Campus Party Berlin!

Luke, Alex and Charlie travelled to Berlin to take part in the O2 App Workshop, as part of the Campus Party Europe festival. It was an awesome experience and we have breathed new life into our vision for Change The Future!

We have created the brief for the Change The Future pitch website.

this details what we want our web builders to do.

This image shows the page that lists our Supporters. Most are who we want, but some of them are real now, such as David Gribble, Derry Hannam, ESSA and O2

Luke at TEDx London

When Luke went to TEDx London, he met some great people and was inspired by some great talks.

Here's a short sneaky video to give you a sense of the place:

Meeting the education Guru

Today was an exciting day because I met with Derry Hannam.

He's a really important person to me because he is

• an ex-Ofsted inspector
• ex-Headteacher/Deputy head
• Occasional government advisor on Education policy
• Author and researcher
• lovely

He's also a real advocate of alternative approaches to education although he works and focuses on the mainstream as opposed to residing in a bubble of hippy schools.

When I arrived he was just finishing an email essentially advising the dutch government on how to inspect Sudbury Valley schools. (In many ways, more radical that my democratic school)

 Asides from a random bird watching excursion he took me on at the mouth of Southampton, we were pretty thick in ChangeTheFuture for 2 days.

 

He was completely amazing and gave me many exciting leads we're following now.

I feel like it's coming together. Charlie and I just need to put in the time.

It's largely about finding a lead web developer now. All the other tasks feel within arms reach, largely thanks to Derry.

Derry convinced us to definitely include primary school.

"You can't just not listen to what a 10 year old  has to offer just cause they're a year too young to be in secondary school. The problems reach beyond secondary education."

IDEC, Grib, MY MOTHER and moving to Brighton

So I spent a couple of weeks at IDEC - the International Democratic Education Conference, this year held in England, by my old school Sands.

These are the Sands student volunteers!

I've been to 2 before (India and Berlin) and they were pretty great with an awesome bunch of people, though I've always found it a tiny bit like preaching to the choir/people slapping each other on the back or at least just being in a bit of a bubble... It's such a fundamental need of mine for beautiful education to be accessible to everyone, not just those who can afford to pay for it privately, which is what all these democratic schools (in England at least) have to be, cause the government can't get their head round them.

I held a workshop on ChangeTheFuture

where I invited people to critique the idea.

It was cool getting different peoples' ideas and particularly hearing the things they thought were the biggest risks...

There were some amazing speakers including Yaacov Hecht who is like mr Democratic Education of Israel and in particular a guy called Derry Hannam, who I was really impressed by.

He was a great speaker, kinda like Ken Robinson; enjoyed himself, but full of information and interesting and challenging ideas. I decided I needed to meet up with him to discuss ChangeTheFuture.

Before this, I would meet up with David Gribble; essentially the founder of Sands to talk about how CTF is shaping up. He's like my grandad, and always fun and inspiring to chat to about education (or anything) and learn about what books and things he's working on.

My mum's on the left.

She's realised her dream of horses suddenly a few years ago- something she was unable to do as a little girl in Rhodesia. Now she's swapped her last bits of money for a field of Rocky mountain horses.

She's always been really straight with me when I've not done things as well as I could have.

As a kid, I'd come to her showing off a drawing I did, and she'd usually say "Hm. Yeah it's alright I suppose" and she was right. And I'd do it again, better. She's a harsh critic, but also one of the most overwhelming knowledgable people; like an bottomless pit of information about politics and history and has a strong history of activism.

My brother works as a teacher, and my half brother (on my dad's side works in film)..my dad (who I only met when I was 12) is a bit more technical/computer savvy, doing graphic design. They're all people who enjoy a good debate in politics and have strong ideas about things. It's just mad that I am so much like all of them.

Moving to Brighton

I now live in a house of 10. Boys & Girls, half students and half not.

We had a housewarming BBQ with the neighbours who've just moved in :]

TEDx London brief excitement from Charlie

Hello.
Luke has managed to get into the TEDxLondon event today. The theme was Education Revolution!


TEDx London website


He has let people know about us and our plans to create a system that will bring all people together, particularly students, in reshaping secondary education.


We are at a very exciting moment right now. It feels like we are tip-toeing on the edge of a spring board, just gathering the last bits of courage before diving deep.


