Genuine education is not passive absorption of facts or compliance with authority; it’s the cultivation of critical thought, human agency and shared purpose.
What is education actually for?
It is how young people should learn to question their world and shape their future. Yet our public system has traded this for standardised exams and marketised competition.
The Portal – a new community-led initiative taking shape in Norfolk – is being built to confront this head-on and reclaim education as a democratic, public commons.
Unfit for purpose
Over two thousand years ago, Plato observed that true learning cannot be forced through harshness, but must engage a child’s mind. Yet as the Industrial Revolution reshaped society, mass education took a different turn. Schooling was consciously engineered around the assembly line – built for standardisation and age-batching, with ringing bells signalling ‘shifts’.
Shadow students in a typical school and the reality becomes clear: this model is not a good fit for all. In High Schools, students are shuffled from room to room every fifty minutes, forcing abrupt cognitive gear-shifts between disconnected subjects. Learning experiences feel disjointed.
There’s little space for deep focus or cross-disciplinary curiosity; instead, students are managed through a relentless regime that fails to cater to the diverse ways young minds actually learn and thrive.
Exam factory
Over the past two decades, educational policy has doubled down on this industrial logic.
The post-2010 push toward academisation in England effectively transformed the traditional factory school into an exam factory. By severing state schools from local democratic control and folding them into multi-academy trusts, education was marketised.
In the process, the educational commons – a shared public good belonging to the whole community – was systematically plundered. Local authorities and schools were left to deal with the structural fallout, nowhere more evident than in the spiralling crisis of Special Educational Needs (SEN) provision. Here families battle an underfunded bureaucratic system to secure basic support.
Top-down
Now, as government prepares yet another major wave of top-down SEN reforms, experienced teachers will recognise a familiar pattern. Education professionals are all too accustomed to shifting statutory mandates and rebranded frameworks that promise sweeping fixes, only to impose new compliance burdens with pressures on teachers even greater.
Meanwhile, this restructuring has birthed a lucrative administrative industry. Today, chief executives of large multi-academy trusts across England routinely draw salaries exceeding the Prime Minister’s. Students are trained to generate “human capital” rather than explore being human.
Rigid
This consumer model creates a fundamental contradiction. The UK is moving toward a voting age of 16, but we expect young people to participate in a complex democratic society and navigate an often-toxic media landscape.
Yet, for 12 crucial years, we confine them within rigid, hierarchical institutions where independent scrutiny is discouraged. Tokenistic school councils fail to cut the mustard. If we want citizens capable of critical thought and truth-seeking, we need learning environments where they can practice those skills daily.
The change we need
This transformation has roots in a deep tradition of British radicalism. From 17th-century Diggers and Levellers, to 19th-century Chartists, to the 21st-century Phoenix Education Trust, history shows that real change occurs when communities defend the commons against enclosure.
Internationally, pioneering Agora Schools in the Netherlands prove that dismantling rigid timetables in favour of personal coaching and self-directed challenges helps young people thrive.
The Portal is bringing to Norfolk self-directed experiential learning. It has been established using the Community Benefit Society (CBS) legal framework. Usually the CBS model is used to bring community pubs, heritage piers, solar farms and civic centres into public ownership. Applying it to educational settings breaks entirely new ground. It offers a community-owned learning ecosystem returning control to local people.
Democratically designed change
The initiative is being co-created by students, families, educators and local residents as equal democratic owners under a “one member, one vote” framework.
The founders have laid down principles such as non-punitive practices, co-produced learning pathways, and provision free at the point of entry.
Rather than locking learning inside an isolated building or fragmenting the day into rigid subject blocks, The Portal will enable and support their students to access their learning in environments that will ensure the most positive outcomes. Local green spaces, civic venues and cultural sites will be part of its daily scope. We are exploring the potential of a number of possible sites, including the suitability of the former Angel Road Junior School in Norwich. Every young person will be able to shape their own programme, and therefore much learning will happen outside our sites.
The future is in Norfolk
What is taking place in Norfolk is not intended to be a singular initiative. It is a practical, replicable model for communities to reclaim education using proven social enterprise mechanisms.
We cannot wait for Whitehall to hand down another wave of top-down mandates. Meaningful educational change has always been driven by communities brave enough to build a working alternative. The Portal will bridge the gap between democratic ownership and flexible, real-world learning, showing what compassionate, community-owned education can look like.
To launch this vision, The Portal (Community Benefit Society Ltd. Reg. No. 9826) will host an official launch event on 22 September in Norwich. Further details about this event, and how to register, can be found here.
The Portal’s website can be found here.
More from East Anglia Bylines
Friends of Bylines Network
There has never been a greater need for grassroots journalism that investigates the stories that really matter, holds power to account and champions the voices of everyday citizens. We are proudly powered by volunteers but what we do isn’t free.
STAND WITH US for independent, citizen-led journalism that makes democracy stronger, and you will even get some exclusive benefits.
