Education for the future

I attended a conference last week which was the beginning of the process to shape schools for the future in Wigan. Soon the Council will be bidding for one quarter of a billion pounds of Government funding to improve the Borough's education provision and build schools that will prepare young people for the future. This expenditure will be the biggest capital investment in the last 50 years.

One of the most interesting aspects that were discussed at the conference was the nature of educational provision for children of the future. I have a grandson who is nine months old. According to what I was told at the conference he will probably have 18 jobs in his lifetime - long gone are the days when you started in a job as a young person and retired doing the same job. Furthermore 80% of the jobs that will be available when he is of age to work do not exist now. And finally he probably will be working on his own as the work community as we know it will have gone. This is already happening - my second son does a lot of his work from a lap top computer wherever he is at the time.

Now all this is conjecture but I believe the main thrust of it is accurate. So the question for today's education chiefs and indeed the community is ' How do we educate our children for the future and what skills will they need to cope with a very fast changing world?'