Very shortly, we will be needing lots of help from people - searching for super talented web designers/system developers, helping us spread the word, getting funding, getting artists involved, creating pitch videos, figuring out how to become an official organisation, etc

How closely my school (not that i'm there any more but it will always be my school) matches the

The Children's Manifesto 

the Guardian are doing

plus some photos i took at sands : ]

 

★ Active 9/10– students built climbing wall in school + do quite a lot of trips out swimming, climbing, etc. 2 treehouses, allotments, not massive grounds cause it’s a smallish school which receives no state funding and has many students from poor backgrounds, but it works!
occasional martial arts lessons etc – just ask for them in the meeting and they’ll happen if enough people want

 ★ Calm 9/10 – lots of zones for socialising or reading a book on a sofa (and put some music on the cd player/watch a film anytime) all rooms like music room are always open, summerhouse the students made. No bells – you have to be on top of your schedule; no one will come get you

★ Comfortable 10/10 – carpeted and loads of sofas! But no slippers – you wear socks upstairs

★ Creative and colourful 9/10 – art room is always open – lots of things to do; crazy hobbit-like hive of creative stuff; students art in most rooms of school and sculptures all over the place!

★ Expert 9/10 – teachers truly passionate; listen as much as speak – allowing lessons to digress if students are fascinated with something and go off on a tangent. Fun/silly/hands on most of the time. No celebs though!

★ Flexible 9/10 – lessons aren’t cumpulsory at sands (though no one really misses the key subjects because they’re well taught, and any reasons for not attending are heard and solved)
it’s probably most often art that people continue with after the lesson’s ended, as they’re really wrapped up in what they’re doing and really want to finish it while inspired

★ Friendly 10/10 – no assemblies – we have school meetings where we make all the decisions a head teacher would (including things like hiring/sacking staff) – students and staff get one vote each. Everyone called by 1^st name. staff are more like uncles and aunts that you look up to and think are amazing and wise and clever and funny

★ Listening 10/10 – after being in a school that’s run by the students and seeing how well it works and ultimately how much everyone who went there loved it and is doing such amazing things now as adults; I see school councils as a weak second best (but can still be loads better than most current schools)

★ Inclusive 10/10 –this is easier for sands because it’s less than 100 people; but the det fri gymnasium in Copenhagen is basically sands with a thousand students, so clearly this personalised approach and democratic operation is scalable

★ International 8/10 – students help make lunch and they’re a mix of mostly local produce and things from the school allotments! Could probably be more world dishes though.

★ Outside 8/10 – yeah, quite a lot of out of school things happen, particularly when it’s sunny, like heading to spitchwick where everyone leaps of the cliffs into the stream, or going for georgraphy walk-picnics on Dartmoor and studying funguses

★ Technological 5/10 – definitely no budget for anything like this. People are very welcome to use their own kit though.. and don’t abuse mp3 players and stuff

What the perfect school would have

★ No homework – yes. home work isn’t compulsory but it is allowed

★ A flexible timetable – yes? there’s still a timetable but it isn’t compulsory, there’s CHOICE sessions and the timetable’s obviously up for debate if you have an issue with it

★ An hour-long lunchbreak – yep. School finishes at 4:30 though (includes 15 mins of everyone cleaning their allocated area of the school – no cleaners to clean up after us!)

★ Pets – yess Huw the welsh science teacher usually has his dog running around!

★ First-aid lessons – yes ish.. we used to do these, haven’t seen them for a while

★ A choice of uniform – yes? no uniform unsurprisingly ; )
also pretty much no bullying. I think people only want others to suffer when they’re suffering

★ After-school clubs in all sorts of subjects
not really. Could happen if a few people asked for it but we have long days and everyone’s ready to go home I think

★ Hot dinners- yes hot lunches 90% of time

★ An iPad for each pupil. No! kinda silly though? That’d be about 30 billion pounds for every student

★ A football field - yep

★ Fewer tests – it still does GCSEs (unlike Acorn in Gloucestershire whichis worth looking at)

Some thoughts about why we need the school system REVOLUTIONised (from Charlie)

I was lying in bed this morning just thinking about my days at school, which for the most part I tell myself I was happy; I must have been; I had a couple of best friends who were really great and I got on with most of my teachers; my school was a pretty decent as far as schools go; but then I started replaying some memories. One particular memory is my drama teacher shouting at me so much that it brought me to tears, all just because of some coursework that he’d been told I hadn’t done. If he had stopped to let me speak for any point before his explosion of disappointment and anger, I could have saved him the trouble of shouting at me, as I’d done the work anyway; he just hadn’t got the news yet. So there I was walking away shaking and upset and emotionally punished for something that just wasn’t a problem anyway. This sort of authoritative disrespectful behaviour is pretty much encouraged by our education system. To be fair, this rarely happened to me: I usually got on with my work quietly and non-disruptively like the perfect little school boy. Too many kids are too quiet in school; it rewards non-collaboration, silence, obedience, uniformity.

