Working Towards a Learning City Standard for Birmingham, July 2004 (168k)
This set of ‘tools’ was developed as part of Birmingham’s range of activities under the ‘2003 Year of Lifelong Learning’ focus. It was constructed from a range of local, national and international thinking and practice re learning cities, learning communities, learning organisations.
It attempts to capture the very wide set of perspectives on learning cities, learning communities, learning organisations that have been worked up in many different places i.e. rather than adding to an already long list of features of learning cities, it is more of an attempt to bring these together into a framework that can be used for three different purposes:
- to aid discussion, debate and insight
- to aid assessing the extent to which a locality is a learning city
- to aid the production of the development steps to be taken if a city wishes to move further towards being fully a learning city
There are sections here covering:
- Some early analysis, in 2003, of what was meant by the concept of a learning city. This arose in response to concerns that Birmingham’s tradition of asking questions of itself and being innovative in terms of bringing about change in the lives of citizens was being replaced by ‘events’ that did little to change main practices. At the very time when it was doing most to promote itself as a Learning City, it had ceased to be learning about how it learned. One challenge was to establish a set of criteria by which the city could assess its progress on the long-term journey towards being an ever-more-learning city.
This thinking was shared with the Learning City Network and with partners in this country and abroad. We were encouraged to take it further and to develop a simplified tool that could be used for regular assessment of progress. - The Learning City Survey documents were sent out by email to key intermediaries within the learning infrastructure of Birmingham. Results were collated and gave reliable and consistent overall scores for the extent to which Birmingham could consider itself to be a learning city (just over 50% on these measures in 2004); the strengths and weaknesses of the five key components; and which of the 33 elements were our best features and those aspects that needed further work if Birmingham was to become more of a learning city.
- The outcomes of this first survey (2004)