move beyond existing occupational competences to increase productivity and deal with future technology innovation (Rauner, 2007). However there are counter trends towards increased high level specialism in particular occupations.

The role of trainers

There are also profound implications for the role and training of trainers. Whilst ten years ago trainers were a clearly delineated and identifiable occupational group, the European Commission funded TT-Plus project has found that the training function has spread to include many who would not describe themselves as trainers (Attwell, Grollman and Luebke, 2008). This includes managers, team leaders and skilled workers who may have some responsibility for learning and training as part of their job and also learning consultant and ICT based learning designers who may work in conjunction with enterprises. Traditional programmes for training trainers have focused on full time professional trainers. The TTPlus project is calling for ongoing programmes to provide support for continuing professional development, based on peer group learning and accreditation. It is also interesting to note that whilst vocational teachers and trainers have tended to be regarded as undertaking similar work, the move towards greater integration of learning and working may mean the work of trainers is becoming increasingly differentiated from that of teachers.

In terms of role, with increased online learning materials and the move towards more work based learning, trainers are spending less time in classroom based didactic instruction and more time in providing guidance and support for individual learners. Such a change is challenging for some trainers, as is the increased use of technology for learning.

Structuring learning

A further important issue is that of the structuring and content of learning experiences. Structure and content has been traditionally externally defined by experts in the form of curricula or teaching programmes (Cormier, 2008). With a greater integration of learning and working, the learners are structuring their own learning within a work based environment.

There is a question as to how learners are able to incorporate learning within personal knowledge frameworks or structures. Because learning is motivated by problem solving or personal interest, it is far more closely related to practice than the education acquired through formal courses and is often episodic. The immediate context of applying the learning may be an aid to incorporating and scaffolding new learning within a personal knowledge schema. On the other hand the learning acquired is not sequenced in the same way as learning acquired from formal education and training.

From curricula to personal learning pathways

One way to view such tendencies is a move away from formal curriculum as related to its Latin origins and meaning as a race along a predefined course toward the original meaning of the word learning as a pathway (Attwell and Hughes, 2008).

Thus learning and working become integrated not through a formal course based structure but through the development of individual learning pathways. This change is reflected in recent thinking amongst researchers in e-learning.

Personal Learning Environments (PLEs)

Socio-cultural theories of knowledge acquisition stress the importance of collaborative learning and ‘learning communities’ but Agostini et al (2003) complain about the lack of support offered by many virtual learning environments (VLEs) for emerging communities of interest and the need to link with official organisational structures within which individuals are working. Ideally, VLEs should link knowledge assets with people, communities and informal knowledge (Agostini et al, 2003) and support the development of social networks for learning (Fischer, 1995). The idea of a personal learning space is taken further by Razavi and Iverson (2006) who suggest integrating weblogs, ePortfolios, and social networking functionality in this environment both for enhanced e-learning and knowledge management, and for developing communities of practice.

Based on these ideas of collaborative learning and social networks within communities of practice, the notion of PLEs is being put forward as a new approach to the development of e-learning tools (Wilson et al, 2006) that are no longer focused on integrated learning platforms such as VLEs. In contrast, these PLEs are made-up of a collection of loosely coupled tools, including Web 2.0 technologies, used for working, learning, reflection and collaboration with others. PLEs can be seen as the spaces in which people interact and communicate and whose ultimate result is learning and the development of collective know-how. A PLE can use social software for informal learning which is learner driven, problem-based and motivated by interest – not as a process triggered by a single learning provider, but as a continuing activity. The ‘Learning in Process’ project (Schmidt, 2005) and the APOSDLE project (Lindstaedt, and Mayer, 2006) have attempted to develop embedded, or work-integrated, learning support where learning opportunities (learning objects, documents, checklists and also colleagues) are recommended based on a virtual understanding of the learner’s context.

However, while these development activities acknowledge the importance of collaboration, community engagement and of embedding learning into working and living processes, they have not so far addressed the linkage of individual learning processes and the further development of both individual and collective understanding as the knowledge and learning processes mature (Attwell, Barnes, Bimrose and Brown, 2008). In order to achieve that transition (to what we term a ‘community of innovation’), processes of reflection and formative assessment have a critical role to play.

Personal Learning Environments are by definition individual. However it is possible to provide tools and services to support individuals in developing their own environment. In looking at the needs of careers guidance advisors for learning, Attwell, Barnes, Bimrose and Brown (2008) say a PLE should be based on a set of tools to allow personal access to resources from multiple sources, and to support knowledge creation and communication. Based on an initial scoping of knowledge development needs, an initial list of possible functions for a PLE have been suggested, including: access/search for information and knowledge, aggregate and scaffold by combining information and knowledge, manipulate, rearrange and repurpose knowledge artefacts, analyse information to develop knowledge, reflect, question, challenge, seek clarification, form and defend opinions, present ideas, learning and knowledge in different ways and for different purposes, represent the underpinning knowledge structures of different artefacts and support the dynamic re-rendering of such structures, share by supporting individuals in their learning and knowledge, networking by creating a collaborative learning environment.

Whilst PLEs may be represented as technology, including applications and services, more important is the idea of supporting individual and group based learning in multiple contexts and of promoting learner autonomy and control.

Personal Learning Environments offer both the framework and the technologies to integrate personal learning and working.

Digital Mobile devices

The latest technological advancements as well as the progressive reduction in the cost of digital media are having a profound impact on different sectors of society. Even though more and cheaper possibilities of connectivity (the wider access to broadband and wireless) is an important factor, it is the micro technologies and mobile possibilities currently available that are likely to have a major impact on society. It is also influencing the way employers conduct their business and the new demands of employability. As physical mobility is growing more common, so the adoption of mobile connectivity is progressively developing. A new platform for learning is hence taking shape. The recent inclusion of internet connectivity in mobile devices, as well as the wider availability of WiFi in public areas is proving to be effective and influential in the way people communicate and spontaneously broadcast themselves in various formats (from pictures, to text or video). A new culture of multilateral sharing and learning is evolving this way. The development of sophisticated handheld and portable communication tools and their direct link to the connected world make us believe this is an emerging approach for learning and working and for life in general, which will complement other approaches already in place.

Most personal technology and artifacts are mobile, or have been reduced to a size and weight which can be carried. These days, phones can carry more information than any stack of paper or book individuals used to carry in their business cases. The new smart phones not only accommodate digital files, they also enable the creation, storage and reproduction of photos, sound and video files, not to mention their immediate publishing features.

All of this is already having an impact on how individuals are enabled in representing their learning almost as it happens. Most learning is accidental and occurs often unexpectedly. The new mobile devices are providing a rich platform that will help individuals bridge their presence between different learning contexts and thus provide them with the flexibility and the opportunities to focus on their personal learning environment in a meaningful, personalized and immediate way.

The location of work

Thus far we have focused on integrating learning and working within the work process. But there are a number of further trends which should be considered. The first is home working. New technologies allow dispersed collaborative work for many tasks and there would seem little doubt that home based work is increasing, as is a mixture of home based work with periodic attendance at the workplace. Environmental concerns and the increasing shortage of oil would seem likely to add pressure for this trend to continue. Certainly video conferencing is already replacing many meetings which would have formerly been conducted face to face.

However, once more, there are caveats. Home based work seems to be largely concentrated on a limited number of professional occupations such as media workers, consultants, researchers, designers etc. In many occupations the nature of the work still requires presence at a particular workplace – for instance in construction and craft work or in manufacturing. But, even here work may become dispersed. Advanced diagnostic interfaces and computer based control systems can allow management of advanced systems and processes at a distance. Such a development is likely to lead to more dispersed communities of practice for learning, rather than learning being acquired through enterprises or physical organisations. There also remains the issue of the social nature of work. Home based work can lead to social isolation. Whether the (geographical) community or the family can substitute for work communities is an issue which could repay more research. It is also interesting to speculate on how dispersed teams may function in practice. Evidence from European projects bringing partners together from six or seven countries and only meeting face to face occasionally, suggests this is not unproblematic!

Motivation and the ideology of learning and work

In this section of the paper we have postulated a growing together or integration of work and learning. This has profound ideological implications. Whilst it is possible to measure output on a production line and to reward workers accordingly, the measurement of learning is far more problematic. The integration of learning and work requires motivation. Common sense would suggest extrinsic motivation will be of limited value in encouraging learning through work. Indeed in those occupations with the highest level of integration at present, anecdotal evidence suggests high levels of intrinsic motivation. This in turn suggests that work will have to be both stimulating and rewarding. It also suggests a high degree of autonomy in undertaking work and a personal identification with work. In this regard, the findings of the ICT and SME project are interesting in that they suggest the main motivation for learning was personal interest (Attwell, 2007). Encouraging personal interest could be critical to integration of work and learning and might lead to higher levels of innovation and productivity. However learning takes time, even when integrated into work systems, and managers may see such time as non-productive in meeting immediate work targets and maximizing productivity. To that extent, the answers may be more about the ideology of how we choose to organize work within society than a technical or economically rationalist development. Some countries, such as France, have introduced regulation to provide greater learning opportunities at work.

