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Education Exchange - bringing together innovators, social entrepreneurs and teachers

Education Exchange - bringing together innovators, social entrepreneurs and teachers

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What happens when a community of innovators, social entrepreneurs and teachers get together to innovate to improve education? UnLtd is determined to find out, so we partnered with the Young Foundation to hold the Education Exchange.

We began proceedings with two incredible demos from social ventures now>press>play and Panjango, showing their engaging and innovative education tools. With the demonstrations over we tackled four challenging topics affecting the education sector:

  • Pupil wellbeing - how best to support young people and mental health
  • Embedding employability in the curriculum
  • Teacher recruitment and retaining talent - challenges with wellbeing, motivation and resilience
  • Can school budget cuts create opportunities for innovation?

Over the next month, we will be sharing the reflections and ideas from those discussions.

Pupil wellbeing: how best to support young people and mental health

We know that pupil wellbeing and mental health has serious consequences for academic attainment. But wellbeing among young people in the UK is at a low ebb, a recent global survey found millennials in the UK to have among the poorest mental wellbeing and a recent BBC report highlighted the difficulties schools have in providing adequate mental health support to pupils.

Conversations at the Education Exchange acknowledged that mental health and wellbeing is a broad topic, but that at its centre a key challenge was the need to create a more engaging ways of developing soft skills.

The need for character education' in schools

Character education may seem an old-fashioned term, but it was a popular topic in our discussions from teachers and social entrepreneurs alike. It was defined as those soft skills - resilience, communication and confidence - considered vital to improving pupil wellbeing and to help conversations around mental health.

The introduction of better character education into schools was seen as invaluable for improving wellbeing. It would put an important focus on emotional wellbeing, help to improve pupils' confidence, and provide students and teachers with the tools they needed to discuss emotional needs.

Taking part in this discussion was Young Academy social venture, Sisterhood, who aim to raise the confidence of young women through design thinking workshops. They identified lack of confidence as a key factor in mental health issues with the young people they worked with.

The work of the Ashoka Changemaker schools, such as School 21 in London, was highlighted as a good example of integrating resilience and confidence learning into the curriculum. These joint projects between UK schools and Ashoka, a global organization that supports social entrepreneurs, offer fewer academic subjects. In their place, the schools encourage project-based learning aimed at improving soft skills.

Measurement and implementation frameworks

It was recognised that simply introducing personal development and character education into schools was only part of the solution. An issue that seemed to face many organisations involved in education was a lack of a framework to help measure mental health and wellbeing.

One initiative that featured in discussions as a potential solution was the the Healthy Schools Rating system, a toolkit trialled by Leeds Council to support schools to evaluate their physical, social and emotional health provision.

Yes Futures, an UnLtd award winner, shared some of the benefits of their Talent Toolbox system. A tool specifically designed to allow schools to measure soft-skills development among pupils and a powerful way of showing the impact of character education.

Starting conversations

Alongside the more systematic changes, a practical and immediately implementable idea was to simply start conversations with students about mental health or wellbeing early on. Embedding and normalizing conversations of this kind is an important step. It gives the teachers as well as the pupils involved the confidence to deal with any issues which may arise. The experience of teachers is an issue that is too often ignored. A recent survey by Place2Be, a leading children's mental health charity working in schools, showed that 92% of teaching staff are managing issues for pupils which go beyond their professional role and nearly 4 in 10 teachers said they were not confident in responding if a pupil had a mental health crisis.

Providing teachers with support and schools with pupil wellbeing services has never been more important. Over the coming weeks we will be sharing more of the discussions from the Education Exchange and updating you on how some of the ventures are tackling the issues.