Community Foundation Funding: How Marine Park Primary School developed the PACE curriculum
Schools North East partnered with the Community Foundation to make £100,000 of funding available for schools wishing to develop their cultural, sporting or careers provision for disadvantaged and looked-after children. Funding of up to £4,000 was available per bid for schools across Northumberland and Tyne & Wear.
This project meant so much to us all here at Schools North East, and we were delighted to facilitate such a powerful opportunity for some of our local schools.
We recently caught up with Marine Park to learn more about how they used this fantastic funding opportunity to develop the PACE curriculum.
The impact of the project
The curriculum project provided the learners with wider educational experiences to support language acquisition, understanding and use of vocabulary, and to build upon cultural capital. This ranged from educational, cultural, and sporting visits, visitors and experts, extra-curricular opportunities, learning through enterprise, and through community partnerships.
Community partnerships
The children were supported to attend off-site competitions where they competed in several skills games, against each other and with children from other schools. These included basketball, skittles, relay races, target throw, kicking skills and throwing and catching.
All the children worked hard to beat their personal best and were able to identify how they had improved their skills as the competition progressed, using subject-related vocabulary.
Year 6 worked with Peter Sagar in workshops designed around the theme ‘Inherit Our Past and Build Our Future.’
They investigated the local area’s fantastic history and heritage around mining, and they didn’t stop there! They also looked at the bright future of our local area and the region as a whole, particularly in relation to renewable energy. They examined the exciting Dogger Bank Wind Farm project and found out that lots of the work will be done right there in South Shields. The workshop also included drama and music, with the children composing their own song and writing their own script in Geordie dialect.
The event gave the children a strong sense of place and the possibilities for their local area going forward.
Curriculum enhancements
‘Leon and the Place Between’ by Angela McAllister was one of the chosen whole school texts. They decided to provide the enrichment opportunity at the start of the unit, instead of once the work was completed.
Even better, they hired a Magician to come into the school to show the children what a magician was, and to illustrate to them how they create a sense of suspense and drama, and use their performance skills to hold the audience’s attention. How exciting!
This opportunity supported comprehension of the text through exposure to key vocabulary, and they were able to relate to the experiences of the characters. Plus, immersion in the story strengthened their overall writing outcomes.
As part of learning about living things, their life cycles and caring for animals, the children in EYFS were offered hands-on experience of caring for chicks and observing the life cycle of butterflies.
The children have limited opportunities to experience events like these outside of school. The children’s engagement in the direct access to ‘real life’ encounters such as these greatly enthused the children and promoted better understanding of subject related language and vocabulary.
Funding well spent!
Marine Park Primary School is a Schools North East Partner School . If you’d like to find out more about our Partner School membership, click here.
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