Learnlife

The Twittersphere is ablaze with the news that the UK, after Australia and Ireland, is set to ban essay mills. While the news is unsurprisingly welcome by mainstream institutions, there is remarkably little bold discussion about why it happens in the first place. Is personal learning the true cure?

Learnlife has tackled the challenge to provide a fresh experience of learning, unleash learner curiosity, facilitate learner agency and encourage discovery in a variety of ways.

We need to replace traditional learning, which is no longer fit for purpose, with personal learning where learners forge unique learning paths.

In Learnlife we think a lot about change. In the Learnlife Alliance, we talk a lot about change. In the Learnlife hubs, hublings, communities and partnerships, we push for change and try to show and share with others how it might look, as we learn and grow together.

Personal learning sounds like a logistical nightmare to the top brass of education, who have had us marching lockstep for centuries. The truth is that if you try to personalize learning within the same old traditional system, it is almost impossible. But when the learner takes over, it really can be done. Let’s look at the personal learning approach of our Home Hub programme, and why it really is the future.

The traditional model of education tells us that as you progress, you narrow and specialise. But the future needs generalists too, who can connect the dots and see beyond the boundaries of specialism. So why do we still tell our children to choose one thing and do it well?

The world is full of successful entrepreneurs who were told in school that they would never amount to anything. So many people succeed ‘in spite of their education’ instead of ‘because of it’ tells us not only that the current system is broken, but gives us a yardstick to measure progress towards something better. When entrepreneurship finds its place in mainstream education, we might actually be getting somewhere and, to be honest, we’re not about to wait.

Literacy skills go beyond reading and writing, it covers how we interact with the world around us. To understand its scope better, here are 7 questions about literacy skills at Learnlife answered by learning guides, Harriet and Annette.

As governments and institutions rush to respond to the post-pandemic landscape in education, wellbeing for children is finally at the heart of policy. Dig just a bit deeper, however, and you’ll see that the majority of these strategies are temporary reactions. We discuss why wellbeing is the fundamental priority of learning environments and why that commitment needs to be permanent.