3. Work: Integrating personal learning and working environments – future discontinuities

Whilst the previous section has proposed a relatively optimistic scenario for the integration of personal learning and working environments there are a number of discontinuities which may counter the trends described previously or which may impact in different areas of society.

Globalisation and human resource development

Globalisation has seen the creation of an increasingly open world employment market. Aided by technology, many jobs can now be moved from one country to another. Telephone call centres may be located on a different continent than the customers they are advising. If there is no regulation, jobs may become increasingly precarious with workers competing for employment. Whilst skills and knowledge may be one factor in encouraging inward investment, often it would appear employment is merely located to the lowest cost location. Given that salaries are a considerable part of cost, then this means to the lowest wage economy and that with most limited workers rights. It is hard to see how learning can be integrated with working in such a situation. Governments and regional authorities are more concerned to ensure the existence of a pre-trained workforce to encourage investment in employment than they are to work with companies to develop work based learning opportunities. In this situation, employers can off-load the cost of training and learning to the state.

Regulation offers one way out of this and the recent banking crisis has revealed the problems of an unfettered market economy. Of course, some companies do take learning seriously, both as an issue of social ethics but also because they believe a stable and well trained workforce will result in better profitability. However, other companies have adopted ‘human resource management’ policies determined by the situational context in the external market environment (Nyhan, 2003). This entails adapting human resource policies to fit in with the corporate business strategy. Companies ‘up-skill’ or ‘down-skill’ as the market demands. Brought to its logical conclusion, human resources are a contingent, instrumental factor with no inherent value in their own right. Accordingly ‘human resource development’ as a distinct activity may or may not be a part of the ‘human resource management’ policy, but based on the principle of ‘external flexibility’, human resource stocks can be renewed more effectively through a process of short-term ‘project-based’ recruitment, outsourcing products and services, downsizing staff etc. (ibid). The concept of ‘business process engineering’ (see Hammer and Champy, 1993), entailing an over-night reshaping of one’s organisation with an emphasis on cost-cutting and downsizing the number of employees, offers a way of implementing this form of ‘human resource management’. Such a policy is essentially a continuation of Taylorism in a neo liberal form. Once more there would seem to be little space for integrating personal learning and working environments when access to learning opportunities is strictly limited according to cost.

Thus there is a discontinuity between the idea of integrating personal learning and working environments and the business strategies of many companies, a discontinuity which is fuelled by present policies and trends towards globalisation.

How we learn and the schooling system

A series of reports have shown how young people use computers not just for consuming information but for creating and sharing knowledge (Lenhart and Madden, 2005). Such a development has been facilitated by the emergence of Web 2.0 or more precisely by social software. Whilst platforms may change as one social networking site goes out of fashion and another emerges, there seems little doubt that social networking in one form or another is here to stay.

It is difficult to make a call on future technologies. Semantic web applications may make information search and retrieval simpler and the development of Multi User Virtual Environments may make learning more of an immersive experience. However, the major change is that learners have become practitioners.

Such developments pose a serious challenge to the future of our education and training systems. Institutions (and teachers) no longer have a monopoly on learning. Knowledge and learning can come from many different sources – from media providers, from enterprises and from peer networks. Whilst traditionally knowledge has been produced by experts, the use of the internet is providing a flourishing of community based knowledge (Cormier, 2008). Wikipedia, developed by a community of users, has become one of the most consulted (White, 2007) (and best loved) sources of knowledge. Curricula have also been developed by an experts. With such a move to community knowledge development, it seems likely that curriculum too may become an emergent property of communities (Cormier, 2008) rather than of the expert driven schooling system,

With the availability of multiple knowledge sources, and the way young people are using computers for learning, school or a schooling system looks increasingly dysfunctional (Attwell, forthcoming). Whilst primary schools may serve a purpose in providing a social environment and allowing development of literacy and numeracy, the aim of secondary schooling is becoming hard to fathom, with most countries implementing rapid reform programmes. Indeed, the reaction of schools to social software has at best been ambiguous and often hostile (ibid). Despite the fact that many young people carry around a powerful multimedia-enabled miniature computer, in the form of a mobile phone, which they use regularly for information and knowledge exchange, most schools insist such devices are turned off! Many young people shun the walled garden of institutional Virtual Learning Environments, designed primarily for managing learning, and prefer to share their knowledge with peers though social networking environments such as Facebook. Even at a professional level the social network based Linked In site is increasingly the place for sharing of business and professional contacts. It has been suggested by some commentators that the future role of the universities, apart from research, is as accreditation bodies, with a limited role for teaching and learning (Wiley, 2008).

Once more, there are different possibilities. Whilst for some time the privatization of education has seemed possible, the recent banking crisis and loss of confidence in market solutions makes this much less likely. There is renewed interest in Ivan Illich’s (2007) call for deschooling society with learning being integrated in society and the community and an abandonment of a separate institutionalized education system. Interestingly, Illich, writing in an age before Personal Computers, envisaged a postcard and database system to link and network peer group learners.

Others have called for reschooling of society with education and schooling being extended beyond its present limited target groups (Trevitte and Eskow, 2007).

If learning and working are to be integrated it is hard to see how this can happen with our present organization of institutionalized education.

Up-skilling, down-skilling and learning rich working environments

In this paper we have looked at the potential of technology and computers for learning. Some commentators, for instance Andrew Keen (2007), have an opposite view seeing computers as “dumbing down society”. Whilst this may be an extreme view, there is not an inevitability that advanced technology will lead to knowledge rich and learning rich jobs.

Whilst the use of technology may led to more complex work processes and more knowledge rich work, automation can also led to deskilling. With fast changing technologies and employment, it is hard to have an overview of present trends. Governments talk of the knowledge society and the need for higher levels of skills and knowledge. Whether this is actually happening is another question.

Technology has been widely used to replace jobs in some sectors. The first wave of technology replacement was in manufacturing – for instance with the use of robots in car manufacturing followed by a second wave in administration, eg in the banking industry.

It may be that there are choices to be made in how we shape technology. Some commentators have suggested different patterns of technology development and implementation between countries and continents. Studies of computerized interfaces for machine tools, suggest that whilst in Germany interfaces were developed to provide more control and autonomy for skilled workers, in the USA interfaces and control systems were developed to automate processes and remove operator autonomy (Ito and Ruth, 1998).

Whilst Artificial Intelligence remains a dream, robots are increasingly able to perform complex tasks. How we choose to use and deploy such robots is another issue which requires urgent attention.

There is also an intriguing question which was raised in an interview undertaken for this paper. With increasing access to context relevant and just in time documentation, do we need to know so much? Instead of developing learning will we instead just rely on documents or artefacts to tell us what to do?

The idea of integrating personal learning and working environments is largely predicated on the provision of learning rich working environments. If society chooses to use technology to downskill jobs then this would become a major discontinuity.

Inequalities

The integration of personal learning and working is also predicated on access to resources. However, whilst technology has advanced over the past twenty years, so too has inequality with widening gaps in income, not just between the richer and poorer countries in the world, but also within countries (Jaumotte, Lall, Papageorgiou and Topalova, 2007).

Such inequalities are not limited to income but also include inequalities of status, inequalities in access to technology and inequalities in access to knowledge based work.

Research into access to continuing education and training has long suggested those most qualified were gaining more resources than those less qualified. Equally those in higher paid and higher status employment such as managers were much more likely to gain access to further e-learning opportunities (Attwell, 2003).

Despite a suggestion that younger workers more comfortable with computer technologies would be those most likely to use ICT technologies of informal learning, the ICT and SME project found this not to be the case (Attwell, 2007). It was most likely to be older, better qualified, more experienced and more senior employees who would interact with peer groups and communities of practice through the internet. This appeared to be because they had more autonomy in their work and tended to be in more knowledge-rich and learning-rich jobs. So, even at the level of informal learning and internet based learning inequalities are being perpetuated.

Whilst the digital divide remains a discourse at an academic and political level, there appear to be few real initiatives to overcome it. Indeed, it is doubtful whether the digital divide can be overcome on its own, without actions to address the more fundamental inequalities in society. Whilst access to learning may be postulated as a way of overcoming inequalities, those very inequalities may prevent such a development. Without action to tackle inequalities, integrating learning and working may only be available to the ‘haves’ in society and be denied to the ‘have nots’.

