It’s easy to get the idea that the future of education – and indeed the great learning revolution – will come about mainly as the result of students being able to watch a multitude of videos of lectures anytime, anywhere. The argument goes that it’s a pointless waste of money for thousands of professors and lecturers around the world to be delivering the same content when learners could instead watch videos presented by just the very best experts in their field.

I’ve nothing against watching lectures on video, but it concerns me that as a result there’s a good possibility that the number of academic staff retained by learning organisations will come to be drastically cut, at the expense of a quality learning experience for students.

Now why do we go to watch live sports events? Why do we go and see bands and orchestras live? Why do we go to the theatre or the cinema? After all, these are all things that we can easily watch on our TV screens and tablets, anytime, anywhere. But the fact is that the shared, live experience is ultimately far more powerful, enjoyable and memorable.

I recently attended Learning Without Frontiers 12, but was only able to catch a few of the talks, so I’ve been watching the others online. Now the online videos are well worth viewing, but the sessions I really remember – and that had the most impact on me – were the ones I actually saw live. There’s nothing that compares with that personal interaction between the real people who were there – the sense of occasion, the shared consciousness of the audience, and the feeling of direct participation.

It’s the same in the classroom. Good quality teaching and learning involves so much more than the delivery of a series of facts and exercises determined by a stranger standing at the front. It involves a personal interaction – a direct exchange of electro-chemical energy between two or more living beings who have a shared understanding of what makes the others tick.

It may be that as a result of lectures delivered by video, teaching staff are given more contact time with smaller groups of students which extends the quality of that personal interaction, which would of course be great. Or they just might be made redundant as a result of the latest round of public service cost-cutting.

Image credit: BenjaminThompson

Today’s futures forecast – major disruption is expected…

Once upon a time, not so very long ago, things didn’t change very much. Tomorrow would be very much like today, which was much the same as yesterday and the day before was. But slowly, ever since around the 1960s, the rate of change has started to speed up a bit. The pace really began to pick up in the 1980s and 1990s, but even then many people believed things would stop changing after a while and go back to normal – and after all computers “are just another tool aren’t they“? But things just kept on changing, and increasingly we started to accept the fact that frequent change was inevitable, albeit in evolutionary, predictable ways that were perhaps not too difficult to cope with. Today, a few brave souls are finally beginning to realise that tomorrow’s changes are becoming increasingly unpredictable, discontinuous and disruptive, and that the reality is that tomorrow is unlikely to be like anything we’ve ever had to deal with before.

Predicting the future is, in itself, not that difficult – science fiction writers have being doing it for years. But what they consistently get wrong is how long it is going to be before their visions become a mainstream reality. 1984 is still on its way. The voyage to Jupiter due to depart in 2001 has been indefinitely postponed. And somehow I don’t think that by November 2019 Los Angeles if going to be full of flying cars, or off-world colony replicants for Harrison Ford to identify and terminate. But one day, I’m sure all these things will come to pass.

Meanwhile this video link appeared the other day. A group of schoolchildren had asked delegates at the LWF12 conference for their views on the future – what it will look like, and what are the skills that will be needed to be successful? Full credit to the school and children involved in making the video – however many of the responses were somewhat predictable – digital literacy, more engaging computer technology,  global communication through utopian technological fixes, or the more dystopian, ‘we’ll all have to save more to survive’. And it may be more honest, but is it acceptable anymore to admit you don’t really know what the future will bring?

Now, given that I’ve had more time than the delegates did to think of clever answers, what struck me was that they were generally speaking providing essentially wild, uninformed guesses, aspirations and fears. Which is worrying really, because, assuming things continue to change discontinuously at an increasingly fast pace, my prediction is that one of the most essential successful survival skills of the 21st century will be the ability to anticipate and predict what’s going to happen next, and even more importantly, when. And that’s something that’s yet to make it onto the curriculum.

Futures forecasting is, of course, by no means new, and there are plenty of well established techniques and methodologies. Essentially there are two main approaches. The first is ‘predictive’, where subjective guesses are made about expected desirable and undesirable outcomes, supported by likely evolutionary time-scales, projections and statements made about the social, economic, technical and political circumstances that will need to be in place for that particular future to occur. The second type is a ‘predictive’ forecast based on detailed and sophisticated data analysis and extrapolation of current market and social, cultural, and economic trends and cycles – and ‘web analytics metrics‘ derived from computer-generated user behaviours is an approach that’s already very big business. A third approach is called ‘scenario writing’, which usually involves a mixture of normative and predictive forecasts.

