Personalised Education Now had some input early on in the life of the Tomorrow Project and has been invited back again to join the debate regarding educational futures and educational research. Peter Humphreys has been representing Personalised Education Now in these consultations and using the opportunity to network and get further exposure for PEN ideas and materials.
The remit of NERF, which was established in 1998 by the then Secretary of State for Education and Skills, is to provide strategic direction for educational research nationally and to raise the quality, profile and impact of educational research. Its key objective is to oversee the development of a coherent strategy for education research. (See www.nerf-uk.org).
TTP is a registered charity, whose role is to support organisations and individuals in thinking about the long-term future of people’s lives. (See www.tomorrowproject.net).
Following NERF’s decision to take part in the TTP programme of work, the two organisations are undertaking a project using futures methods to help ensure the best possible match between the needs for and delivery of education research – so fulfilling NERF’s declared intention of including a futures element in its work in support of those relating to funding, capacity and research priorities.
The project aims to help ensure that match by identifying the main, long-term pressures on the education system that require better knowledge and understanding through research. Its method is to use a set of societal trends as a framework within which to ask questions about those pressures, using TTP’s established consultative approach.
In the course of its work across a broad range of topics and organisations, TTP has evolved material on the main trends and drivers of change affecting the future of people’s lives. This material has been expressed by TTP in the form of an acronym, GLIMPSES, which is used in its work as a means of presenting and using these drivers as an integrated set:
Globalisation
Life course
Individuals and identity
Media
Politics and government
Social exclusion
Employment
Sustainability
The eight headings in this set are being used as the basis of a series of consultations involving key players in education and research, with the aim of promoting questions and discussion.
Once again Personalised Education Now expertise has been invited into a new project. Peter Humphreys is involved in developing our ideas through in this emerging project.
We can see the damage and loss to the whole of society of sexual or racial prejudice. Yet children and young people are often vilified in the mass media, excluded and discriminated against. This seems to be so taken-for-granted that we do not even have a name, such as childism, for this stereotyping and discrimination against young people, simply because of their age. Without a word for it, it is harder to see how this prejudice harms all generations now and in the future.
Inequalities between adults and children are not simply to do with slow biological development. They need to be explained critically through Generation Studies. Children are as much affected as adults by most public policies and yet their views are seldom heard. Yet there is growing research evidence that children can be informed, reliable, competent and rational. In these ways, there is no clear difference between children, young people and adults. Babies are expert learners. Young children are deeply concerned with being fair and kind. Children cope bravely and sensibly with long-term illness or disability. They have clever ideas about how to prevent and solve problems in their lives, and how to improve their schools and communities.
Priscilla Alderson PhD FRSA, Professor of Childhood Studies
Childhood Research and Policy Centre, Social Science Research Unit, Institute of Education, University of London, 18 Woburn Square, London WC1H ONR, fax 020 7612 6400, www.ioe.ac.uk/ssru.
The international Childhood email news list can be joined via ssru@ioe.ac.uk