I was then playing back a moment soon after that in a lesson with the same drama teacher; his problem is that he thinks he’s helping us - kind of like Nurse Ratched perhaps (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nurse_Ratched) But he's not really a horrible person at all, he's generally a nice bloke and rather friendly to me; he just takes the current educational system too seriously.

In the lesson:

So there are about 10 of us sat in a drama room, yearning to have something creative happening in it, but instead we’re being put through one of our intensive 2-hour essay training sessions; we talk about exams for a bit, then we have to get on with the task and complete three 30 minute essays in the remaining hour and a half (with absolutely no break in between). Doesn’t sound so bad, but just step back and think about what’s happening: there are 10 brilliantly creative people here, not because they want to write essays, but because they love to perform. But remember this was not a one off; instead of being allowed to practice what we want to try in life: acting and performing and being creative; we are being forced to spend all of our dedicated 3 hours of drama in the whole school week to train in efficient bullshitting of the third kind. These essays aren’t helping us think about anything interesting or useful – they’re just pure Ducking bullshaft, only created because drama had to be seen as an “academic” subject and not “just acting,” which of course is not good enough for the government, I mean training to jump through the hoops to becoming a teacher so you can teach how to become a teacher in teaching this ever spiralling loop of continuous useless vacuous bollocks is obviously more of a fulfilling use of time than actually acting and doing something DUCKING CREATIVE for a change, surely?! Then I imagined myself in that scene again just thinking about the usefulness of the task, but instead of blindly following orders, like I did too often in that school, I would decide, after about 30 minutes in, to stand up, put my pen down and just rip up the first essay that I had written, nice and loudly so everyone could hear what I was doing. Looking at my highly bemused teacher, I would say, “I don’t want to take part in this.”
He gets angry (his only available response) and tells me in a hush voice, “Charlie, continue.”
But I won’t continue today. “No. Look at us. What the DUCK are we doing? It’s weird, it’s not natural, I want to be creative, why are you stopping me be creative? I don’t want to waste my precious time on this beautiful planet taking part in this STUPID roundabout anti-educational game. I’m leaving. I’ll come back when you stop subjecting us to this ridiculous bollocks.” Then I would grab my things, go to a sign printing service and pay them all my (pre-Tory) EMA pocket money to make the biggest banner I can afford with this quote on it: “The only thing that interferes with my learning is my education.” – Albert Einstein.

I then hang it up at the school entrance the next morning...

I wish I did this.

A small aside: thanks to Michael Gove, I wouldn't even have the power to do this now, even if I wanted to.

Yeah well done, Michael.

Politics

One trait I love in clever people is  Not getting used to something just cause it's been that way for ages.

If it's ducked up  it's ducked up and it needs to change.

One ducked up thing in my opinion is the way our political parties talk about each other.

Almost without exception  it reminds me of immature children bickering about each other, spending all of their time and effort thinking about what failures they can highlight.

Wouldn't it just be really refreshing if the current government looked back on the previous office and just said "Yeah, i'd have probably done some things differently but hey, there's been some big challenges and tricky calls to make. So let's learn from these experiences and do our best to improve."

I just think it's a rubbish example to set for the public.

Blame isn't going to help anyone. Compassion and empathy will.

Working together, sharing ideas, sharing wisdom..

o2 funding, Website plans, Project outlines, etc

It's been a while since the last post, and only partly  because every facet of my life has been stuck in snow.

a lot of STUFF has transpired:

1. Spoke again to o2 Think Big and they definitely sound interested; I think it's going to happen - Come on guys! We want you in on this!
   
   
   
2. It's 4:10am and I've just cracked it... After countless days with Charlie brainstorming how we can create a website that provides all of the features that are needed to address the key problems in today's dysfunctional education system (particularly secondary school) it's happened.
   It literally just clicked and I could see it. It feels like every important button has a place now and I can finally imagine using the site. Either I am suffering sleep deprivation or I feel a bit like Mark Zuckerberg probably did when he invented Facebook (except that I'm sober)
   
   Here's the main layout which will soon be in a presentable form:
   
   
3. Outlines for the project have been drafted in many forms. Understandably (I hope) a massive and pretty original idea like this is fairly hard to summarise briefly in a nice shiny paragraph; something we've been griping with for a good while.
   
