[originaltext] Hello, everybody. What I want to talk about today is an idea

Hello, everybody. What I want to talk about today is an idea for a new kind of school, which turns on its head much of our conventional thinking about what schools are for and how they work. [20]Where it comes from is an organization called the Young Foundation, which, over many decades, has come up with many innovations in education, like the Open University, and things like Extended Schools, Schools for Social Entrepreneurs, Summer Universities, and the School of Everything.
    About five years ago, we asked about what was the most important need for innovation for schooling here in the U.K. And we felt the most important priority was to bring together two sets of problems. One was large numbers of bored teenagers who just didn’t like school and couldn’t see any relationship between what they learned at school and their future jobs, [21]and the other was employers who kept complaining that the kids coming out of school weren’t actually ready for real work and didn’t have the right attitudes and experience.
    After hundreds of conversations with teenagers, teachers, parents, employers and schools from Paraguay to Australia, and looking at some academic research which showed the importance of non-cognitive skills and formal academic skills, we came up with an answer, which we called a studio school. We called it studio school to go back to the original idea of a studio in the Renaissance where work and learning are integrated. You work by learning, and you learn by working.
    The design we came up with had the following characteristics: first of all, we wanted small school, about 300 to 400 pupils, 14 to 19 year-olds, and critically, about 80 percent of the curriculum would be done not through sitting in classrooms, but through real-life, practical projects, working on commission to businesses, NGO’s and others. Every pupil would have a coach, as well as teachers, who would have timetables, much more like a work environment in a business. All of this will be done within the public system, funded by public money, but independently run. There would be no extra cost, no selections. And pupils would be allowed the route into university, even many of them would want to become entrepreneurs, and have manual jobs as well. [22]Underiying it were some very simple ideas that large numbers of teenagers learn best by doing things, they learn best in teams, and they learn best by doing things for real—all the opposite of what mainstream schooling actually does.
20. Where does the idea for the new kind of school come from?
21. What do employers always complain about according to the speaker?
22. What is the basic idea of the studio school?