The Department for Children, Schools and Families are trying to gauge the opinions of children and young people in the UK regarding climate change to create an ‘ambition statement’ which would be used by the Department for Energy and Climate Change to get their voices heard at the United Nations climate talks in Copenhagen.

Children and young people can register their views by clicking on the link below. All entries must be in by 3 July 2009. www.surveymonkey.com /s.aspx?sm=7xvTuQ4MS4QVFtPlrxRnQw_3d _3d <http://www.surveymonkey.com/s.aspx?sm=7xvTuQ4MS4QVFtPlrxRnQw_3d_3d> The data received will provide a powerful vehicle for engaging Ministers and policy makers on children and young people’s views at a national and international level.

A new article entitled Home Education Monitoring Legislation has been posted on the EO Campaign website,
http://www.freedomforchildrentogrow.org/update.php.

Polly Curtis, education editor guardian.co.uk, Monday 29 June 2009 17.28 BST

Gordon Brown guarantees an education individually tailored for each child, but parents could be fined if they refuse to take more responsibility for their children’s behaviour.
Parents should be able to expect a private school style education under plans to reform the education system, the prime minister said today.

Families will be guaranteed personal tutors, one-to-one tuition, and a range of qualifications under the plans, which will be laid out in full in a white paper tomorrow. More: http://tiny.cc/TyHJO

This is yet a further attempt to try and make a bad education offer more ‘ tailored’  for its students. We’re clearly getting set for the last raft of policies designed squeeze whatever it can from a bankrupt system. So young people will take their ‘medicine’ get a ‘private style education’  and personal tutors, parents will be criminalised, teachers will be on  5 year licences, and ‘fat cat’ super heads will be running federated institutions. Budgets undoubtedly will increase and the litigation culture thrive. For real personalisation we have to look elsewhere!

Microsoft Introduces New Ways to Help Teachers Personalize Learning at the National Educational Computing Conference 2009.

WASHINGTON, June 29 /PRNewswire-FirstCall/ — This week at the National Educational Computing Conference (NECC) 2009, Microsoft Corp. is showcasing innovative technologies that enable teachers to engage their students more deeply by adapting teaching to the unique needs of each learner. These tools range from the introduction of Windows 7 education-friendly features to a new collaborative initiative between the Microsoft Innovative Teachers Network (ITN) and the Smithsonian Center for Education and Museum Studies, as well as a variety of free software and services to help teachers enhance the education experience for their students.

More: http://tiny.cc/aYr6D

Unicef launches campaign to support children’s rights by Staff, Brand Republic 25-Jun-09, 08:00

LONDON - Unicef is highlighting the problem of child exploitation in an integrated campaign, created by Rapp.

The campaign runs on and offline with the aim of encouraging supporters to show their commitment to upholding children’s rights.
It focuses on the plight of millions of children who are forced to live and work on the street, and is built around the strapline ‘promise me’.
The campaign features press ads with headlines such as ‘Promise me I won’t be sold for sex’ and ‘Promise me we won’t be forced to work 20 hours a day’.
The ads end with Unicef’s pledge ‘We promise. Will you?’ More: http://tiny.cc/aTXmA

By Anne Kyle, Leader-Post June 26, 2009
 
REGINA — Regina teacher Kim Weiss is hoping to open the doors to a new freestyle-learning school this fall that will offers parents an alternative to the traditional public school setting.  More: http://tiny.cc/WDAUH

These examples of increasing efforts for flexibility may not be the whole story as CPE-PEN see personalisation and learning sysytem transformation but they are indicators of shifts thinking.

Press release: New Flexible Learning School. http://www.media.tas.gov.au/release.php?id=27104   

David Bartlett, MP Premier and Minister for Education and Skills. Monday, 22 June 2009

Premier and Minister for Education and Skills, David Bartlett, today announced that a Flexible Learning School will be established in Tasmania.

“The school, which is as part of the State Government’s partnership with the Australian Government, will offer personalised learning that meets all learning needs, including digital and online learning,” Mr Bartlett said.

“It will cater for students who need additional learning, including highly able and gifted students, those who can’t attend school for a variety of physical, medical or geographical reasons, and students for whom regular school isn’t a viable option.

“The school will bring together existing services including Distance Education, the Online Learning Network and the Centre for Extended Learning Opportunities to deliver efficient and effective services.

“It aims to ensure a student-focussed education built around personalised programs to suit a broad range of student needs and interests.

