Background

Language Futures was first developed in 2009 by Linton Village College in Cambridgeshire as part of the Learning Futures initiative led by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, in partnership with the Innovation Unit. Learning Futures itself drew significantly on the Foundation’s prior Musical Futures initiative which has transformed music teaching in hundreds of schools across the UK and internationally. Learning Futures aimed to deepen young people’s engagement with their learning across the curriculum, to achieve better outcomes and sustain a commitment to learning beyond school. Over 40 schools worked to design and test innovative methods of teaching and learning to increase engagement.

The initiative aimed to achieve deep engagement such that the learner:

• cares not just about the outcome, but also the development of their learning
• takes responsibility for their learning
• brings discretionary energy to their learning tasks
• can locate the value of their learning beyond school and wishes to prolong it beyond school hours.

Four key approaches were identified that, when applied together, can prove transformative for schools and lead to deep and sustained learner engagement:

• using project-based learning that crosses disciplinary boundaries, with students of all abilities
• treating school as a base-camp for learning rather than as a final destination
• utilising a range of extended learning relationships to support each student so that learning is something that can happen at any time, in any place and with many people – not just in a classroom
• transforming school into a learning commons for which teachers, students and the local community share responsibility, over which they share responsibility and from which they all benefit.

Published by the Paul Hamlyn Foundation, Work that matters: A teacher’s guide to project-based learning provides further information on the Learning Futures approach.