I’ve been considering of late what happens when schools offer the chance to learn and reflect outside of the classroom and can robustly justify doing so. 

I have long been a defender of the notion that students learn more than we think they do, and do so in more places than we imagine. 

As a young teacher, I was privileged as well as challenged, stretched and given opportunities in my first job in a school that was new and still expanding, year group by year group. 

Alongside the final year’s intake of first years (Year 7s, for all of you young folk) whose presence completed the school’s number on roll, I was one of the final cohort of eight probationary teachers (NQTs, for the same young folk) to start in September 1979. It was an amazing place to learn my craft. 

There was an expectation from day one that everybody rose to more challenges than only those in teaching our subjects. 

I was a form teacher from the start: mentored? Yes, of course I was. But I was nonetheless a form teacher, fully involved in the school’s pastoral life and climate setting. 

It was a completely comprehensive school where I taught in a completely mixed-ability environment. All my classes included children who would now have an Education, Health and Care Plan, alongside others who would go on into Oxbridge degrees and then soaring careers.

We differentiated because we had to, given that all our classes featured the full mix of both prior and likely future achievement.

For gifted and talented youngsters, in particular, we differentiated on the basis of close one-to-one challenge, using questioning that pushed pupils to defend what they were doing as if we were in a supervision session. We created extended opportunities and research activities, and undertook deep “live tuition” feedback on work in progress. 

Marking and detailed commentary were done either in pencil or green pen. Where learners struggled, we were taught, as their teachers, to scaffold both our learning materials and their ability, so the students could work their way up that framework and become confident but realistic about both their strengths and weaknesses.

‘We planned as a team, taught as a team’

We expressly did not put a teacher-decided ceiling on what they experienced, such as through well-meaning but crashingly dull or self-limiting “alternative activities.”  Our special educational needs and disability team challenged how we thought about and worked with these strugglers. They were among the school’s best teachers.

Our results were excellent. Expectations were high. Good behaviour was rigorously modelled as part of that climate. There was an automatic expectation of the presence of support staff in your classroom. 

My room had three walls, the fourth was a folding screen that could be open or closed during lessons, and there was a shared learning and resource area outside my own and two other classrooms in my quadrangle. We team-planned, team resource-created, team-observed and team-taught. =

My head of department was a quietly fierce “came-from-nothing-got-two-degrees, thanks very much” Scot who could fell a gobby 16-year-old with a look at 50 paces - or with a whisper delivered very close up, if really necessary. Stepping between the guns and her team was natural to her if hierarchies challenged what we were doing, as they do in most schools at some points.

What drove this climate of mutual respect and achievement? The realist in me knows that as exhausting as teaching there often was, we had it easier than life can now be in schools. 

We were, for example, under-inspected, and when Her Majesty’s inspectorate came in, they were incredible: expert in their field, brains the size of this and another planet combined, keenly observant, rigorous but deeply expert, challenging but inclined to get in alongside us and advise in order to help us all to raise our game.

We did not have the national curriculum, Sats, league tables, Assessment 8 or Progress 8.

Exams were taken in large numbers by well over 98 per cent of our cohort year-on-year, but a good deal of what students did was based on rigorous continuous assessment, which was closely - sometimes harshly - moderated both internally by the team and by external examiners.

What really marked us out, however, was what we did beyond the classroom - routinely in every subject, without fail.

‘That school shaped me as a person’

Into every year group’s annual programme the school built external learning as a matter of course. The expectation that we would all learn away from the school building and our homes was automatic. 

The school raised money from all over to ensure that students whose families struggled to fund what we were doing could do it. 

In exam years, those taking the sciences, languages, history, geography, geology, drama, dance, music, PE, art, DT, all worked beyond the classroom for anything from two to five days, at least once during the course. 

We took groups to the Lake District and helped them to learn the outdoor skills that were part of the experience. We registered as a venue with the Arts Council, hosting writers, dancers, mime artists and others to work with students.

We learned a phenomenal amount about each other, adults and children alike, in every experience.

Exam results in the sciences, humanities and the arts were what they were at least in part because study of them was done in real places that brought to life the phenomena, periods of history, geographical and other features we were learning about.

That school shaped me as a teacher, indeed as a person. 

I loved teaching my subject. But the rounded, ambitious, “You’re firm but fair, Miss” teacher I became, and the qualities, beliefs and values I took with me to the rest of my career, were created. I was nurtured and fed by my involvement in things that went further than only the classroom, or only my subject, could take me. It’s still why I do what I do now.

Around a fortnight ago I was present when 70 pupils representing schools in the London borough of Barking and Dagenham joined London arts and cultural organisations at the Barbican, coming together to launch the London pilot of the Arts Council England-funded Cultural Citizens’ programme.

We got very involved in television-style gameshow activities with arts and culture as their theme, before the students went to take part in a treasure hunt around the Barbican. We adults stayed to hear the challenge: you can’t wait for children to come to you, you have to reach in and welcome them, then once they’re with you, welcome them, including if they challenge you. 

You can’t expect them to be ambassadors for what you do or believe in unless you teach them what that means, and make them believe they can do it. 

In August, as part of the culture White Paper’s attached initiatives, culture secretary Karen Bradley MP announced three Cultural Citizens’ Programme pilots in areas of historically low cultural engagement.

Giving children access to the arts

The pilots - in Barking and Dagenham, Birmingham, Liverpool and Blackpool - will each give at least 200 young people increased access to arts and culture, in a purposeful drive to develop them as learners and citizens in whose lives and achievements these rich experiences will play a central part.

In London, the pilot is led by the body I chair, A New Direction, with the Barking and Dagenham Cultural Education Partnership, and is delivered by both Studio 3 Arts and Creative Barking and Dagenham. 

Here, 300 young people from schools will now co-design a programme of visits and workshops with some of London’s innovative, exciting cultural organisations.

They will work with professional artists, supported by local cultural connectors, a network of local adults seeking to engage more Barking and Dagenham residents of all ages. 

The schools will achieve an arts award as part of their - and their students’ and communities’ - journey of discovery in London as their city.

Education, surely, is about the creation and nurturing of people who will be the active citizens we would like to think we are ourselves.

My involvement is with arts bodies because I chair A New Direction. But I would argue that schools could just as keenly pursue the same involvement and learning through lasting engagement with businesses, employers and commercial interests in their areas, with sports bodies, faith and community organisations or community activists.

Weaving it into the curriculum matters if such work is to succeed. 

The CBI and others go on telling us that the skills, aptitudes and attitudes that society needs are those nurtured outside as well as inside the classroom. I wholeheartedly agree.  

Professor Maggie Atkinson is chair of A New Direction, London’s flagship cultural education agency

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