Setting a new bearing

Stephen Heppell has had his hand on the education tiller for 30 years, challenging conventions and using technology to unleash children’s capacity to learn

Words Eleanor Young | Portraits James Bolton

­­Stephen Heppell scans horizons. He puts education and technology trajectories together and starts to sketch out new futures. He set up teachers’ social networking site Schoolnet before Facebook was even dreamt of. He has been looking into the future for 30 years, founding learning technology research centre Ultralab at the Anglia Ruskin University before becoming an independent consultant (with a little teaching on the side). But he is not academic in bearing or method: he works by being engaged and engaging. This draws out the best in children and technology. And he spends a lot of time with both.

In a deft but genial turn of conversation (‘I bet you were bright as a button when you were 11’) Heppell can bring you onboard with his preference for ‘stage not age’ learning and show what he means by children’s ambition. In a conference setting (he is in great demand on that circuit) his claims that seductive learning technologies can make kids brighter sound overblown. But humour and anecdotes help – he knows kids who have used it or a school in New Zealand where it really works. As lead sponsor of an academy in Portland he hopes to try out many of those ideas soon – although the project is currently stalled, of which more later.

Much of Heppell’s horizon scanning has become reality. He worked with Future Systems on two Classrooms of the Future in West London which had less furniture, multiple points of focus, whiteboards and ‘window’ seat perches as well as a slick Future Systems look. In 2003 he drew up the RIBA/Cabe report 21st Century Schools – many of its ideas defined the last government’s school building programmes. He has been advising Kent on its huge BSF programme and its first ‘learning plaza school’, New Line Learning Academy which opens this September, is on his patch. Here, indoor plazas replace classrooms with the possibility of big screen delivery of material and team teaching for groups of up to 100. In between he helped found Teachers’ TV, a public service channel for teachers, and sail his 40ft ‘Cracker’ yacht.

Straight after our meeting in London’s Piccadilly at BAFTA – where he sits on the council, a long term member for his work on new media – Heppell is off to Downing Street. He has advised governments since the 1980s and still does – armed now with just an Iphone and an Ipad. So what does he think of the new government, which has cancelled the Portland Academy he was sponsoring and thrown many weeks of work on the Kent BSF programme into the air? With no hint of bitterness Heppell picks out the elements of coalition philosophy that most appeal to his world view. ‘We used to have big organisations that did things for people, the National Curriculum, Cabe, Becta. This century we are helping people help themselves. It is the zeitgeist, not just government.’

He believes part of that has to involve where and how children are taught. ‘Children are educated for the expected,’ he says. ‘So with the oil spill we had a week of “it’s not in the exam paper” comments before real action.’ But the last decade was full of surprises and children have to learn how to respond to them creatively. On the flip side he sees the danger of a world where people accept what they are told.

‘Lose creative responses and you are left with fundamentalism,’ he warns.

Central to Heppell’s ideas are children as eager, playful learners and the organisational structures around them as barriers. ‘There are mad things in our system,’ he rails. ‘Expecting 1,000 kids to be hungry after a bell or to go to the loo in the break, that’s mad.’ At Portland Academy he sees the chance to reduce barriers and nurture an exemplary group of children who are behaved, interested and articulate. ‘There are examples of good school architecture but not of cohorts of children that make your jaw drop.’ So Portland will work towards that: catering for children from 0-19; all age learning with children going at their own pace; raked superclasses (‘we have not built 3D learning at all well’); smaller units through a house system that would be reflected physically in the space. The learning style will be more like home with shoes off (‘it’s not good science, but I think boys’ testosterone is located in their shoes.’) And of course specialisms that relate strongly to Portland’s heritage as well as Heppell’s interests: environmental science, particularly sports science with sailing – after all, this is home of the 2012 Olympic sailing events.

Heppell anticipates my question about where his £2 million sponsorship money came from. ‘I didn’t have to put up lorry loads of money,’ he says. Instead the pro bono third of his working life is entirely taken up with Portland at the moment. And he is determined to make it work. Despite the ongoing government review of academies including Portland (decision expected in the autumn) Heppell is convinced it will go ahead somehow. ‘It will open in September 2011, even if it is in old buildings,’ he insists. One building, currently styled as a new school but eventually planned as a home base, will have to be ready; it’s been sublet for the Olympic sailing academy.’

Sailing threads through his interests. In the winter he moors his yacht at St Katherine’s Dock to give him a London base while in the summer it is sailed from race to race. His adult children are keen sailors and his first grandchild will attend Portland Academy – itself intimately aligned with boats in its position, specialism and even business case. But, like the education sector, Heppell’s sailing is now going traditional (or is at least in flux), as he trades in his carbon fibre Cracker for a 1907 oyster smack.

So how is his work responding to the new government mood? Depressingly, his next project is with EC Harris investigating the possibilities of reusing retail spaces as educational spaces. However, his concept is more subtle than shopping centre as a school. It places education rather retail at the heart of our towns, dissolves the division between school and community and breaks up the fortress school that he bemoans into smaller units.

‘Shops are big agile spaces, DDA compliant with ventilation and car parking, food and security are already provided in a town centre,’ he enthuses. ‘Your homebases could be the Burger King unit or Clinton Cards.’  These are ideas the free school movement is already starting to pick up on as the government loosens class orders in planning. Whether they will get the vision as well as the savings is another matter. But that is the danger of being ‘futury’, you pick up the big ideas and other people get to put them into practice.