rebarbarised

Culture Trip?

Extremely rough notes from this Channel 4 event inspired by government plans to offer all children five hours of access to arts and ‘high culture’ per week. I got tired towards the end, and gave up completely for the Question & Answer session.

Janey Walker, Head of Education
Channel 4 is interested in engagement and reach
"talent is our obsession"

Peter Jenkinson, cultural broker
5 hours a week, in and out of school
Difficult to implement?
On brink of a renaissance?
London and UK as world cultural hub
Boosterism?
Just a way to tackle anti-social behaviour
What's in it for artists, and are the children up to it?

Margaret Hodge, Secretary of State, DCMS
10 pilots, nearly150 expressions of interest (LEAs, voluntary orgs)
Reasons:
1) sheer joy in cultural experience
2) involvement in creativity raises standards
3) more jobs in creative sector
Experiment with 5 hours sports has had many benefits

Jeremy Hunt, Shadow Secretary for Culture, Media and Sport
Clash of culture and politics is often dangerous. Culture usually wins.
Sat through The Ring at age 10.
Used to be a Classic FM listener, but more sophisticated now.
"an aspiration not a target"
A pilot, no money assigned to roll out.
Many schools already doing 5 hours.
Can culture be packaged up and delivered as a target? Could infantilise what counts as culture.
Risk of forgetting what the real problem is e.g. difficulties of learning a music instrument
Good architecture is what helps you thrive not just survive.

Tony Lyng, Headteacher, Brockhill Park
5 hours is irrelevant.
Recognise fundamental worth of culture. Many schools working towards this for some time.
Thread of creative learning through all subjects.
5 hours is 20% of curriculum time, but less than 5% of waking time. As such it's not enough.
Culture is what we are.
Don't care much about 5 hours sport either.

Helen Reddington, musician and teacher
Risk of creativity getting tangled up with talent.
Talent implies competition, and want to take that out.

Anna Cutler, Head of Interpretation and Learning, Tate Modern
Told a story about a childhood cultural learning experience, and drew some lessons from it, which...

Estelle Morris
Told by teachers that creativity had been squeezed out of the curriculum. But on visits to the schools, they often showed off their creative achievements as what they were most proud of.
Targets and money are poor levers for dealing with culture.

Discoveries from the World Music Awards

A quick note to myself about the artists I felt were worth checking out from last night's World Music Awards:

• Hazmat Modine

• Bassekou Kouyate & Ngoni ba

• Sa Dingding

• Justin Adams & Juldeh Camara

• Andy Palacio & The Garifuna Collective

• Mayra Andrade

All collected together at this Last.fm tag.

Social Innovation Camp

My rough notes from Social Innovation Camp today. See also Guardian coverage plus David Wilcox's blog and videos.

Judges: Paul Birch (dot com entrepreneur), Roland Harwood (NESTA), ? from Office of Third Sector, Becky Faith (?), Christian ? (Yahoo), plus at least one other that I didn't get.

Ontheup.org Personal Development Reports

Stakeholders: young people, team leaders, commissioners of projects

real accounts and real stories from real people in real time

each stakeholder can see needs of the others

Stuffshare.com

a power drill is used for 20 mins in its lifetime

"a place to share stuff with people like you"

free to communities, companies pay

Developed in ruby on rails

trusted networks, lightweight reputation, not eBay

primary instinct is to buy - this has to change

Rate Your Prison

150,000 children have parents in prison

good family relations reduce reoffending

prison visit league table

issue of validating that rating is based on a real visit, but retain anonymity to avoid repercussions for inmates

precedent of patientopinion and positive impact on NHS

Enabled by Design

Denise diagnosed with MS in 2003

aid gadgets make your home look like a hospital

how to connect the needs of people with disabilities to design expertise?

WiBi.it (aka Barcode Wikipedia) 

(domain not working yet, at time of writing)

When buying food, people want more info than is on the label

what does FairTrade really mean?

mashup with reviews from Amazon etc

cvlifeline.co.uk

migrants, women returners - people out of touch with labour market

tag experience, skin it, get it rated

bounty fee from recruiters and employers

monster and guardian could buy white label version of service

The Glue

ageing population, dispersed family members, don't know where the will is etc

1. find local - contact others who have family members near yours, share info about useful people to talk to at local council, health care etc
2. family blogs
3. third part that I didn't get...

prototype in drupal

Winner (£2,000): Enable by Design

Runner up (£1,000): Rate Your Prison

Diversity of provision in education (RSA lecture)

Here are rough notes from this RSA lecture and discussion. In due course an audio recording of the full event will appear here, so you can check how inaccurate and superficial I have been.

Kim Catcheside, BBC (Chair)

Famous New Labour quote about the 'end of the "bog standard" comprehensive'

Geoff Mulgan, Young Foundation, founder of Demos

personalised, holistic (Ross School in East Hampton)

project-based 

In the '80s there was a trend towards centralisation; in last 10 years a move towards pluralism.

In government there's a belief in economies of scale that defies evidence to the contrary.

Life skills (non cognitive) are critical, but don't get attention from policy makers, who mostly did very well in academic field.

"Seed skills": social intelligence, enterprising behaviour, disciplines etc

Diversity of schools: "studio schools", v small, not comprehensive, but meet needs of a minority

Diversity in existing schools: people from other walks of life going into teaching

Diversity out of schools: Tower Hamlets Summer University, school of everything -- everyone has something to teach -- Ivan Illich would have approved

What the govt is doing for diversity here is modest compared with Denmark, Netherlands, Sweden.

The reason we're having this debate is that the lower end of provision is so poor.

Anders Hultin, co-founder of private secondary schools in Sweden

UK school system is a mess

Voucher system in Sweden, which led to creation of many new schools.

Parents have legal right to choose between different types of school.

Define personal goals for every student.

Don't have the same testing regime in Sweden.

No correlation at all between money and results, so it's not a case of just pumping more money in.