Last week some of THS's year 10 GCSE PE groups had the privilege of having professional footballers from Exeter City come in to talk to them about life in professional sport. Striker Adam Stansfield delivered a captivating speech about his journey into footballing stardom. Coach Pugh then finished by talking about the other opportunities that are around for those who don't quite make the grade. We hope this may inspire some of the group to continue to pursue a career in professional sport.
You will notice that we have started to share some ‘Future Stories’ here on our website. The idea behind Future Stories is that they help to visualise preferred futures, and these particular stories are part of our journey towards transforming learning and teaching at Tiverton High School. The stories we are publishing over the next few days and weeks have been prepared by members of our Transformation Team, and we hope that over the coming months we will be able to share further stories from other members of our school community.
Please do click on the ‘read more’ link below each story to read the whole text, and please also do feel free to leave comments - conversations around the future stories would be a really helpful way of knowing what our community thinks about our ideas!
My name is Peter. I was one of the older boys in pre school. I loved making rockets in junk modelling, knew all of the colours of the rainbow in order, came first in shape detectives and my cress, sunflower and beans were the tallest in the pre school. Primary here I come.........
Years of hell followed. Years of sharing a classroom with 30 other kids, timetabling by rote, all doing the same projects, all doing the same P.E, all writing the same themed stories. I struggled every step of the way. It was soon obvious that I was having difficulty with my reading and writing. Nobody could understand my written work, it took me so long to write all the words down I very rarely managed it all. So what followed was years of “ he must try harder,” “ he needs to finish all of the questions,” “ he needs to read more books, he should be a free reader by now.” This, combined with my inability to walk in a straight line and ability to continuously trip up over everything in sight also led to me loathing P.E. and games. I heard whispers of “clumsy” for years.”
Woken by the Telescreen chirping and reminding me it’s another Monday morning. Glad I don’t have to get to the school building before 10, at least. And nice to wake up to Frank’s face. Quite calming in its way, and better than having something like the PM’s ugly mug glaring down at me. We were reading 1984 in class recently and the Telescreens then had secret cameras and messages from Big Brother (not the old ‘reality’ TV show they had in the Noughties). Thank goodness we don’t have that. Thank goodness we still live in a democracy.
Flipped through my feeds. Loads of people saying not very much. I screen out the news. It’s just too depressing. Something about terrorists… blah blah blah… China… blah blah blah… Iran… blah blah blah… recession… blah blah blah. Checked out Shona’s stream though (of course!). Seems she went to bed at midnight without having done the foreign language element for the ‘10 Things I Hate About Europe’ project. Her deadline is this morning. Knowing her she’ll just record something on the way to school and stick it in Miss Edgar’s drop box from her phone. And she’ll get an ‘Outstanding’. Just as well she can do a monologue and not a written piece. Man, I hate writing more than a couple of lines. Who doesn’t? Why have those geeky techno dudes in China’s silicone valley not figured out how to have your thoughts transcribed into written text yet? With the proper spellings and auto-corrected grammar of course. Hey, maybe that technology really does exist somewhere but the United Federation is not allowing it into the wild. Imagine the impact on language learning! But they’d only ban it in schools anyway, so whatever…
I am 14 in the Year 2015. Why do I need to go to school? I can read, write and am able to carry out mathematical tasks. I have access to ICT and Learning Resources. If I need to study, I can access all the relevant information I need at home on my computer when I want to and not during ‘school hours’. I have contact with my teachers through the school network system; almost the same as the Australian outback children did throughout the 40s and 50s, only via a radio set, not a computer.
What do I want to do with my life? I want to be independent, I want to have a career and earn good money. My mum keeps saying we live in difficult times, and talks non stop about energy resources running out and protecting the environment, sustainability and getting good qualifications as there are ‘lots of other people out there all looking for those few good jobs’. I just want to have fun while I can and enjoy time with my mates.
When I am at school I want to be taught as an individual, I want the teacher to bring out the best in me. I need to be kept interested – I want to enter the world of learning. I want to take part in scientific experiments. I want to talk a foreign language with someone like me. I also probably need to be taught the discipline to learn as, after all, I’m a kid and though it pains me to say, I don’t know everything yet!!
The Disability Equality Duty (DED) for the public sector is a new legal duty that requires all maintained primary and secondary schools to take proactive steps to ensure their disabled pupils, staff and governors, parents/carers and other people using the school are treated equally.
The duty requires schools, when carrying out their functions, to have due regard to the need to:
promote equality of opportunity between disabled people and other people
eliminate discrimination that is unlawful under the Disability Discrimination Act 1995
eliminate disability related harassment
promote positive attitudes towards disabled people
encourage participation by disabled people in public life
take steps to meet disabled people’s needs, even if this requires more favourable treatment.
Schools must ensure that unlawful discrimination is eliminated in employment and education.
My name is Peter. I was one of the older boys in pre school. I loved making rockets in junk modelling, knew all of the colours of the rainbow in order, came first in shape detectives and my cress, sunflower and beans were the tallest in the pre school. Primary here I come.........
Woken by the Telescreen chirping and reminding me it’s another Monday morning. Glad I don’t have to get to the school building before 10, at least. And nice to wake up to Frank’s face. Quite calming in its way, and better than having something like the PM’s ugly mug glaring down at me. We were reading 1984 in class recently and the Telescreens then had secret cameras and messages from Big Brother (not the old ‘reality’ TV show they had in the Noughties). Thank goodness we don’t have that. Thank goodness we still live in a democracy. 
I am 14 in the Year 2015. Why do I need to go to school? I can read, write and am able to carry out mathematical tasks. I have access to ICT and Learning Resources. If I need to study, I can access all the relevant information I need at home on my computer when I want to and not during ‘school hours’. I have contact with my teachers through the school network system; almost the same as the Australian outback children did throughout the 40s and 50s, only via a radio set, not a computer. 