“The Flexible Learning School is likely to be located in a Department of Education school made available through a school merger or restructure. A number of possible sites for the school will be considered.

“The facility will include staff accommodation, and spaces where groups of teachers can meet and work. The centre will also house physical resources and be able to accommodate up to 75 students on-site at a time.

“Services and courses will be provided online, using mobile devices such as handhelds, iPods and other MP3 players, by telephone, by post and in person.

“The school will offer both full time and dual enrolments where students can combine flexible learning with attendance at a primary or high school.

“All students and teachers around the state will potentially benefit from the school as work and resources will be shared with regular schools, increasing their capacity to be more flexible.

“The Flexible Learning School provides an innovative response to the growing need for more flexible and relevant education for students in Tasmania.

“This new school will help meet the State Government’s priorities of improving our literacy and numeracy rates and retaining students at school beyond year 10,” Mr Bartlett said.

The Summer Reading Challenge, for children 4-11, is here once again at North Yorkshire County Council’s Library and Information Centres.

 Children…
• Get down to your local library any time from July 18th and sign up for the Challenge. Mobile libraries have an early start from Monday 29 June.
• Read six books over the summer, collecting stickers and other fabulous freebies as you go. At the end, we’ll reward you with a medal and a certificate.
• Not a member? No problem! Joining the library is free and easy, just ask!

North Yorkshire Libraries will be celebrating the annual summer reading challenge in unique style this July with NYMAZ Musical Storytimes.  Five sets of professional musicians from Live Music Now have each chosen a book which is inspired by this year’s theme of Quest Seekers, and between them will be running workshops in every part of the region in just one week. Read the rest of this entry »

Recapturing Childhood: Positive Parenting in the Modern World by Mildred Masheder
Published by Green Print. ISBN, 9781854250957
( To obtain copies of this recent book, as well as the others by Mildred please contact the author: Mildred Masheder, 75 Belsize Lane , LondonNW3 5AU or telephone  020 74…. Copies may also be obtained (add £2.00 p&p from e-mailing sales @ positive childhood.net )

We all worry about the times we live in, the poisoned chalice we may be bequeathing to the next generations and how we should react to the very new circumstances within which children today grow up.  The smallest incidents create a sort of panic in adults which may in itself be one of the most dangerous elements of this new environment.

“Can I have a chocolate rabbit, Pip?”
Five year old Louis has come down from his bed/playroom and is poised on one leg clinging on to a kitchen chair beside me as I consider writing this review. We are in the family kitchen of our fourth child and her husband and two children.
“No!”
73 year-old grandfather  (me) has rapidly done a “take” on the situation. I am minding Louis for one hour while his mother takes his two year old sister Betty on one of her favourite outings, to their excellent  child-minder who has given up her well-paid office job  to be a professional child-minder.
I see the need for “secure boundaries “ looming.
“Why not?”
I decide to lighten the moral prohibition by a jocular approach.
“ ’Cos, as Ed (his dad)  said earlier “You’re crazy enough without eating chocolate.  Eat that and you’ll shortly be hitting the ceiling.”
“No I won’t. Why are you making fun of it? If you go on with stupid reasons I’ll go on asking.”
“Well, you also said you were feeling sick after playing a computer CBeebies game for half an hour! Chocolate will make you feel worse.”
“You don’t know until I’ve eaten it!”
“Then it’ll be too late. And we’ll have to clean up the mess.”
Louis leapt backward off the chair. It had worked.
“ OK  then. I’ll go up and play. Bye.”
I breathe a sigh of relief. But will he sulk and get his revenge for the prohibition by being really bad?
I creep upstairs. He’s listening to Chopin’s Polonaise and playing with a construction set. I’m taken back to my own childhood .This was my first record for our wind-up gramophone.
I decide to get back to my work and leave him to his. So I come downstairs and muse about drugs and threats of violence , growing up in London as a teenager, bullying at school, too much telly, internet games and inappropriate web sites etc etc. What about my prohibition on chocolate and subsequent reasoning? Had I been any use as a (largely) absentee grand father? Should I have given in?  Shared some chocolate with him?
I concluded that there are, as ever, no absolute answers.  We needed a positive relationship and that was so difficult when I only saw him at most for a few days every six weeks.  The most I could hope for was a balanced approach to prohibition and permission.

A balanced approach is what Mildred is recommending. Balanced and caring. Above all,  with love. But love? What is this? Mildred implies that it is the resolute and careful engagement in the business of  helping  the young grow  in happiness and  creative discovery of self and the world.

