Future Creative

How can we improve the outdoor environment so that it can be more extensively used for learning especially understanding science around us, for play and for after school activities?

The school benefits from extensive grounds. There are three playgrounds, one large field, an ‘adventure playground’ area and a ‘quiet’ area. These areas are rarely used for teaching in. Indeed, there is little outdoor teaching beyond the Foundation Stage and Year 1. We are planning to investigate how we can use the outdoor spaces in order to facilitate learning, particularly in science, since this is one of our key areas for improvement throughout the school.

We envisage that we will need to work with practitioners in the field of painting, sculpture and gardening. We felt that these practitioners offered most possibility in terms of beginning a change in how we use the outside spaces. They could begin a line of enquiry and work that could be sustained and fits with the long term plan for the federated schools and the primary phase school improvement plan of building creativity in the curriculum by changing the opportunities for learning outside the classroom.  Initial activities would be about establishing where we are now: surveying the school site, what do we like about our school grounds, what do we dislike, what could be improved now, what needs a longer term solution, which spaces do we like, why do we like them. We anticipate at this point that there will be a lot of photography, sketching, recording with film/audio recording, written recording (see Mind Map – ‘Now’)  Having established the baseline of where we are now we then intend to find out how children might like to change the outdoor spaces to make them more of a learning environment given no boundaries: what’s on the wish list, what would we do if we could start again, fantasy (see Mind Map – ‘Dreams’).  The next phase will be to look at possibilities: choose a space to begin change in, visit other places/schools, draw together ideas through market research using own photographs, ICT research, costings, etc (see Mind Map – ‘Possibilities’). The final phase will be to look at starting to create a change (see suggestions on Mind Map – ‘Reality in the Future’). At this stage the children and artists will be in control of the project so it is impossible to outline activities in a more concrete way, although it is anticipated that  children will be involved in hands on working with materials alongside school staff and the artists.

The project will reach out to all those pupils within the school. Throughout the project we intend to keep the school community informed of progress by adding to a display of work, photographs, comments, etc. which will be situated in the entrance hall. In addition we will be sending regular updates via whole school and class newsletters. It is also our intention to work with the whole campus to publicise the work through the community distributed ‘Campus Newsletter’ which is delivered to all schools in the district for distribution and is leaflet-dropped to all houses on the London Road Estate, Canterbury. One further intention is to use the local press (Kentish Gazette/Adscene) to show the wider community of the work undertaken as part of the project.