A 2-Year Programme For 16 -19 year olds
Beginning Spring 2027
RESILIENT · PREPARED · CONNECTED
The School of Human Sciences is the young people's educational division of the British Transpersonal Association.
It has been created around a simple question:
What kind of education do young people need for a world we cannot yet predict?
Young people are entering adulthood during a period of extraordinary change.
Artificial intelligence is transforming our relationship with knowledge and work. Technology is changing how we communicate, create and form relationships. Questions of identity, mental wellbeing, meaning, belonging and our relationship with the natural world are becoming increasingly important.
Yet much of education continues to be organised around the acquisition and reproduction of information.
The School of Human Sciences starts somewhere different.
We study the subject every young person already inhabits:
The human being.
WHY HUMAN SCIENCES?
Human beings cannot be understood through one subject alone.
To understand ourselves, we need psychology - but also neuroscience, biology, philosophy, anthropology, consciousness studies, creativity, spirituality, relationship and culture.
The Human Sciences allow us to bring these perspectives together.
Students explore questions such as:
How does my brain shape what I experience?
Why do human beings behave as they do?
How has my past shaped who I am?
Who am I becoming?
What is consciousness?
Where do meaning and spirituality belong in human life?
How do I relate to other people and the living world?
Rather than providing predetermined answers, the School teaches young people how to investigate these questions for themselves.
THREE FOUNDATIONS
Our aim is not simply to prepare students to pass an assessment.
We want to help prepare them for life.
Three principles therefore sit at the centre of the School of Human Sciences.
RESILIENCE
Can I meet life?
Resilience is not the absence of difficulty.
It is the developing capacity to encounter uncertainty, disappointment, challenge and change
without losing the ability to respond.
Students learn about emotion, behaviour, neurobiology, character, relationships
and the ways human beings make meaning from difficult experiences.
The aim is not to protect young people from every difficulty, but to help them develop
the resources with which to meet difficulty.
PREPAREDNESS
Can I meet the future?
We cannot know precisely what the world of work, technology or society will look like in ten or twenty years.
Preparation therefore cannot simply mean training young people for existing roles.
Students need to learn how to think, inquire, communicate, collaborate, create, adapt and
act when the answer is not already known.
Preparedness means developing agency.
The confidence to enter unfamiliar territory and begin.
CONNECTEDNESS
Can I meet others and the world?
Human beings develop through relationship.
Connectedness involves our relationships with other people, communities, cultures, nature and the wider living world.
It also asks deeper questions about meaning, belonging and whether human beings experience themselves as part of something larger than the individual self.
At a time when much of life is increasingly mediated through screens, we believe the capacity to encounter another person, and the world itself, deserves renewed attention.
FIVE REFLECTIONS
The programme is structured around Five Reflections.
Each asks students to turn attention towards a different dimension of being human.
1. THE BRAIN
How do I experience the world?
Students encounter neuroscience, perception, attention, emotion and the relationship between brain, body and experience.
2. BEHAVIOUR
How do I meet other people?
Students investigate personality, character, cooperation, empathy, power, influence and human behaviour — including the Light and Dark Triads.
3. THE PAST
What has shaped me?
Development, attachment, family, culture, experience, memory and the stories through which we understand ourselves.
4. THE FUTURE
Who am I becoming?
Agency, imagination, creativity, artificial intelligence, work, entrepreneurship, uncertainty and the capacities needed to enter a future that is still emerging.
5. THE LIVING WORLD
How will I participate?
The final reflection moves beyond studying the world towards encountering it.
Students take what they have learned about themselves and other people into communities, environments, organisations and real-world projects.
The question changes from:
What do I know?
to:
What will I do with what I know?
CONSCIOUSNESS AND THE TRANSPERSONAL
The School of Human Sciences is an educational division of the British Transpersonal Association, and this gives the programme an unusual additional dimension.
Alongside psychology and neuroscience, students are introduced to some of humanity's oldest and most difficult questions.
What is consciousness?
Why do human beings seek meaning?
What is spirituality?
Why have contemplative practices emerged across cultures?
What can dreams, imagination and unusual states of consciousness tell us about human experience?
What happens when we confront mortality?
We do not tell students what to believe.
Nor do we present spiritual or transpersonal claims as scientific facts.
Instead, students learn to distinguish between evidence, interpretation, personal experience, philosophical argument and belief.
The purpose is inquiry.