We need to listen to the wisdom of our elders.  Mildred is a previous generation to me , being over 90 and 16 years older than me. 16 years nearer to the end of her expressive life and still full of the compulsion to express. Her latest book, Recapturing Childhood, is not a sort of last will and testament, a P.S to a series of expressions  It is fresh and forward looking. It follows logically on from her other titles which have had such good sales and have no doubt been very influential in the field of child up-bringing.

The list is impressive:
•  Let’s Play Together…300 games which put cooperation above competition.
•  Let’s Cooperate (video)… giving  visual demonstrations of these cooperative games.
•  Let’s Cooperate… (book) emphasising the importance of self-concept, creativity, cooperation, social interaction and the peaceful resolution of conflict at successive ages.
•  Freedom from Bullying …about how to diminish the scourge of bullying in schools and so free more children to enjoy childhood.
•  Let’s Enjoy Nature … suggesting over 500  ideas for activities for children and adults to do together in order to enjoy the natural world and so to grow towards being active in helping to protect our planet
•  Positive Childhood… setting out resources for making the journey of childhood fun, active and participatory..
•  Carrier’s Cart to Oxford…a social history of an Oxfordshire village, Elsfield, in the 1920’s, seen through the eyes of Mildred as a child. It sets out the picture as a valuable alarm call to the present day , pointing to what we have lost in the splendours and miseries of the intervening years.
• Recapturing Childhood: Positive Parenting in the Modern World.. by no means is this a nostalgic book. It points to the present situation and to the possible ways of giving back to children an experience of childhood which can form the basis for a happy and constructive life.

Mildred’s book sets out the vital elements of the framework for such an experience of childhood. She cites the latest alarming evidence from research about the poisoned chalice we are passing on to our children. She quotes parents on every point.  These are parents who have consciously  decided  to make sacrifices to achieve a better environment for their family life then might have been  possible if both parents had pursued a career.  This is a limitation in her book , since most parents will have  been obliged , or thought they had to gain two incomes. The mortgage, the annual holidays, the payments on the car,  all these considerations have been built into the concept of ‘the good life’ for most people. This is perhaps why the book is so important.  Their experience  is important for everyone even though it may not be the choice which everyone makes. They blaze a trail that holds lessons for all circumstances in the same way that parents who decide on home-based education illustrate for schools some of the essential truths about education, even though every parent may not wish or be able to do this themselves.

In this sense also, Mildred puts in a special appendix on Steiner schools.  They have much to offer. They are an important part of the educational scene, even though they may not be the answer for every family. There is perhaps no blueprint for all schools but what is certain is that we have a need to reform our present school system and models of how to do it differently are useful in this quest. Steiner is important in the emphasis placed on the arts, in the continuity of relationship between one tutor and the child, and in the regular celebration of learning. Parents need to take into account much of what Mildred writes about childhood in making their choices. They need to be wary of models which are paraded as the only solution. I am with Browning on the subject of panaceas “lest one good idea should corrupt the world”.

Her 13 chapters range through
•  Positive Parenting in the Modern World
•  The Security of a Good Family life
•  Feelings and Emotions
•  It’s good to Talk and Listen
•  Creative Play and the Arts
•  Keeping in Touch with Nature
•  Care of the Body; Exercise, Food and SLeep
•  Happy Schooling
•  Positive behaviour
•  Keeping Technology under Control
•  What Values do we Choose?
•  Controlling our Time
•  Parental Power in action for our children

The wisdom of Mildred needs to be listened to. All young parents should read this book. Not all will be able to heed the call to forego one career, live off one salary, and engage so intensely with their children. But the book is a basis from which each will be able to work out their own unique solution to the opportunity of having their own children, of providing love and care in this overwhelmingly demanding world. It may even give reassurance to those who, in the more straitened circumstances of the post credit crunch world, find themselves with less money and more time on their hands than before.

01.05.09  Philip Toogood. (Trustee of Personalised Education Now)

The Home Education (Badman) Review has been published and we’ve already blogged posts about it below. It’s a timely reminder that like all alternatives differences are conceived as threats. The inability to see the true outcomes of education and the capable, contributory active citizens they produce is astonishing. If only the state controlled sectors were half as successful. Home-educators are actually pathfinders not problems and currently they do not place a burden on the state. So where is the bad news?!

