There's a lot of stuff about the future out there at the moment – speculation, prediction, crystal-ball-gazing, wacky assumptions, that kind of thing. And some of it has startling implications for schools. The best and most digestible account I've encountered is Robert Hill's summary of his work-in-progress in assessing the future in ASCL's Leader magazine (issue 38).
Hill cites the following projections about the changing nature of our population:
Currently there are around 61 million people living in the UK, up 5 million since the 1971 census. By 2020 the population is expected to swell to 67 million, with most of the increase in the south east of England.
The UK population is ageing. The number of people aged over 65 is expected to increase by a third by 2020 and the number aged over 85 to increase by a half.
We've already seen some big changes to traditional patterns of family life. By 2021 a third of all households are expected to be single-person households, may of them elderly living on their own.
Meanwhile the population will become more ethnically diverse. Hill reports that in the 2001 census just over half the population described themselves as from a non-white ethnic minority group, and this trend will increase.
The danger, of course, is that all this future stuff gets put on the back shelf because of the hefty issues that need to be dealt with today – like the minor matter of the economic meltdown we're all currently living through.
What's clear is that whoever gets into government in 2010 there's going to be massive debt to be serviced, associated cuts in the public services, a need to deal with a generation not used to mass unemployment. There will be plenty on our collective plates.
The risk is that these big immediate issues distract us from the even bigger long-term ones. And whilst they have major cost implications – a need for a younger population to be working to support an increasingly older one, and the retirement age likely to have to be raised or abolished – there are also some ethical as well as economic issues that those of us in education will need to absorb.
So, as Mr Scott used to advise Captain James T Kirk, ‘it's life Captain, but not as we know it.' Prepare for a brave new world.
For our pupils, more urgently than ever we need to be educating them for a society rather different from the one we inhabit today. Jim Rose's primary review takes us a small step forward, as did the recent secondary curriculum review. But so long as we tussle over subjects and time allocations, we really are missing the point.
Community cohesion – seen by some as a trendy Ofsted bolt-on – is going to be crucial. We need our young people not only to be more ethnically aware, conscious of a society that reflects a massive range of cultural values and beliefs, but also more aware of age. If at present our young pupils only encounter older students in the amoral zone of a Friday night town centre, or only perceive people of retirement age via the letters pages of local newspapers, then we're never going to establish meaningful inter-generational interaction.
The notion of care will change too, as more of us have responsibility not only for those younger than us – children and step-children – but also people older than us – parents and grandparents. If only for practical reasons, we'll urgently need young people who are tolerant of older generations and vice versa.
So the more we can be doing in schools to get our young people interacting with an older generation, mixing with people of different cultures and beliefs, the better. And the more it places in doubt the Conservative notion of encouraging anyone who wants to set up their own school to go ahead and do so. Because the risk of a strategy like that is that people simply replicate the kind of society they are used to, and we see more enclaves that are exclusive rather than inclusive.
Community cohesion, broadening minds, social engineering: whatever we wish to label it as, there's a compelling need to prepare our youngsters for a world in which the UK will be quite different from what it's like now. The responsibility lies with us.