4. Work: Integrating personal learning and working environments – Uncertainties and tensions

Over the years learning has been confused with the outcomes of formal, institutionalized teaching and training (Illch, 1970). However, research (Cross, 2006) suggests most learning happens accidentally, and most frequently in informal scenarios, often through work and leisure activities. Many individuals acknowledge that ‘reality learning’ begins when they start their working life. However, national educational bodies have paid only limited attention to informal learning. National curricula all around Europe have been targeted with numerous reforms, in an effort to promote the prestige of schooling. Nevertheless, the key issue that would potentially develop an autonomous knowledge-based society is lacking – the curricular freedom to meet learners’ needs. School, in its role of educating or training, has always reserved for itself the activity of regulating, standardizing, restraining or keeping knowledge within limited boundaries prescribed by a curriculum often out of focus with the current reality.

Even though in the last decade efforts has been made to foster curricular innovation, especially through the introduction of ICT, it is our belief that this will not succeed with the mere introduction of new technologies inside the classroom. A classroom will always be the territory of the teacher, not of the learner, and therefore will never help foster personal learning in a continuous effort, let alone combining it with a work environment. A new learning, not teaching, policy, requires not the re-adaptation, but rather the design of a brand-new curriculum, where teachers’ roles and their preparation are newly defined, and new learning spaces are also provided. It is curious to notice that as it stands now, school is mainly thought of as for teachers and is not targeted at their main and exclusive costumer: the learners, and their needs. This per se is the antithesis of what happens in the ‘real world’.

Today’s learning needs are more than ever directly related to metacognition skills, even if learners do not realize it. In the changing world we live in, schools which are still attempting to teach their audience as a way of preparing them for the future will fail their main goal. On the other hand, those who focus on granting their learners the skills and the know-how they need to keep up in their field and re-orientate their practice to suit the competences required in an unpredictable tomorrow will have a greater chance to succeed.

For this change to happen, however, institutions will have to establish close cooperative relationships with the world that they have until now tried to distance themselves from, and which is still regarded by learners as an ‘outsider’. The work sectors and daily life activity, in general, need to be embedded in the learning process from the very beginning of the teenager/adult learning process. This will, of course, imply a major change for the role of the individual as an active learner, who is directly involved with the outcomes and process of their knowing, as opposed to a passive responsibility as a knowledge receptor. This also implies a shift in the activity of educators from knowledge prescribers to knowing advisors, from teachers to mentors, from owners of the ‘truth’ to co-workers and co-learners. In this sense, training and education will be combined into something more meaningful to the individual: integrated personal learning based on the reality of experience.

Reality Learning

As noted by Buckley and Caple (2004), training is a “planned and systematic effort to modify and develop knowledge/skill/attitude through learning experience”, whereas education is the “process and a series of activities which aim at enabling an individual to assimilate and develop knowledge, skills, values and understanding that are not simply related to a narrow field of activity but allow a broad range of problems to be defined, analyzed and solved.”

Both definitions in a way support the distinction we attempted to start portraying above, training associated with practice and education with a more theoretical understanding of a broader reality. Nonetheless, it is our understanding that the preparation of the individual for a constantly changing society needs to approach their training and education as an integrated unity where practice and theory, work and school are combined as an integral personalized unit. And the same above cited authors provide an answer with their understanding of learning which, in their views, consists of a “process whereby individuals acquire knowledge, skills, attitudes through experience, reflection, study and instruction”. In other words, today’s professional world cannot divide the two pillars of improvement and innovation based on practice and the individuals’ constant reflective observation of a society in progressive transformation and redefinition of its demands. In this sense, the future of tomorrow is hard to guess, but the future of today can hardly be ignored. It relies more and more on the individual perception and consequent willingness to pursue further development, as at the same time it urges education and practice to be integrated. It also implies a new culture of active and autonomous collective learning to be encouraged, valued and recognized, in and outside the workplace.

In a way it implies revisiting Schneider’s proposal of cooperative learning with the idea of not alternating institutional education with glimpses of real life, but embedding both as unseparated constituents of an ongoing, real and situated learning reality based on performance, exchange of practices and reflection on that same activity.

This will mean a massive change in schools and the change from a teaching to a learning curriculum (Lave and Wenger, 1991) based on situated learning contexts offered by the placement of the individual in relevant working scenarios and learning opportunities. Such provision will necessarily also imply the establishment of cooperative relationships and strong collaborative involvement of staff from both schools and real life sectors.

In this sense the latest advancements of technology, with an emphasis on social software and web applications, are already making a difference in how individuals learn and pursue further development in their areas of interest. When embedded in a new strategy where theory and work are bound with experience-based learning, the communication and information technologies will help enhance environments where the exchange of practice, communication of experiences and weaving of new ideas can take place.

Furthermore, it will eventually also promote the ongoing construction of one’s digital professional profile, where the individuals learning activity and reflective outcomes will come together in a personalized space.

Access, data ownership and privacy

However the issue of formal schooling is not the only tension. Whilst technologies can facilitate and support the development of personal learning and working environments, these in turn require the freedom for individuals to develop networks and share ideas and knowledge. Many employers limit access to the internet to approved sites and are hostile to social networking which is seen both as time wasting and a potential risk for company data.

Furthermore there remain major issues over privacy and data ownership. A Personal Learning Environment implies personal ownership of data. Will employers allow this and how can we ensure personal data is secure. Where will data be stored and how can we ensure longevity of personal data? What is the relation between a Personal Learning Environment and an organizational learning environment? What data should be shared and who takes decisions and responsibility for this? And if we have ubiquitous connectivity and multiple mobile devices meaning we are all on line most of the time, how can we preserve personal privacy? What level of privacy should we have? Geospatial and contextually aware technologies can be used for monitoring activities as well as for learning. These are important societal issues. There would seem to be some differences in terms of national and cultural attitudes. But without a public and a resolution of these issues, there may be a backlash against the use of new technologies for learning and working.

Open knowledge, knowledge sharing and copyright

If personal privacy is one issue, a second is that of knowledge ownership. Recent years have seen a growing move by universities to make knowledge openly available through the development of open knowledge initiatives. This has extended to journals. The widespread use of the Creative Commons licenses has also made reuse of learning materials easier. Despite this movement, the use of restrictive copyright regulations has been extended, particularly in the USA. In Europe, the European Commission has repeatedly attempted to extend copyright to include software. Furthermore, universities are under pressure to develop new sources of income and may see the outcomes of teaching and research as a potential source to be exploited. The idea of personal learning and working environments is largely predicated on open knowledge sharing. Prohibitive copyright regulations and the development of a ‘knowledge market’ would make difficult the realization of this idea.

How we use technologies

Changes in pedagogy and approaches to learning will allow us to bring personal Learning Environments and Personal working environments together. But this is also dependent on how we value and organise work. Learning-rich working environments require conscious design. They also require opportunities for individuals to shape the work environment for their learning and the potential for taking decisions over the organisation of their work. Once more, technology may offer many possibilities both at an individual level and at a cooperative level. However, technology can also be used in different ways, to reduce choice and flexibility in work, to automate processes and limit decision making, and thus reduce learning opportunities.

Key issues for the future and initial reflections on the implications for education

Scenarios for the future of work and learning are dependent on wider issues than those included in this paper. But it’s possible to present a series of possible futures, the resolution of which will determine how future personal learning and working environments evolve. These different statements for the future are not discrete and may overlap.

Possible Futures

1. The schooling system embraces pedagogic and technological change. Instead of the present massification of education, learners are encouraged and supported in developing personal learning pathways, supported by Personal Learning Environment toolkits. Informal learning is valued and the PLE brings together learning for formal learning programmes, from the home and from work.

2. The schooling system continues to be the subject of reform but fails to recognise the new ways individuals are using technology for learning. Formal education and informal learning become ever more separate. Whilst the education system is based on formal qualifications, employers increasingly look for evidence of what a potential employee can do. Learners develop their own e-Portfolio. As the education system becomes fragmented, learners increasingly turn to private online education and training providers.

3. A new model of open education emerges. Schools retain a role as accreditation providers, but learners develop their own learning pathways based on open online learning programmes. Trainers and developers are paid from accreditation fees by institutions.

4. As the education system fails to cope with changing society, new forms of education evolve based on learning in the community, both face to face and online. Learning is ever more embedded within community and work structures and systems, and schools become community learning resource centres. Society is effectively deschooled.

