Partnerships
PARTNERSHIPS THAT PERFORM
Sam Baker explains how two of his school’s Business and Education Partnership members delivered a project to inspire students from disadvantaged backgrounds
D
on’t you just love it when a plan comes together? Our local university, a faithful supporter of our Business
and Education Partnership programme, wanted to set up a long-term scheme to inspire young people from disadvantaged backgrounds to consider going on to further education, especially where no one else in their family had taken that route before. The scheme, called Aspire Higher, is part of the Higher Education Funding Council for England (HEFCE)’s National Collaborative Outreach Programme (NCOP), a £60 million project to
increase participation in higher education across England. The university established that almost a third of our pupils come from a ward that is considered particularly disadvantaged and, on the back of this, approached us with funding and administrative resources for a series of engaging projects for pupils
‘The Headteacher was
overheard saying, with some pride, that this was the kind of innovative education that the school was known for!’
in Year 9 who were considering their GCSE subject choices. At the same time, we were
approached by Bedford Creative Arts, another long-standing supporter of our programme, with a fascinating idea for a project that combined dance choreography and computer coding. It would involve a group of students taking part in a week’s residency where they would choreograph a dance, match each move to a piece of code and then use the code to direct a set of coloured lights that would, in turn, control the moves of another dancer. This would culminate in performances at both school and the local university. Under the tuition of professional dancers and coders, with further funding from Arts Council England, 30 pupils from our disadvantaged ward had the amazing opportunity to come off their timetabled lessons for a whole ve days and focus not only on choreography and coding, but teamwork, leadership, working to deadlines, keeping focused and resilient – then performing to a public audience in a grand nale.
Innovative education It took a little courage to put the idea to the Headteacher (‘How many days off timetable?’) but he gave it
FundEd AUTUMN 2017 41
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