Station Studios
Background
As part of the Creative Partnerships process we encourage schools to develop their skills and to take risks, to try new pedagogies that engage and inspire. For many schools this might mean dipping their toes into developing a creative curriculum for the first time and for others it might mean a little more.
Bedlington Station First School was one of the latter. Having already looked at the potential that a creative curriculum could offer, the school felt that it was time to jump right in.
In their first year, the school transformed itself over a weekend into Station Studios. The children left as pupils one Friday teatime and returned on Monday as employees of a film studio set to make a range of exciting programmes. The hardworking staff had spent the whole weekend redecorating the school to create a fantastic new world in which each classroom had been reinvented as a studio.
For five weeks the children worked with writers, film makers, set designers and musicians creating scripts, jingles, current affairs programmes, adventures, chat shows and even French language shows.
Within this time the school collapsed timetables and allowed the children to monitor and decide their own breaks and a staffroom was created for the children containing pool tables, TV, refreshments and comfortable sofas. The children were also allowed to enrol in employee recreational activities such as yoga.
Impact
The result of the project was amazing. The creative agent for the school often found it difficult to pin children down for interviews as they were so engrossed in their work. One particular pupil who was being monitored as part of the evaluation process and had been quite disengaged with literacy prior to the project, commented when interviewed at the project midpoint, “that he was too busy writing a script” and that he had a “deadline”. It was quite a turnaround.
There had been a worry that given authority over their breaks, the children might take advantage. However, this wasn’t the case. Many of the children who were spoken to, would reduce their afternoon break to compensate for taking longer in the morning to talk. The children seemed to respond very well to the responsibility; they did not see themselves as pupils but as co-workers and their teachers as managers.
The school learned a lot from the first year and looked closely at the evaluations of the project. Not everything had worked as well as they had hoped whilst some things had exceeded expectations. This was all taken into consideration as they looked at how they might better develop their next enquiry.
One thing that had been clear was the positive attitude that the children had shown to their own learning during and after the project. The school began to consider what had created this and how it could be best developed.
Core Attributes
As a result of working with the children in this way, the school identified six core attributes that they felt it was important for their children to have in order to become not only good learners but lifelong learners. Using this as the focus for their next enquiry the school began again to look at an exciting and innovating way to engage and motivate the children.
