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How will these people want to learn? What technology will they
use? What work or educational processes will they accept? What
we do know is that many more people will be learning in the future,
and that the overwhelming trend is towards collaborative learning.
We also know that the lecture format, like this, is about the least
effective way of transferring information – for which I apologise.
We need to widen our expectations of learning. We need to
think not just of disciplines, isolated pockets of learning, but at
linkages between different departments and different areas of
the world because there are no finite boundaries between areas
of knowledge. There’s an increasing understanding that learning
takes place anywhere and everywhere, is blended into life.
This is challenging the long-standing belief that education is
We need to widen our expectations somehow only meaningful within its own context. Learning within
of learning. We need to think not the boundary of a school or university is becoming less and less
just of disciplines, isolated pockets realistic. The future of education will be about taking learning out
to wherever it needs to happen. This idea of blended learning
of learning, but at linkages between
needs to be understood in terms of technology as well – it’s not
different departments and different a case of either face-to-face or IT-based learning, it’s about new
areas of the world because there are realities that we don’t yet fully understand such as the use of
no finite boundaries between areas virtual environments or augmented reality.
of knowledge. Here are some statistics that show the scale of educational estate
in the UK. In England, for example, there are 60 million square
metres of educational space with a replacement value of £130
billion. In Scotland there is eight million square metres of school
space, with a £7.7 billion replacement cost, and 24.9 million square
metres of higher education estate with a value of nearly £40 billion.
There’s something scary about the scale of those numbers (and
if you do the maths something is wrong with either property
valuations or the quality of educational buildings in Scotland – I think
further research is needed on that). But if you look at how this huge
investment in learning is actually used, you could argue that it
doesn’t represent value for money for the nation. Classrooms
may be utilised for around 80 per cent of the core school day, but
in terms of the 24-hour day and the seven-day week they’re used
for only 18 per cent of the time. The formal utilisation studies that
are done in most universities show rates of between 15 and 20 per
cent. For specialised spaces, rates of between 8 and 10 per cent
are not uncommon.
If you think about the total amount of educational estate in the UK
and its value these utilisations represent a poor use of the nation’s
6 Change in the educational world
