Imagining just futures of education with children and young people: the case of not A trend

Just like children and young people, education is intimately woven with the future. In this article, we engage critically with the notion of the future as a multidirectional temporal horizon, intertwined with histories of the past and conditions of the present. We propose a concomitant contestation of commonly held misconceptions around education and childhoods/young people, usually rooted in linear understandings of time, and structured through Western/colonial legacies. Taking young people's visions and acts of otherwise educational imaginaries as our primary point of departure, we use the theoretical lens of 'reparations' to explore the work of Not A Trend, a youth-led activist organisation that advocates for the decolonising of the English schools, discussing how past, present, and future are intertwined in the future-making practices of youth striving for more just futures of education. We avow that understanding young people as 'education future-makers', who envision and produce just educational imaginaries, can help us enhance our perceptions of the nexus between youth and futures. The co-authorship of this article is a collaboration between a young activist and an early career researcher, itself an exploration of the forms that intergenerational solidarity can take in the project of imagining more just futures together.