Never mind the technology, where’s the learning?

According to the BBC, South London’s Durand Primary is to buy a building in the home counties and create a weekly boarding experience for its inner city students. The idea is to create an all-through 3-19 Academy, with those over 13 attending as weekly boarders. Jim Davies the Headteacher is reported to have said he wants the, “kind of facilities pupils at Eton and Harrow have access to … we want to teach our children in a better environment where they can take part in physical activity - some of the sites we are looking at have 30 acres. I believe that this does help drive up results.”

I think we can all agree that the environment in which children learn does have an effect on their ability to do so, but I wonder if removing them from their homes for the week, and the surroundings they have grown-up in, is really the answer. There have been plenty of educational experiments in the past where groups of children have been removed and isolated, some with unforeseen and regrettable consequences for the children involved. It’s also interesting to compare this view with that of Steve Barr, of Green Dot Public Schools, a charter school network in Los Angeles. He also looked at the characteristics of $25,000 fee paying schools in the area and started to apply them to state education. Key to the turnaround was that they were small (around 300 to 400 students) and had high expectations. He’s worth listening to:

Tags: education, 21st century, learning, schools