School of Everything

The Government’s Learning Revolution programme has contracted ‘School of Everything’ to develop an online portal for informal adult learning opportunities. ‘School of Everything’ is a small Internet start-up company launched in September 2008 that “connects people who can teach with people who want to learn”. To date its focus has been largely on individual private teachers offering lessons but the site will now expand to include information on courses, organisations and clubs – including voluntary arts groups across the UK. They also plan to include a venues database (allowing users to search for free and low-cost venues for informal adult learning activities) and an events calendar.


Arts subjects are School of Everything’s most popular topics. If you enter ‘learn Morris dancing’ in Google, for example, the first result is from School of Everything. School of Everything content can be syndicated to other sites, filtered by subject or location. So a national voluntary arts umbrella body could have a search box on its website which would search opportunities relating to the relevant artform in the School of Everything database. Or a local authority could include a search box on its website, filtered by the relevant geographical location.


They are really very keen to talk to local authorities and organisations from across the public, voluntary/community and private sectors who would like to get their informal adult learning [non accredited] courses and learning opportunities and also their venues, or other free or low cost spaces which local self organised groups and others could use or hire, onto the School of Everything. Ideally this will be where you have large numbers of courses and/or venues. Costs you nothing, but you will get your stuff promoted which has to be a good thing and yet more chances of local people signing up for your stuff.


Within the next month or so, there will be a single form and also a ‘bulk upload’ tool, which will allow you to upload your own stuff at no cost [and you will be able to manage it as well]. However, for the early birds, the team at School of Everything will do it for you and also work very closely with you. We can then promote these areas as examples which have to be good for you and your communities. You just need to send in your CSV or TXT file or whatever format you have it in and we will be in touch.

If you are interested, please email: – Chris.Swaine@becta.org.uk or hello@schoolofeverything.com [or even better – both of us at the same time!]

See: www.schoolofeverything.com and you can read details of the new features being developed at: www.schoolofeverything.com/blog .