In 2019 more than 262 million children and youth were out of school. Six out of ten were not acquiring basic literacy and numeracy after several years in school.  
COVID has obviously made things a lot worse. Recently UNESCO puts those numbers at over 1.5 billion students and youth across the planet who are or have been affected by school and university closures due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
 
A quality education means different things in different places. At any time there are up to 4 million children out of school because they’re fleeing conflict, famine, climate change. For the poorest, access to education is a critical step in improving quality of life and access to all the other opportunities that are available. What Covid has taught us however is that while the world might have laudable goals in broadening access to education globally, we still have significant challenges at home.
 
With almost no warning, the right to education has become dependent on connectivity. Over three-quarters of national distance learning solutions available during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic relied exclusively on online platforms. Yet as many as 465 million children and youth, or almost 47 % of all primary and secondary do not have access to these platforms because they do not have internet connections at home.
 
Many families are realising the challenges involved in education as they are teaching their children from home:  some children are without computers to access schoolwork, or sufficient mobile data to log on, or are sharing workspace with siblings and parents.  One of the indicators used to gauge the effectiveness of an education system is how many children are in school – how do we do that now? It seems as if the only option is to focus on grades and completed work and yet many educators accept that this isn’t a fair way to gauge children’s progress under lockdown.
 
In the UK the debate about lockdown is centred about the damage that it does children to be out of school – not ignoring the impact is has on their parents if they suddenly have to home school.  So basically, what we’re saying is the education is at once the most important tool for changing the world, and yet at the moment our children are missing out on the experience of school and the ways in which they learn to build the social skills, empathy and resilience necessary to overcome a crisis of this nature.
 
A recent World Economic Forum report states that the workforce of 2022 will need higher order ‘human’ skills - creativity, originality, initiative, critical thinking, persuasion, negotiation, resilience, flexibility and complex problem-solving. There are huge opportunities here, to allow different pupils to learn in different ways.

Connection means more than connectivity however, so we need to find new collaborative tools that fully engage pupils, stretch their imaginations, their management of complexity and their empathy.  If we’re going to be able to provide this, we’re going to have to find new works of working with technology to deliver these skills. And that means embracing the change and encouraging educators to lead this evolution, not letting the technology dictate the process.

This article first appeared in the February 2021 edition of Education Today www.education-today.co.uk

The last year has been the most challenging in recent history. But for children whose education has suffered from school closures, it’s been an experience that could have long lasting consequences. Given the complications, it’s also fair to say that no one wants to add a changing curriculum on top of it all. There is however an increasingly strong argument that we need to add another perspective to teaching – and that’s climate education.
 
With the UK hosting the 26th Conference of the Parties to the international climate negotiations in 2021, its increasingly important that our children understand the changes they face. This year should see governments increasing their ambition for action, with new targets due under the international climate change agreement. The original plan under the Paris Agreement was that five years after signature, governments would have to rachet up their national climate plans and ambition to get on track. These plans need to cover all the areas and Articles of the Paris Agreement and that includes climate education under Article 12 of the Agreement.
 
Nick Nuttall, deputy spokesperson Earthday.org, says “Since 1992, when governments agreed the first climate treaty (UNFCCC) and included climate education as being important, the response has been patchy and climate education and environmental literacy generally have been the Cinderella topics in the UN climate negotiations. It is time to right this wrong and take climate change education seriously as essential for every child’s future.”
 
Climate change puts children’s most basic rights at risk, seriously affecting their access to health, food, water, clean air, education and protection. We know that children take climate change seriously – just look at Greta Thunberg and Fridays for the Future, ZeroHour, The Child Movement amongst many children’s groups.  Their concern about climate change impacts, both direct and indirect, is also something which causes anxiety, fear and depression.
 
Haldis Holst, Deputy General Secretary of Educational International, agrees that teachers are reporting that many young pupils are showing signs of fear and of anxiety about their futures. He says, “A commitment to put climate education into the core of curricula is thus not just about equipping youth with the skills and the knowledge they will need as adults. It is also about healing, hope and engagement in the solutions that can, if the world steps up ambition, solve this crisis in time.”
 
