Dick Sblog

In his article on Extended Projects, (Guardian. Tuesday January 8, 2008 ) Peter Kington discusses at length the problems associated with this otherwise very welcome development. Quite rightly he points out that a result of making the EPs into qualifications will be that they become yet another target – something to be exploited to boost a school’s position in the league tables – shifting their value onto ‘points’ rather than the actual learning achieved by pupils.

He quotes the DCFS as saying that EP is being introduced to help young people develop their ability to study and carry out research on their own. Teenagers need to boost their “personal, learning and thinking skills”, according to the Department. And who can argue with that?

Unfortunately, many Universities are apparently reluctant to place much faith in the projects when making admissions decisions precisely because of the impossibility of ensuring they are the candidates’ own work.

Surely this is the critical point – whatever the aspiration for EPs to develop an individual’s ‘personal, learning and thinking skills’, in reality it is highly unlikely that any EP will be a purely personal piece of work. In fact it will be the result of collaboration, completed with the assistance of parents, siblings, teachers and friends (and that’s without considering the potential for ‘borrowing’ stuff from an ever expanding library of dubious online sites).

Is this a problem? Well, I don’t think so; after all we’re social animals, we collaborate instinctively, collaboration is daily reality for most people in the worlds of work and academia. Collaboration in EPs only becomes a problem because of an insistence to treat them as individual pieces of work.

Why therefore don’t we take an alternative approach and acknowledge the inherently collaborative nature of project work? EPs could be structured and supported accordingly, valued for what they truly represent – not just another tick in the box but an opportunity for pupils truly to learn, not merely about a topic but to about the essential skills they will require to participate in a knowledge economy?

And does this mean that projects don’t offer an opportunity for accreditation? Of course not, they just require re-framing so that the pupils’ work is accredited as ‘informal learning through, say, ASDAN’s award processes – so the school still gets the points.