   I'd love your thoughts on these Google Docs as we pull them together:
   What exactly is CTF?
   Problems in education
   
   
   
4. Also while visiting my mum in Devon over Christmas, I met up with David Gribble, who is a bit of a legend; a kind of mentor for me and was heavily behind Sands School which I went to, and also the notorious Dartington Hall School...
   
   We watched a great documentary called Race To Nowhere about the american school system which I'd definitely recommend. Will check out Schooled and Waiting For Superman next. WeAreThePeopleWe'veBeenWaitingFor also pretty cool.
   
   
   
5. Finally I'm planning some more shooting:

• Ask a handful of headteachers what they point of school is
• Find some kids skipping school during lesson time and talk to them about why they're doing it
  
  

Logo + DfE videos + New Tory anti-modular

So we need a logo for CTF, and these were some of the ideas I had,

tell me what you think ;]

Luke's personal rants

My opinions on education can be split into 2:

1. The basic foundation it's based on (its core philosophy)
2. The countless individual techniques and practices I think are great (e.g. more extensive work experience)

It's important that Change The Future is not about me personally trying to indoctrinate the general public so that everyone agrees with me and makes schools like I think they should be.

(for a start, I am still naive to lots about how education is actually managed, beyond the walls of the school)

My fight is simply about actively involving young people in their education, not just being passengers in it.

I don't just mean choosing a module of shakespeare. Unfortunately the life they need to be prepared for  will demand bigger choices of them.

They need to be allowed to really take control of their path, thinking about the directions they can go; trying to guess what the options are at the end of each road

(and will they have to perservere through a boring journey to get there? are the roads rough, rocky and dangerous?) they need to learn to lead themselves as well as recognise dysfunctional systems; not just automatically become a cog in them!

Life is full of difficult decisions

and loads of people are RUBBISH at making decisions; pretty much always 'cause of the same reason; they were Not allowed to (or encouraged to) make important decisions when they were younger.

(Also growing up with people who are rubbish at making decisions doesn't help... also being involved in other peoples' difficult decisions does help)

Parenting

Is obviously a massive part of how we are shaped (or mis shapen) as we grow up.

This is why schools need to drop the 'one size fits all' approach and realise that not all kids come from the same place. It IS the role of the school to help provide where parents fall short. It's not that hard!

For me, it was just getting a hug (and the odd wrestle) from my teachers (mostly the male ones probably, as I grew up without a dad and never realised how that probably affected me)

Me stuff's all over the telly!

So that's good.

I've  just finished my own cut of the Millbank student protest. I would've finished it earlier, but I was frantically uploading stuff to Ch4, just a few minutes before the story aired on telly. Madness. Really need to get our own broadband soon and stop nicking the open Wifi from the house opposite :/

BROADCASTERS AND PAPERS: this footage is not available as News Access

I don't really feel like I've had time to reflect on the event... Didn't even have enough time for a shower last night (getting back home about 1am and working on the footage til about 6).

What's gonna change?

Obviously tuition fees will MASSIVELY rise; double or triple depending on where you study.

So that's really bad for students, but then as I understand, the paying back has been significantly improved for the student: only when you're on a decent wage - unless perhaps you live in London - 21k if I recall, do you then pay anything back.

I'm really struggling to get a clear before & after on the policy; can anyone help?

I feel a bit detached having just returned to UK politics from my 6 week documentary shoot..

Taken from here:

Under the proposals, students will start repaying their loans at 9% of their income at a real rate of interest when they earn £21,000, up to inflation plus 3% for those earning £41,000 or more, with outstanding loans written off after 30 years.

Students who pay off their loans early could be hit with a financial penalty.

A UCU analysis concludes that a graduate earning the national average salary of £31,916 would have a 19.3% higher tax bill than colleagues who had not been to university, for the duration of their student loan repayments.

Teachers, police inspectors and doctors could see their bills rise by around a quarter, it claimed.

The British Medical Association said medical students would be left with debts of nearly £70,000.

o2 Think Big got back to me during the protest saying they're very interested in supporting us. If that happens I will SMILE.

Charlie checks out the new Department for Education website

Applied to o2's think big jobby today. Hope something comes of that. It looks really cool.

I also filmed charlie having a play (as a young person) on the DoE website; THE official website for education in the UK. You would have thought it'd be a bit more about young people...

