DISCOVERY - unsurprisingly - is all about finding things out. This stage is involves listening and looking in different ways at what goes on in school. The aim is to really understand what students and staff are trying to achieve and what's helping or preventing them from doing so ... Read More

Key deliverables

Friday, 9th of March

On Friday, we met with the two key stakeholders for vocational training: Kath Davidson, head of Personalised Learning and Mike Collier, Deputy Head.

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Posted by julia schaeper on 03/14

Best practice

Wednesday, 7th of March

On Wednesday, we went to visit the Lifestyle Academy at Newcastle College - an impressive training facility which caters for beauty, sport, tourism and hospitality students right in the heart of Newcastle city centre. ... Read More
Posted by julia schaeper on 03/13

Learning more about learning off-site

On Friday the 16th of Febuary, we spent a day up at Walker and got to speak to a range of people who are involved in off-site learning as well as the planning of training and work placements. What did we learn? Here is a short summary:... Read More
Posted by julia schaeper on 02/22

The 50 minutes chair

Students spot new chair opportunity in their school

The executive student group said that they found it hard to sit for 50 minutes on the regular school chairs. They estimated that there were about 2700 chairs in the school (if you included lab stools). We thought the current chairs cost about £10 each, so to replace them all would cost £27,000. This was thought to be a lot of money. The chairs in the meeting room we were in were liked by the students but we agreed that they would be too expensive, too heavy and tool hard to stack. The students reckoned that they were comfortable in the existing chairs for about 30 minutes at a stretch. This led to a discussion about designing an affordable '50 minute chair'. ... Read More
Posted by engine on 02/05

Engine meets Student Executive Council

Walker Technology College's Student Executive Council on what makes learning easy or difficult

We hijacked a meeting of the Student Executive Council to get their views on what makes learning easy and what makes it difficult at Walker. Three factors were discussed the most. ... Read More
Posted by engine on 02/05

Dance City Tour

Walker co-design team's first workshop

Steve, a Manager at Dance City described to us the effort and time that had been spent designing the 'social architecture' of Dance City. The designers of the centre wanted to create an experience of a building that was welcoming and that could accommodate all sorts of people with an interesting in dance - of who just wanted a comfortable place to meet or be. ... Read More
Posted by engine on 01/26

Mr Taylor reveals what keeps Walker ticking

designers get to see first-hand what goes on inside Walker

Joe, Julia and Steve from Engine, a design consultancy in London visited Walker Earlier this week and were treated to a tour of the school by caretaker Mr Taylor, who understands the building better than anyone. His expert knowledge of the site will help shape the Our New School project and inform the new building work.... Read More
Posted by steve lee on 01/19

big decisions for Y9s at Walker POSTED 14TH MARCH

Year 9 students at Walker will choose their GCSE and vocational study options this week

In order to find out what students think of the process and what influences their decisions, a new section has been added to the site - http://www.ournewschool.org/walker/choices. By answering 3 simple questions, students can voice their opinions and help improve the process for future years. Click the link above to visit the section... Read More
Posted by steve lee on 01/01

Mapping relationships with the Leadership Team

Today we met with the senior leadership team at Walker. The objective, to gather as much information as we could about the critical relationships between people that make the school work. The team worked in pairs to map the people, groups and organisations that they have a relationship with and then to think further about those they weren't directly involved with but saw as important. We evaluated each relationship and were able to use the map that we created to begin to identify ways to support these valuable relationships though the design of systems and things.
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Posted by engine on 11/30