5. The growing scarcity of employment, linked to increasing regulation, means that formal qualifications become the only accepted way to gain employment. Schools retain a monopoly on the provision of education leading to qualifications. There is a growing divide between those with formal qualifications and those without.

6. Technology to support learning is embedded in the workplace. Employers increasingly see the importance of learning for innovation and seek to develop learning rich work environments. Learning and working become part of the same process.

7. Privacy of data becomes a major issue. Workers increasingly refuse to participate in processes where they are forced to reveal personal data. Learning becomes a private activity to be undertaken in the home or with trusted friends.

8. Copyright laws are progressively extended. Technology is used to produce an online knowledge auction house. Whilst a minority benefit financially by selling their learning, knowledge becomes a scare commodity and cannot be accessed by many.

9. Open knowledge sharing models are increasingly adopted. There is widespread open sharing of artefacts and resources. Educational resources are abundant and cooperation and knowledge sharing leads to a rapid growth of small knowledge based enterprises.

10. Informal communities of practice, based on social networking technology, become acknowledged as the major source of learning. Such networks embrace both the education systems and the workplace leading with seamless movements between working and learning.

11. Technology is used widely to replace employment with computerisation of processes and the increasing deployment of intelligent robots. Work becomes scarce. Whilst a small minority of workers require high skills to programme and develop robots, most employment is in those occupations where low wages and therefore cost of human labour inhibits the use of machines.

12. There is a growing political discourse over the purpose of work and who controls organisations. Work becomes seen as a social process, with workers’ control leading to the design of work environments from a humanistic viewpoint with rich learning opportunities.

We could continue this list almost endlessly. To us, some seem more desirable than others. Technology is a powerful driver of change. But ultimately the issue is how we shape technology and for what purpose we wish to use the different affordances of technology processes.

The ICT and SME project (Attwell, 2007) looked at workplaces where technology was being used for learning. It found that learning was more likely to take place in enterprises:

• Where employees had greatest freedom in the organisation of their work
• Where employees had the greatest opportunities for proposing and implementing changes in the way work was organised
• Where the nature and technologies being used were changing fastest
• Where ICT was most involved in the work process
• Where employees had most responsibility for the outcomes of their work
• Where team work was most important
• Where employees were integrated in communities of practice
• Where employees had opportunities to develop their own occupational profiles
• With networks with other enterprises

It was precisely in those organisations where workers had the most opportunity to co-shape their working environment that learning took place. It is highly likely that such factors will continue to determine the future development of personal learning and working environments.

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.

The authors of this review commissioned us to write this review based on arguments we developed in the book, where we identified an array of examples in policy texts, popular culture, everyday educational practices and the experiences of friends, family and colleagues that we argue demonstrate the rise of therapeutic approaches to the management of emotions amongst children, young people and adults. We argue from the basis of these examples that a fundamental shift is taking place in ideas about what education is for, and in ideas about what it means to be human from which the purposes of education at various points in history are derived. Drawing on Wittgenstein, we developed a methodology based on giving examples to shift people’s perception of what was happening in schools, colleges, universities and workplaces. The power of examples is that they enable people to look and see for themselves by making them sensitive to similar instances in their personal experience. As Wittgenstein said, the solution to problems in the way we misunderstand the world was to follow the advice: ‘don’t think, but look!’ (Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, p66).

We now aim to carry out systematic empirical work and further theoretical exploration, to test out the arguments and propositions we developed in the book. We recognise that the arguments are both original and controversial and we ask readers not to reject them outright, as some of our critics have done, but to consider what our arguments, and the numerous examples we have collected, indicate if they do not identify a therapeutic shift in education and its consequences for the future of education which we address in our book and take further in this review.

A new emphasis on emotional well-being

Diverse concerns

Former adviser in the British Prime Minister’s policy unit, Geoff Mulligan, argued in February 2008 that the well-being of populations would come to be the main preoccupation for national governments, just as military prowess had been in the nineteenth century (The Times, 15 February 2008). This mirrors calls by international bodies such as UNICEF for official indicators of children’s happiness and well-being, where children feel loved, safe and respected, to be the hallmark of civilised societies (2007). Other international bodies also present well-being as key to progressive and prosperous societies (OECD, 2001).

In the United Kingdom, support for policies to develop emotional well-being throughout the education system emanate from very diverse concerns. A core influence since 1997 has been the British government’s particular conceptualisation of social justice, where social policy has connected emotional well-being to a view that social exclusion emerges from destructive influences that damage self-esteem and emotional well-being and is therefore a key characteristic of social injustice (see Blair, 1997; Furedi, 2004; O’Connor and Lewis, 1999). Policy makers attribute ‘complex needs’, including low self-esteem and feelings of vulnerability and risk, to a complex cycle of material, social and emotional deprivation that both creates and exacerbates marginalisation and exclusion (see SEU, 1999). Advocates of interventions and measures to develop well-being argue that emotional deprivation is as, or more, important than social and material deprivation and that the latter account for only 15% of people’s sense of well-being (see Layard, 2007; Huppert, 2007).

In keeping with such arguments, the government argues that children with emotional problems will be prone to mental illness, marital breakdown, offending and anti-social behaviour, and that the scale of emotional deprivation and illiteracy may be so great that schools and other agencies can no longer leave children’s emotional skills to parents (DfES, 2005; DCFS, 2008). These concerns resonate with those expressed by the World Bank, UNICEF and the OECD where well-being is presented as integral to equity and social justice and embedded in legislation for human rights, aid interventions and reconstruction programmes (UNICEF, 2007; OECD, 2001; Pupavac, 2001, 2003).

In Britain, a spate of widely-publicised reviews reveals concerns about the unhappiness and levels of emotional ill-health affecting children, young people and adults (see UNICEF, op cit; Alexander and Hargreaves, 2007, DCFS, 2008). In 2006, the book Toxic Childhood by child psychologist, Sue Palmer depicted children as over-stressed, over-tested, unhealthy, materialistic and under-nurtured emotionally and was promoted through a letter to the Daily Telegraph signed by 100 experts in the fields of education, neuroscience, psychology, care and social work. Such themes also appear in popular books on mental health and psychoanalysis (see, for example, L. James, 2007; O.James, 2007; Connelly-Stephenson, 2007).

A strong influence on government interest in emotional well-being is the work of economists Andrew Oswald and Richard Layard, and the pressure group Antidote who have helped create consensus amongst supporters of the New Labour government and some supporters of other political parties that the State should address the public’s happiness, self-esteem and well-being as integral to healthy citizenship and economic prosperity (see Antidote, 2007; Layard, 2005; Oswald 2007). Defined by Antidote as “becoming aware of our inner experience, so as the better to understand other people and through them to experience a sense of connection to the wider community”, emotional literacy enables people to

• Find ways to feel connected to each other and [to use] their relationships to deal with emotions that might otherwise cause them to lash out in rage or withdraw in despair

• Deal with the emotions that can render them unable to take in new information, access emotional states such as curiosity, resilience and joy that lead to a rich experience of learning

• Engage in activities that promote physical and emotional well-being and broaden the range of what they can talk about with each other in ways that make it less likely that they will abuse drugs and alcohol, bully their peers, or engage in other forms of self-destructive activity (Antidote, 2002, p2; see also Weare, 2004; DfES, 2005a; OfSTED, 2007).

An important recent shift has been to embed emotional literacy and self-esteem in the broader notion of emotional well-being and to depict schools as a key site for developing them, alongside de-stigmatising mental health problems for certain groups and dealing more effectively with the behaviour of others, such as disruptive boys who are seen to mask emotional vulnerability and poor emotional literacy (see Cowie et al, 2004; Spratt et al, 2007; Francis and Skelton, 2006).

In summary, our review of policy texts and texts from those advocating different interventions for emotional well-being in educational settings shows that such interventions have become prominent because diverse constituencies seek numerous goals and make strong claims for the various interventions they promote. Aims include:

• addressing the mental health problems of a minority of children and young people
• remedying assumed emotional deficiencies and emotional ‘illiteracy’ of families and particular groups singled out as emotionally vulnerable or lacking emotional well-being and therefore marginalised and excluded
• motivating people to learn and achieve more effectively
• making people feel good about themselves
• exploring the factors that affect children and young people’s sense of self and identity in negative or debilitating ways and which affect motivation and capacity to learn and which are a prime cause of social inequality
• promoting a range of social, economic, occupational and personal benefits that are claimed to arise from better emotional literacy and/or emotional intelligence and/or emotional competence and/or emotional well-being
• engaging people with education by elevating emotional dimensions of their experience in a system widely seen to be arid, over-rational and test-driven for all children, or irrelevant and demotivating for those deemed to be disaffected.