Here's an example of a website that's not even specifically about young people (like education SHOULD be) and it's still 74 times more exciting.

www.wearewhatwedo.com

---

I've been thinking a lot about The social network, how in a way, this is the most exciting part of this whole project, because it's kinda all in our heads, and there's every reason we'll create the next big thing and massively improve our education system forever. It's like being pregnant. I feel like...a pregnant man. Course it might all go tits up and be a £35 grand website that's only used by me and a couple of my mates who feel sorry for me.

Latest ideas

1. Facebook app
   Or is it even an app? Something that can save you having to log in, it just pulls all your details out your FB profile (verifying your age and stuff). Also recognises your school - "would you like to review your school (or raise problems with it/suggest improvements/view what other people have put)?
   It could also say which of your friends also went to your school and would you like to invite them to Change The Future?
   It'd also promote CTF on your wall...
2. Google
   One day we've got to partner with google... They also have a database of all the schools in the UK, so if Nick Gribb doesn't ever get back to me I'll give up and try google instead.
   My dream is that the young peoples' school reviews will have an 'overral rating' which google applies (along with the conclusion from the review) to each school, so like, on Google maps, you can click a school, and similar to when you're searching for hostels or food places, you get a review pulled from Change The Future.

The thing is, either I'm completely deluded, or we really do need CTF, because school is fairly crap for most people, and it doesn't need to be that way.

For some it's a total trauma, but for most maybe, I think it's largely enjoyable at the time, often cause of friends but also you do obviously get a few amazing teachers who make all the difference...

BUT you still have those problems

• You forget the vast majority of what you learn (almost immediately)
• The vast majority of what you learn is not very relevant in your day to day life, or applicable to the things you want to do
• There's so much we're passionate about and we would learn 10 times more if we were allowed to focus more on THOSE things rather than being forced to be 'well rounded' (basically be taught all the same stuff as the next person) ...Obviously it's good to have broad knowledge, but if it gets to the point where the student is switching off and doesn't relate to it at all and is forgetting it (even getting punished for distraction and restlessness) is it worth it?
• School could be so much more fun. I really thought the purpose of life is to have fun. What's the best thing a good job and good income and good lifestyle can do for you, if not make you happy?? So why are we all obsessed with this idea that we have to endure loads of stuff we HATE in order to suddenly reach a place where everything's great and happy?!
  Does that REALLY happen, or should we just start practicing doing what makes us happy before we forget how to do it anymore and get old and boring and locked into a lifestyle of crap we hate?

I just hope that there is some magical way that you can get student + exstudents who really don't give a shit right now, to start thinking about how good stuff COULD be in school, in their education... and see their education as a beautiful, powerful thing that can bring them everything they need to get where they wanna be, not this chore they just have to turn up to and deliver work to so they don't get in trouble.

I think there is a way, but I need to learn more about apathetic people and how to reach them.

Change The Future goes to parliament

One of our main supporters, Big Challenge, invited us to the houses of parliament where we met lots of other prize winners for this year and last year, did a bit of mingling and wandered about a pretty swish .....apartment(?) it was a very old beautiful sort of entertainment suite but had a fairly massive bed in one room, so I'm not sure.

ANYway, there were some pretty inspiring people there, and a heap of lords and baronesses as well as about 30 people working in goverment organisations.

Charlie and I split up so we could cover more ground and shake more hands, but in reality I spent most of my time trying to push other people out of the way of Tim Loughton, as he was pretty up our street working for the Dept for Education... Still waiting to hear back from Nick Gribb who he put us on to regarding getting hold of a database of schools across the UK...

Need to do a heap more fundraising. Probably looking into o2 think big next, there's some great stuff on there.

Also got a bit excited after Googling 'Fix the world' and stumbling across Wearewhatwedo; talking to them at the moment too. Hopefully we'll collaborate in some way. they're pretty overwhelmingly massive though.

The beginning

to our blog for Change The Future.

Check the tab at the top to learn more about who we are and what on earth we're doing.
(It's still a draft outline, so share any feedback you have on it)

This whole project is yours. We're just your full time staff while you're fixing the education system.

So we've got about £7.5 grand and we need about 35. If you're rich, please give us some money. Thanks.

Also any other advice is beyond welcome; particularly anything to do with finding more funding...

Also we could use some extra hands, but we need the right people.
If you've got some time and you're organised, please give us a shout! :)

Back to planning the CTF website. It's literally going to be like Facebook's little brother...