SEVEN HUMAN CAPACITIES
Running through the programme are seven capacities drawn from the BTA's developmental work:
Imagination · Curiosity · Creativity · Expanded States · Wisdom · Spirituality · Love
We call these the Seven Transpersonal Stages.
They are not a ladder that students are expected to climb, nor qualities against which young people are judged.
They provide another way of asking what education might cultivate beyond knowledge acquisition alone.
Because the question facing education is increasingly not simply:
What should young people know?
but:
What capacities will they need in order to become?
PORTAL PROJECTS
Learning moves out into the world.
Portal Projects are a central feature of the School of Human Sciences.
Students work individually and collaboratively on substantial inquiries that cross traditional subject boundaries.
A Portal Project might begin with a question, a problem, a place, a person or something a student has become curious about.
It might involve interviewing people, conducting research, making a film, creating an artwork, developing a social initiative, investigating a community, designing an experiment, building a business idea or presenting an argument.
Facilitators are present to question, challenge, teach, connect and support.
But they do not provide every step.
Students gradually learn to navigate the territory themselves.
A DIFFERENT ROLE FOR THE ADULT
We do not see the adult simply as the person in the room who possesses the answers.
Our facilitators are educators, mentors and knowledgeable companions in inquiry.
Their role is to introduce ideas and disciplines, create intellectual challenge, recognise when specialist teaching is needed and help young people learn how to pursue a question rigorously.
Sometimes they teach.
Sometimes they question.
Sometimes they challenge.
And sometimes their most important task is knowing when to stand back.
We are not simply developing a different curriculum.
We are developing a different kind of adult to accompany young people through it.
LEARNING TOGETHER
Young people need opportunities to discover what they think — not simply to learn what somebody else thinks.
Dialogue therefore forms an important part of the School.
Students learn to listen carefully, articulate an emerging position, encounter disagreement, change their minds and recognise that complex questions do not always have simple answers.
The ability to participate thoughtfully in a group is itself part of becoming resilient, prepared and connected.
ASSESSMENT
Assessment should help a young person see development, not simply rank performance.
Students therefore build evidence of their learning through research, written work, projects, presentations, dialogue, creative work and reflection.
Academic knowledge matters.
So do the capacities required to use it.
We are interested in what students know - but also in whether they can question, connect, communicate, create, collaborate and act.
The programme is being developed at Level 3, the educational level associated with A-level study in England.
[Qualification/accreditation information can be added here once finalised.]
THE LIVING WORLD
The second year culminates in The Living World.
By this point students have spent considerable time investigating the brain, behaviour, their past and their possible futures.
Now the direction of attention changes.
Outwards.
Students enter the world to investigate something that matters.
They may encounter communities, workplaces, landscapes, social problems, organisations, crafts, professions, businesses, technologies or ways of living.
They research.
They film.
They interview.
They make.
They test ideas.
They collaborate.
And eventually they bring something back.
The Living World asks young people to discover the relationship between who they are becoming and the world in which they will participate.
EDUCATION IN THE AGE OF AI
Artificial intelligence makes the founding question of the School increasingly urgent.
When information can be retrieved instantly, essays generated in seconds and increasingly sophisticated cognitive tasks undertaken by machines, education cannot justify itself simply by transferring information from adults to young people.
Knowledge remains essential.
But so does knowing what to do with knowledge.
Curiosity.
Discernment.
Imagination.
Creativity.
Judgement.
Relationship.
Agency.
Wisdom.
The ability to recognise when something matters.
These capacities are difficult to reduce to an algorithm.
They may become some of the most important capacities education can cultivate.
WHO IS THE SCHOOL FOR?
The School of Human Sciences is being developed for young people approximately 16–19 years old who want an intellectually serious education but may be looking for something different from a conventional sixth-form experience.
Some may be academically able but dissatisfied with examination-led education.
Some may learn best through projects, discussion and independent inquiry.
Some may already know what interests them.
Others may have absolutely no idea.
They do not need to arrive knowing who they are.
Discovering that is part of the education.
THE SCHOOL OF HUMAN SCIENCES
RESILIENT · PREPARED · CONNECTED
We cannot give young people a map of the world they are about to enter.
The world is changing too quickly for that.
But we can help them understand themselves.
We can introduce them to some of humanity's most important ideas.
We can give them opportunities to encounter difficulty, uncertainty, difference and responsibility.
We can help them learn how to inquire.
And we can create places in which they have the freedom - and the challenge - to begin becoming themselves.
Education for a world not yet mapped.
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BECOME A FOUNDING FACILITATOR
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