Judging by the range and variety of World Book Day activities on Twitter this week, it looks and sounds like it was a tremendous celebration of books, characters and plots! There were Tweets from so many schools sharing virtual assemblies and parades, all with amazing costumes, and even a report of Bananaman flying in (alias Rob Earrey at Fitzjohn’s). At LSU, the students celebrated World Book Day by enjoying readings from a short story in five instalments throughout their day’s lessons. Students discovered their teachers’ favourite novels, and wrote book reviews for the library competition. Interestingly at Acland Burghley, during online lessons, students picked from blind date descriptions of books they would like to read.

I was really pleased to attend the STEAM Hub event on Thursday. Since September, five teams of teachers (from across half our schools), Camden employers and Central Saint Martin’s students have been busy co-designing STEAM curriculum projects for each key stage. Each project is deeply rooted in the local area – from designing a new community garden in Euston to shaping the future of the Camden Highline – and incorporates a deep level of careers learning within the curriculum, with young people learning from local architects, engineers, user designers and a whole range more. It was a real treat to hear each group presenting their project so far. The standard and depth of the presentations and the imaginative ideas were outstanding, it was easy enough to comment on the What Went Wells (WWWs), but not quite so easy to come up with the Even Better Ifs (EBIs)! The STEAM Hub will be sharing these projects for all Camden primary and secondary schools to use, which will include a range of video resources embedded into the schemes of work.

Thursday was a really busy evening as I went between the STEAM event and Shalina Patel’s training session with secondary leaders and teachers at the same time. Shalina, as ever, provided a first-class session, passing on useful practical advice with her usual passion and depth of knowledge. One takeaway was her practice of picking a weekly positive media story to share with her students. Last week the focus was on Swati Mohan, NASA’s Mars 2020 Guidance and Controls Operations Leader: a photo showed her in mission control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Her cool job is acting as the “eyes and ears” for NASA’s most sophisticated spacecraft to date. Some of the other members of the team included Allen Chen, Moogega Cooper, Neel Patel and Norman Asien and, as she highlighted to her students, they are people like those you find our school community. Camden schools could complement this by using the STEAM Futures YouTube series of videos with Black STEAM Ambassadors sharing insights to their careers. The Primary session for leaders and teacher is on Thursday 11th March at 4pm, please do sign up for the session here.

Wishing everyone well for the Monday 8th March when pupils return to school. Please ensure all updated risk assessments are completed and sent to: CorporateHealthandSafety@camden.gov.uk.

Jon Abbey

Managing Director of Camden Learning