In our future world the holy grail for our global corporations is to be able to predict what you are going to do or want before you even know it yourself, and then push it at you. And as a result we are going to need to be a lot clearer about what sort of a future we really desire for ourselves and others. More than ever before we are going to need a rich mixture of creative and logical thought and action to be able to survive by knowing how to learn from the past to understand the present and anticipate the future. And a new hybrid approach to the recently denationalised subjects of Design and Technology and Information Technology would be an excellent place to start.

The reviews, posts and tweets about Learning Without Frontiers 2012  (or LWF12 as it has become better known) that have already started appearing are, as one would expect, all busily documenting and commenting on what various speakers at LWF had to say. So of course I’ve decided to be different. Indeed I’ll admit that this year I didn’t go primarily to listen to the speakers – and in fact I would have heard more of them had I just stayed at home and watched the free on-line stream.

So why did I go? Well partly for the ‘networking’ and catching up with old friends opportunities, but mainly to see the inflatable domes and, would you believe, the signage system?  It makes a change for an organisation to invest in the design of the conference environment, and, for me anyway, it made a real difference.

Up on the balcony of Olympia’s National Hall, the main conference area was surrounded by an encampment of what were called ‘pop-up’ domes, pods and salons – futuristic inflatable structures – to house trade shows and locations for breakout presentations by various organisations. At long last, the Space Age we were promised in the 1960 and 70′s seems finally to arrived – well at LWF anyway!

During my visit I was lucky enough to be accompanied by Carla Turchini of Turchini Design who had created the conference programmes and the signage system for the event – that all-important necessity that ensures you end up in the right place at the right time – or not as in the case of many conferences I’ve attended. She told me…..

‘For LWF12 the brief was to design and produce very large wall panels to welcome, inform and direct the visitors to, about and through the Conference and the Festival events. The white inflatable domes and pods would be lit only by coloured lighting so we decided to merge the big wall panels into the surrounding darkness by using black as the background colour, allowing the big bright orange or white lettering to come through the darkness. A subtle dark grey outline representation of a dome on the black background, visually linked the wall panels to the futuristic structures in view beyond. Meanwhile all timetable signs outside each pod, dome or the main conference theatre were designed for maximum legibility with a white background and alternating light grey and white rows.’

The event may or may not prove to determine the Future of Learning, but it certainly showed the way ahead for 21st Century conferences!

And if you do want to learn more about what was said in the main conference, here are some good places to start:

http://dajbconf.posterous.com/learning-without-frontiers-2012-lwf12

http://steve-wheeler.blogspot.com/2012/01/border-crossings.html

Apple’s announcement today of their entry into the on-line textbook market is generally being greeted by educationalists – and the media – all over the world as an exiting, positive move forward, even though in many cases it will be some years before all their students actually have iPads, let alone iPad textbooks. Educational publishing is indeed an industry in need of disruption – but has Apple got it right?

Now before continuing I had better state that I earn most of my living writing, editing and designing educational resources, so I’m not exactly neutral on this matter!

The original vision was that Apple would employ the best textbook writers to create content that would then be provided for free. That I would have no problem with, but it now seems the reality is that it’s more of a collaboration with existing educational publishers. And as such it’s certainly not going to be free! At the same time, Apple probably doesn’t realise is that over the past ten years the educational publishing industry has been severely squeezed: author’s royalties have been reduced, permanent editorial and design staff have been laid off, and marketing budgets slashed. As a result, the overall quality of many textbooks is now less good than it was in the 1990s. Although of course for the publishing industry the potential savings of an eBook in terms of paper, printing and distribution – which make up the main cost of a book – will be substantial.

The fact is that as a result most of today’s existing textbooks may be filled with facts and figures and the occasional photo, but the quality of authorship, editing, layout and illustration and overall pedagogy is generally poor. Text is often a jumble of unstructured knowledge, understanding and activity and lacking in clarity and conciseness. Artwork is cheap, and usually not that cheerful. The imperative to turn the page to find out what happens next is rarely evident.

