Last updated 13:38, Friday, 24 October 2008

Nestled in the centre of England’s highest market town, Samuel King’s School is leading an education revolution.

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On the edge: The schools in the new North Pennine Learning Partnership. Alston, home to Samuel King’s school, lies close to the borders with Northumberland and Co Durham

It is part of the North Pennine Learning Partnership (NPLP), the first cross-border network of trust schools in the country.

And it is its location in Alston, on the very edge of Cumbria, and the geographical affinity it has with communities in Northumberland that has led to the partnership’s creation.

Samuel King’s teamed up with Haydon Bridge High School, Allendale Middle School and Bellingham Middle School earlier this year to improve opportunities for its 220 pupils. Bellingham First School joined in September, taking the age range of children covered by the trust from three years to 18.

It is hoped that the new trust will particularly help specialist groups of pupils such as gifted and talented youngsters or those on specific programmes or courses.

Each school retains its own identity and board of governors but the NPLP formally cements previously informal links and collaborations with the setting up of an umbrella partnership board.

Each school sits on the partnership board which also features outside groups – the neighbouring local authorities of Cumbria and Northumberland, the Institute of Outdoor Learning, North Country Leisure, Northumberland College, the Rugby Football Union, private firm RM Computers and the University of Cumbria and Liverpool John Moores University.

The NPLP was given £50,000 funding from the National College for School Leadership to help carry out the necessary legal work in forming the trust. But, unlike the capital investment currently going into creating academies, the trust will need to raise funds for new things it hopes to do. Part of the trust’s creation allows it to have charitable status so it can apply for new funding streams that were previously unavailable.

Samuel King’s assistant headteacher Anthony Tuffery said: “A lot of people would assume we would be working with Cumbrian schools but our natural links are with Northumberland.

“Most of our children go on to sixth form at Haydon Bridge and it is our nearest secondary school, 15 miles away.

“A third of our cohort, around 80 children, also travel over from County Durham. You only need to look at the county borders to see how far people travel to come here.”

The partnership aims to improve the opportunities available to its 1,400 students spread over a geographical area of 1,300 sq miles, around the size of Greater London. Its geography will pose day-to-day challenges when it comes to making travel and other arrangements between the schools because they operate on two education systems and have holidays at different times.

Cumbria’s state schools are split into primaries and secondary schools while the local authority in Northumberland operates first, middle and high schools for children aged three to nine, nine to 13 and 13 to 18 respectively.

Two-way teacher swaps and improved technology, including regular video-links between headteachers, are among the new initiatives being introduced to share resources and expertise.

Every week catering and food technology teacher Sinead Sheldon leaves Alston to take classes at Haydon Bridge High School.

Mr Tuffery said: “The heads of the trust schools are already working closely together on a management level. They are using webcams and video-links to communicate.

“Technology is very much one of the things the trust is looking to develop. We need things like more cameras and they cost £3,000 each. That is one of the challenges the trust now faces, how to get the money to pay for things like that.

“Elsewhere we do have teacher exchanges going on. Sinead goes to Haydon Bridge one day a week. She was going to do food technology. They didn’t do catering but we had one of their teachers visit and they saw how well the two subjects were taught together and asked if Sinead could do both over there. They changed their curriculum to cover both subjects.

“And we have an environmental science teacher who comes over to us once a week. Ian Porteouse teaches GCSE for year 11s and BTEC for year 10s at Haydon Bridge. Here we did the GCSE but not the BTEC. That’s changed and the BTEC probably offers more opportunities to some of our children because they have the chance to get a double award.

“Also, technology teacher Peter Thwaites goes to Haydon Bridge every week to work with year 10s. Because the departments all have links now and the trust has formalised the relationships it is something that can be done directly without having to go through the bureaucracy of going through different levels or approaching the heads first.

“They are all small steps but very significant.”

The vision of the trust also aims to help children progress in terms of their ability and not age. Therefore a growing number of pupils could be sitting exams earlier than they are traditionally taken. It is a practice that is already a reality for some pupils at Samuel King’s who have taken GCSEs before they reach year 11.

It took several years of planning and consultation before the NPLP was set up earlier this year. Staff have had a range of issues to address, a major one being timetabling.

Mr Tuffery said: “Timetabling is always a nightmare wherever you are but when we looked at the teacher exchanges we had to take into consideration that a third of our staff here are part-time. We have 18 teachers and some are only in a few days every week. It was very hard.”

As well as the vision for children’s education, Mr Tuffery says the new NPLP links are also good news for staff.

“When the key stage three changes were coming in we held joint days so staff from all the schools could get together in their subjects. They were spending time with each other, sharing ideas,” Mr Tuffery, a physics and maths teacher, said.

“The job of teaching can be a very lonely one where you spend hours on your own in a classroom in front of children.

“The trust is now allowing us the chance to get out and meet like-minded people, those with the same specialism and knowledge. That is a good thing.”