Learning Spaces: Courthouse Green Primary School

Courthouse Green Primary School is committed to becoming a Learning Organisation and values the development of creative thinking skills as a means to help children meet the challenges of modern life. It is actively engaged in building a greater understanding of growing learning cultures, with a particular focus on developing creative environments that will improve standards in literacy.

Learning Spaces is an ongoing project which initially grew from a Creative Partnership’s Coventry’s project called Second Skin - a Reggio inspired early years project. During 2007-08 the programme at Courthouse Green focused on KS1 pupils in Years 1 & 2 and in KS2 on year 5 as well as on staff. The area of enquiry centred on whether ‘creative interventions between teachers and creative partners would impact upon children’s use of language’.

Creative partners

The creative partners on this project were Danya Miller, a storyteller and Ravinder Dhaliwal, a visual artist who worked with the adults and children to encourage increased pupil responsibility, exploration and reflection on learning processes through a variety of art forms. They encouraged and enabled reflective practice through the use of pupil and staff journals as well as supporting pupils and staff to take a central role in planning at all stages in the development of the project. The parents of children in KS2 were also involved, learning about different cultures through dance, drama and artwork so that they too developed a deeper understanding and appreciation of many different ways of learning.

Challenges for the future

Facilitating real pupil responsibility and reflection to enable deep learning was acknowledged as an ongoing challenge for everyone concerned in the project and will provide a focus for future work. The school remains committed to sustain and grow its creative learning environment practice as a positive engagement strategy for learning. It is keen to consolidate teachers planning collaboratively and provide opportunities for deeper understanding about creative teaching and learning. Plans are in hand to develop a system of ‘staff buddying’ with the aim of growing creative cross curricular learning and cross phase work.

Through the staff’s greater understanding of teaching and learning styles they have been inspired to incorporate more movement into the curriculum and to give the pupils opportunities to develop ideas themselves.

And what next…there are many possibilities, but through the Change School programme they will be working hard to make the curriculum more inclusive in content, and the development of creativity throughout the whole school is a real and ongoing ambition.