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An interview with Keith Johnson, Head of Luckwell Primary School

Kim Thomas

About six months ago, Luckwell Primary School brought in a supply teacher to teach its Year 6 class. By lunchtime, says Head Keith Johnson, the 10 year-olds were "absolutely incensed". Some time earlier, the school had adopted, with great success, the Building Learning Power (BLP) techniques developed by Guy Claxton. The supply teacher hadn't asked the children to check their learning or to reflect on what they'd learnt - key elements of the BLP technique - and the children felt shortchanged.

Keith saw this as a turning point, and decided the school should think about what it could do next. He had already come across the Learner's Charter produced by Futurelab and felt it embodied many of the ideas that he and his staff were already interested in. Both teachers and governors were excited by the opportunity to put some of the charter's principles into practice.

The charter (the full title is 'The Learner's Charter for a Personalised Learning Environment') lists, through a series of bullet points, the expectations a learner should have of his or her teachers. These include, for example, "To understand and critically engage with the choices open to me in the education process" and "To have access to learning environments and resources that enable me to develop my understanding and experience in authentic and appropriate contexts."

As Keith says, some of the language in the charter is a little off-putting, particularly for the children, but he and his staff have been working to put the ideas into plain English. When they talked to the children about what they wanted, they found a close correspondence between what the children said and the principles put forward in the charter. One key principle for the children was setting their own targets for learning; another one was feeding back what they'd learnt - remembering it and repeating it to the teacher to make sense of it. "We like the fundamental underlying premise of that Futurelab charter, which isn't anywhere else that I've seen, which is that it's starting with the learning," says Keith.

That emphasis on learning is important. Keith is unhappy with the Government emphasis on an assessment-driven curriculum: "Children are expected to learn a finite amount of information in a finite amount of time in discrete gobbets and then they get tested on the gobbets. It doesn't work like that." Far too much time is wasted on preparing children for SATs, says Keith, when they could be involved in exploring and finding things out for themselves. Even the Year 6 children themselves, he says, couldn't see the point of marking time by going over maths that they already knew and understood.

The school had the opportunity to put some of the charter's ideas into practice recently when it arranged a 'living history' fortnight in which the children found out all about the Vikings. "We deliberately said to the teachers, 'We're choosing something we haven't done in the school and we don't expect you to know about it, because your job is to encourage the children to find out and feed back and learn from each other,'" says Keith. The fortnight used reenactors and storytellers to bring the experience alive. It was what Keith calls an "apprenticeship approach", where children were able to learn from a variety of different adults.

During the fortnight, the school put children in completely mixed age groups, with each group including children between the ages of 5 and 11. At the end, the children were asked to reflect on what they'd learnt from the experience: "What the older children said they found powerful was that the reception kids have got so much imagination, whereas they already feel like they've started to lose some of their imagination and creativity."

So now the school tries to mix up the ages for a couple of days every six weeks: "We've done it with maths, we've done it with science, we've done it with all sorts of activities and the kids just love it. There's a lot of peer teaching going on, and now there's so much experience of it and trust in it that a lot of the peer teaching is going both ways. And the older kids are genuinely learning things from the younger kids."

One of the things the school is now moving towards is more emphasis on children developing the skills to find things out for themselves, and less emphasis on learning certain pieces of information. The school has introduced what it calls TALK weeks - TALK stands for Thinking and Applying Learning Kinaesthetically, and is essentially about allowing the children to demonstrate what they've learnt. "We wanted the kids to apply the learning that they'd done, because by applying the learning and having to talk about it, they structure it better, and our kids don't have many opportunities to talk about the world in any other circumstances. Parents don't particularly listen to their kids talking."

Another thing that's happened is that when the school has its 'mix-up' days (where the ages are mixed up), teachers don't tend to stay in their own classroom. "That's been very good in terms of seeing the progression that's going through the school - getting outside your own classroom," says Keith. The children too can invite each other into their classrooms to show them what's going on.

Keith believes that technology has a useful part to play in implementing the personalisation charter - not because it's important in itself but because it "enables learning to happen". The web provides resources to children of any age or ability, he says: "If you've got a kid who's naturally good at science and has a reasonable reading age, you chuck them at Wikipedia, or chuck them at the NASA website. It breaks down that barrier of not having the right book in the classroom."

What Keith and his colleagues don't want is for personalisation to become too individualised: it's important for the children to work collaboratively. The next step in the process is to make the curriculum much more about exploring and researching and less about learning facts. Recognising the way Luckwell is working with its Year 6 pupils, the local secondary school has begun to change its Year 7 curriculum to make it more flexible, says Keith: "In three years' time there'll be a basic structure in the areas we'll be looking at, and training people to think like an historian and think like a geographer, or think like a mathematician. We'll have pared down the amount of knowledge that has to be learnt, but by helping that learning to happen in a different way."