This page is still in development.
11-14 Education - RSA 'Opening Minds'
The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce) - commonly known as the RSA work on the new curriculum started with a project called Opening Minds which investigated the way young people are educated in Britain today.
Opening Minds Conference - Audio
The Opening Minds IMPACT conference was held on 26 April 2007. The conference covered the achievements and potential of the Opening Minds programme, using film, student speakers and teachers to provide an authentic and engaging account.
You can now listen to the conference by downloading the two MP3s below -
Part 1: Welcome, Students perspectives and Q&A
Download the MP3 (20MB)
Part 2: Impact and Update, Teachers' perspective and Q&A
Download the MP3 (21MB)
News
The new curriculum review was recently launched at the British Library in London, urging parents, teachers and pupils to offer their views on proposals made by the QCA. Read the RSA's response to the QCA curriculum review (PDF 15KB).
'Opening minds, giving young people a better chance' is now available.
It gives an update on progress since the evaluation report was published in June 2003 and highlights the experiences of 8 schools using the RSA Opening minds competence framework.
The RSA has recently produced a Guide to Implementation and this is now available as a free download from the Resources page. As with all the Opening Minds materials, this Guide is a suggestion and schools are encouraged to adapt it to suit their own circumstances.
The Curriculum Network website will be substantially revised over the next couple of months and we hope that this will make it easier for new schools to implement the Opening Minds framework of competences.
The main findings coming out of this report echo all the benefits seen by the pilot schools (reported in Opening minds, taking stock).
Benefits seen by pilot schools include:
- less low-level disruption in the classroom
- students are more mature and more motivated, ready to learn
- students and teachers enjoy the Opening minds lessons
The report costs £10 (inclusive of all postage and packing) and is available from the RSA:
publications@rsa.org.uk
+44(0)20 7451 6862
Opening minds is a report, a project and a philosophy. It sprang from a conviction that the way young people are being educated was becoming increasingly distanced from their, and the country's, real needs. What Opening minds the report identified, in 1999, was a real mismatch between what the National Curriculum tries to do and what education for the new century should be trying to do.
The argument runs, in short, that an information-driven curriculum is unlikely to be able to equip young people adequately for adult life in the new century. The National Curriculum is this kind of curriculum. It struggles to cope with the competing demands of subjects and the struggle gets harder as the volume of information increases. Meanwhile it neglects the development of the competences and skills that young people will need to survive and succeed in their future world (competences for learning, for managing information, for relating to people, for managing situations and for citizenship).
Click here for more details of the five categories of competences. Each category contains a number of individual competences, which are expressed in terms of what a school student could achieve having progressed through the curriculum.
Traditional curriculum thinking argues that competences of this kind will develop out of effective subject teaching. Opening minds argues they will not develop in a systematic and progressive way unless they are the explicit outcomes of education, outcomes that are supported, rather than led by, subject knowledge. This – Opening minds the philosophy - posits a very different approach to the organisation of teaching and learning.
Opening minds starts from a competence framework that aims to meet the individual's needs in the personal, social and employment worlds. The underlying analysis – in the earlier Redefining Work project – indicated that in practice, competences for life and competences for work are converging, and will continue to do so. The RSA curriculum is for life, not just for work.
This point was well taken by the schools which asked to join in Opening minds the project. For students of all kinds and levels of ability they sought a new model to reinvigorate both staff and students. All were volunteers. We challenged traditional models of teacher organisation and behaviour as well as deeply-rooted conventions about curriculum. Nevertheless, statutory requirements were met in all schools.
The result has been radical change in the structure of teaching and learning. The schools have experienced some quite stunning improvements in both student and teacher motivation and solid gains in student performance by conventional measures, to say nothing of real progress in competence development. Teachers felt they were doing what they came in to teaching to do, and students relished their learning and come back for more.
At the same time, the project raises major issues, not least about the culture of the education system. The schools' emphasis on sharing with students the objectives of the project, and the respect shown to young people as learners, have paid dividends; students notice the difference. Opening minds has reduced the professional isolation of teachers and questioned the grip of the subject structure on secondary education.
