However well-resourced the school, one thing is in chronically short supply: time. 

Teachers are constantly trying to find ways of sweating the timetable. Educational arithmetic is very simple, and unavoidable: things are always being added, but nothing gets taken away.

Time dominates our discourse and imposes a tyranny, not least in the perennial dilemma of how to fit quarts of curriculum content into pint pots of lesson time. 

What we call key stages are really about age, not stage: time served (what the Americans call seat-time) counts more than mastery of content, concepts or competencies.

Stretching and compressing time

Tactics for stretching time include lengthening the school day, adding holiday revision sessions, and starting GCSE courses in Year 9. 

Attempts to compress time include adding lunchtime clubs and clinics, and squeezing non-examined components out of the curriculum.

Each tactic might be justifiable in isolation, and might make sense when seen from one or other silo. But is anyone keeping an eye on the aggregate effect of these responses? 

Trying to cheat time too often involves robbing Peter to pay Paul, and ends up in competitive silo-building. It turns out to be a zero-sum game.

The only organised opposition to these insidious accelerations has come in the form of the Slow Education movement. This has, fittingly, been slow to get going, partly because it encourages an even greater fixation on time as the crucial dimension. 

Away from the tyranny of time

We would do better to turn our attention away from the tyranny of time, towards the opportunities afforded by space. It’s time for education to take a spatial turn.

Thinking spatially involves adopting a view of the whole landscape, taking account of the aggregate effect of all the time-based initiatives. A spatial perspective encourages the evaluation of individual elements in relationship with each other, coexisting within a shared curricular space.

Thinking spatially offers the chance to do things not faster but differently, and with direction - exploring new ways of configuring learning, rather than just trying to do the old things more quickly.

We should focus on the quality of the learning journey, and not fixate on the shortest route to the destination. 

Progress, in three dimensions

Pupil progress may be plotted on the three dimensions of space, as well as that of time. 

A spatial turn, encompassing breadth, balance and the big picture, sets the scene for asking questions about how we currently organise the things we currently assume are givens. 

What happens when the learner outcomes articulated by a school are mapped on to the curriculum at each key stage? Are all GCSE subjects really roughly the same size, or do some need or deserve more curriculum space? 

Must we assume that the most valid learning takes place in front of a teacher in a formal setting?

Packing the school day with clubs and clinics makes everyone look busy, but how effective is it? And do pupils - and staff - suffer from the shortage of time for reflection and play?

Mapping the curriculum space

The central concerns around GCSE (undermining non-core creative subjects) and A level (premature academic narrowing) coalesce around the tendency to see things in terms of time rather than space. 

The fact that these are two-year courses, to be delivered in a set number of guided learning hours, are givens that immediately set limits on how many subjects can be fitted into the timetable. 

Let’s start instead with a map of the curriculum space: more subjects could be fitted in if they didn’t all have to be of the same preordained size, and we could even talk about adjacencies and areas of overlap.

A spatial turn in pedagogy would encourage more joined-up thinking about how a school can deliver on its vision and objectives. This is evident in two important and related developments. 

Design thinking offers an authentic alternative to linear-learning models, rejecting the idea that pupils’ knowledge deficits need to be rectified as quickly, and in as few steps, as possible. 

In this model, learning takes place in a spiral, not a straight line. It plays out like the heuristic process of invention, involving successive iterations, each building on the one before. 

Liminal learning spaces

Pupils should be encouraged to embrace the process of trying things out, and be positive about being wrong. They should share tentative ideas, ask and answer questions, be open to feedback, and take ownership of learning.

Design thinking invites a spatial perspective in several senses, mostly metaphorical, fitting comfortably into liminal curriculum spaces. It encourages group work and collaboration, including divisions of labour in the allocation of tasks within a group. 

It transforms the teacher-pupil relationship; and acts as a solvent on rigid boundaries between formal and informal learning opportunities. 

These aspects of the practice of learning are best seen as bundled in space, rather than hurtling down the single track of time.

Associated with this is an interest in how physical spaces can be designed to reinforce, not just reflect, a more authentic learning experience: the quality of light, oxygen levels, plants, wall colours, furniture types, and the classroom configurations adapted to the current task, whether it’s discussing, researching, planning, making or presenting.

What will the learning landscape look like in the school of the future? 

We live our lives in four dimensions, three of which are spatial. It is regrettable that, as educators, we so often defer to time and a single spatial dimension, thereby allowing ourselves to become slaves to the linear fallacy. 

Space is, both literally and in its rhetorical richness, the final educational frontier.

Kevin Stannard is director of innovation and learning at the Girls’ Day School Trust. He tweets as @KevinStannard1