Designing the Curriculum of the Future — Part 1
What do you do when you are successful with a Creative Curriculum Fund bid?
Answer: You call the A-Team….erm…. no they stopped operating in the ‘80's! You get SDA in to work collaboratively with a fantastic group of young people. As a school, Arbroath Academy were clear; they were looking for creative solutions to the urgent challenges the school were facing.
Listening to the data: attendance statistics show that young people are choosing not to attend school, with a particular decline evident at S4. Let’s acknowledge that 20% of their young people move into higher education with 73% moving forward with further education or employment.
Why is it then, that the curriculum is essentially focused on the 20% moving into higher education with limited pathways available for the remaining 80%?
Aha, a problem……excellent….. love the problem, not the solution!!!!
The brief: what would a curriculum look like that was designed by young people, teachers and partners alike?
Day 1 of 3 started with a group of 40 young people chosen at random from S2 right up to S6. The Service Design Academy are experienced in applying this approach to other projects and have seen a decline in attrition rates as well as an increase in positive feedback from students who participated in changes to aspects of the college curriculum.
The young people chose their own themes, then using the human bar chart method voted for which group they would like to join. A total of 8 groups were formed under each of the following headings:
Teachers (Team Plane) Skills & Attributes (Team Oreo and Team Flame) Friendship (Team Fwiends) Safe, Friendly and Healthy Environment (Team KCK) Experiences (Team BTMB & T&M) and Qualifications (Team Peace).
A fast paced introduction to service design and user research set the scenes, SDA adapted their examples to completely relate to the young people. Each group practiced user interviews on each other before testing out the questions they would use on their peers.
“A desk is a dangerous place from which to view the world”
John Le Carre
The young people loved this quote and couldn’t wait to get outside and interview as many people as possible. This included leaving school grounds and heading down to the shops at lunch time to try and collect as many voices as possible.
After carrying out some short, sharp user interviews through street research it was time to build those user research walls. A good few teachers and a couple of parents were also caught over lunch time who gave their insights into the questions being asked.
Moving into ideation to wrap up the day, the enthusiasm and participation was breathtaking. The buzz in the room and the work being produced was very inspiring.
Here is a snapshot of the ideas collected on the day:
More outdoor classes, mountain biking being taught (learn about the great outdoors / biology of plants etc) combine with other subjects.
Class room layout, bin the traditional rows. Hoodies to be worn branded with our house badges. A social space inside that isn’t the library. Smaller exam rooms, with food and drink available, pets to soothe and calm.
A Netflix room, to switch off and relax. More one to one time building relationships with teachers. Experiential trips and more project based topics.
Visits to colleges and universities. H.E, tech, photography, swimming, drama opportunities to be extended or introduced. In addition to some longer term ideas, the young people identified some relatively easy to implement quick wins.
Most importantly, what did the young people take away?
One really interesting point from the data, insights and ideas gathered by the young people was their unconscious unwillingness to be creative or radical with the curriculum itself. For example; the young people want more technology studies, swimming and photography but noted an out of school club approach rather than changing the actual curriculum. WHY?
Something really important here about the restrictive nature of school, how we embed and engrain these elements of the educational experience into the brains of our younger generations. Young people genuinely believe, having been molded to do so, that they have little or no autonomy when it comes to what and how they learn. Does that seem fair to you?
Next up, workshop 2 will be held on 4th October with teaching staff. We plan to work on the same brief, giving the opportunity to compare and contrast the needs of young people with the thoughts and insights of the teaching staff. Finally, we plan to bring it all together with a final discovery and co-design day at the end of October with the young people, teaching staff, the PTA, industry and external stakeholders.
Massive thank you to all the young people who wholeheartedly took part, for the laughs and all of the fantastic work produced. If staff attend with half the enthusiasm of the young people, we are sure to see another productive service design day.
