Lewis and Bill bonded over the exultant joy that some derive from golf. That heady pleasure of striking a little white ball and seeing it sail over sandy traps and knotted copses, then bounding over a perfectly manicured island of grass towards a beckoning flag.

The problem was, Bill couldn’t golf any more. He was a resident in a care home in Glasgow and now uses a wheelchair to get around; golf is a fond memory rather than a current passion.

Lewis, however, was an S1 pupil with ideas - he wanted to see if he could do something to help.

Last year, residents at the care home were visited by a group of S1s from Kelvinside Academy in Glasgow, including Lewis. They came to mingle and chat over tea and biscuits, to hear about hobbies and passions the residents may have had but which, for various reasons, had become harder, if not impossible, to pursue. The pupils were among the first at the school to take part in project-based learning through NuVu, an “innovation school” now based at Kelvinside Academy, an independent school.

Although NuVu has been running in a number of US schools for years, Kelvinside is the first school in Europe to take it on, and opened officially only in October.

NuVu was founded in 2010 by PhD students and graduates of the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It aims to provide “an innovation-focused experience” for students aged 11-18, and has so far reached around 3,000 students worldwide.

The opening at Kelvinside prompted some online criticism from academics and education commentators online. NuVu prioritises creativity and project-based learning, but critics fear that such aims are often too vague in their ambitions and that, in promising to free up pupils’ learning, they may do damage by relegating teachers’ expertise to the sidelines.

One academic warned about the “myth of unstructured education” and the dangers of “group work and inquiry without structure” - which had become “commonplace” - adding that teachers’ role is “vital”. Even advocates of project-based learning caution that teachers cannot just leave pupils to it and should remain “an important source of knowledge”.

The negative reactions were prompted by a hyperbolic newspaper report that described the NuVu innovation school at Kelvinside as a “school of the future” where classrooms would be teacherless and pupils “free to indulge their creativity”.

In truth, initially at least, the ambitions are far more modest: in the senior phase, starting from this year, the innovation school is simply one elective course in the timetable, an option alongside all the other usual National and Higher courses you would expect in a Scottish secondary.

The innovation school approach claims to differ from traditional school-based learning in several fundamental ways. Learning takes place in a “multidisciplinary design studio” where a “coach” guides students in “hands-on problem-solving” to get to the bottom of complex, comprehensive problems”.

Over two weeks, pupils work through “messy”, open-ended situations. By then, they will have completed a final project.

As staff will tell you, the work may be less structured than the pupils are used to, but it is not aimless.

Sense of moral purpose

The innovation school is in a new, purpose-built extension. Upstairs is a large open space with a shiny concrete floor, sofas and a sort of table-top photo booth at one end. At the other end - with plenty of space in between - are long wooden tables and pink chairs on rollers. The exposed industrial innards of the ceiling add to the feel of a design workshop in a Scandinavian tech start-up - only it is blazer-clad teens you’re likely to see mooching around, with nary a bearded hipster in sight.

Downstairs, there are two adjoining rooms. In one, senior pupils hunch together in small groups to compare ideas. Around the outside of the room are various colourful designs and prototypes for all manner of things, from an unwieldy-looking hat designed to aid balance to binocular-like specs with multicoloured lenses for improving the user’s mood.

Next door feels like a cross between a joiner’s workshop and an artist’s studio. There are neatly stored yellow plastic trays of glue, goggles, tape measures, paper clips and elastic bands set against a wall decorated by dangling mallets, pliers and rulers. A cuboid of plug sockets hangs from the ceiling, looming over a laser cutter and 3D-printed chess set, while fist-sized robots on wheels with looping protrusions of coloured wire are scattered on a table.

Last year’s S1 group, who met residents at Balmanno House care home, got down to work here on prototypes of gadgets that might ultimately help older people get back to doing activities such as knitting, fishing and golf. Lewis came up with a ratchet for swinging a golf club. Another prototype device was a walking frame for gardening, with attachments the user could press to do the planting and watering.