The following extracts are from an article entitled

English Home Educators Under Threat: Time for a Stand of ‘Principled Non-compliance’? By Dr Richard House

The full article will be published in The Mother magazine (TM36) September / October 2009 edition. We thank both Richard House (author) and Veronika Robinson for permissions to blog extracts here.
www.themothermagazine.co.uk 

Richard’s piece is yet another timely treatise of the madness and folly of the proposals. They are unfounded and illogical.

Richard reminds us the review proposals put in place a compulsory registration scheme for all home-based educators. A statement of intent would have to outline educational approach, intent and desired outcomes for the following twelve months

One could hardly imagine a more effective way of dissuading parents from even starting out on the challenging task of home educating, with the prospect of being inserted into the state’s “audit and surveillance culture” … one could also be forgiven for the cynical conclusion that this is indeed one of the government’s intentions.

Moreover (and it gets worse), “They will be judged on their plans. These statements should contain some milestones for children to achieve” … “At the age of eight they should be reasonably autonomous learners, competent in handling numbers, with rudimentary ICT levels and able to read. … Whilst Mr Badman is reported not to wish to be overly prescriptive regarding what constituted a suitable education, he has asked the government to review a statutory definition, and said parents would be judged against their education plans! … as one poster on the Guardian website poignantly remarked, “This kind of target and assessment may be required if you teach a school full of kids, but for HEers would make autonomous learning difficult, if not impossible”.

The government’s mixed motives and their sheer lack of understanding are clearly evident. Richard points out:

The Children’s Minister Delyth Morgan is also quoted as saying: “Most home educators do a fantastic job and I want to ensure they get more support from Local Authorities. But we can’t afford to let any child slip through the net – in terms of their education, or safety.” … it doesn’t seem to have even crossed the minister’s mind that it might be precisely because home educators have extricated themselves from the state’s educational embrace that they are doing such a “fantastic” job! (her term).

… But just one massive irony of all this is that it is commonly precisely those families who strongly feel that the state has made a veritable “pig’s ear” of their children’s schooling system that have opted out of institutional schooling to escape from the toxicity of mainstream schooling….
The lack of representation from home-education researchers is an obvious omission from the review Expert Reference Group.

It seems quite clear that the state should only intervene to fix something if there is clear, unambiguous evidence that something needs fixing.

… this group had no effective expertise on home education, and seems to have been populated for the most part by the heads of the child protection industry).

… research has shown that children in home-educated families often have far better educational outcomes than the norm …

Why, the researchers ask, do we as a society assume that formal learning needs to take over beyond the age of five? “There is no developmental or educational logic behind the radical change in pedagogy from informal to formal when children start school”, Thomas and Pattison argue. Moreover, and contrary to expectations, the surveyed home-educated children had no difficulty entering formal education. The informal curriculum is “as good a preparation as any” for college, university or academic correspondence courses, they argue. “The young people had the personal skills to make the transition with apparent ease.”

Richard draws his own conclusions. The review has little to do with child abuse and a lot to do with centralized control. He believes a stand against these proposals should be made.

…it was wild claims about possible levels of child abuse in home educating families that precipitated this review in the first place.

… The report found “a small number of cases” that caused concern. What evidence is adduced to suggest that such abuse that did occur would not have also occurred in an alternative regime? – none. What clear statistically reliable evidence is adduced to show that any abuse that has been identified in home educating families has a greater likelihood of occurring compared with the general population? – again, none. And what attempt is made to show that the negative unintended side-effects of a new stringent surveillance regime for home educators won’t do far more net harm to the overall quality of the field than any reductions in abuse that ensue? – again, none. As one poster on the Guardian website put it, “The business about ‘abuse’ is a smokescreen. What Mr Balls is trying to do is institute a regime whereby the curriculum of home education is dictated by central government.”

Just what are the “standards” that the state will impose on home-educating families? It is almost inevitable that they will be the kinds of “modernist”, utilitarian “standards” from which home-educating families have sought to escape! …
 …home-educating families are commonly rejecting conventional ideologies (competitiveness, consumerism, materialism etc.), and working towards making a different kind of world for their children. It is in this sense that home education is part of the counter-culture, and one thing that the state just can’t abide is counter-cultural activity…

This is why these proposals are such a matter of concern, and a place where a strong, principled stand of non-compliance surely needs to be taken. There are many many thousands of home educators in this country. If they can stand together, and simply refuse to comply with this further example of state colonization of the private sphere, then it won’t have a hope of succeeding.

