11-14 Education - RSA 'Opening Minds'
The Royal Society for the encouragement of Arts, Manufactures and Commerce (RSA) Opening Minds Curriculum aims to help schools to provide young people with the real world skills or competencies they need to thrive in the real world.
Information on the impact of Opening Minds is available on the RSA's website.
Opening Minds is a broad framework through which schools can deliver the content of the national curriculum in a creative and flexible way so that young people leave school able to thrive in and to shape the real world.
Opening Minds was developed by the RSA at the turn of the millennium in response to a belief that the way young students were being educated was becoming increasingly detached from their needs as citizens of the 21st century.
It is based on five sets of competencies, including Citizenship, Learning, Managing Information, Managing Situations and Relating to People.
What is the impact of Opening Minds?
Opening Minds is now being used in over 200 schools across the country and is growing rapidly. In 2008 the RSA opened the RSA Academy in Tipton which is the first school to be designed around the principles of Opening Minds.
Schools using Opening Minds tell us that their students are more engaged with school, more independent as learners, have developed real world skills and have higher self esteem.
The RSA has produced a Guide to Implementation and this is now available as a free download from its website. As with all the Opening Minds materials, this Guide is a suggestion and schools are encouraged to adapt it to suit their own circumstances.
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 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.
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 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.
For further information visit the RSA website at www.thersa.org