Schools within schools : human scale education in practice

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, working with the charity Human Scale Education, has funded 39 secondary schools in England to develop along human scale lines.

This book is an account of the aspirations and process in some of those schools, including Brislington Enterprise College in south Bristol and Lister Community School in London's East End.

It includes a photo essay on Stantonbury Campus, Milton Keynes.

England has 25 contemporary 'monster schools' - of more than 2,000 students, four times as many as a decade ago.

There are 263 English secondaries of 1,500 to 2,000 students.

Large schools are cost effective and can offer wide curricula, but they do not have to mean an impersonal experience for children.

Brislington Enterprise College is one of a number of schools taking advantage of the Government's Building Schools for the Future (BSF) programme to reconstruct themselves physically as schools within schools - and forge a practice to match.

Other schools are changing their structures and practice within existing school buildings.

Education still fails many children. Nationally, fewer than half achieve the five good GCSEs including English and maths that the Government has set as a benchmark; many leave with no qualifications.

While primary schools often succeed in containing and nurturing children with emotional problems, secondary schools tend to lose them.

The basic human scale values - stress on positive student/teacher relationships in smaller learning communities, on enquiry-based learning - are now finding resonance politically and culturally.