Designing Transformations: Schools of excellence

For over 50 years, including some form of Space education in school curriculum has become an established approach for inspiring young minds to study the sciences and pursue science-based careers. Space camps and schools are active all around the globe and typically attract the ‘best and the brightest’ young minds. But the context of Space is broad and all young minds need the confidence and ability to make choices that will best serve them in the world of learning, life and work.Designing Transformations: can the context of ‘Space’ serve as an inclusive educational engagement model and career skills tool to achieve “Schools of Excellence” (SoE)? This paper presents a case study for democratising space education within Scotland; through a new Schools of Excellence Model, which uses design methodology to convey an educational experience. It further demonstrates how the SoE model proposes the context of Space to dovetail with Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence (CfE)1 , with particular relevance to skills for learning, life and work to build skills and foster career agility to equip individuals for the new and changing demands of the future workplace.

► The context of Space has been used effectively to engage young adults to build skills and foster career agility.
► Broadening and enriching the learning journey and community enables young adults to make better choices.
► Use of design thinking methods led to insights, ideas, relationships, cross-curricular synthesis and solutions.
► Partners who inspire learners do not need to be world-renowned/global or indeed on the other side of the world. There is an opportunity for further research into the impact of influencing moments before pupils make subject and career choices.