Adventure Learning
Professor David Hopkins, Emeritus Professor at the Institute for Education, recently summarised the effects of adventure learning as “unusually powerful”. We couldn’t agree more. Therefore, at Phoenix Academy, we proudly offer an Adventure Learning programme. The primary goal of this programme is to provide young people with thrilling outdoors opportunities that will help to instil their skills of leadership, teamwork and resilience, and to equip them with the resilience that they need to become responsible, confident and self-aware adults.
The programme consists of a series of gradated and cumulative experiences from Year 7 through to Year 12. Students have the chance to connect and interact with the natural world, and to experience the wonder and power of nature in its raw form. Adventure activities give students the unique opportunity to experience difficulty, risk and hardship in a managed environment, which helps them to become more self-aware, and which develops their personal and interpersonal skills in pressurised environments.
The Academy will invest in the Duke of Edinburgh Programme as part of this curriculum. All students at Phoenix Academy will take part in the Bronze Duke of Edinburgh Award scheme in Year 9, and will have the choice to progress to their Silver Award in Year 10, and their Gold Award in Year 12. It is our aim that, by 2020, all students at the school will have benefited from the programme, and that Phoenix Academy will have become a trailblazer, leading the way in UK schools for Adventure Learning.