Peter’s Story

Every child is an expert learner, they just don’t always value what we want.

Personal journey and beliefs.
As a child of a family employed by the armed forces, my educational history is wide and varied. I believe this is why I have become deeply concerned about the implicit messages permeating the reform agenda of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. The centralized reforms of the United Kingdom in this period focus on the need for high levels of performance in academic tests as the measure of learning. Furthermore that learning measured thus, is a key to a prosperous society. However I reflect that many adults I meet are good learners but do not always value what schooling offers. They still contribute to out prosperous economy, have happy and stable family lives and are committed to social harmony. I question the reasons why academic test success should be the measure of learning and furthermore believe the weight of academic performance data is in jeopardy of crushing the cultural, moral and spiritual values in childhood. I believe these are the keys to learning and engender a prosperous society.

Context of the school.
I am head at Rayleigh Primary School. It is a two-form entry primary school, which includes a nursery in the South Essex commuter town of Rayleigh. The town is quite affluent with few of the difficulties associated with inner cities.

How we did it
As head I am a keen learner. I follow research in the belief that I can ‘stand on the shoulders’ of other to improve my practice. I also read widely on the theme of our future as a civilisation because I am mindful that we education children not for our world but a world we cannot see. Encouraging others to share in their views of the future needs of children created a profitable mindset when the school amalgamated from an infant and junior school into a 5-11 through primary. After amalgamation in 1995, we took a difficult decision to review our curriculum and plan an individual way forward. This involved asking the question what do we mean by learning? From this small beginning the school developed and resourced a curriculum based upon four areas of development. Core Skills, PSHE, Research and Creativity. These areas were then broken down into practices that informed our learning policy, a policy that identified different practices for different stages of a child’s development. For example, we separated the Early Years from the National Curriculum as play based learning before the Foundation Stage was published.

The next step involved developing schemes of work and a curriculum plan that illustrates the school meets the requirements of the National Curriculum. Eight years later, the school is investigating ways to maximize achievement in terms of performance data and continually evolve this personal curriculum. Research into thinking skills revealed the vision developed by the school was finding wider popularity but rather than being thought of as a learning curriculum, it is being massed as the ‘thinking skills’ movement. Comparison between research and the school curriculum showed both match and areas for further development. It seemed we were already on the path of visual, auditory and kinaesthetic learning, emotional intelligence, philosophy for children, creative intelligence and memory skills. However, we needed to develop a stronger pedagogy of learning progression. What exactly are the differences between learning at the age of 4 to the age of 11? Is it the repetition of learning environments and habits or are their appropriate and specific approaches for key phases of development? Thus, the thinking skills movement is offering Rayleigh the opportunity to consolidate its approaches into a more rigorous and practically based system that enables that most difficult of ambitions, success for all.

Peter Malcolm
Headteacher, Rayleigh Primary School, Rayleigh, Essex