SMALL-SCALE PROJECT - Chantry

Piloting a range of spaces to support personalised learning in advance of BSF
Chantry High School, in Ipswich, is a specialist Humanities College, with just over 1,000 pupils on roll, and has one of the most personalised KS4 curriculum offerings in the county including a range of BTEC courses and a pre-16 apprenticeship in Food & Drink Manufacturing.

A National Challenge school, Chantry is moving towards a cluster approach for both learning and extended services, in collaboration with a number of local providers. It is currently a sample school in Suffolk's Wave 6 BSF programme, with an anticipated build date of 2012, and has recently completed a Sorrell Foundation project.

Personalised Learning at Chantry
Chantry has a strong emphasis on relational schooling, and sees learning as taking place in the context of a relationship. This in turn has led to the identification of three core values which are focussed on the learner and learning experience: Achieve More, Listen More, and Look After Each Other More.

The school have been actively engaged in developing student voice activities to further their assessment for learning practice.

The Pilot project aims
Through its visioning and engagement process as part of its Building Schools for the Future briefing, Chantry have already begun developing its change management plans for transforming learning, and is currently exploring alternative curriculum and pedagogic models for future delivery.

One of the key aims of the pilot was to create an environment that allows the school to test ideas about supporting personalised learning from both the learner perspective and the teacher perspective, well in advance of the detailed design and build.

Personalised Learning Themes
During the visioning process, the school identified that it wanted to create space for personalised learning that supported them in:

Developing independent and confident learners, who are self-motivated and happy, and capable of engaging with traditional school subjects in new, personal, meaningful and flexible ways. They will be ambitious but balanced: capable of defining their own ideas of success.

Emphasising real life experiences and skills, creating the capacity to make "connections" with the local and wider community, and providing access to role models and the freedom to make mistakes and learn from them, with active involvement of families.

Emphasing the importance of knowledge and awareness at a personal and social level (emphasis on individual and social relationships and responsibility), and increasing awareness of options and available choices.

This resulted in the development of three Personalised Learning Themes, which were viewed as the focus points for supporting the visions:

- Students as self managers, empowered and responsible
- Equal and effective participation
- Collaborative team working

A variety of key activities, such as independent study, project based working, and peer-peer learning, were identified for each of these themes, and the design created around these activities.

Design principles
Using the key activities, principles for the design of the space were then developed centred on the provision of a range of settings within a single large space to support the different activities. This resulted in a need to create a space with support for:

- Agility and versatility of space with flexible settings
- Small groups and individuals (that can be merged into larger groups) with moderate flexibility and minor boundary control
- Supporting experimentation in order to try things like team teaching and interdisciplinary work
- Good access to technology
- A mixture of timetabled (e.g. thematic) and un-timetabled usage (experimentation, CPD)
- Be an integral part of staff CPD