Greening the Valley
‘Our starting point is ‘everyone is different’.’
This is the ethos of Valley Road Community Primary in Sunderland. The school described its challenges as ‘mostly those of low family aspiration and parental disengagement with education’ on application to join the Creative Partnerships Change School programme. The school began to address those challenges with a CARA award in 2005 - which it used to work with an after school group of parents and children to set up an art gallery in the school’s ‘community section’.
The Valley Road research question has been fully explored and the school has taken time to ensure that parents and pupils are supported to develop the appropriate skills to fully engage both groups in an exploration of outdoor learning. The parents who were involved in the project have shown a significant increase in their engagement with the school, the external environment and their children’s learning. They have voluntarily formed a steering group for the continuation of the project, will be contributing to a conference and have planned a whole series of events for year 2 (09/10), such as ‘planting picnics’. Many of the parents had lacked any awareness of responsibility for their children’s learning. They now not only recognise that responsibility, but take it very seriously and deliver it in practice.
The CP projects at Valley Road during the 08/09 school year also raised two new, not entirely unconnected, questions:
How do we encourage similar increases in engagement with other stakeholders such as the wider community and local allotment holders?
How do we translate the findings about other external environments into our own outdoor environment?
The project has also had two additional unforeseen benefits:
Earthkeepers found so many benefits to using the school grounds for their sessions rather than the more public space they normally use that they are now considering using the school grounds to deliver Earthkeepers sessions for other schools. This could provide an income stream that might be an enormous help for the sustainability of any outdoor development.
The school's experiences on this project have led to an application to the Paul Hamlyn Foundation for £50,000 to widen the experience of residents to more year groups, where possible utilising schools grounds (Valley Road’s and grounds at two partner schools).
The next step for Valley Road is a conference, which will bring together all the findings from all the different participants and facilitate a discussion about the next stage of the project. This will ensure that pupil, parent, staff and practitioner voices are all given equal weight and that the next stage of the project is truly jointly owned.
Young people working on grounds at Valley Road Community Primary