No child at school today will be able to face the challenges of adult life without an understanding of the science behind changes in the natural world, technology, energy, business, data and more. The world our children will graduate to face is one that is likely to markedly different from the one we know well.  We need to start to think about systems, about how interconnected every part of nature, economies and societies are. Climate education can also help foster a new generation of citizens with the interest and the skills needed for jobs in a growing green economy, to make better, sustainable consumer choices and to hold governments — both national and local — accountable for their decisions.
 
Patricia Espinosa, Executive Secretary of UN Climate Change (UNFCCC) said, “We need to better educate our children and youth on the science and the risks, but also the excitement of building a better world; generating more good jobs in sustainable businesses and the benefits of being greener consumers and more active citizens. I welcome this global initiative and look forward to it stimulating excitement and enthusiasm among all governments and all sectors of society.”
 
In 2019 Italy and Mexico called on all countries to commit to climate and environmental education to ensure that the next generation have the knowledge, awareness and skills to address climate change. In Italy that new curriculum was launched in September 2021. Called civic education, it has three branches consisting of the Italian constitution, sustainable development and climate literacy, and digital literacy. As Professor Massimiliano Falcone, climate ambassador - EDN advisor, says, “Climate change and sustainable development are fundamental topics for the citizen of the future.”
 
Whether we’re talking about climate change, or a green new deal, there has never been a more critical time for children to become engaged in learning about what climate and carbon mean to them. “We need to equip future generations with the knowledge, skills, and enthusiasm to survive and indeed thrive in the decades to come. And that begins in school,” said Sharan Burrow, General Secretary, International Trade Union Confederation. 
 
The importance of education in addressing climate change is increasingly being recognised. A recent analysis from PNAS suggests that business as usual and technological change are not going to be sufficient to address climate change, but that certain tipping points can trigger large scale system changes in society and the economy. Out of six, two were educational – climate literacy in schools and universities, and general awareness of the carbon impacts of our choices.
 
A survey by World Wide Views, conducted in close to 80 countries before the 2015 Summit that adopted the landmark Paris Climate Change Agreement, found that close to 80 percent of those questioned thought climate education was the strongest policy for reducing emissions followed by action to protect tropical forests. In September 2020, the UK citizens climate assembly announced the results of its debate on how the country could achieve net zero emissions by 2050. While proposing direct measures from taxing frequent flyers to reducing red meat consumption, the overarching recommendation was information and education.
 
In September 2021 EarthDay.org launched a coalition of organisations urging governments to step up and require compulsory, assessed climate education with a strong link to civic engagement.  To date over 350 organizations, ranging from trades unions, teachers and green groups, to women’s groups like Australia’s 1 Million Women and Parents for Future Global have signed up to call on all governments by COP26 to make climate education ‘compulsory, assessed and linked to civic engagement ‘.   Support is coming from so many disparate groups because, as Kathleen Rogers, President, EARTHDAY.ORG says, “Climate education will prepare youth across a range of positive fronts– from stimulating a rapidly growing global green economy to holding their officials accountable. Indeed, I am convinced that competitiveness in the 21st century will increasingly be linked to the quality of environmental literacy among a nation’s citizens.”
 
In a crowded curriculum, it will be probably important not to create a standalone subject but to integrate and embed climate education across the curriculum—not just science but also geography; literature, arts, history and even sport. As Nuttall says, “The essential point is that climate change will define the future of this and successive generations—it can no longer be a ‘ nice to have’: if education is about preparing young people for their future, then it can no longer ignore climate change or pop it into a silo.”
 
Education should be about connecting knowledge and understanding how connections are made between different types and aspects of knowledge – and that means that we need to teach children to learn to think. Not simply about climate but about the implications of learning to what we know, how we live and how we want to grow.
 
Children need to learn the skills that will enable them to face unprecedented challenges, such as critical thinking, empathy and creative problem solving.  Never forget that environmental issues are intricately connected to social justice and equity and understanding and addressing this will play a critical role in economic development and growth in coming decades.
 
This year Earth Day will occur on 22nd April and it provides an opportunity to explore how you can integrate climate issues into your teaching, with resources from EarthDay.org. As for the Learn2Think Foundation, our theme for 2021 is climate and the skills and tools our children need to face an increasingly volatile and confusing world. We are currently developing resources to help teachers bring climate into the classroom and support you in focusing on climate literacy in 2021.

