Primary schools sessions at The Red House have won the prestigious Sandford Award for Heritage Education. Joe Carr tells us all about it:
“We are delighted to inform you that our schools offer at The Red House and our in schools sessions has won the prestigious Sandford Award for Heritage Education. The Sandford Award is a framework for success in developing learning programmes across Heritage Services and sites (About the Sandford Award | Heritage Education Trust).”
“We are amongst a fantastic group of winners https://www.heritageeducationtrust.org/2023-award-winners.”
“Part of the assessment process was observations of our school visits, with judges meeting staff and teachers to explore the impact of the learning session. Here are some highlights of the view on the session she observed:
‘This was an excellent session where children of five and six came for the day from their school environment into an unknown heritage site. They arrived knowing a little about the composer, the music and the local house, but left with their knowledge and experience significantly increased while enjoying themselves greatly.’
‘The Red House staff worked hard in advance to make this happen, boxes of instruments were prepared, skeleton verses structured, and a lot of skilful manoeuvring employed to get the children in the right place in a relatively small site, also open to the public.’
‘The school teacher rated this trip amongst the best she had done in twenty six years. She found it particularly valuable as a non-musical primary school teacher, the musicality of the session gave the children musical input in a way that she could not. Comments written down while observing the visit are that the children were ‘listening intently’, ‘working out sound’ ‘working together’ ‘calm’ ‘have thrilled faces’ ‘completely engrossed’ and finally that the session ‘Created Magic’.’
If any other Suffolk museum is thinking of applying and would like to talk through the process, please do get in touch.”