In a report published in September about creativity and critical thinking in schools (see box, opposite), the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD) described these as “increasingly important in the labour market”, especially with artificial intelligence and robotics possibly leading to more automation. As a result, “skills that are less easy to automate, such as creativity and critical thinking, become more valued”.

But the imperative is not simply economic, the report said: “Even if there was no economic argument, creativity and critical thinking contribute to human wellbeing and to the good functioning of democratic societies.”

This sense of moral purpose is reflected by David Miller, director of the innovation school at Kelvinside and a former English teacher who was named Scotland and UK teacher of the year in 2008.

He stresses that pupils should not be learning about product innovation as an instrument of free trade, as a process whose success is measured simply by profit and loss. Instead, pupils should be thinking squarely about how their product might have an impact on individuals and communities’ wellbeing.

According to pupils who were part of the S1 group that visited the care home - and are now in S2 - the innovation school feels very different to what they are used to.

Ella, who helped design the gardening walking frame that waters and plant seeds simultaneously, says: “It’s different from school. When you come in here, you don’t think, ‘Oh, I’ve got to do this, I’ve got to do that’. You just come in here with an open mind. You come in here thinking … it’s gonna be fun, it’s not going to be like school sometimes is.”

’I’m asking them to fail’

Another S2 pupil, Alex, helped design a knitting board, which is a bit like one of those boards with spikes that will be familiar to parents whose children were part of the loom band craze a few years ago.

“It’s not like just another lesson,” says Alex. “You can do … not what you want, but you have got a lot more freedom.”

He adds: “From the outside, it would look like making stuff, but it’s a lot more than that - it’s about thinking outside the box. You don’t use skills you would use in the classroom - it’s skills you would use in real life.”

The pupils’ work is overseen by James Addison, a recent graduate from MIT with a master’s in architecture. His presence means the innovation school is on offer to 50 secondary pupils - it is oversubscribed - and some pupils have taken time to adjust.

“For every student who came into this space, it was the first time doing something remotely like this,” he explains. They have been “pulled out of a very strict learning environment where there’s a clear hierarchy between teachers and students”, and they are used to being told “this is the content you need to learn for exams”, whereas the NuVu learning environment is “very open-ended”.

He adds: “Students call me by my first name. They’re working in groups. It’s quite a messy environment. I’m asking them questions where I guess there’s no answer. I’m asking them to fail in a lot of pieces, so all the students I’ve worked with, I’ve put them in a position to feel uncomfortable intentionally.”

Some students who “excel in an exam-centric environment” struggle when there is no opportunity to score 100 per cent, when success is a more elusive concept, says Addison. They try to think through all possible outcomes in advance rather than learning as they go and “end up not making anything - they overthink it”.

Successful design at the innovation school is a process of iteration, where prototypes are constantly refined but may also have to be jettisoned - a student may work on four or five prototypes over two weeks. The children become accustomed to learning through failure and, in theory, more conscious of the actual process of learning.

The promise of freedom in learning is manna from heaven for those who bemoan the difficulty of creativity getting a foothold in schools.

In a 2018 piece for Tes, Kate Latham, head of learning and community engagement at the Jupiter Artland Foundation near Edinburgh, said: “We need to make time for creativity because it is here that we build not only the curators, designers and film-makers of the future but also the most imaginative scientists, successful entrepreneurs and dynamic politicians.”

But she added: “The hard truth is that time spent designing a new product or working on a fine-art portfolio is often not seen to be as valuable as study for a chemistry exam.

“The development of creativity can be slow and hard to quantify so it is harder to defend its value.”

There are also, however, some educators who fear the balance tipping too far the other way. One academic, who tweeted after reading the newspaper report about Kelvinside’s innovation school, said there was merit in less structured approaches to learning but not as the sole or main approach in schools.

This points to where ideological battlegrounds may lie ahead. Miller, for his part, makes no secret of what he sees as the shortcomings of education in schools and beyond. He rails against the “tyranny” of university admissions processes and the vaunting of Higher exam passes as the passport to success.

