FIDA Article Featured in The Herald
We were delighted to have our new Futures Institute building highlighted in The Herald, on 11 October 2025. You can read the article below:
On the surface, Dollar Academy is about as stereotypical a private school as you’ll ever come across.
Its 70-acre campus is situated in the heart of the beautiful little town from which it takes its name, at the foot of the Ochils and surrounded by glorious countryside.
Beyond the main gates, a long, tree-lined driveway draws the eye to an imposing main building with neo-classical columns harking back hundreds, even thousands, of years.
There is a rugby club, a hockey field, and a swimming pool; as well as a library that, to someone who attended state school, feels like something you’d normally only find in one of the books on the shelves. For the sake of completeness, the school even has a history that is tied to a slave-trading founder.
It all feels expensive, and for good reason: fees for the prep school start at more than £15,000 per year, while full-boarding and tuition for senior pupils will cost nearly £50,000.
Last month, Dollar Academy was named European School of the Year.
With all of that in mind, it wouldn’t be unreasonable to assume that this is a place focused on maintaining the status quo – one where rocking the social boat is to be discouraged.
But something is happening here that challenges those ideas and raises big questions about the wider direction of Scottish education.
These days, when you walk through those front gates you find a building site on your left-hand side. The construction work itself is hidden by a large boarded fence, on which a series of mocked-up photographs and slogans have been installed to show what will be taking shape over the coming years.
Those walking by are promised that, upon completion, they will find “Scotland’s most extraordinary teaching space, designed for world-class learning” and “an inspiring space that nurtures creativity, critical thinking and collaboration”.
The ground floor will include a four-hundred capacity, 300-square metre space for lectures and talks, an experimental laboratory, a maker space, a film and photography studio, and two modern learning areas “designed for multi-modal teaching”. The majority of the upper floor will be taken up by a “flex deck”, which has been designed to “stimulate ideas and discussion” and facilitate modern, interdisciplinary working, as well as providing room for collaboration, individual study, and personal reflection. There will also be an area called the “Think Tank” – an adaptable, one hundred-square metre space in which “teachers from across the country will work collaboratively”.
The circular building will be landscaped into a part of the grounds that originally held a botanic garden, and will be topped by an innovative, semi-transparent dome structure that is being specially constructed in Austria.
Calling all of this ambitious doesn’t begin to cover it, and it’s not going to be cheap either. Although the school has benefitted from the support of former pupils, including the award-winning architect Andrew Whalley, the scale of the investment is still clear to see, and is pushing the limits of affordability even for an institution like this one.
So the obvious question is: why?
The ISD is a level 6 qualification – broadly equivalent to Highers – which is also recognised by UCAS. It involves problem and project based education, with young people learning by designing solutions to real-world challenges built upon the UN Sustainable Development Goals.
There is no final exam. Instead, a portfolio approach is used to both support and challenge students while helping them to develop the skills needed for modern, collaborative working environments. Accreditation was supported by Glasgow Clyde College and partly backed by the Scottish Government.
But why is a whole new building, one that is so far removed from traditional ideas of teaching and learning, relevant to all of this?
Although many young people have already benefitted from the philosophy underpinning FIDA and the ISD, those behind them say that a “significant limiting factor is the lack of a purpose-built educational centre” designed with this new approach to learning in mind. The vast majority of the work that has been carried out so far has had to be delivered in “traditional, single-subject facilities” which are, they say, “not fit for purpose.”
The ultimate goal for the home of the Futures Institute is to provide a space in which young people can “think, design, create, test and collaborate”, and in which a very different idea of education can flourish.
When completed, its backers hope that it becomes an educational and architectural beacon showing what can be achieved when innovation and sustainability are made top priorities, and there’s no reason to think they won’t succeed in that goal. The young people whose parents have tens of thousands of pounds for fees will certainly benefit, but the intention is to make sure that these facilities are open to, and used by, any many pupils from as many schools as possible.
It’s all very impressive, but it also raises difficult questions about why this kind of pioneering work has to be pursued by an otherwise exclusive private school.
The staff at Dollar Academy are working not just to help their own pupils, but also to support schools that want to be part of the innovation. This has meant running on-campus events and training sessions, but there is a limit to their capacity, and it is about to be reached. In its 2021 manifesto, the SNP said that the Covid years had “raised real questions about whether our current system of school examination is properly capturing our young people’s success.” In government they went on to commission academics to explore this issue in far more detail, and received a report that advocated for major, ambitious reforms along exactly the sort of lines being pursued by Dollar Academy.
Yet progress has been all but entirely halted on that front, and at a national level the educational status quo looks as secure as ever, and so the burden of major, badly-needed innovation falls to places like Dollar Academy.
According to Jacqueline Smith, the Director of FIDA, Scotland is “facing a national challenge, with successive reports pointing to the need for reform to ensure a future-facing curriculum.”
Smith adds: “The Diploma offers one model of how a new kind of qualification might look: young people learn by investigating and tackling real-world problems rather than subjects, and demonstrate attainment by building a Portfolio of evidence across the year. We are fortunate to have the flexibility to try something new – but it has been a fantastic collaboration across sectors which we hope is providing some valuable insights to inform this vital national discussion.
“The new Futures Institute building is the physical embodiment of this educational approach – an inspiring space designed to break down artificial barriers between disciplines and support young people to learn in a new way. It is a major investment for Dollar – but one that’s essential if we are to offer an education that equips young people as best we can for the increasingly complex and challenging world beyond school.
“Our ambition is that every young person in Clackmannanshire will have at least one educational experience in the new building, and that it will become a national hub for the sharing of ideas and good practice.”
