NEW OPENING
A free school in Luton is the first in the UK to be set up by a leisure trust. But what do leisure trusts know about education and what value can they really add? In the case of Active Luton, quite a lot, as it turns out. Rhianon Howells talks to CEO Helen Barnett
AN ACTIVE EDUCATION
W
hen the reception class pupils at River Bank Primary School in Luton, Bedfordshire, UK, walked through
their school gates for the first time last September, Helen Barnett – CEO of leisure trust Active Luton – had never felt more proud or emotional. Barnett, however, was not among
the parents dropping off their sons and daughters for their first day of school. Her baby was not one of the four- and five-year-olds taking their first steps towards independence, but rather the school itself: the country’s first free school to be set up by a leisure trust and the first to base its ethos on physical activity, health and wellbeing. River Bank Primary School, located
in one of the town’s most deprived areas, is still very much a fledgling project. Opened in 2013 with just two reception classes, it will add another year group each year until it has reached full capacity. This year, the children are being taught in mobile classrooms on the edge of a building site; from an adjacent playground they can watch their brand new, two-storey school going up. Work is due for completion by
22 August 2014, with the second school year beginning a couple of weeks later. It’s a tight deadline, but if the last two
years prove anything, it’s that Barnett is not afraid of a challenge – after all, there is no precedent for what they’re doing. But although convincing the authorities, the community and parents that a leisure trust can indeed run a school has been no mean feat, she is quick to stress that both she and Active Luton have a track record that make them ideally suited to be pioneers in this field.
STRONG CREDENTIALS A PE teacher for 15 years, Barnett joined Luton Council’s school improvement team as PE advisor in 1999. Three years later, thanks to the vision of
“an incredibly forward-thinking boss”, her remit was widened to include the management of both sports development and facilities, so that for the first time everything to do with physical activity – in schools, community outreach and council-run leisure centres – was brought under a single umbrella. When Active Luton was set up in
2005 to run the council’s leisure facilities and sports development initiatives, Barnett was appointed CEO and simply
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carried on the good work. As a result, uniquely among leisure trusts, Active Luton has not only a large community outreach team but also a well- established education team including qualified and experienced teachers. Since then, the trust has worked
with numerous primary and secondary schools in Luton to promote physical activity: from helping them to improve the quality of their PE provision and running extra-curricular sports clubs to training teachers in how to introduce activity into their English and maths lessons (Literacy in Action and Numeracy in Action) and reviving playground games. “You’d struggle to find a school in Luton we haven’t worked with,” says Barnett. Far from seeing its schools outreach
as separate from its sports and leisure operations, Active Luton encourages all of its centres to forge links with the schools closest to them – from pre-schools through to sixth-form colleges – via swimming programmes and other initiatives such as hosting inter-school competitions. “We want there to be those links,
because these children are going to grow up to become future customers,”
February 2014 © Cybertrek 2014
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