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Clacton Coastal Academy and the Human Scale Project
Nearly ten per cent of secondary schools in England have over 1,500 students. A handful have over 2,000 and at least one has over 2,500. No-one wants to be a cog in a machine. Time and again parents and teachers call for smaller classes and smaller schools where students matter as human beings. Time and again we hear from young people about how easy it is to feel lost and confused as they struggle to find their feet in large secondary schools. This is why the Gulbenkian Foundation is funding a seminal new project to support large secondary schools in developing human scale principles and practices.
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. Many schools are seeking innovative ways of ‘growing small’. As one headteacher wrote in her application for a grant: ‘We want to make each student known and cherished so that we can enhance their learning potential by giving them that all important self-confidence and high self-esteem.’
At Clacton Academy in Essex, the Headteacher believes that developments here represent the renewal of a true vision of education. “Our aim is to personalise and individualise learning as much as is practical through our learning pathways and our focus on learning styles. We aim to create lifelong learners who continue to grow and develop knowledge and skills throughout their lives. ‘Learning to learn’ as part of our Coastal Competency Curriculum is a cornerstone of our work, teaching students the skills of embedded learning, study skills, revision, thinking skills, problem solving and developing core learning skills such as Literacy and Numeracy."
We believe that the education of young people flourishes when it is built on good human relationships. This has important consequences for the scale of organisations and the number of people involved in learning and teaching. To quote the American small schools pioneer Ted Sizer: ‘One cannot teach a student well if one does not know that student well.’ Small per se is not enough – it is not an end in itself. But it is an important first step in establishing the conditions necessary to create active, collaborative communities where young people and their learning are taken seriously.