This article first appeared in the January 2021 edition of Education Today www.education-today.co.uk
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Why does an outstanding school ticking all the right boxes - with exceptionally well-trained staff, using all the technological bells and whistles- still fail to engage pupils with their own learning?
 
This was the question we were asked by a school we worked with recently, whose SLT had shadowed individual pupils for a week, hoping for a new perspective on their classroom culture. The teachers noticed one skill absent from their superficially capable cohort: they were not asking questions.
 
Why does it matter?  What is so important about students asking questions?
 
Looking at the latest cognitive science, it appears that the act of asking a question not only plays a valuable role in the brain’s learning process, but is also a measure of engagement and depth of thinking.
 
The wonderful thing about a question is that it is generated from personal curiosity:  to find out more about something new and interesting, to fill in a gap in understanding, or to challenge something that conflicts with an existing view. Ashwin Ram, computer and cognitive scientist, calls a question a ‘knowledge goal’, a personal driver and engager of a pupil’s short-term memory.  Curiosity has been shown to have its own neural signature and occurs in the ‘zone of proximal learning’ or when we think we almost know something.
 
Competing for attention in the pupil’s potentially overloaded sensory register is the first hurdle many teachers face. Can your topic stimulus win the day against the day-dreaming, the pencil fiddling and the stomach rumbling?  The more dissonance we create, the more surprising, the more heart-racing the stimulus, the more likely the brain is to begin processing it in short -term memory.
 
The next step for learning is the active processing of information, as the short-term memory can only hold something for 30 seconds before it is lost and your fabulous stimulus has gone to waste!
 
Information needs to be filed in long-term memory, otherwise it will not be available for later recall and use.  This filing happens when the brain is actively engaged in thinking. This is hard and requires effort. It is only through the interplay between a students’ short-term and long -term memory (prior knowledge), that learning occurs. And it seems that generating their own questions is a powerful way of facilitating this interplay.
 
On the non-cognitive side, questions also have considerable psychological value. When examining student motivation, Columbia University Teacher’s College identified intrinsic factors, coming from within the student themselves, as far more powerful than external factors such as praise, grades or rewards. Amongst the main motivators they found were autonomy and purpose. 
 
A question is a marvellous thing.  It guarantees our attention, rewards us and then helps us make connections and lay down and reinforce neural pathways.  In cognitive science terms it ticks all the boxes for effective learning.  In psychological terms it is highly motivational, being personal to the asker, and showing purpose in the asking.
 
So why aren’t we cultivating and teaching questioning as a skill in its own right?


This article first appeared in the November 2020 issue of Education Today www.education-today.co.uk

Conflict is a normal part of human relationships. Today however it is being amplified everywhere, stoked for political ends and fuelled by self-interested motivations. How can we foster the habits and skills to help children resolve conflict and build a positive future?
 
The challenge lies in recognising that real progress is only achieved under peaceful conditions. When we can see that we are better off cooperating and communicating than fighting and tearing down; situations can become win-win.  By learning and practicing crucial interpersonal skills we can help children manage their new reality and succeed.
 
Children today are returning to school unnerved, often in new groups they don’t know well, with uncertainty and confusion at the heart of their learning experience. What they need is reassurance and support for learning in new ways, with new people, under strange circumstances. They need to build on their social, emotional and thinking skills in order to be able to effectively meet the challenges they face.
 
One of the ways in which they can do this is by learning the difference between debate and dialogue, how questions create empathy with others, how important it is to control emotions, and how creativity and communication can drive positive change. At Learn2Think we have built a relevant and accessible programme which helps children do this, under the patronage of UNESCO UK.
 
For Tolerance Day November 16, 2020, we’ve developed a workshop called Red v Blues that has pupils role-play a ‘battle’ scenario and then listen, question, communicate, and problem-solve their way out of it. This builds on years of work on religious tolerance, understanding history and challenging false information.
 