Meanwhile  the majority of multimedia CD’s and websites produced over the past ten years are little better, if not in many cases worse. With a few notable exceptions, adding novelty animations, confusing navigational routes and electronically marked multiple choice questions has done little to improve the quality of learning. A well prepared, easily digestible ‘static’ text together with closely related and skillfully executed artwork and photographs can be just as ‘engaging’, if not more so, than any so-called multimedia interactive experience. The most important interaction needs to be with the mind, not the machine.

Ah – but then there’s the new iBooks Author. So now teachers will find it easy to publish their own resources -assuming of course they have the time, and a Mac with the very latest version of OSX.  Great. I expect some will even be quite good. But the rest will be rubbish. Ask any educational publisher and they’ll tell you that most unsolicited submissions from teachers are little more than photocopied worksheets or bullet-point Powerpointless presentations they’ve produced for their own classes, which may work well when they are present to fill in the gaps, but don’t make a lot of sense when they are not. And the fact that the provided templates look like more of a glorified, unimaginative and corporate Word file isn’t going to help. The initial titles appear to be a long way from being any sort of ‘magical experience’ that today’s highly media-literate children are going to get very thrilled about.

Maybe the real breakthrough that would really make a difference would be a suitable Help! file entitled ‘How to prepare a high quality educational resource‘?

So Apple’s announcements today have not made me go ‘Wow!’. They do little more than automate the existing idea of a traditional textbook or a multimedia CD. Where is the integration with social networking, the access to collaborative learning and on-the-fly e-portfolios? In its present format I don’t see them having a substantial or disruptive impact on educational publishers, or on the way teachers teach and learners learn. It’s yet another case of New technology: old learning. Let’s hope future upgrades are more adventurous and herald real change.

Sadly, nothing could be further from the truth. No technology teacher under the age of around forty has ever been in the position of having the freedom to determine their own course content, and suddenly asking them to do so is a little like sending a domesticated animal out into the wild for the first time. I suspect most IT and D&T courses will in reality stay well within the safe confines of exactly where they are now. The lack of expertise in the current workforce means that there’s going to continue to be a lot of working in Wood and Word for some time yet.

In a few schools there will be outstanding exceptions, and enlightened enthusiasts will form collective departments that use the time to create new schemes of work that imaginatively merge IT and D&T to explore the creative processes of designing innovative electronic products, services and systems that are easy and satisfying to use. It is these schools that are likely to provide the future programmers, developers, interaction and games designers that can potentially save the country’s future economy and global standing. But there are unlikely to be many of them.

Meanwhile the responsibility for defining the technological curriculum of the future would now seem to be in the hands of the examination boards. No school is going to offer a course in Technology that does not lead to a GCSE or equivalent recognised vocational qualification at 16+. And at the same time, those boards will have to face up to the challenge of providing a format for examinations which can be seen to effectively assess technological capability – a three hour written or multiple choice question paper taken in the school gym just isn’t going to reveal evidence of the ability to undertake creative and collaborative open-ended problem-solving.

Now that the current Technology curriculum is about to be switched off, there is a potential opportunity to create something new and exciting, and finally provide a grounding in what are frequently referred to as 21st Century skills (or more accurately, the late 20th Century skills that were never provided).  The question is how?

And, one wonders, was Mr Gove given an iPad for Christmas and at some point needed to be told to try switching it off and then on again?

Herr Gove announced today that from September, the National Curriculum requirements for teaching ICT are to be scrapped from September 2012. Schools are free to do what they want.

“Our school system has not prepared children for this new world. And the current curriculum cannot prepare British students to work at the very forefront of technological change….Imagine the dramatic change which could be possible in just a few years, once we remove the roadblock of the existing ICT curriculum.”

It would seem to be extremely naive of him to believe that just by ‘deleting’ ICT lessons in schools we are going to somehow move to the forefront of technological change, especially as last year nationally only three teachers with a computer science degree became teachers, and many traditional subject teachers would still rather not have computers in their classrooms.

It will be interesting to see what happens in the long-term. Presumably what will emerge will be a great muddle, sorry, diversity, of provision, with some schools going overboard on coding (which many kids will find even more boring than current ICT lessons), and others ignoring IT all together, or specialising in just one area, and with very little sense of continuity and progression. Some really good, balanced, coherent guidance and CPD is needed, but in the current economic situation this seems unlikely to happen?

Comments please!

The other day the all-important official figures were released of the most-played tunes of the last decade.

