In the 2023 review of qualifications and assessment, Professor Louise Hayward proposed that senior secondary students should all undertake a project.
The idea was it would allow them to tackle a question or a problem that was “important to them” and “too broad or complex to be dealt with adequately by a single subject”. Examples of potential areas of exploration included “climate change, artificial intelligence or conflict”.
Long before the Scottish government’s response to the review was published, the education secretary made her reservations known. As a former secondary teacher, Jenny Gilruth told the MSPs on the Scottish Parliament’s Education, Children and Young People Committee that she was preoccupied with the practicalities, including how it would be timetabled.
Barriers to interdisciplinary learning
There are several barriers to project learning - or interdisciplinary learning (IDL) - in secondary schools, says Helena Good, the director of Daydream Believers, which creates free resources for schools, designed to promote creativity, critical thinking and problem solving.
A timetable that tends to be divided up into 50-minute blocks is one of them. Another is the by now well-documented tendency to always have an eye on the exams, even in early secondary.
Added to these constraints is the fact that teachers are time poor and overworked, and therefore have limited capacity to innovate.
Yet Daydream Believers is making inroads in project-based learning and IDL, as recognised in the government’s response to the Hayward review, published in September.
The government rejected Hayward’s plans for all senior students to undertake a project. It said more work was required if high-quality interdisciplinary learning was to “essentially become a mandatory part of the senior-phase curriculum in all secondary schools”.
However, it cited a number of organisations already working in this area that could be learned from - Daydream Believers was one of them.
So, given the aforementioned barriers to IDL in secondary, from subject silos to time-poor teachers, how has Daydream Believers made progress to the extent that it now has a presence in 90-plus schools in 27 councils?
First came the very real desire to get more creative and critical thinking into schools, Good says.
A former design lecturer at Edinburgh College, Good was clear that Scottish education needed to be more fleet of foot in responding to the predictions being made about the future skills that workers would need, by the likes of the World Economic Forum.
For some time now, the international think tank has been emphasising the importance of creative thinking as a future skill. In its Future of Jobs 2023 report, it predicted that “creative thinking” was the skill likely to increase most rapidly in importance between 2023 and 2027.
But Good’s philosophy is that if you want something to change, it’s not enough to explain “the what” and “the why”, you must also address “the how”. In other words, provide support.
CfE ‘stayed at the abstract level’
The renowned researcher Michael Fullan, speaking to Scottish education directors this month, made a similar point. Of Curriculum for Excellence (CfE), he said the goal was clear but “the means”, or how to get there, was not, and so it “stayed at the abstract level”.
The same could be said of IDL. It is already one of the four “contexts” for learning within CfE, but a recent report from the inspectorate, looking at how some aspects of CfE were being delivered in Scottish schools, found it was “an under-utilised element of curriculum design across all sectors”.
Arguably, Daydream Believers did not set out to solve this conundrum; it wanted to equip young people for the future and make learning fun. But the upshot is it has created resources that allow schools to deliver high-quality IDL experiences.
Good says interest has gathered pace because of “the powerful stories of the teachers and what’s happening in the classroom”.
One challenge, Forestopia, asks students to design a theme park connected to the ecosystem of a forest; another, Marseum, transports them to the year 2050 and asks them to design an exhibition about life on Earth for the first museum on the Red Planet.
Daydream Believers has also launched a creative-thinking qualification, which students in upper secondary can study at the equivalent of National 5 and Higher levels, and recently secured £146,000 in Scottish government funding to improve entrepreneurial learning in schools. As a result, three entrepreneurial challenges will be added to the growing suite of Daydream Believers’ resources.
Collaboration between art and science
Last year, the teacher Lewie Wicksted wrote for Tes Scotland about his experience of using the Daydream Believers’ resources, which he described as “exquisitely designed”.
His school, West Calder High in West Lothian, used the Solarpunk Island resources, which involve students imagining being shipwrecked on an island and having to build a habitat in a way that respects nature.
The course ran across S1-2, with two periods of the project per week in S1 and one in S2.
He said the project was originally designed to be a collaboration between the art and design and science departments, but at West Calder, teachers from “most, if not all, departments across the curriculum deliver the project in a collaborative manner”.
Good says this is the beauty of the resources - schools can use them however they like.
For her, the broad general education, which in secondary runs from S1-3 and is often lambasted for its lack of coherence, holds great promise. Here, she says, every school has the space to “put something different in”. And the success of Daydream Believers has shown that they will take that leap of faith providing the support is there.
“It’s a combination of being able to give teachers that space, agency and autonomy to do something different, coupled with examples of what that might look like,” she says.
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