We created this innovation to provide a means for schools who are thinking differently to come together and collaborate to solve shared problems of practice, using a Head, Heart, Hand approach. We found that schools in the UK who approach education in a more expansive way felt geographically isolated and did not have a loud voice in the system. We wanted to help them find a way to have a collective voice and to shout louder about their approaches, offering pathways for other schools to either join them, or to learn from their strong innovative practices.
The project has become a vehicle to explore many innovation areas in education, for example:
- shifting from behaviour management to relationship building restorative approaches
- implementing the progressive teaching and assessment of important competencies such as creativity, collaboration, metacognition
- designing Learner Profiles to showcase the full breadth of children and young people's experiences and development as they move through their school careers
- ensuring all students, staff and pupils experience a sense of belonging at the school through a focus on diversity, equity and inclusion
- tackling climate anxiety amongst young people through curriculum and community action projects
- designing approaches to professional development for teachers that enable teacher agency
10 schools join each year and each school nominates a Change Team which represents both leaders, who can faciliate change, and teachers, who can implement and test changes. They meet face-to-face eight times over two years to visit inspirational schools, hear from inspirational speakers and to use a Design Thinking methodology to collaboratively solve shared problems of practice. At the end of the two years, project participants produce sharable outputs that can be used by other schools to make similar changes to practice, for example toolkits, audit tools, resource packs, playbooks, guidebooks and case studies. Participants also blog about their participation in the project to help create a social media campaign which will encourage other schools to learn from their experiences.
We began with 10 schools in 2021 and now have 35, expanding to 45 schools in September 2026. We have also shared the outputs from the project widely on social media, run two annual conferences to share their work with a wdier group of schools and published a book which showcases their learning and offers advice to other schools: https://www.bloomsbury.com/uk/practical-guide-to-a-big-education-9781801997928/
The project is very responsive to the needs of different cohorts of schools as they join, for example the innovation areas they explore change for each new cohort. We also take an iterative approach to ongoing impact evaluation, adjusting each iteration of the programme in response to feedback. Finally, we have sought sponsors for the programme, in recognition that school budgets have been shrinking and that we want schools in challenging circumstances to be able to join. This has meant that the cost of joining has actaully dropped over the lifetime of the project.
Contact the project leader sarah.seleznyov@bigeducation.org or visit our website and complete the 'contact us' form for a call back: https://bigeducation.org/rethinking-school/
