VIEW FROM THE CLASSROOM
Linking the curriculum to the world of work
we will be moving to our new, permanent site in west Newcastle next year.
You connect Callerton Academy with local businesses and industries to support learning. How did this come about? This began as a project for the Science department in the summer term of 2022. My Principal passed on an email about the North East Local Enterprise Partnership (North East LEP) and North of Tyne Combined Authority (NTCA) project ‘Linking Curriculum to the World of Work’ pilot, which aimed to connect students with the world of work through practical engagement with industries and businesses.
I
n our View from the classroom feature this month, we were delighted to hear from Stacy Jones, Leader of Teaching and Learning in Science, Associate Leader Coaching at Callerton Academy in Newcastle, who explains how the school has established connections with local businesses and industries to support learning.
Tell us about your school
Callerton Academy is a secondary school in Newcastle, part of Gosforth Federated Academies. At present we have 360 students on role, across Years 7-9, 56% of which are pupil premium pupils, 13% SEND and 33% non-white British. Currently situated in central Newcastle,
After being accepted on to the programme, we went along to an introduction session and were impressed by the scope of the project. We had grand plans to have a super curricular session for each topic across KS3 but weren’t sure how to make this a reality.
Working with the North East LEP as part of this project gave us the opportunity to remove the barriers around how to find the time to connect with a business, as well as giving us amazing support to network and develop sessions with businesses that linked directly to our physics curriculum.
As we didn’t have a physics specialist, I wondered how we would be able to make the subject as innovative and exciting as our chemistry and biology curriculum. Working with North East LEP helped mentor us and connect us to these experts outside of the learning environment. This helped develop our teachers’ physics knowledge
16
www.education-today.co.uk
and support our goal of developing a curriculum that linked directly to the world of work in our local area.
What industries have you introduced your classroom to, and why?
In our first year of the pilot, we worked with Newcastle College’s Performance Academy and utilised their technical support to run a session based on how loudspeakers work, directly supporting our lab-based teaching of the KS3 science curriculum. During this session students worked in the post-16 learning environment with sound engineers to build their own loudspeakers that could play a song of their choice via their own mobile phones.
We then worked with industrial equipment company, Komatsu, to develop a session linked to an authentic problem they encountered which was solved using electromagnets on heavy machinery. We took our students to a Komatsu site where they were given talks on the different careers available, as well as the chance to drive a digger on a test site! Their experts then hosted an electronics-focused lesson back in school, building scale models of an electromagnetic circuit we had seen in practice.
Most recently, we worked with our local medical physics department. A physicist came in and delivered a session based on how MRI scanners work. During the session, we revised KS3 science, and pushed on into GCSE science to stretch our most able students. Students had the opportunity to build a model MRI scanner using a basic electromagnet and then evaluated the risk
March 2024
Page 1 |
Page 2 |
Page 3 |
Page 4 |
Page 5 |
Page 6 |
Page 7 |
Page 8 |
Page 9 |
Page 10 |
Page 11 |
Page 12 |
Page 13 |
Page 14 |
Page 15 |
Page 16 |
Page 17 |
Page 18 |
Page 19 |
Page 20 |
Page 21 |
Page 22 |
Page 23 |
Page 24 |
Page 25 |
Page 26 |
Page 27 |
Page 28 |
Page 29 |
Page 30 |
Page 31 |
Page 32 |
Page 33 |
Page 34 |
Page 35 |
Page 36 |
Page 37 |
Page 38 |
Page 39 |
Page 40 |
Page 41 |
Page 42 |
Page 43 |
Page 44
