New Falkirk Professional Academy plan to teach children of the future

Over the next five years, Falkirk Council will spend around £968 million educating 27,000 young people.

But it’s estimated that 65 per cent of children entering primary school today will ultimately end up doing types of jobs that don’t yet exist.

With that in mind, education chiefs presented their vision for the future to members of Falkirk Council’s education, children and young people committee.

As well as the new academy, they want to replace ageing primary schools with new buildings; create a new campus for children age 3-18 with additional needs; and set up a new training centre to keep staff up-to-date.

Their aim all is to ‘future-proof’ education, looking in particular to ’Generation Alpha’ – the children of millenials, who will be most tech-savvy ever but will face challenges of their own.

Plans for Falkirk Professional Academy – which will accommodate 300 senior pupils – are still just an outline.

But head of education David McKay said it will mean schools working in partnership with local industry as well as further and higher education, building on an already strong partnership with Forth Valley College.

The academy’s focus will be on “the middle 60% of young people”, helping them get high quality jobs – preferably locally.

Robert Naylor, head of children’s services, said that in some ways Covid has presented them with opportunities.

Not only has the pandemic rapidly accelerating the pace of digital and online learning, exams being cancelled has forced people to think differently about how successful learning is measured.

“I think it will mean that when we start talking to parents about different pathways for their children, some of the previous reluctance to not being in school and picking five Highers begins to go away,” said Mr Naylor.

Councillor Adanna McCue, Falkirk Council’s education spokesperson, said it was an exciting vision and she welcomed the different pathways that the programme would open up.

The ‘Succeed Today Excel Tomorrow’ strategy hopes to build on what is happening just now in schools, such as giving every pupil in P6 upward an iPads to use.

The aim is for all pupils to leave school for a ‘positive destination’ – either to a job or staying in education.

Councillor Fiona Collie said: “This work has never been so vital – we are in a very difficult situation for children and young people and the work to ensure they have positive destinations is so important.

“We have 95 per cent of children moving on to a positive destination but we should always be striving for better and equipping children for well-paid quality jobs is vital.”

Councillor Pat Reid said he believed the term could be “a bit of a misnomer” as many of the jobs young people took on were zero hour contracts or low-paid jobs with ‘international fast-food companies’.

Director of children’s services Robert Naylor said that nationally they were looking at getting more nuanced information about the kind of jobs school leavers were going to.