The Edge Foundation has a history of supporting schools and colleges to broaden and transform education, making it relevant to the twenty-first century. The team spent several years visiting and working with some of the most effective schools, colleges and models around the world. Although they may use different language, Edge found the similarities between all these highly effective approaches to be striking. At the time Edge distilled these into three key principles that sat at the heart of Edge Future Learning (EFL) – Project Based Learning (PBL), Real World Learning and Community Connected Learning. They went on to pilot these approaches with schools and colleges across the North East of England in partnership with Ford Next Generation Learning (NGL) and the North East Local Enterprise Partnership (NELEP). EFL ran for about five years with an aim to learn lessons from that work and to share these with schools and colleges in the UK. In the first phase of EFL there was a strong focus on PBL. Learning from this phase informed the second stage of the pilot.
To inform this next phase of the work of Edge, they asked IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society, to undertake an independent reflection on the second stage of the pilot to identify how different elements of their approach worked and the lessons learned so that these can be shared across schools and colleges and support them to adopt and adapt good practice. The research took place between August 2022 and August 2023.
