Crispin Knill sits down to map out his whole-year plan for his English literature A-level class. He works methodically, moving deadlines, crossing out topic titles and pencilling them in again, as the school year begins to take shape.

However, his plan looks a little different from most planning documents you would find in an FE classroom, because it has an added dimension to it. As well as mapping out what needs to be completed and when, Knill is also carefully planning around the stress levels that his students will be experiencing throughout the year.

If you were to represent these levels visually, they would form a wave pattern: each peak is followed by a trough, before another peak. This planning is not arbitrary. Knill is harnessing knowledge from neuroscience about the impact that stress has on learning to inform his plan and, hopefully, get the best he can out of his students.

“A little bit of stress in any situation is very positive,” explains Knill, who is head of English and assistant principal at Space Studio West London.

“Most people don’t learn things unless they are stressed in some way. [But] we know that, actually, both very low stress and very high stress is poor for learning.”

Knill is one of a growing number of educators in the FE sector who are attempting to bring knowledge of neuroscience into their classrooms. He, and others like him, are convinced that lecturers can improve their teaching by learning more about the human brain and the latest neuroscientific advances.

But can reading research into how the brain works really affect what happens in college classrooms? Is planning schemes of work with stress levels in mind going to become more commonplace, or is this yet another passing educational fad?

According to Knill, neuroscience has a lot to teach those working in the FE sector - and that goes far beyond curriculum mapping. He believes that lecturers can use the principles of neuroplasticity (the idea that we can change the way our brain reacts to situations) to explicitly help students to develop the key skills they will need in the workplace, such as cognitive processing, stress management and cognitive load management.

“In FE, we’re preparing students for the outside world a little more than our secondary and primary colleagues,” Knill points out. “We are teaching them a way to react to situations that they will be able to use later in their life.”

Knill is not the only one who has been won over by the benefits of a neuroscience-informed approach to FE. Julia Harrington, headteacher at Queen Anne’s School in Caversham, Berkshire, and founder of Brain Can Do, part of the Centre for Educational Neuroscience, similarly believes that neuroscience holds the key to helping lecturers better prepare students for life outside the college corridors.

In fact, Harrington is so sold on the idea that she has decided to train all of her school staff in key principles of neuroscience research (see box, opposite), including learning about the development of the teenage brain.

“We used to think adolescence was a time of weakness in the brain as kids are too activated by their emotional centre. But what we’re learning now is that although young people are vulnerable to mental health issues, adolescence is a strong time for creativity in their brain,” Harrington explains.

“Neuroscience is telling us that our teenagers and young people in FE are actually in the prime time for learning.”

To put this understanding into practice, her school has teamed up with researchers at the University of Bristol to look at how they can use neuroscience to inform changes to school life that will enhance students’ performance. For example, one simple change that Harrington has made is pushing start times forward by one hour.

“For a month last year, we started the school day an hour later for sixth-formers, as we knew sleep was a particular problem for this age group. We did some interventions before and afterwards about the importance of good sleep hygiene, and the students made some changes to their sleep patterns,” she says.

Students reported improved wellbeing as a result of the later start time, and also reported better energy levels in afternoon lessons.

In fact, the results were so encouraging that the school plans to stick with the change. “As a consequence of the trial, we’re going to be running an optional late start time for all our sixth-formers,” Harrington says.

This might sound like a no-brainer: why wouldn’t we use what science is telling us about how our brains work to make further education more attuned to the needs of students? Yet not everyone is convinced about the value of applying this type of research in colleges.

Peps Mccrea, dean of learning design at Ambition Institute, thinks that while neuroscience does offer potentially useful insights into the brains of learners, much of the research is not yet at a point where we can reliably apply the findings to determine what lecturers should - or should not - be doing in their classrooms.

“Even if you could pinpoint the exact places in the brain where electrical signals are happening, we are not able to extrapolate that to anything useful in the classroom. It offers nothing that cognitive science or behavioural science aren’t miles ahead of already,” he explains.

Rather than trawling through the latest research into the inner workings of the human brain, then, Mccrea would advise teachers to stick with more tried and tested methods and focus their time there.

“Retrieval practice, for example, has a huge wealth of consensus in terms of research,” he says. “It’s been replicated and confirmed by multiple researchers. It’s really accurate and useful. Whereas neuroscience is nowhere near that stage yet, where it has had robust findings that we can test if it really works.”

So, if we have so much reliable research in the education sphere already, why are people like Knill and Harrington so keen to turn to neuroscience?

According to Mccrea, the fault lies in the name: “neuroscience” just sounds too good. “Neuroscience has the seductive allure effect, whereby anything that has ‘neuro’ in it, people trust it more,” he says. “It’s its own worst enemy by having such a sexy name.”

However, Ben Stephenson, director of sixth form at Queen Anne’s School, disagrees. He feels that educators are drawn to neuroscience by more than just an impressive name.

Although he recognises that this is still a relatively new area of science, Stephenson sees the potential for neuroscience to inform teachers’ understanding of the more well-established field of cognitive psychology and that, when applied together, knowledge from these two disciplines can change further education for the better.

“Cognitive psychology is a more traditional discipline that looks at how we study and then extrapolates behaviour through the thought processes to try to understand what is going on,” he explains. “As technological advances have occurred, we’ve now got this branch of cognitive neuroscience that is studying thought processes and looking at what is going on in the brain.”

On its own, then, neuroscience may not be at a point at which we can lift findings from studies and apply them directly to the college classroom. But the field is only going to develop further, and you can bet that we will see more and more learning from neuroscience trickling down into pedagogy - just as we did with cognitive psychology before it - so these ideas are not going to go away any time soon.

This is OK, says Stephenson, because when our new understanding of how the brain works is taken alongside more well-established knowledge about how students learn best, there is real potential for neuroscience to add a new dimension to how lecturers teach.

What’s more, says Harrington, if this understanding is shared with FE students, it can give them a chance to “look under the bonnet” and see what is going on in their own brains, helping them to make sense of the intense emotions they are bound to experience in late adolescence and early adulthood. “The adolescent brain is like a car in which the gas pedal is working overtime but the brakes and steering wheel aren’t able to control the car,” Harrington says.

“If you use this analogy with teenagers, they’re able to understand some of the emotions they’re feeling. What we want to do is harness this power, and teach teenagers how to channel their emotions when they are feeling out of control.”

Rather than simply interpreting their emotions as a symptom of raging hormones, neuroscience can help students to visualise their brain as a powerful car that they are still “growing into” - it reframes a negative narrative into something much more positive.

“What we want to do is help our girls to talk about their emotions,” says Harrington. “Using neuroscience, we can help them to understand that this is just something their brain is going through. There will be times when you feel anxious or depressed - and that is totally normal.”

So will neuroscience transform your FE classroom? The answer is: possibly. Although more research is needed into how the science can directly improve the way that lecturers teach, there is the potential to improve the experience of students right now - by helping them to understand how changes in their brain affect their emotions, you can improve their wellbeing. And that is a worthwhile outcome in itself, even if the impact on teaching might still need a little work.

Grainne Hallahan is senior content writer at Tes

This article originally appeared in the 18 September 2020 issue under the headline “Will neuroscience transform teaching in our colleges?”