Fulbridge-on-Sea - making writing come alive at Fulbridge School
Fulbridge School is a national School of Creativity in which visitors brush shoulders with the pharaohs in the school's themed corridors, and you're as likely to find children learning on the school's beach or in the caravan as in the classroom. The large primary school in New England, Peterborough, hosts over 130 staff and about 700 pupils from more than 30 different countries.
For their 2010 Schools of Creativity project, Fulbridge decided to investigate how they could make writing come alive, building on the development of their creative curriculum, which they had been working on over the previous five years. They decided to concentrate on offering the children opportunities to explore topics and themes using first hand experiences, visits and celebrations, and write in situation rather than at a distance, in the classroom.
Project objectives
The staff at Fulbridge wanted to challenge the environment in which writing takes place, and investigated starting and finishing a piece of writing in the location of the experience, where the location had inspired and motivated the children. They planned involve the pupils throughout, evaluating the project continually to ensure the children were motivated, challenged, inspired, stimulated and engaged.
In addition, they wanted to develop their staff training and offer opportunities to their broader networks to plan, observe, participate and evaluate in research projects, to not only support their teaching but to encourage their own learning and develop passion and skills, and methods of meaningful reflection.
To achieve this they decided to draw on their local community and network of schools to support and encourage the children to understand the importance of writing as a purposeful tool in everyday life. They aimed to develop links with their local community in offering opportunities to access the school using facilities provided through the school’s children’s centre, crèche and nursery provision, adult classes and other enrichment activities as a starting point to encourage members of the community to participate in a lifelong learning journey.
The project
The writing project began with discussions with each year group in the school to identify their topics for the summer term. Following this, the school identified where support was needed for pupil and teachers, the challenges they faced and which groups would benefit most from the project. They decided to focus on Year 3 as the year group which would be most able to support other year groups with similar processes over the next few years.
The project comprised three strands: creating opportunities for their pupils to explore writing through focusing on key skills by using external creative practitioners to support and encourage alternative structures to writing and motivation; exploring curriculum links with writing through investigating sculpture, film, animation, drama as the tool to success; and capturing, exploring and developing the senses, emotions and vocabulary experienced by children during school trips.
During the summer term the Year 3 pupils explore the topic 'Beside the Seaside'. Traditionally, this had involved a whole year group visit to one local beach to stimulate and reinforce learning which mainly took place in the classroom, but for the Schools of Creativity project, the teachers split the year group into six groups of fifteen pupils who all visited different seaside locations on the Norfolk coast. They partnered each group with a creative practitioner who accompanied the pupils and their teachers on the trip to engage them in experiences designed to explore their curiosity, intrigue and interest using their initial responses to the environment. The six creative practitioners recruited came from a diverse range of artforms including installation artists, digital media specialists, filmmakers, textile artists, storytellers, writers and poets.
Each practitioner worked with the pupils collaboratively in the classroom to further explore the school’s thematic approach to creative teaching and learning. Back at the school, as part of the project’s development, they developed a caravan installation (which pupils from the school sourced after developing their own media campaign) and a manmade beach within the school grounds, engaging the whole school and wider community through further developing their outdoor space.
As the staff at Fulbridge were keen to involve the whole school community in their creative project, they decided to recruit a group of ‘mini agents’ from the school’s students, who were a driving force in the planning and interviewing processes for the creative practitioners, and who were involved in attending the trips to capture the responses and feelings of the children through photography, film and sound.
To further ensure sustainability of the outcomes the school entered into a partnership with a corporate communications company CTN to explore and develop an online learning tool to share our learning with a wider audience using new technologies. The mini agents were involved in developing the relationship with CTN and this year are responsible for creating and managing the content of the online learning resource that we will develop with CTN to share the school’s journey with a wider audience. The partnership also represented the opportunity to create links between the school and creative industries.
Results and impact
The young people discovered that learning can take place outside of the classroom and in environments that release boundaries but which are still focused on a specific objective and they have learnt to be flexible, adaptable and engage with different colleagues at different times.
An unexpected outcome was the use of space, notably the caravan and cellar and the teachers felt that they would now consider using unconventional spaces to stimulate the desire to write. As the Fulbridge-on-Sea project had promoted a process based way of working from the outset the practitioners were surprised by the quality of work produced. The children were surprised by their desire and motivation to write and their change in attitude towards the subject.
The teachers and school staff, learnt to take more risks and trust others’ planning and judgments. They explored mediums which were unfamiliar and new to their teaching styles and surroundings and embraced them, and in particular, learned that expanding boundaries enables children to explore in greater depth within a context they prefer.
All project partners felt that the project would have a huge impact on the development of sustainable and creative learning within the school. The rethinking of the school trip illustrated the benefits of taking small groups rather than the whole of a year to explore a seaside location and afforded the time for more one-to-one interaction between teachers and pupils and illustrated the value of free play. The trip highlighted the value of responding to the environment immediately rather than only using these responses back in the classroom.
The future
The Fulbridge teachers intend to use the positive outcomes of the project to develop sustainable and creative learning within the school. Staff from the school will deliver INSET training to schools struggling with their creative journey, using this project as a model of innovative practice.
Fulbridge School's learning caravan