Dr Richard House is a counsellor-psychotherapist who lectures at Roehampton University; a trained Steiner teacher; and a writer and campaigner. He is a founding member of the ‘Open EYE’ Campaign for open early-years learning. In 2008, Richard was voted one of London’s ‘Top 1,000 most influential people’ (by the London Evening Standard newspaper).

The full article will be published in The Mother magazine (TM36) September / October 2009 edition.
The Mother magazine 
Subscriptions, samples, books: www.themothermagazine.co.uk 
Phone: + 44 (0) 1768 897 121

Thanks to Brittany Gravely of Documentary Educational Resources for flagging up their film reource.

We distribute many new and older documentaries on alternative education: http://www.der.org/films/imagine-a-school-summerhill.html http://www.der.org/films/breaking-the-cycle.html http://www.der.org/films/family-of-many-nations.html And we will soon release FULLY AWAKE about the experimental Black Mountain College in North Carolina. For more information, contact us: docued@der.org

Just how safe are some schools? Rather than pusrsuing home educators perhaps the government should focus its mind on the known horrors revealed here in the From The Sunday Times June 28, 2009 by David Leppard.

Hidden surge in classroom sex attacks. Police fear a link to gang culture after a rise in rapes and serious assaults in schools

The spectre of a hidden epidemic of sex crimes inside Britain’s classrooms has emerged after Scotland Yard revealed there have been nearly 900 rapes or serious sex attacks in schools.

The figures - the first of their kind produced - show that 65 victims were raped in secondary and primary schools in London in the past five years. A further 826 were the target of other sexual assaults.

Last year, the number of alleged rapes rose 60% on the previous year to 32. The statistics suggest the vast majority of victims were schoolchildren under the age of 16. As many as one in three were under 11.

More http://tiny.cc/jV0Ww

On education, Labour failed our children.
The government has finally acknowledged that its centralised control of schools doesn’t work – but for many, it’s too late
  
Jenni Russell guardian.co.uk, Friday 26 June 2009 13.18 BST. http://tiny.cc/1zJ3X

A withering piece accounting the Soviet-like centralism of Labour’s education policy. Jenni Russell’s article and the extensive comments that follow are well worth a read

Telegraph View. Published: 8:01PM BST 11 Jun 2009

Written a couple of weeks ago now but this Telegraph article and the comments posted since provide good coverage of the Home Ed Review issues.

Even in its current decrepit state, the Government has not lost its unappealing appetite for control. It has given Douglas Jay’s notorious aphorism, “the gentleman in Whitehall is usually right”, a wholly unwarranted lease of life, long after it should have been consigned to the political graveyard. Nowhere has this been more true than in how we raise our young. In Labour’s view, the primary responsibility for this most elemental human activity rests not with the parent, but with the state.

That is the only conclusion that can be drawn from the indefensible decision of Ed Balls, the Schools Secretary, to accept the recommendations of Graham Badman’s Review of Elective Home Education in England. Mr Badman appears to have concluded that parents are not safe to be trusted with the education of their children and that those who decide to school their children at home must become, in effect, subsidiaries of the state. They will have to register annually, be subjected to inspection visits by the local authority and submit a statement of their intended approach to their child’s education.

More of this article and comments http://tiny.cc/48lQX

Labour to junk Tony Blair’s flagship school reform. Headteachers to get more powers as era of centralised control ends

Polly Curtis, education editor guardian.co.uk, Thursday 25 June 2009 22.25 BST

The government is to abandon the most significant education reform of the New Labour era in order to end the centralised control of schools and grant headteachers more powers, the Guardian has learned…. more at http://tiny.cc/wZinr

Futurelab has just launched Vision Mapper, a free online resource that is intended to support education leaders embarking on school redesign, planning a curriculum change or just needing support for long-term decision making or strategy setting.

Vision Mapper provides inspirational and practical materials to challenge and support futures thinking, including six possible future scenarios, current trends that should be considered when planning for the future and case-studies of successful long-term planning initiatives.  There is also a wide range of group activities and resource packs to help education leaders prepare for the future.

Vision Mapper is part of Beyond Current Horizons, a research programme conducted by education innovator Futurelab and the Department for Children, Schools and Families (DCSF).  The programme aims to help our education system prepare for and respond to the challenges it faces in the context of social and technological change beyond 2025.

For more information please visit http://www.visionmapper.org.uk

More evidence (if its needed!) that the fears of those supporting the Badman review are being focused  in the wrong direction!

