The Clean Slate

• ‘School’, we suggest, should begin as soon as a child is ready. This might be as soon as three years old or maybe not until six or seven years old.
• Progress through ‘school’ could be determined by the child’s readiness to move on, not by the child’s date of birth. Since not all children progress at the same rate in the same disciplines, children could climb the learning ‘ladders’ at a rate appropriate to their ability. 
• There could be a ‘School Leaving Certificate’, designed to be achievable by the time a child is fourteen. This Certificate might be the corner stone of such a system. It would be the hinge between ‘school’ and ‘education’.  It would be a certificate of competence, not a measurement of academic achievement.
• Such a Certificate should demonstrate that each young person has a sufficient level of literacy and numeracy, and sufficient knowledge of social and cultural institutions, basic law, and basic financial structures to cope constructively with the adult world. This would mean that no one would enter adult society without the knowledge and skills to become a fully independent member of it.
• By this means every young person would earn the right to leave ‘school’. No one should be left as a prisoner of the system, serving out their sentence until they are released simply because they have now become fourteen (or, in the current system, sixteen) years old. With this approach no one would leave ‘school’ with nothing to show for it, except a clutch of failed exams.  Everyone could leave school with their self-esteem boosted by an achievement that would be valued by all of society. Everyone could earn the right to choose their own future. Everyone could achieve the most valuable qualification of all, the qualification to take a full part in adult life.
• We would suggest that anyone who reached, say, their fifteenth birthday unable to pass all the components of the School Leaving Certificate should receive remedial help in those areas where their skills or techniques are deficient, perhaps in a ‘school’ staffed with specialist teachers.
• Each component of this rite of passage could be taken when the child is ready. 
• At the age of fourteen, most, in the areas in which they have the greatest aptitude and interest, could have passed far beyond the Certificate’s requirements. If the young people have the ability to do it, there should be nothing to stop them from doing it.
• No one should leave ‘school’ without the full Leaving Certificate. 
• After the School Leaving Certificate had been obtained, there need be no further requirement for anyone to go to ‘school’. 
• However, in order to give everyone a fair chance to discover and develop their own particular skills, talents, and abilities, no one should be employed beyond the limited periods currently allowed for young people until they reach the age of 16.

What we are sketching out is not revolutionary. Much of it is already reflected in those non-academic, non-school areas of learning which depend upon successful outcomes for participants, not successful outcomes for the institutions which hold them in, and which, in many cases, hold them back.

The point we made above, that ‘no one should be employed beyond the limited periods currently allowed for young people until they reach the age of 16’, would free the interim period, between achieving the School Leaving Certificate and gaining entry to higher education or employment, for Personal Education, the other fundamental difference between the current custodial system of schooling until sixteen and the freedom of our idea of education for all. Crucially, the Personal Education stage, described in more detail in ‘Chance of a Lifetime’, would be the point at which young people could start to take charge of their own learning. In Personal Education, as we define it, young people would be able to choose what they wanted to learn, academic or otherwise, to whatever level they wanted to learn it. They would have the chance to take responsibility for the learning they did, or didn’t do, and for the consequences which would flow from their choices: they would begin the vital lessons of judging what is a mistake and what is a success and learning equally from both.  

• At age fourteen we are not dealing with toddlers. We should not underestimate what young people, properly equipped and prepared can achieve. 
• Between ‘school’ and employment young people could be paid to learn what they are interested in/good at from Personal Education teachers (rather than ‘school’ teachers) who are interested in/good at it, too. 
• The family could also be ‘paid’, receiving an element of the learner’s total earnings to enable them to support the learner.
• At age 16 young people might continue Personal Education, enter full time employment, or combine the two.
• Personal Education teachers could be drawn from a wider range of society – universities, the professions, the business, arts, sporting world and so on – and might find it attractive to be paid as other professionals (doctors, dentists, lawyers, architects etc.) are, through their clients. 
• At the conclusion of the Personal Education stage young people could enter full time employment, or go on to university or to other forms of higher education as they chose and as seemed appropriate to them.