The Partners
Murrow Primary School is a small village school near Wisbech in Cambridgeshire. Wisbech suffers from many of problems connected with rural deprivation including isolation and a poor transport infrastructure. The school has a significant number of children from the local traveller’s community and an above average number of children with special educational needs and eligible for free school meals. Wisbech is only about an hour’s drive from the Fitzwilliam and yet the children visit very rarely, if ever and almost none of them had been to the museum prior to their involvement with Children & the Arts.
The Project
Murrow Primary School is in its second year of the working with the Fitzwilliam Museum so for some children it was their third visit to the museum. The familiarity and confidence that the children displayed during this visit was inspiring. They recalled lots of the objects and pictures that they had seen before, even remembering the different rooms and where they were in the museum. The year 5 pupils who had not been before were equally excited and confident as they had heard so much about the museum from their class mates.
“we’re really, really excited about it,
“it’s really fun to do and you don’t usually get to do it
During their time in the galleries looking at objects and pictures the children were all thoroughly absorbed and engaged. They asked questions about new things, requested particular routes so that they could see familiar things and displayed an air of ownership and self-assurance that only comes from experience.
“it’s amazing, I didn’t think it would be this big, I’ve never seen so many patterns”
“the boys are really getting into art, they are realising that
Every pupil described their feelings on coming to the museum as ‘excited’ or ‘happy’, this included the half of the group who had never been before! Many of them commented on how special they were made to feel when they were there and without exception the one thing that they would have changed about their trip was “to have more time in the musuem”!The pupils value the school’s relationship with the Fitzwilliam very highly, they are proud of it and think of it as something unique and special about their school. They are looking forward to continuing the relationship over the next 12 months.
“‘we go the the Fitzwilliam’, they’re really, really proud of that.”
The teachers feed their experiences at the museum back into lessons right across the curriculum. The pupils have recently created a huge mural of the nativity in RE and they have created their own story books, from folding the paper, through writing the story to producing the cover, a process that involved developing skills in art, IT, maths as well as literacy.