A festival of education..

Wow yes a festival... now education has not been that exciting in the past 20 something years.  At least it feels exciting and full of hope for a really innovative creative day of sharing and probing especially when you see the line up of minds attending, some of course more brilliant than others.

Having scanned through the plans for the day and the location as well as the list of attendees and workshops I felt like this was a real step to value education and bring together those who do it and those who have it done to them.  Feel free to place yourself whichever side of that divide that you feel most comfortable.  But yes I felt this was an attempt to bring government ministers and advisors in contact with a wider range of the young people and those working on the learning floor (so to speak) so as to really share thoughts for the future and views on current policy and developments.
But I wonder how are they to get young people there on a Saturday?  Will schools bring groups of students? Will young people have seen the adverts which to my knowledge have only been in the TES, not the paper with the highest youth readership. How will they get young people there?  So my mission over the next 2 weeks will be to push this info out to as many people as possible, after all is there anyone without an interest in education? Parents, carers, young adults just emerging from Uni, youths in the education system, businesses, managers, directors and self employed business owners who aspire to one day be recruiting surely all have a reason to be interested in the education being provided and planned in London.  Lets not forget residents with schools on their doorsteps and even those who are yet to discover the free school opening over the fence should all be taking an interest.

So what can we look forward to on the day...well it seems there will be a lot of opportunities to hear the thoughts of those writing policy and planning for future education alongside a range of workshops on everything from behaviour to learning slowly and of course networking with other equally interested members of the community.  I am sure all of this will take place whilst carrying a suitably large bag of goodies gathered at the trade stalls that are also signed up to bring along boxes of recently arrived from china trinkets advertising their resources and skills.

Of course how enthused you might feel about the whole event does depend quite heavily on which of the scrolling banner pictures is on the website main page when you click to go there... tickets are limited so dont let the grey men in suits put you off...click on either pic to get booking.