Grayrigg CE Primary School: Place-based and community learning
This article has been published as part of the Rethinking Curriculum project, kindly funded by The Helen Hamlyn Trust.
Kirsty Cooper, Headteacher at Grayrigg CE Primary School
Our small rural school, on the edge of the Lake District, looks out onto Whinfell Beacon. Our setting looks like it popped straight out of an episode of Postman Pat (in fact we’re very close to the area where the books were set). An idyllic setting but as anyone who works in rural communities knows, we are miles away from the city museums, theatres, art galleries and the multicultural beauty of humanity. Embarking on our Rethinking Curriculum project, we underestimated the importance of place in our learning. In fact, we thought our place-based learning was already exceptional – it’s not hard to deliver forest school when you are walking distance from beautiful woodlands full of wildlife. We’ve been able to nurture links with local landowners that have enabled us to explore nature, habitats, adaptation and the human impact on ecosystems through our river school project: our Year 3 and Year 4 students are currently rearing trout from eggs to reintroduce them into our local river. The trout will mature and migrate before coming back to lay their own eggs. Then we will be able to reintroduce a critically endangered species – the freshwater pearl mussel – back into our river. The species is dependent on fish such as trout to reach reproductive maturity. If we are successful, the students will have played a role in saving a species. To sum up, we use our locality well.
Our area for development was to thread our school values – justice and belonging – throughout our curriculum, aiming to create a curriculum that inspires and enables children to create a better future. Our concerns focused on what was lacking in our locality. Cumbria is a county that is 97.6 per cent white, and the local town had its first pride event in 2023. Our students need to be able to recognise, celebrate and be comfortable with the diversityThe recognition of individual differences in terms of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, physical ability, religious beliefs and other differences that is humanity.
How do you celebrate diversity in a place where there is little? We found out that you look for it. Rather than considering who is in the room, we chose to consider who is not, which led to some amazing work in both:
- art, by reaching out to inspirational artists who represented humanity more accurately – using technology to connect
- English, where we drew on the Reflecting Realities (2019-2024) work by the centre for literacy in primary education (CLPE) to ensure that authors in our curriculum represent humanity.
It wasn’t until we began to explore history that we began to realise that there was another question we needed to ask: who might be in the room? This had completely bypassed us; we had made assumptions. As a school leader, I had completely underestimated the power of allowing staff time to really dig into how justice and belonging can be threaded through our learning using our locality.
In Key Stage 1, we introduced our “Grandfriends” – older members of our community who we mentor to come and play every half term. The “Grandfriends” bring in photos, artefacts from their own life and share these with the children. Over a cup of tea and a biscuit they share these things, and during play they will chat about how things are different now. This has led to another exciting development. As we began to explore intergenerational learning, we discovered that some students in our school are Windrush descendants – we had no idea. We have now introduced Windrush as a famous event in Key Stage 1, which of course links to the birth of the NHS (BBC Bitesize, nd).
In Lower Key Stage 2, we knew from David Olusugo’s books that Roman Cumbria was home to a Black African Community (Olusugo, 2016, 2020). We visited a Roman dig site where students were able to draw amazing conclusions from findings, including proof that Cumbria was the home of Black Algerian Roman Emperor, Septimius Severus. Proof came in the form of traces of Tyrian purple dye and the structure of the roof, which the students can now explain in detail.
In Upper Key Stage 2, we wanted to develop a student-led local history project but we doubted ourselves, worrying about coverage and knowledge; but we took the risk and were amazed. The children started with food, making Westmorland Pepper Cake (watch Nadiya Spice Trails Series 1 Episode 4 on BBC iPlayer) with a local baker (who you can also see on this episode). Looking at local recipes (the Cumberland sausage, Grasmere gingerbread) the children were able to establish that many of the ingredients do not grow in our local context. The teacher in the class was amazing: she used CPD time to visit local archives, take local history trails, and study census materials. This project will initially run over two years following the timeline below.
| What we did | Some of the learning |
| Baking Westmorland pepper cake | Children established that the ingredients in many of our local dishes do not grow in our local climate, so we’re left with a question:
How did these spices end up here? |
| Visit to local archives | A visit to the archives taught children about primary and secondary sources and how to both check and validate sources. They were able to establish that our local town made much of its money from trading two things: wool, which was produced locally and exported; and Tobacco, which does not grow in our climate so must have been imported. |
| Historical detectives searching for signs of wool/tobacco trade | They established that the town was split in half, with one half producing the cloth and the other processing the tobacco to be sold.
