Background to the development of Next Practice

What will tomorrow bring? Or the next day? Or the next year?

These are questions that face us as individuals everyday. We don't know everything for certain about the immediate future, but we often make plans to ensure that, as far as possible, what happens is what we want to happen.

What about children and young people growing up today? What will the next year, the next five, ten, twenty or even fifty years bring for them? Technology, environmental challenges, cultural and social change all seem to be impacting on how we live at an ever increasing rate. We don't know what is round the corner for them, but many of us try and make some kind of personal plans for our children's futures.

But how will education face the future? What kind of systems will be needed in five, ten, twenty or fifty years - and who will decide?

There are many organisations worldwide dedicated to predicting future trends in demographics, climate, monetary policy, food production, technology, medicine, science and society generally. Increasingly, instead of just trying to predict what the future will be, successful organisations are combining predictions with techniques to engage their decision-makers in structured and thoughtful speculation about future possibilities. This helps prepare them and their organisations for whatever futures may come - and, crucially, helps them plan to create the futures that they want to see.

In 2003, The Innovation Unit started to work on "the future" in conjunction with Demos and the National College for School Leadership. Together we created FutureSight, a toolkit which contains workshop materials for disciplined and creative thinking about the future. The pack draws on the Schooling for Tomorrow project that was first developed by the Office for Economic Co-operation and Development and encourages people to look at trends in society that are likely to affect the future of schools, consider what impact combinations of these trends could have on the future shape of schooling and then construct together a 'preferred future' based on their own beliefs and values.

The Innovation Unit then took this work a step further. Building on the FutureSight project, we set out to co-design, with practitioners, what we have called Next Practice projects to seek out radical new solutions to the key challenges facing our education system.

We are aiming to develop ways of supporting practitioners to engage in systematic, disciplined innovation within a culture of challenge. In our view, this kind of innovation arising from the work of practitioners is essential if the education system is to build on the recent improvements in school standards, achieve the five outcomes set out in Every Child Matters and begin to shape the kind of education that will be needed in the future.

We are drawing on ideas from outside education and using disciplined, creative processes to encourage the development of new solutions. The processes we are using are not often applied to education, although the techniques are common in the design and creative industries. 

top