EDUCATION VOL.1, NO8 – GEOFF MULGAN: A SHORT INTRO TO THE STUDIO SCHOOL

The Young Foundation in the UK is a force of nature for innovation. After hundreds of conversations, across continents, they have launched studio schools. Their champion, presenting in this next video, is Geoff Mulgan.

Contemporary education values cognitive skills nearly to the exclusion of everything else. The reality is that real world projects require many skills including operations managers, janitorial services, IT specialists, secretarial support, delivery men and women, project managers and so on. At Studio School UK, kids get the opportunity to work on real projects, within real teams, in real settings. This idea draws from guild era training. They have successfully negotiated the obstacles to forming workable alliances between business and education, in order to provide specialized on-the-job training for disenfranchised youth. Remarkably, students who previously performed at the bottom of their classes in subjects like math, and appeared to have limited futures, after one year in studio school, jumped to the top quartile.