Building Schools for the Future
Key guiding principles and priorities
The key guiding principles and priorities for Building Schools for the Future are to:
1. Extend choice, diversity and fair access by:
- Expanding successful schools
- Increasing faith school options
- Transforming vocational, technical and practical opportunities in every school
- Developing all-through coordinated campus provision on at least 3 sites
2. Personalise learning and teaching
- Building to enable structured and responsive approaches to each young person's learning, enabling all to reach their full potential academically and in their adult and working life, and to develop their personal and particular interests, gifts and talents
3. Harness technology to:
- Improve attainment and build on the evidence of the impact of the borough's central involvement in the recent ICT Test Bed improvement programme
- Support personalisation of learning
- Combine contributions of parents and the voluntary and community sector to learning
4. Promote excellent social interaction for learning and personal development by designing for:
- High quality speaking, listening, discussion debate and dialogue in paired, small-group, seminar and whole-class situations
- Productive environments for personal, social and health guidance, mentoring and support
- Ensuring that children with learning difficulties and/or disabilities, for example those on the autistic spectrum, have supportive, non-threatening spaces in which to thrive
- Enabling children and young people to develop the whole range of 'soft skills'
5. Strengthen the support to families in favour of the welfare, well-being and upbringing of all children and young people
6. Maximise the contribution of Building Schools for the Future investment to the social economic and cultural development of the whole community
7. Promote and enable new ways of working, for example:
- Pedagogical transformation across the whole range of learning opportunities, with ICT at the heart
- Developing shared social pedagogical principles across all practitioners working in and from the new and refurbished schools
