Events

The Cambridge Primary Review Northeast and Cumbria is currently running three kinds of events:

• Regional conferences
• Scoping events
• Learning walks

All of these events aim to facilitate conversations between practitioners who work with primary age children, whether in schools, local authority, clubs, museums, charities or other organisations. We want the network to use the CPR report as a lever to support effective collaboration and enquiry into effective primary practice.

Regional conferences

These large gatherings provide the chance for network members to hear from leading authorities in the primary age phase while also providing a showcase for innovative practitioners in the region. Conferences will be run regularly to support the dissemination of regional thinking as well as engagement with the national picture.

Seminars

These events are small scale conferences where the emphasis is on conferring. Seminars will facilitate discussion across groups such as schools and third sector organisations. The emphasis will be on innovative pedagogy and curriculum and the shared learning and practice which can be developed under the CPR recommendations. 

Learning walks

A learning walk is the opportunity to visit a school along with professionals from other teaching contexts, to explore a theme related to the Cambridge Primary Review and discuss particular aspects of primary practice. Learning walks will provide professional learning opportunities as well as providing a basis for further evidence collection around the Cambridge Primary Review aims in practice.

Scoping events

The aim of these events is to facilitate shared experience and discussion around each of the aims from the CPR report. At these events network members will be asked to bring along a piece of evidence which they believe encapsulates that aim in practice in their school (this could be video, a child’s work, planning documents etc). These will be the centre of a discussion to explore areas of commonality and difference when putting the CPR into practice. Discussion will be recorded for analysis.

Scoping event rethink

We are always learning and therefore we are happy to admit when we are wrong. We have always had the ambition for this network to be based around what practitioners in the region need rather than what someone else thinks they should be doing and so we have recognised the need for a rethink around some CPR Northeast and Cumbria Regional Network activities.

As you will have noticed, we have had to cancel the last two scoping events. The scoping events produced some incredibly interesting discussions but they required time away from work, travel and expense and we have concluded that they are not working. We think there are a number of reasons for this, but when talking to network collaborators, in main they do not seem to be fit for purpose and involve too much reflection and not enough action.

In an effort to facilitate effective spaces for talk about primary curriculum and the CPR in action, we propose that the emphasis of this element of the network activities changes to a focus on enquiry based approaches. We propose that from January through to June we will support a group (or groups, depending on demand and geography) of practitioners in undertaking enquiry to generate evidence of innovative pedagogy and curriculum. This process and the outcomes will then form the basis of discussions around the CPR in action.

So, the scoping event on the 5th December (2-4pm in School of Education, Durham University) will change focus, and will now target the practicalities of how we take the enquiry network idea forwards. 

If you would like to attend this event to express your interest in being involved in practitioner enquiry, or if you would like a say in how the network moves forward then please register for a place with Viv: Vivienne.Sturgiss@ncl.ac.uk