The Student Agency Lab, led by Charles Leadbeater, was built on the ideas he set out in his 2017 CSE Seminar Series Paper (#269, December), Student Agency: Learning to make a difference, which provides a framework for developing student agency as individual, collaborative and collective capacity across different domains (moral, creative, economic, social).
The aim of ‘the A Lab’, as it became known, was to help schools help one another to develop practical approaches to developing greater agency among students; and to follow through the implications of greater student agency for the role of teachers, as well as the organisation and leadership of the whole school. Eighteen schools signed up to be part of the three-year lab, developing and testing hypotheses about how student agency could be deepened and recognised.
This paper, school websites, and the A LAB podcast series with The Learning Future narrate the main lessons learned, outcomes, and potential impact of the work of the A Lab schools.