Offering learner-managed learning

Flexicollege is a new form of secondary school in the UK, where pupils manage their own learning with tutor-based education in a "school without walls". The pupils spend 25% of their time running a business (a magazine for the locality), 25% on the expressive arts and 50% on National Extension College GCSE courses. Set into the community, the school is built up from small tutor groups comprising fifteen students, each one of which would have a tutor whose responsibility it would be to gather the resources and the teaching support necessary to carry through a curriculum designed to enable students to get the same qualification as they would have got in the mainstream system. The school has its own permanent study base and uses other community facilities like leisure centres, art studios and public libraries. It has close links with the business sector and benefits from a cooperative arrangement with an educational research and publishing company. Flexicollege won the Education Social Inventions Award 1993 of the Institute for Social Inventions.