Above: Pupils from different schools work together to create the tallest self supporting tower

Cockermouth School and Selly Park School were initially brought together via the Schools Linking Network in January 2009, and the link was subsequently extended to include Kings Heath Boys School; Cockermouth School is a virtually all white rural co-educational secondary, Selly Oak school is an urban secondary school for girls and has a majority intake of students of Pakistani heritage, King's Heath is a boys secondary school and is around 80% non white. Links were established both to encourage community cohesion within Birmingham and to provide a balance of genders with the co-educational Cockermouth School.

Aims: 
The aim of the day's activities was to bring together 45 pupils from all three schools who had been part of a pilot project involving penpal letter writing and 'perceptions' activities. The day would allow students to meet, develop friendships and an understanding of each other face to face via a series of different activities. The perceptions activity had aired many misconceptions and stereotypes; mainly urban vs rural rather than ethno-religious, and the aim was to counter some of those stereotypes.

There was an interesting split in misconceptions of Cumbria between Selly Park and King's Heath; the former picturing Cumbria as a wealthy landowners' county, and King's Heath seeing Cockermouth as poor, backward and rural. Equally many of the perceptions of students from Cockermouth involved urban stereotypes around drug dealing and crime and housing was perceived as being small flats in heavily built up areas.

The Day: 
Cliffe Castle Museum is a large museum with a wide variety of displays. These include an array of glittering minerals, local rocks and fossils (including a 2m long fossil amphibian), mounted birds and local mammals, original furnished rooms with chandeliers, William Morris stained glass, old dolls, toys and domestic items and a programme of temporary exhibitions. Students completed a range of activities at the museum:

Team Building: Pupils were put into teams deliberately mixing up pupils from each school, and had ten minutes to build the tallest self supporting tower from newspaper and masking tape. Initially pupils very much stuck with whoever they knew in their group, with few exceptions.

Lunchtime/freetime: Pupils sat in their school groups, but after lunch a game of 'bulldog' developed involving most of the boys, and attracting the attention of the girls. A little interaction began to develop at this point.

Belonging: Cliffe Castle Museum contains objects from all around the world and staff within the education department ran an activity called 'belonging' based on these resources. Pupils were first paired off with someone from another school (some co-operation began to develop here) to explore the museum and find out where objects had come from and how they had got to the museum. Pupils were then encouraged to consider where objects 'belonged'.

Later pupils were put into 2 groups for a debate - 'British Museum vs Egyptian government'. They discussed the return of 'artefacts' and the pros and cons of objects being returned home or displayed in a museum environment. This activity went extremely well and almost all pupils had something to add to the debate.

Britishness: Pupils again in mixed teams were now asked to brainstorm what 'Being British' was all about. Teams were working well together by now and many friendships were developing. Issues and perceptions discussed during this activity included:

• A perception among Muslim pupils that Britain is a 'Christian' country rather than a multi-faith country.
• The idea that being British meant 'going to war'.
• A strong sense that being British includes many different identities.

Pupils were asked to sum up in one word what 'Britishness' meant - examples were 'diverse', 'multicultural' and 'cool'.  

Team building: Students participated in a build a stretcher game. Pupils were now interacting well in teams and spending more time swapping email addresses and mobile numbers than doing the activity!

Outcomes and evaluation:
After a suspicious start with most pupils sticking to their schools, by the end of the day most pupils had bonded and laughed and joked about the work they had completed the previous year. Pupils are very keen as are the schools, to undertake a joint residential later in the year as a result of the success of this day. All three schools would like to make this a larger annual event, possibly at the same, or another venue, possibly involving parents as well as pupils.

We feel the day achieved a breaking down of stereotypes and misconceptions and a building of friendships. Pupils realized that as Year 8 students they had far more in common than that which divided them.

Written by Mat Richards, Citizenship Co-ordinator, Cockermouth School

The project described in this article was made possible by a grant awarded by the WDWTWA project. Further details about future grants available to schools can be obtained by contacting the project officer at wdwtwa@rgs.org.