The value of the unexpected and unexplained at Old Park Primary School, a School of Creativity
Children and staff alike at Old Park Primary School in Telford found themselves out of their comfort zones when they arrived at school one Monday in January 2010 to find a police tent emanating smoke and strange noises in the school grounds, and were called in for an emergency assembly to discuss the mysterious appearance of a large crater in the car park.
Headteacher, Mandie Haywood and the school’s Creative Agent Richard Shrewsbury had cooked up the plan for a whole-school investigation which took place one week and was a complete surprise to children, parents and staff at Old Park. It was to be the start of Old Park’s involvement with Schools of Creativity, and marked a turning point in the way teachers and children worked together across the school.
The Look Deeper project comprised a week in which the normal curriculum was completely suspended across the school, in which children came up with theories as to what had happened with the mysterious occurrence at the school (theories which ranged from a volcano to a meteor strike to the arrival of aliens). A range of further strange and unexpected occurrences kept the project momentum high as children across the school investigated ultraviolet messages which appeared around the school, other strange events in offices and classrooms and teachers suddenly displaying a range of odd physical symptoms, including altered skin, eye and hair colour.
One of the project’s aims had been to engage parents and the wider community, as one of the challenges facing the school is parental engagement. The police tent was visible to parents bringing their children to school, and the project kicked off with a loud explosion on the site which could be heard throughout the area, both of which events were designed to raise interest levels in the broader community. The week’s activities led up to an exhibition at the end of the week, an event in which parents were brought into the school to share in their children’s work. Part of the project was also the creation and promotion of a blog space online for parents to find out what was going on. The blog can still be viewed at www.oldparklookdeeper.wordpress.com.
As well as a large increase in parents coming into the school throughout the Look Deeper project week, the school saw a dramatic increase in attendance (with no students reported arriving late throughout the week). Staff recalled the children were much more engaged in their learning and were prepared to suspend disbelief to contribute to the project’s success.
Staff also reported being surprised by what they discovered about their pupils, at the level to which they could work independently and many reported seeing a completely different side to the children. One member of staff said of the Look Deeper project: "I realise now how much I can trust them to do things that I wouldn’t have necessarily allowed them to do before".
Headteacher Mandie Haywood, recalled a change in staff’s attitudes to their own creativity, a process which started at the beginning of the Look Deeper week, in which some staff were excited, some panicked by the surprise element, and all learned a lot from the process of being challenged by working with the unknown and unexpected.
She explained the project had been an important milestone in the school’s history, as it had marked a change in the way staff viewed children in the school and kick-started teachers being comfortable with children leading their own learning.
Following the Look Deeper project, the whole school moved onto a second School of Creativity project in July 2010, in which they organised the school to work together as a large-scale garden centre including an art gallery, catering, vegetable growing, cookery as a starter. In this longer creative project Mandie explained, the teachers were happier to let children take the lead, something they would not have been as comfortable with had it not been for the high impact initial experience of Look Deeper.
And since these initial projects, which were on the whole planned by teachers, the school has taken another step towards empowering the children to plan their own work, and now each term every class creates their own ideas for a project, puts together a bidding team bids for funding from the creative school budget through a panel of teachers and Year 6 pupils. This has led to projects such as Year 6’s Leave your mark project, based on the idea of the Hollywood walk of fame and Year 3 running a large scale medieval banquet for parents.
These longer term projects mark a move to staff facilitating and guiding rather than leading the vision, and enabling the pupils to use their own creativity and initiative, at the same time taking more of an active role in shaping their learning.
