Whose Hoo?
Hundred of Hoo School has just finished a second year on the Change School programme and has worked with Future Creative previously as a pilot School for the Creative and Media Diploma. The School is currently in Special Measures and is extremely isolated from the rest of Medway, being situated on the Hoo peninsula, meaning that it has its own characteristics. The age range of pupils is 11-19 and there are approx 1700 pupils at the school. The School specialises in Media and has a good reputation in the mainly rural, local area and has a large catchment area.
After a visit from Ofsted it became evident that Hundred of Hoo School needed to address community cohesion within the school. It was decided that the Change School programme would focus on developing community cohesion alongside the curriculum requirements for both Year 8 and Diploma students, looking at forging positive links with the local community and exploring how students could gain a greater understanding of their own community.
As Ofsted identified the need for the school to develop its community cohesion programme the practitioners felt that this would work well with the Creative and Media students' “Our Medway” exhibition which the students were working towards. The practitioners and School wanted to look at cross curricular links between a number of subject areas in Year 8 to encourage creative teaching and learning across a variety of subject bases; to encourage effective communication between staff; and, to access the impact of cross curricular, project based learning of a controlled group of students.
The project worked on two levels:
Firstly, Creative and Media Diploma students were encouraged to develop their exhibition work. This involved planning meetings with staff to discuss the syllabus requirements, setting criteria and identifying areas of weakness within the students work. Staff felt that students needed to extend their creativity and expand their independent learning techniques. Within the sessions, practitioners worked on developing specific skills such as photography and introduced the work of other artists. Students visited the Tate Modern, the Wellbeing Trust and Whitechapel gallery to experience different styles of work and how exhibition space could be used. The students began to design their own exhibition and practitioners took the role of facilitators, encouraging students to push the boundaries and to take responsibility for their own work.
The second strand of the project involved working with two Year 8 groups: one for the first half of the year and the second for the latter part of the year. The first group of Year 8 students looked at the similarities and differences between Hoo and London, visiting the Tate Modern and comparing power stations, rivers and architecture from the two districts. The group worked closely with the Creative and Media Diploma students, sharing ideas and collecting stories from a coffee morning when local people were invited to attend.
The Year 8 students developed creative methods in which to communicate with the community, including designing sandwich boards to be placed around Hoo to counteract the newspaper boards that had publicised the school’s failing status and inviting locals to tell their stories. The students also released 200 balloons with tags attached asking for the finders to send back their stories.
The second group of Year 8 students continued the project through drama, film and imagery. The students visited a local day care centre and talked to the residents about their past, comparing childhoods. They developed their findings through film and drama.
Forging these links with residents has dramatically improved the perception of local young people, as previously residents felt threatened and were reluctant to visit the school. Many residents have now attended events held at the school and will visit the final exhibition.
The impact on the school and the wider community thus far has been a dramatic change in perceptions of both the students and the older generation of Hoo. Through interaction and involvement both generations have seen similarities between themselves: students have realised that the older generation were very similar to them in their youth, even if technology and methods of communication were different; similarly the older generation learnt that the ‘youngsters’ were not threatening, but interested in what they had to offer. All pupils learnt to develop their independent learning skills and how to co-construct their own learning.
The staff became aware of the impact of cross-curricular education, noting that some students had moved up two sub-levels in their Maths, Drama and Geography assessments due to the project. Students learnt to work with different peers and age groups effectively, widening their cultural understanding of what was Art. They started to gain a sense of belonging to their own community and explore their place within it.
This project is culminating in a final interactive exhibition which will be open to staff, students, parents and all those who have been involved with the project from the local community. The School and Future Creative practitioners intend to contact local libraries and museums to encourage the work to go on tour and be exhibited in other areas making it more accessible to the wider community.
"We would love to be invited up to the school for any event that might be held there; we now feel safe to come and visit you" -Elderly local resident
"It’s made me take responsibility of what I learn and how I learn" – Year 8 student
"I now look at everything in a different way, in a much more creative way; not just when I do this but in all my subjects" - Year 12 student
