As part of our launch of our School Environments Charter, we asked an ICT teacher from Hamble College in Southampton (who Ty met by chance at an SSAT event) to get his Digital Leader students to do a short poem and video about why they thought school environments matter.
As you can see from the blog post from Kristian Still, we gave them some briefing information and they stunned us with the results. The poem, written by Victoria Akhurst and year 7-9 students, is right at the heart of our charter document and the video below is raw and just as it should be – direct and to the point.
Why do school environments matter? Ask the staff and students in any school and they will tell you…We hope you will sign up to the charter and pass it on. Or put your comments on the YouTube video below or you can spread the word on Twitter using the #schoolscharter hashtag and this shortlink: http://tinyurl.com/schoolscharter
Related posts:
School environments matter but it is not just a case of putting up a nice new sparkling building. One local authority has razed all its secondary schools and built a load of new Learning Centres. They look nice but many are not working. Teachers are becoming really stressed here, many are bailing out and some of these are leaving with no job to go to. There isn’t enough lab space, the open tech areas are too noisy, many children find it difficult to stay on task in the busy homebases, the IT struggles to cope, laptops crash, the buildings leak, the temperature control is too variable …. I could go on and on. Oh, and a relatively high percentage of pupils have no respect for the buildings – over £18,000 worth of damage to computers and laptops in 1 (ONE) Learning Centre in its first term.
If you think this is negative then try teaching, or learning, in one. No, I don’t want to go back to the 70′s and I do want access to as much IT as possible. But I also think all pupils are entitled to a quiet space where they can concentrate and learn.