The North East provides ideal location for enriching curriculum
Walbottle Primary School successfully secured funding from the Community Foundation to help their school take trips to support and enrich their curriculum. The funding aimed to embed cultural capital through outdoor education, physical activity and sport. The North East is rich in resources for students, with galleries, zoos and museums ready to inspire generations.
Community Foundation
The project was funded through a partnership between the Community Foundation and Schools North East. The partnership behind the funding began in 2021. Schools North East teamed up with the Community Foundation to make over £100,000 of funding available for schools in Newcastle, Gateshead, Sunderland, Northumberland, North and South Tyneside.
Funding was provided for projects that focused on providing a broader enriched curriculum to support students in-school learning, raise levels of pride and appreciation of the region, and develop cultural capital within school settings.
Walbottle Primary received £3,200 from the funding to allow them to engage with external educational opportunities.
Local galleries, museums and places of historical/geographical interest
170 students were involved in the trips, exposing them to local historical, geographical and cultural experiences so that they develop a better understanding of their place in the World, in history and in society. Walbottle planned these trips to enhance their curriculum and consolidate prior learning.
Walbottle Village has a larger than average proportion of disadvantaged pupils (41%). Because of this, and the impact that Covid has had on the whole community, many of their pupils have missed out on valuable experiences. When the school returned after Covid, they wanted to provide their students with more opportunities across the year than they would ordinarily in order to address the poverty of experience that they were seeing.
To support History, students went on trips to Beamish Museum (toys of the past), Discovery Museum (fire of London), Segedunum Fort (Roman Empire), Jarrow Farm (Anglo Saxon life) and the Great North Museum (Ancient Greece). Additionally students took part in a fossils workshop at the Great North Museum.
To help consolidate Geography knowledge, students from Walbottle went to the beach, Kirkley Hall Zoo, the coast and the Quayside. To learn about Earth in Space, students visited the Great North Museum, local farms and Northumberland Zoo. For RE students took trips out to places of worship for both Christian and Jewish faiths and in Art students visited the Baltic Art Museum.
Positive Impact
Alison Oliver, Head Teacher at Walbottle Primary, said:
“We always find that visits have such a positive impact on learning across the curriculum and the development of citizen skills. Our visits were interrupted due to Covid and have been fewer more recently due to budget constraints and parents unable to contribute as much due to rising costs. The funding has allowed us to offer more visits than we would have otherwise been able to.
Our visits have been carefully planned out to meet the requirements of our school curriculum. The visits have provided the children with the opportunity to visit places of historical, geographical, scientific and cultural significance.
Outcomes for pupils have been enhanced where they have had the opportunity to see evidence of the curriculum content being taught first hand (for example when seeing a real Roman Fort). The children have developed a better understanding of the past and the impact that this has had on the way they live their lives today. Geography fieldwork has allowed children to see important landmarks, the difference between coastal and rural areas and helped them gain a better understanding of their locality.”
Walbottle Primary School is a Schools North East Partner School. If you’d like to find out more about our Partner School Programme click here.
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