South Downs Learning Centre

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In an earlier edition of this newsletter we announced that we were going to undertake SML programmes for young people through the Brighton and Hove Learning Institute. This venture has now started. However we changed the name to the South Downs Learning Centre as we found that we were attracting interest beyond Brighton and Hove. We now have six students aged 12 to 15 working as a learning group. They started in October and we plan to create other groups in the new year.

Five of the students have been home educated and one is currently at a local school. The latter student joined the group as part of our collaboration with the East Brighton College of Media Arts. The school had been labelled a failing school and it serves the most deprived area of the city. However it now has a new Principal who is keen to work with us to extend the use of SML. One venture we plan is to run learning groups for school students from this school along with two others in the locality.

The existing learning group has been answering the five questions that we use in SML and they are working now on how to meet their learning goals. The venture is proving a fascinating experience and fully justifies our faith in using SML with younger students. We will provide more evaluative evidence on how the programme has been going in a later newsletter.

Ian Cunningham