Briefing 05. On Ecosystem Strategy

For at least ten years now (arguably longer), there has been discussion of schools as ecosystems, in and of themselves. That paradigm certainly works; and yet one wonders whether this ecosystem thinking has been constrained by the putative parameters of ‘how we do school’, or at least how we have done school for the past hundred years or more, when there have been large numbers of young people in education, as opposed to earlier periods when education was the province of a much smaller subset of society. Might there be a place to contemplate what a cogent ecosystem strategy might look like for schools, and how it might change the existing calculus of business models? Or the very construct of such models?