Another avenue enabling pupils to explore their thinking is the returning Learn2Think Young Journalist Prize. This provides a wonderful opportunity for Key-stage 2 pupils ages 8-11 to engage in non-fiction writing, practice asking questions, learn the importance of hearing both sides of an argument, and communicate about issues that are important to them.
 
To ensure that our 2020 competition fits in seamlessly with the school curriculum we'll be launching the competition in September and running it through National Non-fiction November. Entries can be submitted up until 30th November 2020, with the winners announced the week beginning the 18th January 2021.
 
Once again the focus is on interviewing, with this year’s theme being the resolution of conflict. We want children to interview two people with opposing views on the same subject, or one person with whom they themselves disagree.  The aim is to promote better understanding of both the causes and resolution of conflict through listening, building empathy, controlling emotions and problem solving. Once again, the 2020 competition offers entrants the option of doing either a podcast or a written piece.
 
Combining new workshops, lesson plans and the Learn2Think Young Journalism competition, we offer a range of ways to bring these issues into the curriculum. This not only highlights their importance but supports pupils in learning the necessary skills to underpin their education and development. With the challenges of 2020 continuing to affect us all, it’s increasingly important that we learn these skills across every element of society. By starting with our children we can be most effective in the longer term.

This article first appeared in the September issue of Education Today.

No one can deny that there is increasing polarisation in today’s politics, as politicians seek to ascribe blame for systemic failures or fail to engage with science or reason, but nowhere is this more obvious than in the recent Black Lives Matter protests in the US.

Some may argue that systemic racism in the US is a problem that we don’t share in the UK but a country whose wealth and growth was built on imperialism and exploitation cannot help but be the product of its making – you just have to look at the Brixton riots, the death of Stephen Lawrence in the 90s and the McPherson report that that found the Met to be institutionally racist,  the attempted deportation of the Windrush  generation, or even the post-Brexit threats to children of colour that their families were about to be deported because of the colour of their skin.  

When pundits hark back to the halcyon days ‘before the EU’ or ‘before namby pamby liberals’ started weakening the backbone of the country, they’re harking back to days when people of colour had little to no voice. Even when they had the right to vote the system was stacked against them in terms of education, jobs and access.

Failure to understand just how a system which refuses to fund education, health and social care effectively can trap generations away from achieving their potential is a failure to understand privilege. It is a failure to question the assumptions that underpin our social framework and our economic operations.

We talk about the need to engage children with education; we talk about their need to be happy and the importance of developing the learning skills that will support children throughout life. At the Learn2Think Foundation we are passionate about the goal of education being the development of compassionate, creative and critical thinkers.

With the changes our society faces, whether it is learning to adapt to the impact of covid and the potential transformation of education and working life, the impact of climate change on global supply chains and our way of life, the most necessary change has to been to date ignored. What the US protests have show is that at some point society will say, thus far, no further. It is not acceptable to protect and support the few to the detriment of the many.

In the UK BAME populations have suffered considerably more from the effects of coronavirus, and it is those with customer facing jobs like deliveries, warehouse workers, fast food worker who have been encouraged to go back to work now in jobs facing the public, while some banks and insurers have recommended that staff work from home until at least the end of the year. We need to think about the world our children will be facing and start asking the hard questions.

Children are often motivated by the need for fairness and that seems something sadly lacking in our world today.  Psychology has taught us that one of the key factors in predicting adult well being is childhood emotional health. Maybe that is why we don’t ask difficult questions of children or answer them directly, and we don’t encourage them to think about topics that might be upsetting. It’s understandable but is it the right way to deal with issues and challenges that are going to affect the rest of their lives?

Few children today are not aware of what happens in the news, they’re online and they’re connected. We can’t protect them from the worst excesses that the press and the internet has to offer. But there is a way to change the way they experience these things.
Last year saw the release of a film about US children's TV personality Mr Rogers. He always said, ““When I was a boy and I would see scary things in the news, my mother would say to me, ‘Look for the helpers. You will always find people who are helping.”  Hiding children from the reality of the world won’t help them in the long run. Instead we need to teach them why the world is the way it is and how to make it better. Help them understand. Help them see the ways in which our society needs to be better. And help them learn how to make it so.

This article initially appeared in the July/August 2020 issue of Education Today https://www.education-today.co.uk/