1. Can’t Get You Out Of My Head (Kylie Minogue, 2001) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IFx3WX4DES0
2. Toxic (Britney Spears, 2004) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LOZuxwVk7TU&ob=av2e
3. Angels (Robbie Williams, 1997) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2CCiLlNxSDY&feature=fvst
4. Superstar (Jamelia, 2003)http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nbx0rY5uRKw
5. Just A Little (Liberty X, 2002) http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GOMFS0fGwuQ

Ever heard of any of these so-called tunes?

And any idea what’s Number One in the singles chart this week? http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio1/chart/singles

It’s hard to imagine that a track such as ‘Superstar’ will be being re-released in 50 years time as a classic Golden Oldie. Or rather I hope not. Especially as the unbearable ‘Angels’ (which I don’t think would have even charted in the 1960s) is already 15 years old.

Increasingly, most of these successful ‘techno-pop’ songs are written to something closely resembling a mathematical formula, closely informed by up-to-the-minute data analytics based on what the purchasing public are currently downloading and listening to on the radio. Other factors based on media exposure, celebrity gossip and what’s currently trending also play an important part. Meanwhile sites such as http://www.musicmetric.com/ provide real-time tracking through Facebook and Twitter, peer-to-peer and websites matched against related real-world events such as gigs, album releases and TV exposure. Each word of each song is carefully scrutinised to ensure it is suggestive enough, without being explicit, reinforced by the moderately seductive, if predictable videos. As a result there is very little creativity and limited melodic, harmonic, structural or rhythmical complexity. The lyrics are little more than banal.  It’s about giving the general public what they are most familiar with, without challenging them or opening them up to new sounds and musical experiences. And all to ensure that the record companies get the maximum payback from the minimum investment.

Now of course, something like all this couldn’t possibly happen in education could it? The idea of a mathematically derived series of on-line videos and multiple choice question assessments and scores informed by a global database of learner inputs and successes and failures would surely not appeal to anyone who truly understands that education involves more than formulaic learning with a limited range of repetitive techno-test predictability all done to get the maximum payback from the minimum investment?

When the long-overdue education revolution finally occurs, there’s no guarantee it will actually be an improvement. In our rush to embrace the exciting potential of new and emerging technologies it is more than ever important than ever to ensure that the potential to improve the quality of learning is not subverted by savings in the cost of learning that reduces it to a Toxic, mindless set of facts that you just Can’t get out of your head. We could be so unlucky. If we are going to make Just a little progress we’re going to need an Angel or a Superstar to guide and help us.

I was just about to reach out for my one hundred and first mince pie the other day when I caught sight of this article:

http://www.americanthinker.com/2011/12/m-a_world_without_schoolteachers.html

“The Kindle and Nook may make for not only the most important advance in reading since Gutenberg, but also, quite likely, a major lesson in unintended consequences.  Especially for the educational establishment, because for the first time in history, Americans should be able to envision a future without public-school teachers — indeed, a future without public-school administrators or state departments of education with their rigidly enforced, politically correct social-transformation curriculum.  A future without onerous school taxes, “education president(s),” self-preening school boards, or million-dollar classrooms.  But most happily, a future without a single supercilious finger wagging in our face as we’re forever lectured about how much a securely tenured, part-time, self-important, overpaid class of public employees “cares” about our sons and daughters.  Really, really, really cares.  And, of course, knows much better than we do how to bring them up.”

Of course, this sort of thing could never happen in the UK (?), but this is exactly the sort of thing I’ve been concerned about. It feeds the public myth that all we need now is on-line learning. There’s no doubt that on-line learning has a significant role to play in our future education system, but to my mind, there’s still a long, long way to go before artificial intelligence systems are good enough to replace a real teacher. One day, they probably will – but until then we’re going to have to prepare a really convincing argument to persuade the bean-counters that anytime, anyplace access to the Khan Academy on its own just simply isn’t going to do the job.

And then there’s the nonsense suggestion that, unlike today’s textbooks and teachers, on-line resources are going to be free of indoctrination and propaganda and bias of all types.

“But suddenly, with a Kindle or Nook in hand, children can skip the propaganda.  At the fingertips of parents armed with a one of these electronic reading devices, there are eight hundred thousand free books — and a million for sometimes as little as ninety-nine cents.  They can find their own lies if they want to.  Or, more importantly, the truth.”

