Small is Beautiful!

Nearly ten per cent of secondary schools in England have over 1,500 students and a small number have over 2,000 and secondary schools appear to be getting larger. The Government is encouraging popular schools to expand and to find ways of federating and connecting with schools facing greater challenges...

As an alternative, I have become increasingly interested in small schools because, the more I look at the current organisational structures in our large comprehensive schools, I don't think they work and need to be rethought, re-imagined and restructured to create smaller and more powerful learning communities.

Working in Leeds with my colleague Bill Pullen, who sadly died in 2009, I remember Bill's passion for another way of moving forward in impersonal, large and increasingly complex schools by adopting a 'school within a school' approach where the large overarching structure would be broken down into a series of smaller units each with around 250 young people working with a dedicated core team of teachers, learning mentors and learning assistants. In doing this, Bill believed these small schools will develop strong and highly effective relationships working at the heart of the educational journey. The Gulbenkian Foundation has been supporting Human Scale Education and funded a project, which included Farnley Park High School, to support up to 50 large secondary schools develop human scale principles and practices,. Their Human Scale Schools project aims to build a critical mass of secondary schools that can stand up as effective examples of how its principles work. This ambitious project aims to combine the best of both worlds: large schools offering choice and diversity coupled with human scale structures which enable young people to feel valued, respected and cared for, and where they can learn well.

You can find out more about human scale education by visiting www.hse.org.uk.
Chris