We received 14 fabulous entries for Stage 1 of our Future Schools Project Award competition. We have now chosen five finalists that we will work with to focus their ideas in Stage 2 of the competition after the summer holidays.
A short summary of what we asked for
We asked all City of Edinburgh Council schools and nurseries to tell us a story about how changing the design of a space in your school or nursery would improve teaching and learning, inclusivity and wellbeing for the different people you want to help.
We asked for you to show us:
- What? The problem you want to solve.
- Who? The variety of people affected by the problem
- How? Your solution to the problem through a change in the learning environment or how it’s used. How that solution impacts the people you identified.
- Why? Your research and reasoning. Look at the judging criteria and the information on this page to see what you should include.
We were also looking for submissions that are creative, well researched, well presented and show collaborative working:
- How are you going to tell us your story? Be Creative
- We want to see the thinking behind your ideas. Research
- Your research can be part of your story or you can submit it separately. Consider Presentation
- Only one entry per school or nursery. Work Together
The competition was high. The amount of research, collaboration and information gathering from the entries amazed us. The learners threw themselves into this project and came up with some great ideas. Presentation of the entries was very creative, it was great to see so many different ways of telling your stories and we were glad to see so many entries created by the learners.
There were videos, presentations, a story book, a rap, reports, models, moodboards and lots and lots of drawings!
We have included some images of each of the finalists’ work and will talk with the schools about whether we can share their video entries.
The finalists
Broughton High
Learners at Broughton High went to incredible depth in their research for their idea of having an environmental outdoor classroom in their school grounds. The purpose is to provide a tranquil, welcoming space that improves well being.
Corstorphine Primary
Corstorphine Primary are dreaming of an outdoor play space that brings nature into their playground. Their learners, staff and families have been involved in a lot of well documented research with the aim to meet the needs of all their children with a natural solution to a lack of nature play in their school grounds.
St Cuthbert’s RC Primary
St Cuthbert’s Primary are focusing on changing their library space which is a multipurpose area, they submitted a short film that showed the learners interviewing what seemed to be everyone in the school. The learners showed how much they had researched and explained to us their findings and ideas for improvements. They showed us how they would meet the needs of the people using the space in their plans.
St John Vianney Primary
St John Vianney’s Primary chose a room in their school called the AV room which is multipurpose and has to meet many different user needs. They submitted lots of learner designs of the space and a movie created by the learners where they interviewed the different people who use the room to gather ideas for improving the space.
Murrayburn Primary
Murrayburn Primary are re-imagining an unused space in their school into a practical STEAM room to meet their learners needs for exciting and active learning in Science, Technology, Engineering, Art and Maths. They created an entertaining video where the learners told us all about their aspirations for STEAM and their research into studies about how active learning improves learning outcomes.
Congratulations to all five finalists!
Details of Stage 2 will be announced in June.
Hats off to all our schools who took part!
Thank you so much to everyone who joined us in the competition, we loved seeing your entries and know how hard you all worked on this.
Unfortunately we can only take five entries to Stage 2 of the competition and it the quality of the submissions made it very difficult to choose only five. If you didn’t get chosen for Stage 2 don’t be discouraged. If you decide to pursue your ideas to make better environments into a reality we would love to share your progress with everyone here on the blog and our Twitter feed @FutureSchoolsEd.
We hope you enjoyed the challenge and learned a lot about your environment and how you can make changes that improve the experience for the people who use it.
Big thanks to Blackhall, Buckstone, Dalry, East Craigs, Flora Stevenson, Gracemount, James Gillespie’s, Sighthill and Stockbridge Primaries for all your hard work!
Here are some snippets of your submissions.
futureschoolsedinburgh.com 