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The ScholaLiberum project is founded on the back of much research and a long history of successful projects, each illustrating a dimension of the project's detail. From a growing list:
The roots of ScholarLiberum go back to a document presented, at their equest, to the Department of Education in England. Importantly it was proposing a new form of school that would develop protocols for learning at or near home in the event of either a pandemic, or of hostile and murderous attacks of conventional schools - as were seeing around the world at the time.
"SCHOLA LIBERUM a free school for the third millennium"<-- click to enlarge
Notschool.net
Was our fully virtual, state-funded alternative education provision, that began in 1998 and ran for more than a decade with around 1,000 students per year. It was widely praised and studied, showing just how good children might be, given the right circumstances."Our research has developed a clear, scalable, affordable and economically viable model which works. The "complex recipe" of Notschool.net is critical to this success." - report to DfES 2001
The eVIVA project
State-funded by the UK's Qualification and Curriculum Authority, challenged children to set their own attainment targets, to evidence their progress towards them through posted milestones on-line and to be interrogated about 'when ready" through their phones, via an AI / voice recognition engine. The teacher moderation and peer validation was robust and valid. Children posted tougher targets than the curriculum anticipated for them, yet always attained them.Today the underpinning technology is normal and simple. Back then it was remarkable and complex!
Beachschool.org
Beachschool is about learning, play and science. It runs without premises on the beach all year and engages its normally pre-school children in the exploration of their local habitat, flora and fauna. A parent writes:"Fantastic outdoor educational fun on our doorstep! Brilliant morning, finding sea creatures, making beach volcanos, learning about hot and cold water reactions along with so much more and not forgetting toasting marshmallows!"
There are very many organisations offering high quality curriculum focussed learning resources, - from the Khan Academy to BBC's Bitesize. Content from these many, many providers is ubiquitous, needs curation of course, but is typically generously funded as part of an organisations outreach remit. We intend to use all the best of these, with appropriate guidance and curation.Learnometers
The Learnometer project has for 5 years been exploring the impact of environmental factors like CO2, temperature, pollution and more in learners' cognitive performance.Millions of hours of data from learning spaces, ranging from teenage homework spaces to education's examination rooms, has shown the impact of the aggregation of small gains - impact on performance, behaviour, engagement, alertness and much more. We see IoT (Internet of Things) devices with underlying algorithms - like the Learnometer - as crucial to making the learning environments of ScholaLiberum the very best they can be.
Overall the data from school learning spaces have shown they are typically a long way from excellent in terms of their physical environments although when given the data, schools often make remarkable progress. Children deserve better.
Tesco SchoolNet 2000 (TSN2K)
Our Tesco SchoolNet 2000 project entered the Guinness Book of World Records as the then-largest Internet learning project in the world. It challenged children in homes, schools and communities to engage in monthly tasks (for example, finding and interviewing the most famous person where you live and writing online about their schooldays and experiences).The project ran across communities - a little computer lab in every Tesco supermarket - and ran across all ages. The branding of Browser the Cat was on every carrier bag and many of the lorries. As with all these projects it was made by many complex details (the letters of introduction to the celebrities for example, together with the child safety structures around that activity).
link and details coming soon
Stage not Age
Lindfield Learning Village is a state school in New South Wales pioneering many new approaches to learning. We have been involved since the initial proposition some 5 years back. The school - which from opening has enjoyed a waiting list of thousands of families - has many important features but in particular, runs a Stage not Age approach to learning. It is also a mixed-age school, all-through. Their website (the students created it) comments that:"An "all through" school encourages daily connections between older and younger learners. Older students can be mentors to younger students and younger students see the learning they can look forward to."
ScholaLiberum clusters will always be mixed age, and Stage not Age.
want to know more?
If you want to know more, to be involved, to become a Learning Cluster, or even to enquire from a national government position, please mail us now. We will stay in touch and answer your questions.
We will not use your email to sell you anything, or to sell you.
this page created June 24, 2016 by Prof Stephen Heppell, and last updated on Thursday, May 14, 2020 19:07
