News From Nowhere Radical & Community Bookshop

• home
• browse books
• book details:

Schools within Schools: Human Scale Education in Practice

by Wendy Wallace - £8.50  Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation (2009)
paperback    ISBN 13: 9781903080122 | ISBN 10: 1903080126

England has 25 contemporary ‘monster schools’ – of more than 2,000 students, four times as many as a decade ago. There are 263 English secondaries – twice as many as when Labour took office – of 1,500 to 2,000 students. Large schools are cost effective and can offer wide curricula, but they do not have to mean an impersonal experience for children. Brislington Enterprise College in South Bristol, for example, is one of a number of schools taking advantage of the Government’s Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme to reconstruct themselves physically as schools within schools – and forge a practice to match. Other schools are changing their structures and practice within existing school buildings.
 
Education still fails many children at many levels. Nationally, fewer than half achieve the five good GCSEs including English and maths that the Government has set as a benchmark; many leave with no qualifications. While primary schools often succeed in containing and nurturing children with emotional problems, secondary schools tend to lose them. The basic human scale values – stress on positive student/teacher relationships achieved within learning communities of not more than 250–300 individuals, on enquiry-based learning that promotes skills rather than transmitting a body of knowledge – are finding resonance politically and culturally.
 
The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, working with the charity Human Scale Education, has funded 39 large secondary schools to develop along human scale lines. This book is an account of the aspirations and process in some of those schools: Brislington Enterprise College, Bristol; Lister Community School in London’s East End; Stanley Park in Surrey; Walker Technology College in the North-East and Glossopdale in the Peak District. It also includes a photo-essay of Stantonbury Campus, Milton Keynes, by Mike Goldwater.

(Price & availability last checked: October 2018)

Order by email

×

Schools within Schools: Human Scale Education in Practice - by Wendy Wallace

Please fill in the order form, & we will reply as soon as we can to confirm your order & tell you how long it will take. Choose between collection from our bookshop or mail-order, for which we charge postage at cost, at current Royal Mail rates

Select type of order: Collect & pay in the shop - I live in or can visit Liverpool Mail-order - send me a card payment link Mail-order - I will pay another way & give details in the notes section

Your name:

Please fill out this field.

Your email address

Please check carefully that you have entered your email correctly

Please fill out this field.

Your phone number (required for order as back-up contact method):

Please check carefully that you have entered your phone number correctly.

Please fill out this field.

Notes (optional - for additional message or information about your order):

Close

Enquire about this book

×

Schools within Schools: Human Scale Education in Practice

by Wendy Wallace

Your name:

Please fill out this field.

Your email address

Please check carefully that you have entered your email correctly

Please fill out this field.

Your phone number (optional):

Your message:

Please fill out this field.

(optional) If you are interested in ordering this book, would your order be for collection or mail-order? Select type of order : Collect from the shop - I live in or can visit Liverpool Mail-order - send by post

Close

In booklists: Teachers, Teaching and Schools, Radical Education,
In categories: Education, Children & Young People, Changing the World,