18 Feb

Posted at 08:24h in Articles

The Times newspaper of Saturday 15 February ran a typically one-sided and vindictive article alleging that what they labelled as unschooled home education was dangerous. They took the case of one (only one) female who claimed to have been unschooled and learned nothing. She particularly raised the issue that she and others had not been helped to be literate. I sent the following letter to the Times though they have not printed it as it does not, of course, fit the prevailing lies being pushed by the media about the dangers of children not in school. "The case study of so-called unschooling...

27 Aug

Posted at 08:27h in Articles

When I was scribing for a student doing his GCSEs in the summer I pondered on the instrument that I was using. A ball-point pen – or biro as we used to call it. When I was at school we had to use fountain pens for all writing. The use of a biro was forbidden and even the slightest hint of using one would get detention. For the school the notion of not using a fountain pen was seen as tantamount to the end of civilisation. It was that serious. And certainly for public exams right up to A levels fountain...

27 May

Posted at 14:13h in Articles

1. “They can’t be scaled up”. Some people in the educational establishment eventually recognise the overwhelming evidence that small learning communities or similar maybe can work. However, they claim the problem is that they can’t be scaled up. The assumption is that scaling means going from a small setting, which may be a learning community, learning centre or small school or whatever, to a typical large school is not possible. Therefore the whole movement is fundamentally doomed as it can’t cater for the needs of large numbers of children. Let’s look at an example of real-life scaling. When Howard Schultz found that the...

05 Oct

Posted at 09:21h in Articles

There is no need for a change in current arrangements for home education. The law on the ‘otherwise’ criterion is clear on the right to an education that is not in school. Below is some evidence for the need for schools to change, based on the book ‘Self Managed Learning and the New Educational Paradigm’ (Cunningham. 2020) There is ample well-researched evidence on the value of home education. (e.g. Pattinson, 2016). Allegations against parents of potential abuse or neglect have not been proved.  There is more evidence against schools in this respect. For instance, traumatic bullying in school (experienced daily by...

12 Aug

Posted at 12:54h in Articles

Modelling the Structure of Experience It may not seem quite seemly for me to be writing of a book I have co-authored. But, who else would do it?  No-one else has read it. Not that the topic is immediately relevant to Self Managed Learning, even. However, and I hope you will notice this, it is very relevant to the topic of organisational learning. The term ‘modelling’ (in its UK spelling) has a number of meanings. We are using it in the sense it is used within NLP (Neuro-Linguistic Programming), quite different from when it is applied to architectural macquettes, computer templates for...

13 Aug

Posted at 12:42h in Articles

One of the greatest myths in management is the generalisation that people resist change. In fact people love change. ...