The Time Institute

Creative Partnerships Northumberland, Newcastle & Gateshead

Synopsis
On the night of 8 November 2009, time traveller Vortex escaped from his secure prison. The Time Institute was notified and put on red alert. On the morning of 9 November, Time Agents were called to an emergency briefing to advise them of the situation. During the briefing, the sirens began to sound... For the children it then became a race to save time.

Process
Following on from the success of their previous project, the staff of the school once again did a weekend conversion changing the school into the Time Institute - home of The Electronic Purification of Challenged History Machine (EPOCH).

Over the weeks of the project children became used to meeting historical characters that had been brought back by the machine. The characters returning had very vague memories of who they were and it was the children’s job to piece together the gaps.

The children also dealt with Time Anomalies created by Vortex attempting to change history. Employees were informed by video email of the event that their arch enemy was changing and then would work together to research and investigate the facts about their anomaly.

Agents would then gather information and produce documents to support their findings. Throughout all of the exciting work the children were evaluated within their role as they developed their own learning.

Recorded Progress
Having been consulted on their understanding of the core attributes and how they would know if they had them, their Creative Agent, Lesley Wood, designed a “staff” questionnaire which all “employees” completed at the commencement of their employment. This was again repeated at the end of the project and the percentage change noted.

This also lead to employee records on which the children charted their progress in developing their six core attributes. Each session the children would add to a class chart what they had done that day to achieve their goal. As the process developed the children became aware of areas that they needed to focus on and began to change their learning to develop weaker skills.

Staff also monitored the children’s levels of engagement within sessions to respond and develop the project.

Next steps
The project is still in the process of being evaluated at the moment but initial figures look very promising with the children’s perception of their abilities noticeably increasing from their baseline results.
Information gathered from the project includes samples of work, interviews with staff, practitioners and the pupils, and the pupils will develop a final report alongside the statistics gathered.

As a result of the project the children have developed new skills and a fantastic creative and technical language was learnt through engagement with animators, visual artists, web designers and drama specialists.
The children have returned to their usual routines now but the good feeling and the lessons learnt from the project are still clear and apparent. The skills that both staff and children learnt are already being used again within classroom sessions.

The school team see their experience as part of a process toward a creative curriculum and strongly believe that they will carry forward the knowledge that they have gained within the CP programme.