Emotional interventions

Emanating from these aims, we identify four types of intervention appearing in schools and colleges. First, specialist interventions for children and young people diagnosed with behavioural and emotional problems include ‘nurture groups’, group counselling for children with family and personal problems, psychological assessments of individual children and accompanying interventions such as circle of friends (see, for example, Boxhall, 2002; Bailey 2005, forthcoming).

Second, generic interventions through the SEAL include circle time, Philosophy for Children classes, peer and non-peer mentoring and buddy schemes, mediation and anti-bullying schemes, drama workshops for transition between sectors and stages, special assemblies and the harnessing of traditional and new subject areas (the latter include personal, social and health education and citizenship) as vehicles for emotional well-being and emotional literacy (see Ecclestone and Hayes, 2008 for detailed analysis; also Claxton, 2002; www.jennymosely.com; SAPERE, 2005; DfES, 2005).

As part of this second category, while government and professional concerns about emotional deprivation and vulnerability remain, a new general intervention is emerging from a rapid shift from interventions to build self-esteem and address emotional problems to a more upbeat emphasis on interventions that develop and assess characteristics such as resilience, stoicism, optimism and ‘being in the moment’ (Huppert, 2007). This shift in tone and focus reflects the growing influence of academic expertise in positive psychology and neuro-science as a basis for government attention to well-being through specific activities to foster them, dubbed in the media as ‘happiness’ classes (see, for example, Guardian, 30^th September 2008).

Third, there is growing use of support services such as counselling, the use of retention officers, learning managers and classroom assistants, disability support officers and mentoring schemes, as well as stress workshops for examinations and other initiatives such as the use of animals as ‘emotional support’ for university students diagnosed with depression. The government has proposed recently that all schools have a counsellor to identify those with ‘low level’ emotional disorders such as stress and anxiety and to prevent the emergence of these into more profound mental health problems.

The fourth type of intervention encourages broader curriculum and pedagogic changes within mainstream subject teaching in order to develop and assess dispositions, attitudes and characteristics that are believed to be essential for well-being, social equity and integral to an education relevant and fit for modern life. Such interventions include learning to learn and some strands of assessment for learning.

The rise of emotional and personal skills

Learning to learn

In parallel to interventions that address emotional problems or which aim to develop emotional literacy and emotional well-being overtly, other trends aim to broaden the role of educational institutions. There are growing concerns about the need for schools to pay attention to emotional needs and to ‘personalise’ students’ experiences of, and feelings about, learning. Guy Claxton, one of the leading proponents of ‘learning power’ justifies an emotional turn in education:

It is not too fanciful to see, behind the youth culture of raves and drugs, sport and celebrity, the rise of teenage pregnancy and fundamentalism, the shadow of insecurity: the feeling of not being able to get a grip on the miasma of choices and opportunities … No wonder so many young people clutch at the first kind of boy or girl, the first shallow ideology that comes along. It’s not so much that young people live in poverty … as they do not know where to turn for direction and value. In such a state, algebra and parts of speech can seem a little beside the point (Claxton, 2002, p48, our emphasis).

From this perspective, adults fail young people by not ‘listening enough’ to what they are telling them. Citing a survey of 3,500 11-25 year olds by the Industrial Society which reports young people as fearful of challenge and future opportunities and trends, Claxton argues:

Schools are seen as failing to equip young people with the ability to learn for life rather than for exams … That last sentence is key. Remember this is the voice of today’s youth (not some sociological theory). They are telling us they are floundering, and that we are not teaching them how to swim. That’s why they turn off from school … they are not intrinsically lazy or bolshy or lacking ability: they are disappointed in our reactions to their predicament and flailing about (ibid, p48 our italics).

From this perspective, classroom strategies and assessments need to develop ‘good learners’, where: “being a good learner is not just a matter of learning a few techniques like mind mapping or brain gym. It is the whole person: their attitudes, values, self-image and relationships as well as their skills and strategies” (2002, p15, our emphasis). It is important to stress that although Claxton writes in terms of learning and motivation, at the heart of his concern is the idea that we are not giving due attention to pupils’ feelings.

Other advocates of activities to develop dispositions and attitudes associated with emotional literacy, such as developing a positive self-concept, social skills and emotional sensitivity and empathy, also connect these goals with learning to learn. For example, Weare argues that traditional subjects can be vehicles for this through discussion: teachers setting up discussion of how the teacher and learners feel when learning and encouraging students to see how they learn ‘emotional control’ (through waiting their turn and being persistent through difficulties) and resilience by ‘bouncing back’ when learning goes badly (Weare, 2004). Recent promotion of these ideas uses the vocabulary of positive psychology: ‘giving young people the means to be their own happiness creators and maintainers’, where strategies for learning power encourage pleasure, joy, flow, optimism, curiosity, self-efficacy, engagement, resilience and stoicism, mindfulness, holistic approaches, and developing the means to flourish (Claxton, 2007; see also Huppert, 2007).

Assessing soft outcomes

Interest in the personal, social and emotional outcomes of participating in education is integral to some interpretations of ‘assessment for learning’ as a vehicle for assessing crucial outcomes of education. A recent study explored desirable outcomes for pupils identified by a group of trainee teachers:

Empathy; self-awareness; social competence; resilience; creativity; reflectivity; the ability to self-evaluate/self-assess; enthusiasm for learning; being a good citizen; happiness; being caring; being respectful, tolerant good team players; applying knowledge; learning to learn; problem-solving; communication; self-management; making a positive social contribution (Hargreaves, 2007, p190).

Supporters of these goals advocate their development through subject knowledge. For example, the task of sharing meanings from a text students have read “[builds up] a rich picture of collaborative learning … students take responsibility for knowing what needs to be known and for insuring (sic) that others know what needs to be known” (Hargreaves, 2007, p189). Designing formative and summative assessments to capture these outcomes improves students’ abilities to retain subject-knowledge and to make more flexible use in its application, and, therefore, leads to better success than traditional learning (ibid). Integral to these processes and outcomes are notions such as ‘allowing a learning voice’, ‘learning about their own learning and being socially active and responsible’ (2007, p191). According to Hargreaves, ‘for an assessment for learning [method] to be valid, its learning outcomes must be socially appropriate for learners of the 21^st century’ (2007, p185).

Such outcomes are broader than those encompassed by conventional assessments of attainment and methods to assess and record them were designed originally for diagnostic and formative purposes based on self-report by learners (see Daugherty et al, 2007, 2008). Despite the significant difficulties this raises for valid and reliable assessment, soft outcomes are increasingly a focus for developing summative measures, including proposals to assess emotional well-being as part of a citizenship qualification at Key Stage 4 (see Layard, 2007).

Changing the curriculum subject

The lines between learning to learn and associated notions of ‘assessment for learning’, and a view that the emotional outlook, attributes and skills associated with them are as, or more, important than subject content, is blurring rapidly. This challenges ‘old’ ideas about teaching and assessing subject knowledge:

‘I am questioning whether a version of learning as acquisition and using information and skills still has the social currency it had before the information revolution in which information is readily available but wise application of it still depends on choices made by social beings’ (Hargreaves, 2007, p191).

Advocates of emotional literacy as a central goal for schooling also focus on traditional subjects as vehicles for developing the attributes and dispositions assumed to comprise it:

• the arts (dance, painting, music, literature) through seeing, listening and taking part, expressing emotions through movement, sound and picture, rehearsing personal problem-solving, developing empathy by reading and hearing about others with the same experiences and understanding the causes of emotions

• English Language by developing ‘an emotional vocabulary’, developing a positive self-concept through talking and writing about the self, creating a sense of coherence through family history, increasing empathy by writing stories

• biology through understanding the physiology of emotion including own body reaction, understanding how the brain works and the centrality of emotion to how we think, learn and experience the world, emotion in animals and our ‘common ancestry’

• history through understanding the cause of emotion through biography and the relative impact of individual versus social forces in shaping events, developing personal coherence through family and local history, understanding emotion in major events such as war, terrorism and atrocities and the role of positive emotion in humanitarianism such human rights and the abolition of slavery (Weare, 2004, p92).

In a recent keynote presentation to a European conference on assessment, Dylan Wiliam, an influential academic in the field of formative assessment, argued that pedagogy associated with developing skills and attitudes for learning to learn was ‘curriculum and subject neutral’. From this perspective, assessment processes within subject domains, such as questioning and feedback, become vehicles for generic and affective outcomes that are both relevant to employability and to lifelong learning (Wiliam, 2008).

