Headteacher James Biddulph is leading the high-profile opening of a new primary school by the University of Cambridge. He talks about finding inspiration in Nepal and why he’ll be using approaches that move away from labelling children by ability.
Across 150 hectares of farmland in north-west Cambridge, heavy building work is underway for a new town being created by the university. Amid the £1bn plans for 3,000 new homes and 2,000 post-graduate student spaces are proposals for a school. It’s the first primary to be set up by a university and, when it opens this September, it will cater for people living on the new development. The Department for Education is investing in the 630-place free school, which will admit students of all abilities, but the total amount has not yet been finalised.
The school’s £11m site, , has been designed by some of the architects who created the London Eye and Biddulph says the ethos of the school is very much manifested in the building.
“We want to develop a more fluid approach to indoor and outdoor learning, so every class has an outdoor learning space,” Biddulph says. “And because we’re trying to develop learning best practice none of the classrooms will have doors, so people can see each other teach.”
This is the second school Biddulph has helped to open; for the past three years he’s been the headteacher of a Hindu free school, which he set up with the Avanti Schools Trust in Essex. Many of his ideas for the University of Cambridge primary school stem from his time there.
Five values are at the heart of his vision for the school – empathy, respect, trust, courage and gratitude. He believes these are inherent to building a community where pupils are listened to, which is important to him. “In my previous place, children had a lot to say about the school and I was really proud of that,” he says. The headteacher wants students to feel confident and relaxed about coming to his office to talk about something they’d like changed: “It’s empowering as a head [for students] to feel they can do that. It is their school after all.”
Every pupil takes part in a mixed-age meeting circle once a week to discuss what they’d like to happen at the school, and he plans to do the same at his new primary. “If children from a young age don’t believe their voice is acknowledged or acted upon, they’re not going to engage in a future where they can have their say,” he says.
At his previous school, pupils practised mindfulness with staff at the beginning and end of each day, and he will make meditation a regular part of the Cambridge school timetable. In the centre of the school’s circular building there’ll also be a courtyard for reflection and quiet play.
“In a world where life is very fast for children, having an opportunity to be still and reflective is vital,” he says. “[Education] must be about developing full human beings who are connected and intellectually stimulated. We don’t want kids to be frightened of the complex world that they live in.”
Biddulph jokes that after opening the school in Essex he vowed never to do it again. It was a successful project and he is complimentary about the support he received from the trust, but setting up something from scratch is always stressful. In particular, he found the trust’s inclusive approach inspirational. “It was never a problem that I wasn’t a Hindu, in fact it was highly valued,” he says, adding that it made a point of ensuring that pupils and staff came from a mix of religious backgrounds.
The experience will stand him in good stead for helping to found such a high-profile school. Is there anything he’d do differently this time? “I didn’t let go of some things quickly enough,” he says. “I had really good people working with me and I should have trusted them to take ownership of ideas more quickly. That was a big learning point.”
Biddulph’s first teaching job was at a school in a remote part of Nepal, where he worked as a volunteer. His time there changed his outlook. “People materially didn’t have much, but had a huge amount to offer in terms of kindness, tolerance, gratitude and friendship… [It showed me] that by developing these things in a school you can achieve great things.”
Dame Alison Peacock, who sits on the Cambridge school’s board of trustees and co-authored Creating Learning Without Limits, has also been an important source of inspiration. Peacock has done a lot of work on transformative learning and ability labelling, and Biddulph has plans to introduce two of the approaches used at her school in Potters Bar. Rather than setting students tasks by ability, he wants to give children choices on activities, so that teachers aren’t always directing what a child can and can’t do. And he’d like to see students help to write their own report cards and attend parents’ evenings. “It’s about the children, so why remove them from the equation?” he asks.
Biddulph has a lot of concerns about labelling students by ability. “Learning shouldn’t be a competitive sport that not everyone can succeed at. It really upset me once when a child said to me, ‘I’m not very good at learning – I’m only a level 2c’. When children rank [themselves] as top or bottom of the class, they miss the point of what learning is all about.”
The University of Cambridge school will be heavily research informed. As well as having an on-site research facility, the university is employing a clinical professor to be responsible for half of the research work at the school. For the past five years Biddulph has been working on a part-time doctorate on creative learning in minority contexts and he hopes teachers will also pursue their own research interests.
He stresses, however, that the school is “not going to be is a guinea pig school for new ideas”. A system is being put in place for reviewing requests and he is keen to bring other schools in the area into projects. The faculty of education has links with more than 180 schools so there are ample opportunities to do this. “Although the school has the name of the university we want to very much be part of the community of local schools and be in partnership with them,” he says.
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