The Co-operative Schools movement has grown rapidly in recent years as government policy has opened up opportunities to develop new models of governance. The idea behind such schools is that they are underpinned by the cooperative values of self-help, self-responsibility, democracy, equality, equity, and solidarity. All of the main stakeholders – staff, parents and students – have a voice in the school which ensures a degree of democratic accountability and helps to root the school within the local community. There are currently more than 800 cooperative schools across the UK with more in the pipeline.

www.co-op.ac.uk

www.co-operativeschools.coop

Forest Schools is a framework for giving all children regular opportunities to develop confidence and self-esteem through hands-on learning experiences in a woodland or natural environment with trees. It was first developed in Scandinavia and is now used by thousands of practitioners across the UK and further afield. This approach to learning compliments the wider context of outdoor and woodland education and can be adopted by any school with access to outdoor spaces.

www.forestschoolassociation.org

The values underpinning a human scale approach are about putting children and young people at the heart of the education process and ensuring that school structures are organised in such a way that children and young people can be known, valued and supported as individuals. ‘Humanity of scale’ and the ‘primacy of relationships’ are thus seen as key factors in the design of schools. At a time when there is growing pressure on schools to increase in size in order to benefit from economies of scale, human scale schools offer an antidote by showing that the values of democracy, justice and respect – for people and planet – can be more effectively realised within smaller scale learning communities.

www.hse.org.uk

Learn to Lead is a model of student participation in schools called ‘co-production’. It goes beyond participation through volunteering or being elected to the school council to an approach which involves everyone, not just the brightest and most vocal. There is a shift of focus away from what the school thinks is important to what the students prioritise. This requires a move towards an institutional culture where young people have some autonomy and responsibility. Students are trained, supported and given the space to take the lead to bring about the positive changes they wish to see within their school and beyond.

www.learntolead.org.uk

The Learning without Limits project, based at the University of Cambridge, was set up in 1999 with the aim of investigating and furthering approaches to teaching and learning that do not rely on the belief that children’s ability is fixed. The project is inspired by a body of research which demonstrates that ideas based on a view of children as having fixed, innate ‘ability’ or ‘potential’ can have damaging effects on their learning. The Learning without Limits project works with a network of schools in the UK and internationally to sustain and strengthen a more optimistic and empowering view of learners and learning.

www.learningwithoutlimits.educ.cam.ac.uk

The Unicef UK Rights Respecting Schools Award puts children’s rights at the heart of school life. It started in 2006 and more than 4000 schools – nursery, primary and secondary, schools for children with special educational needs and pupil referral units – are now registered across the whole of the UK to promote a child rights-based approach and to share good practice. The aim of the programme is to help schools to use the United Nations Convention on the Rights of the Child as their values framework, thereby embedding children’s rights in their ethos and culture. The programme is based on principles of equality, dignity, respect, non-discrimination and participation and everyone in the school community learns about children’s rights by putting them into practice every day.

www.unicef.org.uk/rights-respecting-schools/

The Opening Minds framework was developed by the Royal Society of Arts, Manufacture and Commerce (RSA) in 1999 and is being used in over 200 schools across the country. It  is a competence based approach which enables students not just to acquire subject knowledge but to understand, use and apply it in the within the context of their wider learning and life. It encourages innovative and integrated ways of thinking about education and the curriculum. Teachers design and develop a curriculum for their own schools based round the development of five key competences:

• Citizenship
• Learning
• Managing information
• Relating to people
• Managing situations

It aims to be a holistic and coherent way of learning which allows students to make connections and apply knowledge across different subject areas.

www.rsaopeningminds.org.uk

The basis of democratic schools is that children have a say in what they learn, when, how and where they learn it and in how their school is run. Given the current belief in the importance of teaching children about citizenship, democratic schools take this idea to its natural conclusion. They allow children to make decisions, to take responsibility for those decisions and to learn from the consequences of those decisions through experience.

www.eudec.org

Célestin Freinet was born in France in 1896 and died in 1966. His ideas about education were underpinned by his concept of “productive work”. Students were encouraged to go out into the locality to study both the natural environment and their local community and the results of their investigations were compiled into journals. It was a child-centred approach with an emphasis on working cooperatively. The class met as a group on a regular basis to coordinate their activities and to address any problems. Freinet’s ideas can be seen in action in schools in a number of countries such as France, Germany and Finland.

www.fimem-freinet.org/en

Montessori is a worldwide movement associated particularly with early years education, although increasing numbers of schools are being extended to accept children beyond nursery age. The inspiration behind the movement was Maria Montessori (1870–1952), an Italian doctor, who turned her attention to education. Montessori believed that children are naturally motivated to learn and that they should be allowed to develop and learn at their own, self-directed pace without adult interference. The role of the teacher or ‘directress’ is to guide each child’s progress and to provide the appropriate environment to facilitate the learning process. Today there are over 800 Montessori registered schools in the UK.

www.montessori.org.uk

www.montessorisociety.org.uk

Reggio Emilia in northern Italy is home to an inspirational model of early years education which, over the past thirty years, has spread throughout the world. The approach is based on the work of Piaget, Vygotsky and Dewey whose ideas were developed and applied by Loris Malaguzzi. Malaguzzi’s image of the child was ‘rich in potential, strong, powerful, competent and, most of all, connected to adults and other children’. Children are seen as having rights as well as needs. The schools are run democratically by parents, teachers and the local community. The emphasis is on following children’s interests and allowing them to determine what is learned. Parents are involved from the outset and so the approach becomes embedded in the way that parents bring up their children and this is one of the keys to its success.

www.reggiochildren.it

www.sightlines-initiative.com

Human Scale Education believes that smallness of scale helps to facilitate the interpersonal relationships that enable children and young people to become confident and resourceful individuals, capable of respecting and caring for each other and for the environment. The charity’s motto, ‘Education as if people matter’, is taken from E. F. Schumacher’s Small is Beautiful – Economics as if People Mattered. Member schools (in the state sector as well as in the alternative sector) subscribe in varying degrees to Human Scale Education’s philosophy, which holds that education should comprise a number of essential elements – positive relationships, a holistic approach to learning, democratic participation, involvement of parents and the wider community and a commitment to a fairer and more sustainable world.- all of which depend on small structures to be put into practice.

www.hse.org.uk

The Steiner Waldorf School movement comprises around 1000 schools, 2000 kindergartens and over 65 teacher training institutes around the world. The movement dates from 1919 when Rudolf Steiner (1861–1925) founded his first school in Stuttgart in Germany, called the Waldorfschule. In the UK there are currently 31 schools, 43 kindergartens and 7 teacher training courses.

Rudolf Steiner saw the purpose of education as being to help the child make sense of the world and this is achieved through a holistic approach. He believed that education comprised three main strands: it had to be practical, artistic and develop the intellect. Developing a healthy relationship with the natural world is a key element and a theme which prevails across Steiner Waldorf education.

www.steinerwaldorf.org

It is estimated that over 40,000 children (and possibly many more) are now being educated at home across the UK. This movement started with a few pioneering families in the 1950s and has grown exponentially, helped by developments in ICT which make it easy to access online resources, information and support. It is a completely legal option in the UK. The legislation makes two things clear: first, that education is the responsibility of parents and second, that it can happen at school or otherwise. This clause was the inspiration for the name of the first support organisation for home educators, Education Otherwise, which was founded in the 1970s.

www.educationotherwise.net/