Throughout May, a group of 25 year 7 students from New Line Learning Academy took part in a four-week Transitions project to think about their own experience of moving from primary to secondary school. The aim of the project was to identify an area of the school that required improvement and develop a solution for this that would benefit future year 7 students. To do this, students gave ambassadors a tour of the school which allowed them to find areas that required change i.e. many felt that the English classrooms were too small.
Students also had the opportunity to visit the University of Kent’s Canterbury campus during the project where they took part in a campus tour and had a chance to view different teaching spaces. This helped them when thinking about the teaching spaces at their school and how they could be improved.
The next task for the students was to create a questionnaire for their peers to complete which asked questions such as ‘how did you feel on your first day of secondary school’ and ‘how do you feel about the size of the English classrooms’. They were encouraged to use a variety of open and closed questions to give them more detailed feedback and help them with their research. Once they had collected the data, students created pie and bar charts to present their findings and use these to create a poster to display their ideas.
During the final session, students presented their posters to members of the senior management team and answered questions from the group. The students had a wide range of ideas which included introducing a dedicated area for year 7s to meet, creating a new English building with bigger classrooms and developing a library area with reading material. Another of these ideas was to purchase tables for their school lecture theatre which was influenced by their visit to a lecture theatre on the university campus.
Feedback from the project was extremely positive: ‘students really enjoyed themselves and were very impressed with the university.’ The school are keen to run the project again next year with a different group of students and we look forward to working with them in the future.
For more information about this activity, please contact outreach@kent.ac.uk.