“The whole model is a busted flush - the idea that I did my Highers in 1979 and, 40 years later, it’s still the same model. Education hasn’t changed. This is why so many people are saying this can’t be allowed to continue.”

Miller describes the approach at the innovation school as “infinitely richer” and adds: “We’ve got to start this way of thinking right from the earliest stage. In a sense, it’s most close spiritually to the junior school play-based experience [with its] projects that overtake a variety of disciplines and subjects. It’s only once [pupils] hit secondary that suddenly everything’s all siloed.”

He wants as many children as possible to experience the innovation school and will be inviting state schools in to use its wing of the school. In the longer term, he would like to see NuVu establishing bases in the state sector, although he says this would probably require national funding to pay the wages of fellows like Addison.

Ultimately, what Miller wants to see change on a grand scale - beyond exam-driven definitions of success - is a “habit of mind” among pupils. The final product, he stresses, is not the point: it’s about “creative thinking, as opposed to creating something”.

This echoes a Tes article by Bill Lucas, director of the Centre for Real-World Learning at the University of Winchester and co-chair of the strategic advisory group for the OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment’s 2021 test of creative thinking.

“Ultimately, human creativity is about developing habits of creative thinking,” wrote Lucas, adding that “these creative habits or dispositions can be learned by all children”.

The research that Lucas is involved in suggests 10 key aspects to making creativity normal in schools, including: framing learning with engaging questions that have no one right answer; providing opportunities for play and experimentation; respecting difference and the creativity of others; and leaving space for the unexpected.

Lucas also pointed to another Tes piece - by psychology and computing science professor Stellan Ohlsson and Pim Pollen, chief research officer of global management consultancy firm CBE Group - which promoted the idea of creativity as a disposition rather than being process-driven, but ended on a cautionary note. They wrote that the ideal profile for a creative person “might be different from field to field” so, while it may be possible to make students more creative in certain scenarios, “it calls into question whether we can ever train someone to be a generally more creative person”.

One academic who tweeted some scepticism following the opening of Kelvinside Academy’s innovation school was Neil McLennan, director of leadership programmes at the University of Aberdeen School of Education. “It looks like an interesting model,” he says, and “if there is robust research evidence of impact, this is great”. But McLennan, a former secondary teacher, also warned that “change does not always result in improvement” and that Scottish education is “in an era of seeking ideas from beyond - from overseas, from business”.

“We need to be careful that we do not slip into ‘new is inevitably better’,” he says.

‘Incredibly different’

But what of older pupils at Kelvinside, who have chosen to add the innovation school to their timetable, meaning that they will end up with a portfolio showing off their final product designs alongside the usual grades? S6 pupil Laura Turpie - who wants to study economics or finance at university - says it is “a lot different” from other classes; a “more laid-back environment” where you are “given time to brainstorm”.

If she were explaining the innovation school to a friend who knew nothing about it, she would say it’s “like a lot of subjects mashed together”. Turpie adds: “It’s refreshing compared with just sitting in a class … writing questions down and stuff like that.”

She finds it fun to cast around for that eureka moment where you finally come up with something, and thinks it will help with university tutorials where there is more onus on original thought.

S5 pupil Blair Ferguson says: “When you come in here, it’s incredibly different - it’s like a break from everything else. But, at the same time, you’re still learning stuff that’s very different [from] what you do in everyday life.”

Next summer, he wants to go to Los Angeles in the hope of becoming a music producer, where, if you want to stand out, “you can’t just do something that everyone else has done before - you have to do something different that people are actually going to listen to”.

Ferguson compares that to the mindset encouraged in the innovation school, where, similarly, “it’s all about thinking outside what you would usually do”. He also sees more cross-pollination of ideas between students and feels that people are less stressed.

In short, he says: “I’ve never really had an experience like it before.”

Henry Hepburn is news editor at Tes Scotland

This article originally appeared in the 8 November 2019 issue under the headline “The eureka school”