WOULD YOU SEND YOUR CHILDREN TO A SCHOOL WITHOUT WALLS?

The current situation has turned the world upside down overnight, forcing nations and individuals to improvise and adapt to dramatically changed circumstances. While this is a time of anxiety, I am taking a positive view that this time will be over and we should learn from this time.

At the time of writing, millions of students are being home-schooled, and parents, schools and colleges are turning to remote and often untested means of delivery. This crisis is one of unprecedented scale and yet it is also a moment in history when we can benefit from disruption to do something different.

At NEOM, we’re going to put together an educational programme that is entirely new from the ground up. It’s both evolutionary, in that we will have mined current research and best practice, and revolutionary, in that we’re going to create something that doesn’t currently exist: schools without walls - in both the physical and metaphorical sense.

With NEOM we have an incredible open space that’s roughly the size of Belgium. We need to think about that space, about the mountains, the desert, the Red Sea and the history and traditions of the place in which we will be learning. It’s as much a matter of philosophy as innovation as we adapt to take full advantage of the freedom of the NEOM environment. 

That means rethinking concepts of time and space. Set schedules and physical boundaries will become things of the past and our spaces will be focused on allowing pupils to interact and collaborate not just with their tutors but with the community and the environment at large. It’s an extraordinary opportunity to take this incredible space we call NEOM and put education at its heart.

Achieving this means moving away from the models with which we’ve become comfortable. We’re going to be disruptive – propelling change for the sakes of our children, our grandchildren and the economy of the future. People have joked of a world in which the teachers are robots and while technology is indeed at the core of that future, we must also remember that holistic education is a social process. We can create virtual learning environments where students feel the human connection – of collaborative exploration rather than sitting in front of a screen. Put simply, I see a future in which a student will be studying in NEOM while attending a virtual lecture at MIT.

What our children are learning in these futuristic spaces needs to change. The focus on science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM) fails to recognise that creativity is essential to success, so we’ll put the arts into STEM and embrace STEAM. It’s clear that one cannot be truly educated without a depth of knowledge but then we need to transcend that by moving onto skills and competencies and taking what we have learned to next level analysis. If we take this systemic approach from day one at NEOM we will create an educational ecosystem within a wider cultural ecosystem in which we all understand it’s not just about what we have learned from Wikipedia or Google but possessing the intellectual ability to discern between elements of those data points. Apply this higher-level thinking across all NEOM’s sectors and communities and we will have accomplished something truly different and new.

Those showing the way to that knowledge are crucial to this achievement. We want to attract people to NEOM who are collaborative - part of a global community that transcends both cultural and political boundaries. They will be people who think more deeply, analyse more critically and have the vision to be accelerators of human progress. NEOM’s teachers will be recruited from that community. They’ll be the idealists with the mindsets to be mentors and guides rather than mere instructors standing at the front of the room delivering the lecture. There are so many amazing teachers in the world who truly struggle to find the environment in which they can release all their greatness as educators.

I want that place to be NEOM.