CONTRIBUTORS A time for reflection
This month, regular Education Today contributor GRAHAM COOPER, head of education at Capita SIMS, suggests that the start of a new year offers an opportunity to look back at the year just gone.
The importance of school trips
As the New Year dawns, regular Education Today contributor KIRSTY BERTENSHAW looks forward to better weather and discusses the importance of school trips.
The arrival of January and 2019’s New Year provides a ready-made opportunity to take stock, evaluate the school year just passed and look ahead to the coming months. I’m sure many of you will have resolutions in place and are looking
forward to remembering them in about mid-March, but, for me this time of year is as much about looking back as it is about casting an eye forward. The Christmas holidays always create a welcome break in the
school year, both for staff and pupils, with some time away from the classroom usually what the doctor ordered in terms of catching your breath and re-connecting with your energy and enthusiasm. It’s also the perfect time of year to evaluate the plans you made
back in September and look at how they’ve been progressing – are your pupils successfully on track as you expected or have those new topics you wanted to cover been as well received as you’d hoped? The real advantage of a mid-year review is that there’s still time to
put into action what you’re learned and see it make a difference. Sometimes those plans which were well-intentioned and equally well thought out in September just need some minor adjustment to bring them back on track – and before you know it, Easter will be upon us and there’ll be minimal time to make a major impact. This time of year is also a perfect opportunity to put teacher
wellbeing back on centre stage – the pressure that builds in the run- up to Christmas, with additional priorities including reports, assessments and for many of you last-minute script changes for the nativity, can quickly escalate and leave teachers struggling to get it all done. And while there is an increasing focus on reducing workloads for
teachers and encouraging a positive approach to managing mindsets, this is far more difficult to put into practice than in theory. Teaching as a profession and classrooms as a place to work are almost unrecognisable from just a few years ago, with the priorities placed upon teachers and the resources available to them both vastly different. It seems as though there is an ongoing race between the shifting
demands placed on teachers – more complex assessment procedures, greater emphasis placed on exam results, increasingly diverse education needs – and the levels of support provided to overcome the challenges. Given our line of work at Capita SIMS, we’re keenly aware of the
ways in which technology can support school staff, regardless of their daily challenges or job role. It often feels as though the edtech industry is on the edge of a huge explosion in technology that would see classrooms take a massive step forward in improving learning outcomes and saving time for hard pressed teachers. Whether or not that is the case, only time will tell – we find that
our customers’ needs change on an almost daily basis, with new trends and opportunities arising all the time, so it may actually be the case that we see a series of small steps along the path made rather than a single huge leap.
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www.education-today.co.uk
School trips are on the decline, especially in secondary schools. Part of this is down to how difficult they are perceived to be to plan, and how to convince senior management that the trip is worthwhile and educational. It’s often seen as easier to get companies in to visit schools and while this is also a great opportunity for the students, it misses out some of the benefits of school trips. Cost is always an issue, especially in the current economic climate.
However, many trips can be done cheaply to museums with free entry and specialist areas for storing belongings and having lunch. Schools have a fund for Pupil Premium students which can be used for trips, and canteens can provide packed lunches for those students on free lunches. Even if a facility with free entry is visited, there are of course travel
costs. Coach hire can be expensive, requiring parents or carers to find the funds. If a trip is planned far enough in advance, it allows parents to prepare for the costs. There are alternative ways to travel to with lower costs depending on the number of students involved. Consider public transport. Group tickets can be purchased in advance
for train services, with some offering discounts for groups of 10+ people, with significant savings. Depending on how many students you are travelling with, bus services can also be considered. I once travelled from the midlands to London with a small group of KS3 students with a well- known bus company for £7 a ticket, for which we had comfortable seats, phone charging points and access to a decent on board toilet. But is all the planning and cost really worth it? There are several
benefits of trips.
• Seeing things we can’t show students in a classroom, such as how technology has changed over time, the size and functionality of space rockets, a journey through space in a planetarium, how people lived in the recent past and even interesting lectures which may be held in the evenings. This can open a whole world of wonder to students.
• Meeting real scientists/ engineers/ conservationists – this is fantastic from a careers perspective! It is difficult to get visitors into schools to talk about their careers but seeing them in action offers a great insight into real life.
• Finding out how things work in reality! One of the most memorable trips I ever went on in school was to a sewage treatment works. We learnt about the skills and qualifications involved in making clean drinking water, attempted to filter water ourselves and came out with whole new view on wasting water.
• Teaching and learning in a different environment can be really effective! Having different adults to listen to and challenges that can’t be replicated in the classroom can motivate even the most disheartened student.
• Enthusiasm and excitement for just being out of the classroom. Students are used to the daily grind of going to school, doing homework, sleeping, then going back to school. The excitement involved in leaving the school, the town and their comfort zone is impossible to replicate. And for some students, these trips are the only opportunity they get for new experiences.
Kirsty is the founder of STEMtastic, an education consultancy with a focus on Science, Technology, Engineering and Maths
www.stemtastic.co.uk
January 2019
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