Colliers Green Focus

Colliers Green Focus is a new and exciting way for children taking Key Stage 3 Geography to explore and learn about environmental and sustainability via photography.

The National Curriculum requires, by the end of Key Stage 3, geography pupils to have acquired and applied a knowledge and understanding of environmental change and sustainable development by carrying out fieldwork investigations.

Colliers Green Focus, www.colliersgreenfocus.com, enables schools to acquire this knowledge by running field trip exploring environmental issues in their local area with a professional photographer and geographer. The children's use of photography, and tuition from a photographer and geographer aims to significantly enhance the pupils' learning experience, provides the opportunity to develop new skills and link to other areas of the Curriculum.

Students' photographs are used in lessons, and schools select their best photographs to be judged by an expert panel for display in a special exhibition at Photographers' Gallery to which all participating Colliers Green Focus schools are invited.

Colliers Green Focus is funded by Colliers CRE and will take place each year for three years. The programme launched in 2007 with 10 schools carrying out workshops during 2008. More schools will be involved in the following two years.

The first school to complete a workshop was Holy Trinity School, Birmingham.

Sally Summers, Holy Trinity School, Teacher, said: "Colliers Green Focus has been hugely valuable and very much enjoyed by the children. The photography field trip enabled the pupils to the look at their local area with a completely different slant and analyse the environment in a completely different manner to normal field trips. The professional geographer and photographers demonstrated the links between the art form and the subject in really powerful and effective ways and in a manner that captured and held the pupils attention - no mean feet when they're outside and its raining!

"The children's photographs will feed directly into classroom lessons and existing scheme of work. The pictures will also be used linked to our work on Haiku poems, on the school notice board and edited for school movies and presentations etc. Enabling the students to take ownership of the photography and have the opportunity to show their pictures to others in the group and school was a very powerful experience for them. They learned an awful lot and we would love to repeat it."

A national conference at the Royal Geographical Society, a schools' resource book and online learning centre to enable all schools to benefit from the programme, will mark the close of Colliers Green Focus in 2010.

Colliers Green Focus is managed by Kallaway and was created by Kallaway in collaboration with the Photographers' Gallery.

The Colliers Green Focus website, www.colliersgreenfocus.com details the programme in full.