What Contribution Can Residential Field Courses Make to the Education of 11-14 Year-olds?

Figure 1 Students working purposefully in the science laboratory at

Nettlecombe.

Only one teacher planned to use work carried out on the course directly back
at school. Another teacher wanted to build upon teamwork skills in PE using
examples from the course. Most other teachers could identify opportunities to
link the work to the science / geography curricula but were a little unclear
about how they would pursue this saying, for example, I will let the science
department know what we did. However, no teacher had a clear, purposeful
plan of how to monitor the longer-term benefits of the knowledge and
understanding that the students may have gained during the course or of how
it might be measured. This was possibly as a result of courses being booked
at short notice. Some referred tentatively to GCSE results as a possible
indicator. Accordingly, the actual longer-term cognitive impacts of the courses
on the students will be difficult to assess.

Only two schools did any preparatory academic work before the courses. One
of these schools conducted some ecology lessons; another did a small
amount of introductory geography work. In fact, several teachers advocated
the element of surprise / anticipation inherent in taking students away to learn
and did not want to dilute that by preparing activities at school.

Five groups had asked / were planning to ask students to contribute to
displays, newsletters and presentations in assemblies or simply to write an
account of their experiences back at school. Two groups of students were
awarded participation certificates.

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