What's the future of schooling? Join the Tortoise Education Summit online on Thursday June 17 to have your say

[RowanMumsnet]

Hello

'Slow news organisation' Tortoise is holding an online summit this coming Thursday, June 17 about the future of schooling - and they'd love parents and educational professionals on Mumsnet to join in. It runs from 3pm to 8pm, hopefully giving parents and teachers a chance to fit it in around their existing commitments. Here's what they have to say.

We’d like to invite you to be our guest and join the conversation at the Tortoise Education Summit on Thursday 17 June.

Great crises have often provoked huge social change. The British welfare state was born from the pain and privations of the second world war. Might the pandemic be a spur to a new approach to education? The world has gone through an unprecedented educational shock – one whose scale and depth we are only now beginning to understand.

Now in its second year, the Tortoise Education Summit (held virtually) will ask whether we can build schooling back better after the virus. We have an opportunity to start again from scratch: is it time to do something else?

The event will bring together ~1,500 policy makers, educators, parents and pupils over the course of the afternoon in a participatory conversation to tackle the big questions, including:

• Have we lost sight of education’s purpose?
• How worried should we be about lost school time – and what should the focus be on for the recovery?
• What do we need to keep from the past year of remote schooling?
• Is the traditional university experience the future of education?

We are delighted to be able to offer Mumsnet users a complimentary place at the event (usually £25 for non-Tortoise members). See the full agenda and register here using the code MUMSNETGUEST for free access.

Please pass on this information to colleagues or friends who may also be interested in attending.

Part of the great reset and disaster capitalism? Will there be WEF supporters there? I guess so. What part of lockdown schooling should stay? Good question, hope you ask all the exhausted parents, children and teachers that one and find an answer that works for you.

@RowanMumsnet - Can you PLEASE make it clear in the title that the interest lies solely with England? Thanks.

A really interesting topic. There's a guy called Sugata Mitra doing some really thought provoking work in this field. His ted talk is great if anybody is interested. He basically argues that our current education system was developed when Britain was an empire; we had to be able to count produce, work out taxes, write a note in the U.K. and whoever intercepted it in for example Australia or NZ had to be able to read it. Hence why the three Rs are the foundations of our education system. However the world has changed drastically since then and social mobility or economic success isn't necessarily gained by being a legible writer, who can read and is good at maths.

Any attempts thus far to modernise the education system, particularly the 2014 reboot, have been laughable and haven't taken into account the world we are supposed to be preparing our children to enter. An example of this is the current primary framework for English containing fronted adverbials, expanded noun phrases and the like. Phrases primarily made up by the government that no adults, including professional authors, really pay any mind to when they are writing.

A rigorous discussion around what it is our children really need to learn and how schools can accommodate this, is long overdue imo.

World history would be a better subject these days than British history.