Some go further, and call for radical changes to traditional subjects. The latest review of the primary curriculum by academics at Cambridge University calls for a reduction in time spent on traditional subjects in order to develop personal and emotional aspects of children’s lives. In secondary education, a book from the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL), appropriately titled Subject to Change: New Thinking on the Curriculum sets out the proposition that ‘Education is assumed to be primarily about the development of the mind’, but … this is a ‘misunderstanding’ (Johnson et al, 2007, pp69-70). A new skills curriculum is needed for all children, which will be relevant and different:

The major difference from previous curriculum models is that it should consider the needs of the whole person without assuming that the academic or intellectual aspects should have a higher status than the others. The first truly comprehensive curriculum should rebalance the academic, situated in the mind, against those parts of humanity situated in the body, the heart and the soul. Curricula may well be designed by people for whom the mind predominates, but those designers should see that the 21st century requires a population with higher levels of social, emotional and moral performance, and a regenerated capacity for doing and making (2007, p71).

The authors state ‘We need a bit of honesty in this analysis. Most people are not intellectuals. Most people do not lead their lives predominantly in the abstract, It is not clear that it is preferable to do otherwise: the world cannot survive only through thought. (Johnson et al, 2007, p72). John White has a similarly sceptical view of the importance of subject disciplines and criticises the ‘Victorian elitism’ and irrelevance of old school subjects (2007; see also Hegarty, 2006).

In a more conciliatory vein, the Universities’ Council for the Education of Teachers (UCET) responds to the demands of ECM by arguing that secondary school teachers will need to ‘adjust’ the way in which allegiance to their subject asserts their specialist expertise. Rejecting popular caricatures of teachers only interested in examinations and ‘crowding heads with facts’, they reassure teachers that subject study remains integral to education, and that ’subjects are educational resources of remarkable power, offering unlimited scope for realising an enormous range of educational purposes …’ (Kirk and Broadhead, 2007, p13).

Yet, after loading this ‘enormous range’ of purposes (which encompasses all the soft outcomes discussed above) into subjects, they continue:

under ECM, the educational purpose of learners will depend on how resourcefully teachers will be able to draw on their subject knowledge base, and how readily they will jettison the monocular professional vision that is associated with blinkered use of the subject …’ in order to develop an extended professionalism that removes ‘old dichotomies’ between … ‘teaching a subject and enabling pupils to learn how to learn, or even being a learning coordinator or consultant; between the cultivation of learners’ achievements and fostering their well-being; and between personalisation and the promotion of high standards’ (2007, pp14-15).

Accounting for soft outcomes

Another important influence on the rise of affective and emotional aspects of education emerges from those who propose system-level monitoring of differences in how children and young people learn to deal with failure and the factors to which they attribute achievement or failure. In this vein, Tim Oates cites evidence from the Centre for the Wider Benefits of Learning to argue that differences in psychological outlooks and attitudes and the behaviours they lead to in relation to educational effort, lead to differential acquisition of personal capital, thereby causing under-performance and social inequalities. He goes on to argue that while it is possible to assess the soft skills that comprise personal capital, this is not desirable. Instead, he advocates ‘benchmarking’ them through surveys at institutional level and possibly at national level as a way of seeing whether educational approaches moderate the impact of social background (Oates, 2007).

Calls to assess soft outcomes or to bring them into accountability measures, together with wider calls to either harness subject knowledge for emotional purposes or to reduce it to fit in a more emotionally-based curriculum, relate to interventions for emotional well-being in three ways. First, the constructs that are claimed to underpin ’soft outcomes’, together with the teaching and assessment processes that lead to them, are frequently elided, along with behaviours and dispositions, values and attributes that also appear in the long lists of so-called ’skills’ associated with emotional well-being. Second, calls to change pedagogy and assessment, and concerns about the well-being of children and young people, both reflect the same disaffection about the content and purposes of schooling amongst growing numbers of academics, teachers and professional groups. Third, classroom activities and assessments of dispositions, attitudes and skills associated with learning to learn and soft outcomes respond to, and encourage, images of humans as emotional rather than rational subjects who need an appropriately affective curriculum.

Influences on the rise of affective, emotional and personal skills

Policy and practice around emotional well-being have been fuelled by, and encourage, a rapid rise of activity to promote these developments and their underlying images of the human subject. As we pointed out above, these developments are not taking place in a coherent way, as part of a strategy to elevate the emotional and affective aspects of learning. Instead, they are ad hoc, emerging from different concerns about the state of childhood generally and children’s well-being in particular, concerns about rising levels of disengagement and disaffection with schooling, and from adults’ own concerns about the future and schools’ abilities to prepare people for it. In these concerns, a target for scepticism is the relevance and usefulness of traditional subject disciplines.

This lack of coherence is exacerbated by the way in which developments outlined above are promoted by a large number of diverse organisations. Over 70 are involved in promoting various initiatives for well-being, learning to learn, emotional literacy, etc. These include university departments and research centres in positive psychology and well-being, children’s charities and campaigning organisations, local authority psychologists, private therapists and psychologists. They are creating a flourishing industry of courses and consultancies in interventions for emotional well-being. Unlike other commercial ventures in education, such as ‘products’ associated with learning styles or thinking skills, the beneficiaries of emotional well-being and associated notions such as emotional literacy and self-esteem are enjoying unprecedented influence and government-sponsorship.

The important observation for this review is that the knowledge base for the rise of affective and emotional aspects of learning is extremely diverse, and incoherent in aims and claims, and that these are dominated by different branches of psychology, counselling and therapy. Its very incoherence enables disparate initiatives to be promoted and funded by government.

The socio-economic content of a therapeutic culture

Although it is important to understand the sources and aims of developments, their effects in the form of growing calls to dismantle or reshape subject knowledge and content cannot be divorced from wider socio-political and philosophical shifts in ideas about the human subject. It is here that the most profound changes are going on, and these have hitherto been unexplored in educational analysis.

Whilst all the interventions summarised above come from diverse sources and concerns, they all draw, in varying degrees of coherence and expertise, on an eclectic range of principles and practices derived from d,ifferent branches of counselling, therapy, cognitive and educational psychology and positive psychology. In our book, we analysed how the underlying psychological base of interventions, and the claims that accompany them, resonate powerfully with, but also draw upon, populist therapeutic ideas about the emotional effects of life on ourselves and others. These are reflected in, and promoted through, the ever-expanding genre of self help books and ‘tragic life stories’, lifestyle and health magazines, television and books, and texts to help people diagnose and deal with emotional and mental problems. We argued in our book that therapeutic assumptions and explanations have become part of an everyday cultural mindset about the emotional self and its problems and have been taken up through government policy.

From this perspective, interventions for emotional well-being are the latest turn in a ‘therapeutic ethos’ which has emerged over forty years throughout Anglo-American culture and politics and increasingly influences the public’s constructions of the self and others (see Rieff, 1966, 1987; Lasch, 1979, 1971; Nolan, 1998; Furedi, 2003). We also argued in our book that the British institutionalisation of a therapeutic ethos through educational policy and practice is unprecedented.

An obvious feature is the exponential extension of counselling, psychoanalysis and psychology into more areas of social and personal life, policy and professional practice. In education, parenting classes and the SureStart and Connexions personal advice strategies blur boundaries between teaching, welfare and applications of therapy, while interventions summarised above are rooted in counselling and therapeutic techniques and assumptions (see, for example, Turner 2007; Watts 2001). Yet, the significance of a therapeutic ethos is much more far-reaching than this: it also offers a new sensibility, a cultural vocabulary, explanations and underlying assumptions about appropriate feelings and responses to events, and a set of associated practices through which people make sense of themselves and others (Ecclestone and Hayes, 2008).

This therapeutic mindset is evident in largely unchallenged assumptions that are translated into interventions. These include:

• children’s feelings about the world, life and learning are ‘baggage’ that get in the way of learning subjects

• it is important to deal with these feelings before ‘learning can take place’

• feelings of ‘not being listened to’ are barriers to acceptance of adult and teacher authority

• more and more children have emotional problems that must be dealt with by eliciting and processing them, preferably with others, either through specialist interventions, or through generic interventions like circle time.

These assumptions might be couched in terms of ‘paying attention to the whole child’, ‘bringing pupil voice into educational processes and organisation’ or ‘bringing the affective dimensions of learning into the classroom’ but they are informed, we argue, by an underlying therapeutic ethos.

Curriculum initiatives and policy statements that have pointed teachers and educationalists towards a concern with emotional well-being may have begun as ad hoc responses to societal or cultural changes but they now have a theory behind them. In a therapy culture, initiatives undertaken for a variety of educational reasons often take a therapeutic form. We are tempted to make the claim that such initiatives must take a therapeutic form except that it is possible to resist a dominant culture; nevertheless, the first premise in developing any form of resistance must be an awareness of what has changed.

