Silverstone Study Centre

On Tuesday morning, I am meeting Northamptonshire’s Paul Burnett, the Director of Children and Young People’s Services, and Andy Downing, the Head of Learning, Achievement and School Improvement. Despite the fact that the Study Centre has been put into storage until July 14th, this website will still allow me to celebrate with them some of our students’ excellence and achievement.

If you have experience of Silverstone Study Centre over the last year, then perhaps you could leave a comment to let them know what you thought of it. Paul Burnett started out his career at Campion School so it would be good to hear from the Campion Crew as well as any others with an opinion.

Sponne Year 8 students had a think about the above question as we were making our way around the track. There were some very good ideas about some of the criteria that might be taken into account when considering the quality of seating areas.

• How long are cars in the spectator’s view in different areas? It was surprising how different this measure was in various areas.
• How sheltered is an area?
• How close to the action is an area?
• How noisy is an area?

We started to measure and make some tentative conclusions. It is still a pretty subjective matter though as you can see from our quikmap below.

Today is a Gold Track Day at Silverstone. People bring lots of different types of cars to race around the Grand Prix circuit. I popped over to watch a few of the speedsters zipping around the track and to assess whether to take the Year 8 pupils from Sponne out there later during their PfS session.

• It would be fun to take the stopwatches to time some of the cars to see how fast they really are going. I wonder how they compare to Schumacher’s lap record over the 3.194-mile circuit?
• While I was out with the superb Sponne Year Six students last week, I was asked where the best place is to watch racing action at Silverstone. I’m not sure really, every location seems to have pros and cons. Perhaps I’ll get the Year 8s to make a more measured assessment based on their travels around the track. It could be recorded on a Quikmap.
• Of course we could take some photo and video footage using centre cameras and the students’ mobile phones for later editing and presentation.

All this is possible! Whether it happens or not is down to whether the Sponne superstars are going to ‘dare to learn‘ or ‘play it safe.’ I’ll update later when they arrive.

3.30pm Update: The Sponne students are ready for action!

6.30pm Update: A quite brilliant set of students enjoyed a really productive session today. They were creative from start to finish and quite adept at timing the cars and working out the speeds. The fastest machine averaged some 97 mph around the Grand Prix circuit which is still some way short of Schumacher’s 147 mph record. Rebecca took the photo above which shows me spoiling Kalim’s attempt at clearing the fence from his photo.

Students from Sponne School’s Year Seven joined me today at the study centre for an introductory day. As always you can follow the action on their SSC Blog.

Paul from Race Control gave them a valuable bit of advice -

You should never stop learning no matter what your age!

I couldn’t agree more. Steve Deeks, who the students also met today, also encouraged them to not to play it safe when it come to asking questions and learning. I suppose you could sum this up as ‘daring to learn’, the new tagline of this website and the attitude we are striving to nuture in our students.