Becta video transcript
Digital creativity and 'hard to reach' learners
More investment please
Wandle Valley School
Doug Bone, headteacher:
The kids are really interested in it. We’ve had massive interest from the kids, so much so they’ve demanded that we have this project in every room, that we go cross curricular. The project’s proved very successful. There are resource implications, you may look at the equipment, you may look at the time spent on it, and it’s time intensive, it’s equipment intensive, and that’s expensive, but it’s not expensive when we’re talking about the young people we’re dealing with. If we don’t actually include them in society, they become a lot more expensive for society in the long term. We had a young person, we did some outreach for other schools, and this young person wouldn’t engage with any other educational environment. In fact, he was so problematic that people were unable to teach him and engage with him in any way whatsoever. We managed to get him to come into the school, and we had all the equipment set up to show him exactly what he was going to do as a project. We increased his time from one session a week to two sessions a week, and when one of the sessions had to be cancelled because of staff training, he phoned up to ask if he could come for a session on a different day. This was a kid who wasn’t attending any school, he was getting no schooling anywhere at all, and the prognosis is that eventually we can get him into school. We talk about inclusion, we talk about inclusion on many occasions, this is an inclusive practice that we need to extend and develop for the future, so basically, erm, keep putting the money in.