Where do the imports and exports arrive as the town is inland? |
| Research by teacher | Researched and found documents/artefacts linked to the local port which was (at one point) the biggest trading port in the North West. |
| Plan visit to nearest port | Children were able to use sources available online (guided by the teacher) to establish that, during the time of cloth and tobacco trading, Whitehaven grew from a small fishing village to an industrious port. They then planned a visit to the town. |
| Research by children | Research continued once they had established where they needed to visit. They discovered a plethora of facts that made links between America and Cumbria:
They also discovered that one of the first banks in the UK was opened in Whitehaven, proving that there was a need for a bank which they concluded meant that there was a lot of money that needed to be safely secured. |
| Visit to local port | The visit to Whitehaven confirmed that historically this town has been rich. They found huge houses with plaques explaining who they had belonged to. Some families were clearly rich and owned several properties. They found the bank that they had read about in their research, they tracked the maps to where George Washington’s grandmother is buried, and they found the signs of the rum trade. Ending their visit at the port, they established that the trade was not linear and in fact was a triangle, which meant that there was a third trade that brought in profits: the transatlantic trafficking of enslaved Black African people, hidden because the majority of enslaved people never crossed our shores. |
| Report back findings | The children were able to report this back and link many of the names of merchant traders to much of the wealth in our local town, even the land our school is built on. |
As part of this research, the class teacher discovered that an enslaved Black African who was trafficked to Whitehaven later went on to have a family. One of his sons grew up to be the first ever Black police officer and he served here in our county. This is a part of our Cumbrian heritage that has never been celebrated. His grave is unmarked. This year our Upper Key Stage 2 children have started research into John Kent (Anti-Racist Cumbria, 2020), to find out as much as we can, and make sure that he is celebrated as a local figure, and maybe whatever they create can be produced to share John Kent with all Cumbrian Schools – making him a famous historical figure.
Recommendations
I’m sure many people reading this aren’t teaching in Cumbria but we hope that the story of ‘who might be in the room?’ may just inspire other schools to look beyond what we know. Using our own context to study history has enabled us to address barriers to our children developing a broader understanding of humanity and society. Many of you will have Windrush descendants in your schools. But how many schools study this as a famous event, despite the many things we would be without if the Windrush generation had not come to our rescue? A more balanced view of history is right on our doorsteps, we just need to find it.
References
Anti Racist Cumbria (2020) Five black Cumbrian stories. Available at: https://antiracistcumbria.org/5-black-cumbrian-stories/ (accessed 3 January 2025).
BBC Bitesize (nd) KS2 History: Alison Bennison – Working as a NHS nurse. Available at: https://www.bbc.co.uk/teach/class-clips-video/articles/zs9cbqt (accessed 3 September 2024).
CLPE (2020) Reflecting realities: Survey of ethnic representation within UK Children’s Literature 2019. Available at: https://clpe.org.uk/system/files/CLPE%20Reflecting%20Realities%202020.pdf
CLPE (2023) Reflecting realities: Survey of ethnic representation within UK Children’s Literature 2022. Available at https://clpe.org.uk/system/files/2023-11/CLPE%20Reflecting%20Reality%202023%20v8%20web.pdf
CLPE (2024) Reflecting realities: Survey of ethnic representation within UK Children’s Literature 2023. Available at https://clpe.org.uk/system/files/2024-12/CLPE%20Reflecting%20Reality%202024%20v6%20WEB.pdf
Olusoga D (2016) Black and British: A Forgotten History. London: Pan Macmillan.
Olusoga D (2020) Black and British: A Short, Essential History. London: Pan Macmillan.
