Teachers take off with pound;500

11th March 2005, 12:00am

Share

Teachers take off with pound;500

https://www.tes.com/magazine/archive/teachers-take-pound500
From the streets of the Bronx to a farm in Cameroon, an innovative school is paying staff to raise their game. Graeme Paton reports

For six days Simon Wells toured the violent, gun-soaked underbelly of New York, protected by a bodyguard. Crossing the Bronx, he was forced to dodge drug-dealers, prostitutes and gangs in sidewalks and back alleys. It sounds like a dangerous way for a geography teacher to spend his half-term holiday, but this is a taste of the extraordinary lengths to which staff at a Hampshire school are going to improve their performance.

Mr Wells is one of 67 teachers at Cranbourne business and enterprise college, in Basingstoke, given pound;500 a year to go the extra mile in the name of professional development.

One teacher will travel to Cameroon to work on a farm, researching a module on food production in undeveloped countries. Another will help rebuild, and forge links with, Sri Lankan schools. Mr Wells, who led a party of five teachers to New York during the February half-term, is writing a geography course on inner-city deprivation in the US.

“I have spent a lot of time teaching about countries and continents I have never visited,” he said. “I saw so much in New York that I would never get the chance to on a professional development course in London.”

He hired a guide - “someone I found on the internet who had grown up in the Bronx, could walk me round and make sure I wasn’t mugged”.

And Mr Wells saw first-hand the different migrant communities now settled in the inner-city and how hugely deprived areas were being redeveloped.

“I could have gone on a normal tourist sightseeing trip, but I wouldn’t have seen what life is really like in areas like the Bronx,” he said. “I can now bring that experience to life for children at my school and give them a picture of New York they don’t see on the TV.”

Another teacher spent a week in the US with young offenders, including teenagers convicted of drugs and violence offences, to learn about behaviour management.

A media studies teacher researched US newspapers and visited NBC’s television studios to investigate a module on different media styles across the Atlantic.

Staff insist they are not simply blowing the school’s budget on expensive foreign travel.

The five teachers on the five-day trip to New York each contributed pound;100 to cover expenses. All slept in two rooms at a budget hotel in Manhattan and trawled the internet for cheap flights, costing pound;400.

In all, the school has set aside pound;36,000 a year to spend on the training project which it claims offers a radical, and more productive, alternative to traditional courses or staff inset days.

Nick Fleeman, deputy head, said: “We believe our bursary scheme represents value for money.”

* graeme.paton@tes.co.uk

Make the Link: news 7, fe focus 3, teacher magazine

Want to keep reading for free?

Register with Tes and you can read two free articles every month plus you'll have access to our range of award-winning newsletters.

Keep reading for just £1 per month

You've reached your limit of free articles this month. Subscribe for £1 per month for three months and get:

  • Unlimited access to all Tes magazine content
  • Exclusive subscriber-only stories
  • Award-winning email newsletters
Recent
Most read
Most shared