Opening Doors: Learning in the Historic Environment

Section D · Users

D 1 · Schools

Historic sites can offer unforgettable experiences for young people, expanding their vision; they can illuminate the way people lived in the past, and how we live now; they can offer learning opportunities across the curriculum; they can bring us in touch with our everyday surroundings and the way in which those surroundings will develop in the future; they can stimulate our creativity; they can help us to identify with our physical environment; they can strengthen our sense of citizenship. All of these opportunities can be enjoyed throughout our lives, but in childhood such experiences are particularly rich and formative. Schools have a crucial role in helping young people to share this potential for knowledge and enjoyment. This Report brings together numerous examples of what can be offered to schools by the historic environment.

Recent changes

Schools have been visiting historic sites for many years, although until around 1980 relatively little was offered in terms of learning opportunities. Generally, enthusiastic teachers organised their own events.

The past twenty years have seen important changes. On the one hand, some (though by no means all) historic properties have become more active in offering education services for schools, which generally benefit most from these services. The number of visits that can be made by schools is, however, limited by a number of factors discussed in this report. Emphasis in the National Curriculum on the teaching of individual subjects has tended –at least until very recently – to underplay the opportunities for cross-curricular learning that historic properties can offer. Schools have limited funds for visits out, and days out at historic properties have to compete with other options, which may be more immediately relevant to curricular needs. Because the history curriculum for England, for example, does not prioritise a visit to an historic site, it may be more difficult for history teachers to take a class out of school than it is for geography or science teachers who can point to a direct curriculum link. Funding for transport and cover for teachers who are out of school pose additional problems.

For many schools, the problem is that days spent visiting historic buildings are not highly rated by senior management and are not given high priority. One factor may be that – for all the excellent work being done, as cited in this report – the standard of what is on offer from historic sites is very mixed.

To ensure that the historic environment makes a full contribution to the life of schools, we need to ensure that its value, and the means of understanding it, are enhanced within the national curricula, and that a support system in the form of specialist subject advisers and training courses in the subject is in place.

Safety and risk assessment

One important issue is the question of safety. The national press has in recent years chosen to highlight the limited number of cases in which a visit out of the classroom has led to disaster. As with crime, this emphasis distorts the actual picture and can discourage initiatives by teachers or suggest to head teachers that it is better to keep children in school. The National Union of Teachers in its official guidelines, School Visits: NUT Health and Safety Briefing, recognises the value of visits out, but stresses the risks they offer as well as the additional demands placed upon teachers asked to carry out extra-curricular work.

From a practical point of view, it is easier and arguably safer for schools to keep their pupils inside school buildings than to expose them to the problems posed by what may be a complex and large historic site.

The need for risk assessments, in loco parentis responsibility, record keeping and the threat of litigation all put heavy burdens on teachers. For owners, there are comparable problems: owners of country houses, for example, find themselves obliged to take out third party insurance on an increasing scale. It is easier to keep children in the classroom, but the classroom cannot offer everything.

A crucial point is the need for thorough risk assessments by schools, and the documentation already exists to guide schools in making such assessments. One way forward is through close collaboration between sites (or groups of sites) and schools.

Rural schools

For rural schools, particularly those in the deep countryside such as mid-Wales, transport problems and difficulties over reaching historic buildings can be particularly acute. One of the most effective ways of communicating is through the Internet, and effective online resources are of crucial importance.

Gifted and talented schemes

The historic environment has huge potential for stimulating the imagination and enthusiasm of gifted and talented children. Some sites respond to this challenge as the case study of a project at Segedunum, Arbeia and Chesters shows. Exeter Cathedral works with gifted and talented children, while St Edmundsbury Cathedral, Suffolk has a children’s guide training scheme. But there is potential for more.

Special needs schools

Visits out of school for special needs pupils are often easier than they are for other schools, and this report contains several references to the work that is being done in this field. Again, there is great potential here, which is not fully realised.

At Charlecote, an Elizabethan/Victorian house in Warwickshire belonging to the National Trust, the Education Officer is active in helping children with behavioural problems. In the Deer Project, when the ancient herd of deer in the park had to be culled, the staff worked with local schools to create sculpted deer, based on wallpaper patterns from the house. These stood for a while in the park and were then exhibited at the school.

It is important that heritage sites should do everything they reasonably can (even though it may not be easy, or always even possible), to make those with physical disabilities feel welcome and at ease. Such an approach may require a good deal of sensitivity – as Bettina Harden has put it, ‘Anything that smacks of ghetto-isation for the disabled, by treating them in any way different from the majority, is really unpopular.’

Local Education Authorities

Local Education Authorities play a crucial role, in the (relatively rare) cases where they retain the subject advisers and the funding to do so. They can offer a broad range of knowledge, both at local and national level, which can transform possibilities for schools. The most effective way they can offer such services – in subjects across the board – is through subject advisers. In Kent, the History Advisers play an important role in coordinating activities for schools and in sharing information. In Yorkshire, all the sites offering advanced learning programmes for schools needed LEA backing, organisation and commitments. Unfortunately the trend in recent years has been for a gradual diminution in the number of specialist advisers, who are seen to be expendable in times of financial cuts.

Citizenship

The new citizenship syllabus offers an important opportunity to integrate heritage into the core curriculum. It could be argued that heritage education is the ideal citizenship subject. It can play an important inclusion role, because it teaches young people to reject simplistic views about nationhood and culture. The historic environment helps us to address political issues and to consider choices about the places we live in and why they are made.

Heritage education has many practical aspects. It can be used to get young people thinking about quality of life issues, and to look at the way the planning system works. It has the potential to be very topical, by looking at the constant conflicts of value between the needs for a modern prosperous economy and the desire to be good stewards of the natural and cultural environment.

English Heritage and the National Trust have developed excellent resources on some of their sites for this part of the syllabus, challenging pupils to consider the merits of conservation over development and to understand that democracy involves finding ways of reconciling many different interests.

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