RSA Fellows in Manchester throw support behind curriculum

On Monday 7th December the RSA hosted a reflections event in Manchester to celebrate and review the fantastic work schools and their students did in the summer term of this year, working with the Manchester Area-based Curriculum.

Student successes

A class of students from Manchester Enterprise Academy presented a slide show about how the Manchester curriculum was designed, and then an informative and entertaining dramatisation of how they chose and developed their own projects.

Whalley Range School brought four of their students to present on their experiences of the area-based curriculum, and display excerpts from the films they wrote, shot and produced about the history and the future of Manchester, which provided a fantastic insight into the opportunities and creativity that the projects had allowed the students.

In both cases, the children took full responsibility for creating and delivering these presentations – one benefit cited by all the schools was an increase in the confidence of the students, both in their own abilities and in talking with or presenting to others.

Staff from Manchester Creative and Media Academy for Boys, spoke about the implementation, difficulties and successes of their project. From interesting observations about not positioning boys with video cameras in front of ‘Ann Summers’ (surprisingly, no one wanted to go in the shop when being filmed entering by a group of 12 and 13-year old boys…!), to the generosity of the bus companies who gave the students and staff free bus travel across Manchester for the 3 weeks, it seemed that the experience had been a learning curve for both staff and students. The result of their hard work is four 9-minute films, to be screened in Exchange Square in Manchester in early January 2010.

Challenges and opportunities

Finally, Professor Keri Facer from Manchester Metropolitan University gave a summary of their evaluation of the Manchester curriculum, highlighted both the things that didn’t work, and the many things that did.

School staff, students and RSA Fellows expressed their enthusiasm for continuing to encourage collaboration between schools in Manchester and between schools and other organisations in the city and the RSA hopes to be able to continue to support this activity as part of its Schools Without Boundaries programme of work.