This very small school in Cumbria aims to extend their successful ‘skills for independent learning’ programme into the community and extend the school into village halls, pubs and churches.

The field trial builds on the school’s approach to curriculum design, which starts with the National Curriculum, and considers the skills necessary for successful child initiated independent learning. The skills are broken down into three main areas – cognition, personal skills and interpersonal skills. The staff have considered these three main skill areas and decided upon components that make up each area of skill. For example, with cognition they consider creativity, enquiry, reasoning, problem solving, information processing, reflective thinking and evaluation. By establishing a learning development worker and a virtual private network the school aims to take self-initiated learning into the community. This would enable pupils to learn from the community and the community to learn from the school. The intention is that this should not only benefit pupils, parents and the local community but extend to other schools in the wider curriculum.