Alberto, thank you. I'm just going to kick off, actually, and thank you for inviting us to share this presentation with you today.
I'm just going to speak for a few moments just to give a little bit of background to the Education Beacon Project programme and.
Now to Hannah, who walk you through the Telling Tales project that we ran last year.
So English Heritage welcomes over 300000 education visitors each year.
And our education visits policy seeks to inspire children, young people and adult learners to enjoy, understand, value and care for its historic.
For our historic environment so that they can become its guardians in future.
We have a long established core programme. We offer free educational visits for a wide range of learners.
Over 400 sites. And in addition, we offer a number of expert led discovery visits, sessions that are,
or at least were for Kofod Interactive Hands-On and immersive sessions led by site staff or volunteers and designed
to help create unique and memorable learning experiences that really bring a topic to life as a way to team.
We've always contributed to larger organisational plans and are committed to identifying projects
that can be seen as shining lights and examples for us to show off really our education work.
In 2016, for example, the year of the nauman that commemorated the nine hundred fiftieth anniversary of the Battle of Hastings,
we provided a number of education engagement opportunities for schools and more recently,
the fantastic roundhouse at Beeston Castle, which is a very small picture you can see there.
And this wonderful structure provides now an immersive environment for education,
visitors to explore prehistoric life and explore, expand their learning outside the classroom.
As Mark Thompson mentioned earlier last year, we began working in a slightly more sort of organisation to organisation wide themes,
and we've aligned or become projects to do that. So with twenty nineteen being telling tales, the myths, legends and folklore of England,
I will now hand over to Hannah to share the details of how we engage young people
with our sites through this and for them inspired their creative writing.
Thanks, Kate. And so basically and telling tales projects.
And while the Education Beacon Project for the Stars is what I was,
that we had regional activity happening across country and a national competition as well.
And so if your brief look at how that looked like over over time and this wasn't something that happened overnight,
it was quite a complex undertaking. But it was a chance to ask to engage with schools, all sites in a new way and beyond typical school experiences.
So regional engagement over a longer period of time. And there was a chance for students to engage with the stories, the myth,
the legend inspired by our sites and encourage them to create their own and stories themselves.
And so for our regional activity and they were supported by writers in residence and but
we also reached a lot of students across the country through our national competition. And so go through and.
And before I do, I should sort of shout out to a lot of other colleagues in this project.
And it was a far reaching and complex project, as I said, had lots of different elements to it, encouraged a lot of its departmental workings.
And we're working with colleagues that we hadn't potentially worked with before very much.
And that was actually a really good chance for us and develop our working relationship with different people across the organisation,
which was fantastic. And I'll start off with the national competition.
Just walk about very quickly. And basically, it was a writing competition open to all five to 14 year olds in the UK.
And we have three age categories. And entries were, as I said before, myths and legends inspired by each sites.
And we're asking for them to be in five. No. One, No one more than 500 words and lots of online assets that have been discussed today.
And Mary was mentioning the interactive map. And we've had references from our own and to our YouTube videos.
And we was able to sign posts and people to these resources and to help help inspire their entries.
And we had some fantastic results and lots of the themes and drawings that came up.
I mean, I could go on for ages about these, but we had quests. We had ghost stories.
We had good versus evil. Love, lost superheroes. Magic and mystery had lots to do with friendship as well.
And as you can see here, these are all sites that were used.
So we got cards because we've got Old Sarum, Waverley Abbey and various different places across across England.
And which was fantastic to see the competition at a glance.
We had over, but we've had over 500. We had 580 entries and had three judges include NASSI, which is fantastic.
And we had some winners, obviously, and they won a myriad of.
Which was really great. And we had a pretty even spreads of sites being used as inspiration as well as a lot of other free sites as well.
And which was lovely to say, we had substance injury, which has already been mentioned. That was a very popular site and off the stone.
Various different prehistoric monuments as well being used, which was really lovely for us to see.
In fact, we probably naively didn't really expect that that was remotely as well.
In terms of feedback and keeping key themes that came out of that were that teachers really
valued at teachers and students and parents really valued this way of engaging with with us,
with English heritage from wherever they were. They wanted to get creative.
And this gave them the opportunity to do so. And a lot of them of better into teachers, get it into their curriculum work.
So myths and legends writing does come up on national curriculum, is taught at a primary level.
And some teachers to that end use the competition as a project at the end of the school year.
We launched it two weeks before the summer holidays and we ended two weeks after the summer holidays.
It ended and some teachers actually set the competition is homework over the holidays,
which was something that we hadn't really expected, but it worked really well.
But as far as the winners are concerned, we were concerned they were actually most excited about being able to take their class on the school trip.
But then on top of that, as if that was the biggest thing for them, they were really,
really excited by the IMF, had some really lovely feedback and from those visits as well.
They are telling tales and reach more activities, content. And this was projects at eight different sites.
So one school engaging with each site and with the support of a writer in residence.
