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Change the Future

Luke Clegg

“A successful school is one that gets the highest grades out of its students.”

This is creed of the current system and it’s wrong. A school should be considered successful if it gives its students the tools they need to have a successful life, and Change The Future believes a successful life simply means being happy. Keep in mind the fact that most people who are happy also enjoy a life in which they contribute as part of a community, tend to lead careers they have an interest in, and have an awareness of the world they are part of.

Unfortunately, a lot of students aren’t happy in school. What is more, many that are happy are still not getting what they need from school to help them remain happy when they enter the ‘real world’ (for example social skills, independence, inspiration, community participation, curiosity-driven learning and such).

There are many problems in UK education, and the strongest weapon we have as a country is our young people. They are on the ground, inside the schools, using the tools school should have equipped them with. Young people have the answers but the problem is we’re not giving them the opportunity to tell us about them.

Too many students just follow a set path through education, and when the path ends they often feel lost, having little idea what they really care about, what their unique talents are and how to get where they really want to be.

Change The Future intends to work too put this right. These are its objectives:

• to help share best practice by showcasing pioneering approaches to education and how issues such as bullying and truancy are being tackled differently across schools,

• to listen to young people talking about the things they’d like to change in education, and to categorise and quantify their contributions so we can find what their major objectives are,

• to inspire and encourage young people to think consciously about their education and what relevance it has (or should have) to their lives

• to be THE place for discussion on education and collaborative planning on how to implement things, welcoming input from young and old.

www.ChangeTheFuture.co.uk is our website (currently being designed by experts from the European Commission, with funding and support from several of our partners). But Change the Future isn’t just a website.

These are some of the other things it does:

• it is making a TV documentary to be called Schools Of Thought. This is already well into preproduction, and has a trailer already prepared at www.SOTdoc.com. This documentary aims to summarise the messages and research that show the need for a revolution. It also includes an amazing human story, taking students on an adventure through massively varying school systems and giving them the power for a short time to run a school themselves, deciding how things should be done.

• PassionWorks Productions will work under Change The Future to help young people around the country to create short, simple showcasing videos highlighting the unusual and pioneering things their schools are doing.

• Change The Future will also be holding workshops in schools encouraging young people to think consciously about how education is relevant to their lives and how it should be shaped. ! These workshops will includes a session on computer, introducing them to the Change The Future website which supports many ways in which they can contribute.

• We will work with student unions and other bodies to hold events, lobby policymakers, and in as many other ways as we can afford.

We currently have around £7,500 but we need £35,000 to implement all of the core elements of Change The Future.

Change The Future is a group of five young people (aged 16-25) with very different backgrounds in education. We have all arrived at the same conclusion: – decisions about education are made by old people who aren't the ones being educated. It's time to give young people, who are the experts, a chance to feed back in an organised way, with an ongoing dialogue.

To avoid wasting all this energy we are setting up a system which will include young people in shaping education policy. The main driver will be a website similar to Facebook, and we need more volunteers to help in this area. If you care a lot about education and might have some time to get involved give me a call at 078 278 111 39.

http://changethefutureblog.blogspot.com

 

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