Notschool.net
Professor Stephen Heppell, Ultralab, Anglia Polytechnic University

New technologies have changed our relationship with learning, giving us a contributory role and allowing us to enjoy creativity, flexibility -agility even. But in schools, children writing examination essays can be frustrated because they have little opportunity to use this flexibility, denied the chance to use the editing skills they have honed throughout their coursework using their keyboards. They value these authoring skills and it is to no-one's surprise if, when the skills are denied a stage and audience, alienation and disenchantment result.

Similarly, the formal linearity of the school day, school term or academic year with its bells, dates and pre-requisites leaves too little flexibility; many children find that a rigidly timetabled linear school life simply doesn't match their needs.

Two things have changed since the mid Nineties: firstly the economy is short of skilled labour so that wastefully abandoning children whom school didn't fit now looks profligate, but secondly it increasingly looks as though the ability to adhere to the rigidity of the school curriculum is producing children without many of the skills needed for the economy to survive in the dot.com age: critical awareness, managed autonomy, collaborative endeavour, teamwork, agility and so on. It is clearly not {yet) that bad, and of course not only is children's enviable grasp of technology pushing us towards some imaginative rethinks of the curriculum, that same technology also offers us the means to be innovative wherever, with whom and how we manage learning.

All of this made for very fertile conditions in which to explore the learning lives of the very many children that school has failed both academically and socially. Ultralab and the DfEE together have pioneered Notschool.net {say it as "Notschool dot net" please) which offers another model of new learning. The 100 children in Notschool's pilot project, drawn from Essex and Glasgow, work from the home in which their various circumstances have placed them: teenage mums, phobics, truants, persistent misbehaviours, seriously ill children and many others. The project gives them powerful home-based technology including an iMac computer with Internet connection (chosen especially for the impact its design can have on self-esteem), a colour scanner and colour printer. Each mixed age group of four children has mediation from a tutor {largely retired teachers, but some from the supply register) and there are 25 eclectic "experts" drawn from museums and galleries but including a children's book illustrator, for example. A powerhouse curriculum team includes the Science Museum, the BBC, Worldwide Fund for Nature, City and Guilds and others. Even more radically the 100 students in the pilot have mentoring provided by 100 undergraduates with top examination grades who are paid {but very keen) to work with the Notschool students online. The resources on tap for these wired learners also include the full resources of the World Wide Web.

Notschool is part of Oracle's Think.com learning communities environment -which also houses the virtual bit of the National College of School Leaders. Think.com offers a range of learning tools: brainstorms, debates, annotated articles, play transcripts, hot-seats and more besides, and it is easy to use.

What Notschool shows us already is that the children that school didn't fit are not the children who didn't fit learning. Institutions failed them, not motivation. Above all else it confirms that we cannot afford to waste these bright, creative, imaginative young learners. Currently Notschool is seeking governors and the surprise is to find just how many successful entrepreneurs, artists, actors, musicians and inventors were failed by the school system too. We need them all. .

A poem by Notschool student Linsie in her first year of virtual learning

The important talk with mum would not be a row if i knew then
what i know now babies are precious and yes they are sweet
but night can be filled with pacing of feet.

i love my baby ever so much to hear his first word to feel his
first touch days can be long and sometimes bad, but when i
see that smile how can i be sad.

if i knew then what i know now, there would be a lot more
talking and a lot less row
parenting can be hard there's no book or no plan, do you stay
on top or let it go down the pan you know the right way some
go with the other but remember one thing the rules are made
by you the
MOTHER
so don't be too hurt when parents let you down cause they
had nothing to follow no book or no plan

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