The Medicine Cabinet

Project Motivation

Levelling up education

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Perhaps the greatest challenge confronting education in the UK is levelling up educational provision. The highly stratified system of private education has created a sharply tilted playing field which compounds the barriers confronting students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Universities can help level this playing field by creating simplified versions of their own next-generation undergraduate teaching resources for use in the upper years of secondary school (in the UK: GCSE and A-Level). Such materials can also be used to address educational disparities in the global south, in the first instance via English-language secondary-school teaching worldwide. This project pilots technical infrastructure for meeting this goal.

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Meeting the challenge of Access

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For Oxford and other elite universities, the analogous challenge is one of Access. Oxford, famously, recruits students disproportionately from privileged backgrounds. The University’s Strategic Plan is committed to recruiting a student body more representative of the general population. A key part of this agenda is to ‘raise attainment in schools’. This project represents a fresh approach to meeting this challenge.

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Enhancing curriculum-driven learning

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The standard measure for ‘attainment in schools’ is examination performance. One means of raising examination performance is enhanced material for curricular study. This means targeting the ‘surviving needs’ of students and teachers: accelerating their mastery of the curriculum is a means to an end. 

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Putting teachers first: a B2B proposition

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The primary target for curriculum-driven teaching is the teacher, not the student. If the teacher is not attracted to our resources, they will not direct the student to use them. If instructed to use them, the student will do so provided that they are better than the wretched ones otherwise available. At this level, The Medicine Cabinet represents a B to B business model because it targets teaching professionals and the institutions in which they operate. It is also B to B in proposing a partnership with textbook publishers (below).

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Demonstrating the value of the humanities

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The public value of the university as an institution is under attack across the Western world. All disciplines need new ways to demonstrate their value to sceptical publics and politicians. A third motivation for this project is to help showcase the quality of university teaching by refashioning UG teaching materials for use at the school level and in heritage institutions.