Click. Rewind. Rethink. A small primary school just outside Abergavenny, south Wales in an 1870s red sandstone and mortar building. It has a schoolyard a scrum half couldn’t swing a decent pass in, and an ICT budget of less than pound;200 per annum.

Welcome to Llanfoist County Primary School, home, until last term, of Carl Sherlock, winner of the Primary ICT in Practice Award. With 115 pupils, five full-time teachers and a non-teaching head, Llanfoist is a fine example of a village community school. Carl has managed, according to head Linda Davies, “to generate an interest in ICT throughout the school”.

What the award assessors found so impressive was the range of creative uses of ICT employed across the curriculum. Carl states: “The power of ICT is to develop children’s creativity, to develop independence in their learning, to make them resilient learners, and to make sure that the curriculum is inclusive. That is the issue; not whether you’ve got the best equipment.”

In English, for example, children use word processing techniques as an aid to creative writing. Newspaper articles are produced in desktop publishing on matters of local interest, and shape poetry has been produced in the form of a tornado and a spider’s web.

Spreadsheets are used in maths to reinforce concepts such as percentages and long multiplication. Similarly, CD-Roms and Internet sites are employed in establishing basic numeracy skills. Science and geography lessons use graphing programs to input data which is then pasted into word-processed documents. The Internet is accessed to find weather information and local maps.

Then there are light sensors, a robotic Iron Woman, complete with flashing eyes, temperature sensors, drama activity recorded on digital camera, multimedia presentations, T-shirt design and transfer and the Three Bears, with pressure pads guarding the porridge!

These examples do scant justice to the diversity of innovative ICT techniques employed at Llanfoist, or to the way in which technology is embedded in the children’s learning. “It’s not so much of a novelty now”, says Carl, “they’re so used to it. It doesn’t matter to them if they’re using the computer to do really good work or just playing on it. They’re used to doing both...”

Stuart Ball is ICT co-ordinator for Monmouthshire, and nominated Carl for the award. “The way Carl uses ICT, it’s an integral part of everything he does. The important thing is what the children are going to get out of what he’s doing. He’s technically minded, and some of the things the children do are technically quite challenging but he gets around that and allows them to achieve what they’re trying to do.”

Carl has since taken up a deputy headship at a primary school in Newport but the lasting testimony of his success as a teacher at Llanfoist is apparent in the enthusiasm he has engendered for technology in both students and staff, and in the realisation that good ICT, where appropriate, can significantly enhance the learning process.

Hugh John