Many critics of our arguments point to the positive personal or educational aspects of interventions. They also claim that these address psychological or affective aspects of learning, or that they foster ‘personal outcomes’ or ‘personal capital’ and are not ‘therapeutic’. Yet, our critics miss the point that not only are the claimed value and successes of these interventions only established through a circular logic, but also that their emergence from a therapy culture strengthens the turn towards the emotional, towards feeling and away from the intellectual. We have defined the therapeutic turn in education as the emphasising of the emotional, of feelings, over the intellectual.

This broad but useful pointer is meant to contextualise all interventions for emotional well-being, including recent ones arising from ‘positive psychology’, as interventions that arise from, and reinforce, therapy culture. The circularity in the defence of positive psychology and other interventions for emotional well-being is that they are based upon assumptions about a generalised psychological need in society that needs therapeutic responses. Therapy culture both produces that need, since no one can escape its assumptions, and, in turn, therapeutic interventions of a crude popular sort as well as skilled psychological interventions become welcomed, desired and lead to successful outcomes within that culture.

The shift to a therapy culture, according to Rieff, marks a ’sharp and probably irreparable break in the continuity of Western culture’ (1966, 1987, p261). We have traced the development and full flowering of therapy culture in the present time elsewhere (Ecclestone and Hayes 2008). We argued in our earlier analysis that this full flowering is distinctive in that it not only pervades education but education is the main site for reinforcing it. This strengthens therapy culture not merely because it makes it ubiquitous but because it embodies a misanthropic theory of human beings (see also Furedi, 2003).

Promoting a theory of the diminished subject

One of the most difficult and controversial aspects of our analysis to both convey and convince listeners or readers of its validity is our argument that, however well-meaning and however much couched in the language of ‘empowerment’ and ‘learner voice’, a view of humans as ‘diminished’ lies behind the emotional turn in education. Of course, this is never directly articulated at policy levels or by educational thinkers. Indeed, such a theory is difficult to express directly in relation to children and subjects taught in schools.

Instead, we argue that this theory is mediated through the variety of pedagogical initiatives we describe in this paper. Although these seem similar in form to many initiatives in personal development or affective education from the past, they differ in their content. This is also why many critics of our thesis think that nothing has changed, and that current interventions such as learning to learn, assessment for learning and activities to teach the attributes of emotional literacy and well-being are merely the latest manifestation of a progressive focus on the affective aspects of life and learning.

Our attempt to convince them is based on a need to look at the explicit theorising of the diminished human being that does exist at the level of philosophy and which articulates what we see as an attack on human subjectivity in its proper sense. By its ‘proper sense’, we mean that the human subject is not merely in the past but also in essence, an active agent who seeks to control and change the world. Malik makes this clear in his essay on What is it to be human?:

‘For the past 500 years, scientists and philosophers have taken it for granted that human beings are exceptional creatures, not simply distinct from other animals but superior to them because of our possession of reason and consciousness, language and morality’ (Malik, 2001, p13)

This was the philosophy of humanism, a desire to place rationally autonomous human beings at the centre of philosophical debate, to glorify human abilities and to view human reason as a tool through which to understand nature; a conviction that humankind can achieve freedom, both from the constraints of nature and the tyranny of Man, through the agency of its own efforts …’ (ibid.). Education systems that aim to develop the full potential of rationality and autonomy have been a goal for western societies since the Enlightenment.

Yet, the idea of the human subject as an active agent of change has been under sustained and increasing attack for the last five decades. An extensive treatment is given in Heartfield’s The ‘Death of the Subject’ Explained (2002) and we draw on this for our overall analysis. We cannot detail this attack here but it is worth noting that it comes during this period of 50 years from the Western philosophical left and then more powerfully and crudely from the political right. Here, we provide just three brief examples, two from the ‘left’ and one from the ‘right’.

Marx criticised the bourgeois human subject as being constrained by capitalism but the French Marxist thinker, Louis Althusser, considered that Marx rejected entirely the individual human subject whether an economic, historical, ethical or philosophical ‘Subject’ and that he ‘replaced the old couples individual/human essence’ as factors in history with the impersonal new ‘concepts (forces of production, relations of production, etc)’ (Althusser, 1969 p229). In this way, Althusser removes human agency as a bourgeois phenomenon.

Feminist thinkers also see the subject not as bourgeois and replaceable by the impersonal, but as being the subject of oppression so that ‘[t]he identity of the feminist subject ought not to be the foundation of feminist politics’ (Butler, 1990, pp5-6). Yet this claim makes it impossible for women to act since they are said to have a bourgeois and oppressed identity so cannot act from that degraded position. So what can women do? Heartfield comments that ‘What began as a criticism of the monopoly over freedom exercised by men has turned, paradoxically, into a criticism of freedom as such (2002, p43).

Both these accounts criticise the ‘Subject’ as an active agent. The evolution of such views means that we cannot assume that a left wing view will necessarily be based on the idea of promoting an active human agency under repressive capitalism.

Yet, while an attack on human agency has come from the political and philosophical left, it is most explicit on the right. In the writings of philosopher John Gray, it reaches new levels (Gray, 2002, 2003, 2004). For him, humans are just one among many animals. In Straw Dogs: Thought on Humans and Other Animals, Gray tries to ‘present a view of things in which humans are not central’ (2002, p.x); that our ‘core belief in progress is a superstition’ (2002, p.xi) and to undermine the assumption that we have the power to remake the world’ (2002, p.xiv). Humanity as the collective subject is done away with … ‘ “Humanity” does not exist. There are only humans, driven by conflicting illusions and subject to every kind of infirmity of will and judgement‘ (2002, p12).

From this perspective, even Islamic terrorists are motivated by the illusion that their actions are a prelude to a new world. For Gray, the problem is science which ‘By enlarging human power … has generated the illusion that humanity can take charge of its destiny‘ (2003: 119). Humanity comes off badly when compared to animals because ‘Other animals do not need a purpose in life‘ (2002, p199). Through his popular misanthropic polemics, Gray aims to reverse the perspective that Malik says has been the basis of humanism for 500 years. His ideas are the nearest to a theory of the diminished human subject at the present time.

Educational thinkers also draw on philosophy to question whether the purpose of education should, or can be, to develop rational human autonomy and ask whether humanism as an attempt to define the essence of what it means to be human is possible, or even a desirable aim. A view that what it means to be human should be an ‘open question’ and that education should be a process of bringing each person ‘into being’ is based on arguments that rationality cannot and should not be a measure of humanity, not least because it excludes those who cannot achieve whatever standards of rationality pertain at any given time (see Biesta, 2006).

Whether as individuals, groups, or as the whole of humanity, ideas from the philosophical and political left and right question not only the notion of an active human subject but also whether education can or should aim to foster it. We intend in other work to look at how these arguments change the purposes and processes of education in more detail (see also Ecclestone and Hayes, 2008, chapter 8). However, from what we have outlined here, it is possible to argue that the attack on the human subject is taken up in advocacy of emotional and affective aspects of education as a dual attack on children and young people as potential rational agents in the world, and on what they learn.

Current and potential future impact of these trends on knowledge, creativity and communication in educational contexts

The dual attack on the subject

It is important to reiterate that proponents of an affective and emotional turn in education never present their view of children in this diminished way. Yet, a dual attack on the subject, as the universal pursuit of a body of knowledge and as a human being, is, nevertheless, we argue, behind their advocacy of new interventions. There has been no serious debate about the developments we have outlined: indeed, there is active and widespread support for the dismantling of subjects in primary schools and their use in secondary schools for an array of attitudes, dispositions and attributes (presented as ‘personal and learning skills’). The Rose Review of primary education, the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority’s promotion of personal, learning and thinking skills, and the ATL’s calls to dismantle subjects have not, so far, received any public challenge.

Lack of challenges to these developments change public, political and professional ideas of what comprises ‘knowledge’, ‘creativity’ and ‘communication’ across the education system. Supporters of the affective and emotional turn in education regard personal knowledge, creative pedagogies and assessments that elicit and develop it and communication that changes the relationship between teachers and students into a much more personal and emotional one as ‘progressive’.

