Fair Field's Big Idea

I’m really thrilled to say that we’ve taken an important step towards replacing the old school pool with something useful and beautiful.

The Fair Field Big Idea Group met again yesterday morning. We set out the forty-odd ideas that have come in from children, parents, staff and governors since we started the exercise last year. We decided in advance that we’d like to involve Fair Field’s pupils in the process – they’ve already contributed the lion’s share of the ideas.

We whittled the list down to five by scoring the ideas – Strictly-style. Every one of them was really thoughtful and warranted serious thought (except maybe ‘a prison for teachers’) so this wasn’t easy. We then chose a single idea to develop. We considered several factors, including:

• Educational value (will this idea make a contribution to the children’s achievement).
• Sustainability (will we be able to keep this idea going year-to-year) and
• Affordability (will we be able to raise the money to get it done).

The idea we settled on was actually a combination of several ideas on a similar theme so it’s a very broad one, which we’ll put under the heading: ‘garden’.

The next step is to decide what goes into our garden. We’ll see if we can incorporate elements of these green ideas from the big list: wildlife learning area, pond with fountain, oasis, kitchen garden with seating, wild food garden, fruit and veg garden with painting/art, multi-sensory area with climbing wall and… the big one… a biome. We’ll consider some of the science ideas too: you can obviously do a lot of science in a garden so it would be a pity to miss them out.

This is where the children come in: Mr Johnson and Miss Voyce (who runs the Fair Field gardening club) are going to recruit the school council and other pupils to help us get to a final design. For inspiration, we’ll take some of the children to interesting local gardens – Shenley Walled Garden or Butterfly World, for instance.

So the next step is a design that we can start to think about building. We’ll also need to start thinking about how to pay for the work. You might be able to help here. If you know about possible sources of funding for garden projects like this, do let us know.

• And don’t forget that most of the great ideas we’ve been considering were submitted as competition entries. It’s going to be difficult to choose a winner but Mr Johnson will decide in due course.
• Picture by Putneypics. Used under licence.