Over the last few months I have had the privilege or some significant world travel, much for the purpose of education and schools. From Saudi to India, England to Sweden and the Netherlands,and then to South Africa, before this latest trip to USA.

Quite rightly, schools are high on the agenda in every country, but I am interested in the differences. Not so much within the schools themselves, but I’m more interested in the differences between the systems and the political contexts that impact on them. You know the craft of teaching is the same wherever you are. And there are more similarities amongst students than there are differences.

I’m not sure this is particularly joined up thinking until the end of the blog, but let’s first see what I notice from each context.

My work is with a particular group of schools who have a common set of values and approach which is committed to personalisation. It is this drive that has become a passion for many school leaders in Netherlands and England. Whatever chief inspectors of schools might say about not prescribing a particular approach or set of methods, the jeopardy of not achieving core exam results, places schools and their leaders at significant risk. One year with a set of lower results can be enough. However the brave understand that young people need more than a traditional knowledge based over- tested system but need an opportunity to be creative, build character and confidence.

In Kent, I have seen the development of the iCollege at Homewood School where a group of 45 students have taken charge of their learning completely and create their own goals and schedules in an environment that looks like a modern office. In Doncaster’s XP school, brave leadership has established a school committed to expeditionary learning. At Bolton and Liverpool, two University Technology Colleges enrich their curriculum to provide relevant skills in dentistry, nursing and engineering in addition to core studies. Diversity lives and these schools are exploring how they can develop a sense of trust in their students.

Over the decades of my career, I have challenged teachers to differentiate their work. Mostly this is a differentiation based on ability. But it occurred to me when running a workshop in the Netherlands recently that the challenge is made so much easier if you shift the decisions about learning so the student increasingly takes charge. If we develop the tools and flexibility in curriculum schedules for students to make some decisions about pace, depth, location and timing then the job changes completely. Rather than differentiating for all in front of you, students can use the power and trust invested in them to make those decisions. The digital options open to us now only make this easier.

What it does though is increase the need for coaching to help students make the choices that will lead to them achieving their aspirational goals.

It’s a switch in thinking! Personalisation taking the lead from differentiation.

One of the things I have learned is that it is so much easier to make this switch in a new school than in one that is already working in a more traditional way. We should not take this as a given – the development of KED inspired schools schools in The Netherlands and UK are testament to this, but it is harder to move a whole staff and student body. It just requires some very effective change management strategies and a consistent resolute approach by leaders who tell the story repeatedly and apply discipline to the journey.

This has been the Swedish experience and now in India and Saudi Arabia where new KED schools are developing. You can’t move much further away in terms of culture and society than here. As private schools they are working to fill a gap for those parents who want to have a different and more effective education at a reasonable cost. It is an over simplification, but it is the rising middle classes in these countries who aspire to providing something better for their children than the stretched community schools. But this in itself provides a challenge to the schools.

Ambitious parents who have grown in existing systems themselves often expect a traditional structure to the school and rightly demand high outcomes. If the school is in an early years setting then for this then to translate into very young students engaged in formal subject based learning, strangely puts those ambitions at risk. Not all countries follow the UK example of formal schooling beginning for rising 5s, many not starting until 6 or 7. If you look at great pre school practice and Montessori schools in Sweden and also many British schools, primary education starts with play and develops through project based learning capitalising on the curiosity and excitement young children have to discover and make sense of the world around them.

We should not underestimate the potential that even our youngest children have for independent learning and research as a way to achieve great outcomes. I’ve just visited one of the new micro schools in Brooklyn, New York (Altschool) and have seen how 4 and 5 year olds are taking responsibility for particular tasks in a collaborative projects, and where as part of the routines of the day they are working on differentiated and personalised tasks to move forward at their pace not in line with their age.

Obviously it’s a balance. But when my grandchildren’s homework at grade 4 is about frontal adverbial clauses, and what is judged effective writing becomes a recipe of grammatical constructions rather than creative expositions of their interests we’ve forgotten what we know about learning. Michael Rosen puts this much better than I could.

http://michaelrosenblog.blogspot.co.uk/2016/03/for-parents-and-teachers-wanting-to.html

So let’s try to pull this together.

I remain as always optimistic as to what brave leaders can do, and what great teachers surrounded by ambitious values can create for their students. But if you operate in a system which does not trust teachers, parents or students, a system that believes in testing as a way to judge progress of children and schools  or believes there is only one way children should learn, then I am beginning to doubt if it is possible to build a school that gives our young people the learning they need.

Thousands of parents in New York continue to refuse to allow their children to sit middle school common core tests. And this last month in the UK as 6 year olds face their spelling, grammar and punctuation tests, parents here are justifiably making a choice to remove them for the day. My 5 year old granddaughter is about to sit a national phonetic test. Really! ( sorry according to the new grammar rules that is probably not a place to put an exclamation mark… should it be a question mark…No I’m exclaiming not questioning).

How do you escape this nonsense and a narrowing national curriculum. O.K. The optimist in me believes that brave heads and committed creative teachers can provide imaginative solutions. But increasingly I’m thinking that to move out of the state system and create home schooling cooperatives or private schools run by social enterprises that are affordable to many might be the only way forward. I can’t believe I’m thinking this having been such an advocate of community based public education as a universal right. But this is where we have got to.

In previous blogs I have written about how I’m trying to ‘rage until the dying of the light’ and have challenged myself about a few things I can help change. Now two of them are connected -supporting schools to adopt a personalised curriculum, and finding a way to help my grandchildren survive this system to become ambitious, effective balanced educated individuals. The challenge is that unless they are geographically very lucky to find such a school, they will be subjected to the opposite.

Not sure I ever thought stepping outside a state education would be matched to my political values.