To be fair though, the article does make a number of valid points that cover the inappropriateness of existing schools and the potential value of one-to-one tuition and home-schooling, while carefully ignoring the costs of these essential ‘extras’ that will quickly get cut out of the calculation to save public funding in times of recession. But the main problem remains – that we are being led to believe that teaching is something that anyone can do.

Recently someone who was not an educationalist casually asked me how do you teach someone something? After a moment’s blankness in response of the complexity of the answer required to answer such a simple question, I remembered AIDA. No, not the opera, but the mnemonic used by the advertising industry. The letters stand for:

A – Attention (Awareness): attract the attention of the customer by using unexpected, exaggerated or puzzling words and images
I – Interest: raise customer interest by focusing on and demonstrating advantages and benefits in a context they will be familiar with, often using analogies and metaphors, and telling a story
D – Desire: convince customers that they want and desire the product or service and that it will satisfy their needs.
A – Action: lead customers towards taking action and/or purchasing.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AIDA_%28marketing%29

Not that long after I started teaching I realised that in many ways I was applying the same approach.

Attention: attract the attention of the learners by using unexpected, exaggerated or puzzling words and images that make them curious.
Interest: raise learner interest by focusing on and demonstrating the key points clearly and simply and putting them in a familiar context, often using analogies and metaphors, and telling a story
Desire: convince learners that they want and desire to know, understand and be able to successfully apply the content
Action: lead learners towards taking action, through some sort of practical activity.

It’s a general approach I still use today. Take the photo and first sentence of this post, for example. What have multiple mince pies got to do with it? Nothing really, except that it places it in the current context of Christmas. And surely a hundred and one is an exaggeration? Or course it is. But, assuming you’ve read this far, it clearly got your attention and raised your curiosity.

Of course there’s a great deal more to teaching than just applying AIDA, but it begins to demonstrate what makes it a complex, sophisticated and professional job. It also provides a reference to evaluate a Khan Academy video, or for that matter, the vast majority of similar content being rapidly produced by new media companies and increasingly by learning institutions themselves. And the on-line learning experiences I’ve seen tend to focus on just presenting the facts in a passive way, without much in the way of stimulating attention, interest, desire or action. Until they start to do so they are likely to remain a poor substitute for the passion and infectious enthusiasm of a good teacher and the chance to learn first-hand about team-work and collaboration.

Finally, of course, all that remains for me to do is to now encourage you to take action by responding in the comments box below! And to eat my hundred and second mince pie.

I wish to make a complaint…

That nice Mr Gove delivered his Christmas presents early this year. Not too early of course, otherwise teachers might still have been at work and managed to find the time to unwrap them before the end of term. In case he missed your chimney, here’s a link to a downloadable copy of the Report of the Irrational Curriculum Review.

https://www.education.gov.uk/publications/standard/publicationDetail/Page1/DFE-00135-2011

So far I’ve not had the time, or to be honest the inclination, to read it in detail, so it’s quite possible I may have missed something significant in the small print. However, the item I was mainly interested was about the future status of D&T. And, as anticipated, the news is that D&T has passed on. This subject is no more! It has ceased to be! It’s expired and gone to meet its maker! It’s kicked the bucket, shuffled off its mortal coil. D&T is an extinct subject.

Well, demoted to a so-called ‘basic’ subject anyway, which means, along with ICT, it has been deemed to be of no academic relevance. Which it never was in the first place. Which is why I think that this is actually good news, in that it will free up the good D&T teachers to extend and develop the subject further, beyond the constraints of its Attainment Targets levels and Programmes of Study. And enable all those woodworkers and metal- bashers to get back to what they do best. I’d much rather children were taught good basic craft skills than bad D&T. Meanwhile it’s also good news that Art&Design has deservedly retained its place as a Foundation subject through to the end of Key Stage 3.

But what makes the Irrational Curriculum Review truly irrational is the focus on old-fashioned academic subjects at a time when other ‘white heat of technology’ countries are busy forging ahead with the development of skills for the 21st Century, about which I shall have more to say next year. To now delay UK curriculum reform further until 2014 just gives our competitors another year to move even further ahead.

Defining what knowledge should be taught from 2014 onwards is quite irrational, given that the amount and nature of knowledge changes by the day. What’s really needed is some form of flexible, responsive approach that enables what you didn’t know today would need to be taught tomorrow to be easily introduced.

