Learner vision

• Further resources

Focusing on students: how a local authority designed a curriculum around student expectations and the local community

Websites

www.sunderland.gov.uk

www.sunderland-bsf.org.uk

Key challenges:

• What is the impact of thinking about the long-term future to the curriculum?
• Is curriculum planning a shared responsibility? If so, who is involved - teachers, governors, parents, support staff, children, the local community, local businesses?
• What sort of long term partnerships exist with other schools and agencies, including voluntary and community organisations?

Overview:

Sunderland Local Authority decided to focus on the values and skills that students gain in their education - as well as buildings, technology or passing specific exams. The latter are important but these will all change; while their primary focus, human values and creating effective communities and citizens, will not.

It is a vision of learners. And from this vision would emerge the structure for schools, curriculum and community service.

Approach:

The heads from across the authority - primary, secondary and from further education, meet monthly. The BSF project team of surveyors, architects, and local authority staff deal with the technical side. And the Education and Improvement partnership - a group of heads and local authority staff - look into the future of curriculum design and support a local approach to transition, behaviour management and teacher development.

A shared vision

These groups created a shared vision addressing subjects such as: personalisation, student voice, appropriate learning spaces, where is ICT going? Plus more general questions surrounding culture, social justice and the curriculum. By agreeing priorities they came up with a vision that could be translated into curriculum goals.

A wide range of students also took part: contributing to design festivals, working with architects and eco specialists. The more disaffected students were also interviewed in order to gain their opinions on what they believed was currently wrong and could be improved. Due to their strong social conscience, these students were keen to help.

The Authority also looked at the whole landscape for learning (schools, vocational skills centre, day releases, and specialisms in other schools). For example, the seventeen secondary schools and colleges joined together to share curriculum offers - the idea was to hook individuals by offering more courses than a single school. Plus, the number of courses offered by the partnership makes personalisation much more possible.

Community learning spaces

Another important aspect is the shift towards considering schools as community learning spaces i.e. allowing out of hours access for members of the public. There are 900 students in Oxclose Community School in Oxclose Village, Sunderland, for example. Yet 1,500 members of the community also use it between the end of school and 9.30pm and at weekends. They were also asked about how the school should be used as part of the BSF process.

Searching for inspiration

Throughout the design phase, team members visited ground-breaking projects abroad for inspiration. The Faraday project, for example, to research science environments. Motivational schools in St Petersburg, the New Zealand system and New York's 'inclusion' method were also scrutinised and customised for Sunderland.

Key points and recommendations:

• Meetings are useful: they allow a sharing of vision and enable all to have an input and a sense of responsibility - the meeting opener material would be useful for this.
• If you want a solution you need local knowledge and people with local knowledge but access to the work of others.
• Focus on the students.

Children learning 1 Children learning 2 Sunderland image