Yet, these claims are not the only aspects of knowledge, creativity and communication that need critical examination. The therapeutic culture that we have outlined here, drawing on a body of work from sociology and political studies, engenders a much deeper change in what we regard as knowledge, reflected in a dual attack on the ’subject’. This, as we have argued, is an attack on the human subject and also an attack on humans’ ability, either in wanting to understand or in being able to be educated in order to understand the world as rational, autonomous beings. It is a simultaneous and symbiotic attack on the knower and the known. In education, the attack on knowledge, on the curriculum subject, has preceded the attack on the human subject. This means that what is to be known requires changes in the knower in terms of dispositions, attitudes and behaviour.

It is this new attack on children and young people as ‘knowers’ that we address in the balance of our critique, and in our evaluation of its implications for knowledge and creativity in education.

We have argued that changing ideas about both the place and purpose of subject knowledge in schools and ideas about the human subject are, simultaneously, reflected in, and reinforced by, a therapeutic ethos. This ethos embodies populist orthodoxies rooted in psychoanalysis and psychology about the emotional self and therapeutic explanations for dealing with it, thereby reflecting and reinforcing images of human beings as ‘diminished’. Preoccupation with emotional well-being in education inserts a cultural perspective that ‘regards most forms of human experience as the source of emotional distress … [where people] characteristically suffer from “an emotional deficit and possess a permanent consciousness of vulnerability’ (Furedi, 2004, pp110/414). From this perspective, a diminished self finds exposure to uncertainty and adversity, including disappointment, despair and conflict simultaneously threatening to ‘the integrity of the self’ and inhibiting of it (see also Nolan, 1998; Pupavac, 2001, 2003).

We argue that, whatever the good and well-meaning intentions of proponents, this diminished human subject now dominates thinking about schooling, curriculum content, teaching activities and assessment. We have emphasised throughout this review that calls to change the subject do not promote this diminished view overtly but we argue that behind such calls are either images of children and young people as needing more and more emotional support to learn at all, or as being so instrumental that they will only learn what is personally and emotionally relevant to them. Either way, the emotional self becomes the subject of education because children are no longer seen as able to cope with traditional forms of subject knowledge that have, until now, been seen as the main purpose of education.

Eroding humanist education

In the context of developments explored in this paper, the renaming of the Department of Education and Skills as the Department for Children, Families and Schools is extremely significant. It removes ‘education’ as a social and political aspiration in the remit of government’s organisation for the first time since 1863, and replaces humanist aspirations with humanitarian interventions based on perceived transgressions to children’s rights.

Taken together, we argue that these concerns and the interventions they lead to are redefining fundamentally what it means to educate the ‘whole person’, and through this, they redefine the subject. Humanist goals of learning a body of worthwhile and inspiring knowledge as a route into understanding the human subject and recognising its potential for agency in the world, learning to love particular subjects, or aspiring to excel in them, are increasingly regarded as dubious goals. Even UCET’s apparent support for subjects turns knowledge into an instrumental vehicle for soft outcomes.

When aligned with the idea that personal capital is integral to social justice, humanitarian perspectives that place well-being at the heart of human rights cast ‘old-fashioned’ humanist education not merely as irrelevant, elitist and demotivating but as socially unjust.

Profiting from the emotional turn

Beneficiaries of the therapeutic turn in education tap into guilt that schools and adults do not listen enough to young people’s anxieties and are not dealing with their feelings of being worried and scared. They also reinforce beliefs that stressed-out and anxious young people cannot cope with, and do not want, a traditional subject-based curriculum. Instead, there is a growing orthodoxy that they want a more personally relevant and ‘engaging’ education where adults and their peers listen to them and affirm them. This view erodes subject disciplines and encourages a curriculum which assumes that topics and processes can only be engaging if they relate to the self.

The creation of an emotional epistemology

Finally, we argue that the interventions, and their implications for education, summarised in this report and exemplified in our book, are an outcome of the emergence of what we call an ‘emotional epistemology’. This reflects an un-philosophical distortion by educationalists of the search for a foundation for knowledge in epistemology. The most famous example of the search for foundations or grounds for our beliefs and our being is Descartes’ ‘I think, therefore I am’ (cogito ergo sum).

Although numerous philosophers including Heidegger, Dewey, Foucault and Habermas have questioned this foundation for humanism, we see a new, and for us, dangerous tendency towards another sort of grounding of beliefs and our being in ‘I feel, therefore I am’ (sentio ergo sum). We do not go here into epistemological matters, such as Russell’s famous critique of the cogito, that all that can be claimed is that ‘There are thoughts’ with no ontological implications. In parallel, the claim that ‘There are feelings’ tells us nothing about the self although it seems to say something important about the self in a therapeutic culture.

We see the need for more philosophical work to be done on the analysis of the turn towards emotions and for clear distinctions to be made between things often called ‘emotions’, such as feelings, sensations, moods, inclinations and motives, in relation to the therapeutic educational literature (Ecclestone and Hayes, forthcoming). This is because we fear that the unphilosophical assumption behind the therapeutic turn is to stress the primacy of unanalysed and perhaps unanalysable feelings in analogy with bodily sensations or ‘feelings’.

Emotional epistemology seems to be the celebration of the authenticity and authority of feelings as somehow increasingly determinant of the self. We hope to undertake more work on the nature of this determination and, in particular, the developing frameworks for the assessment of the emotions of children and young people and for the likely rise of evaluation and accountability measures of these (see, for example, OfSTED, 2008).

Future trends

It is too soon to tell whether the rise of therapeutic interventions and a political, public and professional preoccupation with emotional features and outcomes of educational experiences will be more than a passing fad. Indeed, the sheer number of initiatives introduced in different parts of the education system by the Labour government might suggest that emotional well-being might be replaced by something else. Yet, if we are right that the dismantling of subjects in favour of an ever-widening array of dispositions and attributes is part of an emotional turn in education, and if we are right that this is, in turn, part of a more profound philosophical and cultural crisis of confidence in humanism, then the emotional turn is going to be more enduring than a fad.

For the next few years, we predict that, whatever government is in power, concerns about the poor state of people’s emotional well-being are too deeply embedded in popular culture, psychology and politics to go away quickly or at all.

This suggests some practical implications for educational institutions and curriculum developers. First, the ad hoc nature of developments and the range of concerns that drive them could erode subject disciplines in unintended ways because of the lack of an overview of how they are changing. Second, as children progress through compulsory schooling into further and higher education, too much emphasis on their emotional well-being could undermine their motivation and ability to respond to the cognitive demands of subject learning. Third, they could simply become bored with attention to their emotional needs through education and find education disengaging and demotivating. Finally, if our arguments about the underlying diminished images of the human subject are valid, there are more profound implications for what teachers, the public and policy makers regard as the purposes of education which undermine a humanist belief in its transforming potential.

Conclusion

Educational activities have always produced personal and social outcomes as the by-products of cognitive or practical ones, and education institutions and their teachers have, to a greater or lesser extent, taken account of emotional and affective aspects of their students’ lives and learning. Yet, contemporary disillusionment with a traditional subject-based curriculum and traditional assessment, together with an intensifying belief that children and young people are both disaffected and distressed by humanist education, are creating a hollowed-out subject curriculum into which a plethora of instrumental personal and social attributes, values and dispositions can be inserted. In the name of humanitarian rights, the search for “true sources of satisfaction” will become more popular as the core value of schooling, where the overarching question is “are the children happy?” (Layard, 2007).

Attacks on the human subject as too diminished to learn, and on the curriculum subject as irrelevant, elitist, unjust and inimical to well-being, currently enjoy the sponsorship of the British government. Commercial and political interests in developments we have explored here make critical debate about the impact of emotional well-being on the subject harder but more necessary than ever.

In conclusion, our analysis shows that what policy makers, professionals and parents regard as valid knowledge is being changed fundamentally and perhaps irrevocably by the affective and emotional turn in education. A secondary school history teacher said to us “you know that something has changed when children want to know more about themselves than about the world”. Yet, his lament, like our critique, is increasingly a minority view. An epistemology of emotion is replacing old forms of knowledge, rooted in profound pessimism that children are either able or motivated to know the world. This, in turn, changes pedagogy and assessment and casts new approaches to pedagogy and teachers’ and students’ communication as ‘creative’ and ‘progressive’.

At the very least, this review should be used to create a public and political debate about our analysis: we find an increasing number of teachers and parents agree with the examples we have marshalled to illustrate our arguments and further empirical work and debate will reveal further implications of the translation of an emotional and affective turn in education for knowledge and pedagogy and assessment (see Ecclestone et al, 2008b; Ecclestone et al, 2008b; Ecclestone and Hayes, 2008b; Ecclestone and Hayes, forthcoming).

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This document has been commissioned as part of the UK Department for Children, Schools and Families’ Beyond Current Horizons project, led by Futurelab. The views expressed do not represent the policy of any Government or organisation.