Polly Curtis guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 23 June 2009 20.07 BST http://tiny.cc/RmRYK
 
Ofsted inspectors investigating an increase in exclusions from primary schools have discovered “worrying” levels of sexual behaviour among very young children.
An inquiry into schools that have repeatedly suspended pupils as young as four has unearthed high incidences of children touching other children inappropriately and using sexually graphic language as well as swearing, attacking staff and throwing furniture. Read the rest of this entry »

A new article entitled New Website Page on the Final Badman Report to Ed Balls June 2009 has been posted on the EO Campaign website,
http://www.freedomforchildrentogrow.org/update.php.

A very lively and interesting set of posts follow the article : Parents condemn plans for councils to ‘police’ home education in

Kent Online 24th June 2009 by the political editor Paul Francis. It begins…

Parents have criticised plans to allow councils to enter their homes and question children over their home education.

The plan forms part of a wide-ranging shake-up in the way parents who choose to teach their children at home are monitored.

There are about 750 children in Kent who are currently educated at home.

The shake-up follows a review conducted by Kent County Council’s former children’s services director Graham Badman.

More http://tinyurl.com/mzcxvj

Among some excellent posts (and a few dire!) I had to chuckle at Derry Hannam’s

33 ‘failing schools’ in Kent?
24/06/2009 20:24:26 by Derry Hannam
It would appear that at the time that Badman retired (2008) there were 33 failing secondary schools in Kent judged by Balls’ (DCFS minister) own criteria (the highest number for any English county). If this is the case are some of the 750 home educators in Kent refugees from the ‘failing’ schools that Badman was responsible for? If so it seems a bit rich to pursue them in their homes after you have failed them in your schools! Is this what the policy change is all about - to distract attention from the growing number of parents taking their children out of ‘failing’ schools - either to private schools if they can afford it or home education if they cannot.

‘Education systems too narrow’: Sir Ken Robinson

Australian Broadcasting Corporation. Broadcast: 16/06/2009. Reporter: Kerry O’Brien

Sir Ken Robinson, a leading thinker on education, creativity and innovation, who has advised various governments and major global corporations says that most education systems around the world including Australia’s, are still modelled on the needs of the industrial age, were already narrow and are getting narrower.

Links to two interview videos http://www.abc.net.au/7.30/content/2009/s2600125.htm

Continuning this thread of posts. How sad it would be if we lost what diversity we had in the educational landscape. How sad this diversity is not available for more young people and families

William Tyler Smith’s (Kiss Me Again, The Third Mind) documentary tells the story of A. S. Neill’s Summerhill School and their fight for survival against Tony Blair’s Labour government. A must see for anybody interested in education, progressive, alternative, and humanist ideas.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GdwjvxcJHTA&feature=related

  Democratic education at Sands School    http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-SM2r4Q3mFM

One of the threats to those offering choice in the educational landscape is the continuing default positions of those in power and those dominant established interests. We see this in this country with home-based education. In the USA a current threat faces online Charter Schools. In this case teachers unions rather than looking out to the needs of young people default to their own  misguided self-interest.

On June 23, the House of Representatives debated SB 767, a bill written by special interests that could enable state bureaucrats to shut down online virtual schools in Oregon. House Republicans today opposed Senate Bill 767 to protect the ability of parents to seek alternative educational opportunities for their children.

In this clip, Rep. Matt Wingard (R-Wilsonville) tells the story of a successful online virtual school that is opening educational opportunities to thousands of Oregon kids. Rep. Wingard talks about the importance of these schools, and the effort by a powerful special interest group to deny these students an alternative education that meets their unique needs.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WUXACScdDIY

Natomas Charter School Individualized Learning Program (ILP) is a modified independent study program that serves students in grades 9-12 in Sacramento, CA. This small school setting offers students… http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HbGRX-Jx96g

Creativity and Innovation- 99% Inspiration, 1% Perspiration?
07 July 2009, 10am - 4pm (refreshments from 9.30am)
Mary Ward House, Tavistock Place, London, WC1H 9SN
£175 plus VAT **Special Friends’ rate of £87.50 plus VAT for this week only!

“Creativity can solve almost any problem. The creative act, the defeat of habit by originality, overcomes everything” George Lois

If the above quote is right, how should creativity be used to to encourage problem solving ability and independent thinking in our students, colleagues and communities? Read the rest of this entry »