And each site and on site staff, especially art classes and sort of shut up, Lemina.
There's a few of them on the call today, and it wouldn't have been possible without them.
And so I will go really, really quickly through this and try and get through more.
But basically, we have projects, Cooperage, Roman Town Museum on Hadrian's Wall, Northumberland.
We have a project at Riva Abbey in North Yorkshire, Cana with Cosla, Warwickshire and Tadjo class in Coolmore Stonehenge in Wiltshire.
But Labine Sussex deal costs in Kent and Yarmouth Castle. I have white.
So where the cooperage project was concerned, we heard it was here, threes.
They were taking inspiration from mystery objects found at the site.
They were looking at Roman gods and their origins in Greek myths, and they were looking about the development of localised deities and the creation
of stories around those basic projet opened up a really underused site.
It's not a site that we had used very much for education in the past.
But actually it sort of showed how much site staff, the museum collection and the collection stores, how much potential there is in that site.
And the teachers, they'd visited cooperage before,
but they actually really appreciated the extra depth that the project went into and the opportunities surrounding it.
This this is echoed in a lot of the protests. And it just gave teachers a completely different way of looking at all sides and relay.
And we had a mix of creative outcomes and during the project. So this did include creative writing.
But there was also a visual. All it was performance was music as well.
So some students performed musical pieces are illuminating Rebirth event and as part of their involvement in the project
and one of the students actually created a musical composition inspired by some of the stories that they'd heard Reeva.
And the art department used the museum collection as inspiration for prints, which were then displayed alongside the museum collection and Indonesia.
And you can see some examples there at the bottom of the screen. And they had a celebration day as well,
loping over toward the site and musical performances around the abbey as well, kind of with this physical beauty.
Eight students, they were taking inspiration from the ruins of kind with Castle, the people that live there.
They were looking at work, his tradition of ghost stories, particularly there were local schools that never visited Kenilworth before.
And despite being in kind of with the students involved, weren't able to go on the school's residential activity for various different reasons.
And, you know, because of that, the school was actually already discussing bringing any students in similar positions in following years.
And the site, because the project provided a meaningful alternative for that group.
And so really built a relationship with the local school. You say we get six is from Camford, so I need a couple of miles inland.
They were taking inspiration from the myths and legends associated with Tintagel. So obviously, lots of awful lots of Marlyn,
but I will say taking a lot of inspiration from the local landscape as well, similarly to a lot of the other projects.
And the school was only a few miles away. And they haven't visited Stach before the children either.
And most students didn't actually visit the beach very often either. Which surprised a lot of us, I think.
And what the teachers get back was the stories that the students produced writing
much better than what the students would usually develop in the classroom.
So they saw the value of the inspiration being found outside of the classroom environment in the historic landscape,
and for improving the quality of work and for raising attainment as well as
students were producing much better stories than they would have done before.
And we had a local school that's recently moved to the area.
We had the help of one of our historic property students, Matt Pike, and he runs like two stores.
And Sill's brains are really intricate knowledge of the little known myths and legends based in the local landscape.
And this project is taking inspiration from the monument, the landscape objects costing little known facts about Stonehenge.
And what was really great about this was that we had two classes involved, but they were coming out the project from very different angles.
So year trees have been looking at prehistory, at school, and that's where the project fitted in with them,
whereas the Air Force had been looking at myths and legends and legend writing.
And so that really sort of showcases how varied and the school's approaches were to
these projects and how they were tailored to fit what the school had in mind as well.
Lobbying was another kind of spin on the project in terms of public, the public speaking element, and it was in this project.
So the students here were united attends. They were taking inspiration from that lobby and the battlefield and Occitan, 66.
But they were also learning how to perform stories against the backdrop of the abbey.
So they developed their stories with the help of an author, James Aitchison,
that they also built on their public speaking skills during special workshops. And this was something that the students really valued.
This was something that helped build their self-esteem, the self-confidence and to round off the project.
And there's a special celebration event at the Abbey involving students using that improves public speaking skills for their
stories and feedback is that there was a really noticeable difference in confidence levels by the end of the project.
I feel this was a local school. They walked to site and because they were Cycliste and Simelane to Stonehenge,
we had one Hollister property t shirts, as well as various other contributors,
including a mariner and local history specialists, and helping students take inspiration from local folklore and castle.
And they were also sort of looking at confidence building a little bit.
And during the projects and the students were initially quite nervous about writing stories and actually.
And Lisa, I sort of cch he led a session of guided visualisation,
which really inspired the teacher to think about her costume space differently and
how to things that we do on on site or things that happened during the project
could be replicated back in the classroom to look at developing stories in different
ways and helping students to visualise their stories in a very different way.
Also, the project was to encourage the class to get together begins new school year.
They developed their relationship with a teacher as well. And we ran these projects during the autumn term.
So this was the start of a new school year. Not everybody knew each other.
