Sophie Duncan, NCCPE (https://www.publicengagement.ac.uk)
School students in East Anglia publish a research paper in a peer reviewed academic journal. English teachers in Bristol are inspired and equipped to teach on the Romantics at GCSE. Young people in Milton Keynes support the production of free resources to help them (and others) Manage their Money. Researchers in Manchester gain new skills as they support school students doing extended project qualifications.
These sentences hint at some of things that have been happening as part of School-University Partnerships Initiative (SUPI), an experiment to see whether it was beneficial for schools and universities to partner together to bring cutting edge research into the classroom.
Funded by Research Councils UK, SUPI involved 12 projects, each involving partnerships between schools and universities keen to build effective ways to work together.
One of the SUPI PoP Tool Character Cards.
With such rich learning, we hope the project inspires others to think hard about the opportunities presented by school-university partnerships, and how they can be realised. To support this we have created two resources:
- SUPI Lessons: a booklet summarising the key lessons learnt from the programme, illustrated by taster case studies.
- SUPI Perspectives on Partnership (PoP): a brilliant resource to help schools and universities consider how they might like to work together. We know that schools and universities want different things from working together – the resource illustrates the experiences of teachers, school students, researchers, and university brokers for different types of partnerships – and is a great tool to talk about what everyone is hoping to achieve.