If D&T has any sense, which sadly it rarely does, it will hastily re-position itself in the market as a purveyor of 21st century skills, delivered in a ‘basic’ cross-curricular learning space, along with IT, Business Education and Citizenship.

But finally, this Christmas, let’s spare a thought for those less fortunate than ourselves, deemed to search amongst the scraps for a stale curriculum morsel of Food Technology, which currently appears to be completely off the menu. For it was the wise Food Technologists who probably delivered the best that D&T ever provided, achieving a successful mix of traditional cookery skills combined with industrial understanding and practice. They will be sadly missed.

Meanwhile, a Merry Irrational Curriculum to one and all!

Well, it’s been an interesting week. Sources revealed that various academic and subject-based associations are meeting together and conspiring to put together a revised Design & Technology National Curriculum in the unlikely belief that it will remain a statutory subject at the end of the current review. Of course for academics and subject-based associations it matters a lot that D&T retains its status, but the reality is that the future of D&T lies more appropriately in a vocational rather than academic context. Meanwhile we all need to accept  that, for a large proportion of children and teachers, the D&T National Curriculum has over the last twenty years been a complete waste of time for all but a few schools where it has been done well. At a time when some forward-looking, non-academically-led vision is needed, the last thing we need is another patched-up version of the past, and another attempt to make a somewhat 19th century view of engineering compulsory for all. And a further danger is that what is submitted as being suitable for an academic National Curriculum will then end up as ‘non-statutory guidance’ for a vocational experience.

The 1989/90 first D&T National Curriculum was seen by many at the time as being over-ambitious, which of course it was, given that not nearly enough was subsequently invested in the in-service training needed to enable a workforce with largely no previous design experience to deliver it. Instead it was simplified, and by the mid 1990s had ‘settled down’ into something more manageable. But that’s where the development largely stopped. At a time when technology started to race ahead, a limited 1960s approach to 3D product design for mass-manufacture was still being offered – the only real change being the introduction of expensive CAD-CAM equipment that tended to limit rather than extend creative design ideas.

While 1999 was not so very different from 1989, 2011 is a very different world from 2001. Back then mobile phones just made phone calls and the internet was an expensive dial-up affair. There were no mp3 players, no sat-navs or domestic digital video cameras. And flatscreen, widescreen, catch-up TV viewed on hand-held tablets was still a wild aspiration. Few had even dreamt of the possibilities of Facebook, Blogs, Twitter and YouTube. Today’s 21st Century children think, communicate and learn in very different ways to their teachers

Sadly Technology education is now hopelessly out-of-date, and the problem is we don’t have a generation of enlightened twenty and thirty-somethings coming through into the profession who are capable of teaching children about things such as collaborative, agile ways of creatively solving complex problems for an unpredictable future, how to design apps or intelligent sensor-driven products and interfaces made from composite smart materials, or how to design and program an App that interacts with its environment. Technology education now needs a framework that enables it change rapidly, not once every ten to fifteen years.

But what made the week really interesting was the sudden appearance of a short, anonymously published, somewhat disruptive pdf document that got rapidly circulated amongst the academics and subject associations still trying to pretend that D&T still had a place in Mr Gove’s flawed academic vision for the nation. The document was simply a collection of responses to the question ‘Should D&T continue to be a National Curriculum subject?‘ Although the responses varied, the overall conclusion was a resounding No!, and that it would be better if it were left to those teachers who were actually able to deliver it well, leaving the rest to focus on something more worthwhile. With Mr Gove extremely unlikely to admit D&T into the sacred academic ‘essential knowledge’ circle, it was suggested that this might be a good moment to try something completely different.

2D&Tornot2D&T? ( .pdf download)

This, as someone remarked, put the cat amongst the pigeons. The response of some of the academics and subject associations to the document was particularly revealing in their haste and vehemence in dismissing the responses as being of no interest or relevance, seeing it as an attack on the value of the subject, rather than the reality of its delivery. At the same time others are unbelievably still trying to define what is meant by ‘design’, as if this was not extensively explored in the 1960s and 70s.  Though after a number of days an increasing number of academics started to come out of the woodwork, so to speak, and admit that the document did make some very important points that needed to be taken into consideration. All of which simply begs the question – How many academics,  administrators and politicians does it take to make a mess of the next National Curriculum?

Meow!