And so these projects were. So, Ankur, if you like to get those team building skills working finally, but by no means,
least at Yarmouth Castle and school and touching private school, literally two minute walk down the road.
You can pretty much see the school from the castle.
They were looking at shipwrecks around Yanov Castle, the school and the students have never been to Young Castle before.
But similarly to very you know, the other projects, that story of writing greatly improved.
They focussed on developing vocabulary during the project and they'd previously found great work, really difficult.
But this was something that was ameliorated. And during the project and teachers, CPD,
as well as they continue professional development sessions at the end of one of the in school sessions has actually helped.
And the teaching staff in their teaching of myths and legends,
writing and creative writing acts as a way to sort of give back and the projects and create that long a legacy going forward.
And we have at the time of writing this, we had more classes from the school visiting the castle.
We have more enquiries coming in from across the Isle of Wight. And so opening up that site is more and more than it appears.
In terms of opportunity and for learning outside the classroom.
So this to advance and trying to pay as quick as possible. And we worked with a mixture of age groups on this project.
We worked from Keith's age to, say, primary school age five and a level.
We worked at eight different sites across England. Once each.
And we went to three schools that had never previously engaged with us in any way before.
And the sites that we used were diverse. We had castles, Abbey's prestrike monuments.
We had sites from five different time periods in all. And we worked with lots of external facilitators.
So we had parties in residence, as I mentioned. But we also had the call history specialists.
We have in and as we has all sorts of different contributors and outcomes were many
in various and was definitely dependent on the project and the particular project.
We had books made of all the student stories and for them to keep as a memento of the project.
But we also, as I said before, about frazzle diverse outcomes.
We had musical performances at Raivo. We had to focus on well-being at deal.
And we had a focus on performance as well about lavae.
And so each project was tailored to suit the need to the groups that we were engaging in their needs in terms of sort of transferable skills,
but also curriculum topics as well.
And in terms of payback on this, as I alluded to, teachers, students, facilitators and site staff really enjoyed working on this projects.
They enjoyed engaging with the sites in different ways.
And teachers often haven't previously appreciated how they can use these sites across curricula working.
I hadn't thought about using a heritage setting to teach English.
For example, we had those external facilitators, as we said,
and they were all very enthusiastic and inspired by the sites and the projects they worked on.
And our staff really enjoyed gauging engaging schools with their sites in new ways and were
actually really keen to associate more of this kind of longer term engagement in the future.
And so I think I'm going to hand very quickly back to Kate, who's going to talk about.
And one of our winning entries to national competition.
Yeah, we just thought it would be a nice way to end with one of the stories from the national competition.
So this is from the eight to 11 age category. The lost villages of Craster by the beautifully named Isabelle Butterfield.
Have you ever been unsettled by the anguished cries of seagulls as you approached Dunstable Castle on a foggy day?
Villagers say that they tell of a tragedy long go. It begins with the cross to family in Israel, 72.
The local lords of Craster, the village below the castle, had each in turn been good and kind to the village's reginal.
Craster was no exception.
He was lenient towards those that could not pay their taxes and cared not about the beauty of his bride, but the cleverness and kindness inside her.
Then tragedy struck, struck while still young Lord Cresta died one night under suspicious circumstances.
His nephew took his place across the by name, but not by heart.
He was cruel and the villagers had to toil hard for only his selfish purposes.
Fishermen will be gone for days, trying to catch enough fish to please the Lord,
and anyone unable to pay their taxes will go without food until they paid up.
As the new Lord's rain lengthened, he became harsher, expecting impossible things from his village's taxes, increased punishments became unendurable.
Life was hard for the villages of Craster.
One day, the nephew for that was what the villagers called him, refusing to address him as their lord was looking for a bride.
He demanded that every house present him with their most beautiful maiden.
Look at this. There was an uproar in process to this apparent demand.
The villagers formed a tight circle around their beautiful young women.
A sudden wave of fury overcame the nephew, and he set his dogs on the villages, chasing them up to Dunstable Castle.
Then off the edge of the cliffs. That instant, a strong sea front rolled in, soaking, cloaking the cliffs in impenetrable mist.
The villagers bodies were never found. Legend has it that they turned into seagulls perched on the cliffs below the castle.
They are never able to venture far from their weatherbeaten stone ledges.
Their piercing shrieks mourn the lives lost centuries ago. I'm going to finish.
Think again. I was just going to give a brief overview of our asked competition this year.
Just pleased to say that we've managed to another successful project.
Despite this most unusual of years.
And this this has been based around poetry this year as part of the programme cooperative by our poet and residents, Jacob Santeros.
And really just encouraging young people to explore their places and communities.
And we've had, although a much shorter time frame, still 236 competition entries and explored lots of themes,
cultures, traditions, childhood memories, and, perhaps unsurprisingly, kov it.
And just to say that the winning entries, should anyone be interested in this,
will be brought together in a digital anthology along with other amateur emerging and established poets.