Hundreds of schools across the country entered the RM Education competition in which pupils of all ages used their imagination to dream up an ideal learning space for their school. Athelstan Primary School in North Yorkshire has been awarded £20,000 worth of learning resources after winning first prize in the competition.

The winning design focused on improving Athelstan Primary School’s intervention room, where its highly trained Teaching Assistants run intervention programmes for Special Educational Needs and Gifted and Talented groups during the afternoons.

“We are all really aware of how ICT can support learning across the curriculum. Inclusion is a high priority in our school so we focused on enhancing the technology in our intervention room.

“The students who use the room identified barriers to their learning and our room design addresses them and includes innovative new technologies to engage and inspire our students, including things like enlarged keyboards and voice recording facilities. Winning the prize will transform the way our students learn in the intervention room and help them to achieve their full potential.”

Thorpe Hall School in Waltham Forest took second prize and has been awarded £5,000 worth of learning resources. Oz Orman, Thorpe Hall School’s Creativity Co-ordinator, commented: “We saw this as an exciting cross curricular opportunity for our pupils to enhance their learning environment by thinking and behaving in an enterprising and creative fashion. Class 500 drove the whole project and even developed a scale model of their ideal multifunctional learning space.

The pupils have chosen to use the majority of their prize to fund a mobile interactive whiteboard for the reception classes so they can benefit from this creative technology earlier in their school lives. Winning this prize for our reception classes will enhance the way we deliver the creative curriculum through technology and open the door to more visual learning techniques.”

Terry Sweeney from RM Education said: “We were overwhelmed with the number of entries to the competition, and our judges were impressed by the creativity and diverse nature of the learning space designs. RM Education has been working with schools for nearly 40 years and we know that learning environments should be exciting, engaging and designed around the specific needs of today’s technology-savvy pupils.”