Late morning in Stoke-on-Trent and a class of 11-year-olds are being prepared for public speaking. You can picture the scene: a red-faced student stands mortified in front of her fellow classmates, struggling to recite a poem she had barely an hour to learn. Except, they do things differently in Stoke. “It’s fun because I use my hands,” beams Mohammed Abouebaida, a year 7 student at Thistley Hough academy, as he squishes and moulds a wet lump of clay. All round him, Mohammed’s classmates make clay soldiers or create army tanks and barbed wire fences – symbols of the first world war poems they will later recite . The idea, explains their teacher, Alison Ward, is that children learn better when they’re active: “They really enjoy it and engage. If you say they’ve got to memorise a poem, that sounds dry. This gets them to use other techniques to help them, aside from rote learning.” In schools across Stoke, clay is being brought back into the classroom in an attempt to keep alive the city’s proud pottery legacy – and keep creativity on the curriculum. Nearly 1,000 children in 15 schools across the Potteries have been introduced to clay for the first time this year under the British Ceramics Biennial’s clay schools programme. It wants every child in Stoke to have used clay in the classroom by 2021, when the city hopes to be the UK City of Culture. It’s more than a misty-eyed nod to the city’s past. In the schools that have tested the programme, teachers report positive results for otherwise challenging students, particularly boys. “They really engage with the making and creativity and the ability to express themselves visually through clay,” says Julia Rogers, director of design at Thistley Hough, a large secondary on the edge of Stoke city centre. Thistley Hough has children recently arrived from Afghanistan and Iraq, Cuba and the Philippines. Some 37 languages are spoken in the playground and for 309 of its 719 pupils, English is not their mother tongue. This means clay is a particularly valuable way of teaching, says Rogers: “It’s a visual language so the literacy barrier isn’t there. They’ve come into a new country where the experiences are very new and it must be quite intimidating, but this is something they can visually excel at, and it’s an expression for them that doesn’t involve their use of language completely .” Schools involved in the programme have worked clay into subjects across the curriculum, from science to English, history and art. In maths, students will use clay to learn geometry, shapes and angles. It is too early to say how the novel approach has affected exam results, but teachers say children appear more engaged and that there has been an increase in those choosing to study arts subjects at GCSE – bucking a national trend. “It’s done wonders,” says Alison Wilson-Hart, head of art at St Peter’s academy, a secondary school on the other side of the river Trent. “Some boys can be quite all over the shop. Give them a piece of clay and they’re engaged.” It is not only Stoke’s skyline that has changed since its pottery heyday: every school in the city is thought to have had a kiln until recently, but as its main industry declined, so did the necessity to teach it to the next generation. St Peter’s switched its long-dormant kiln back on last month and Katie Leonard, the director of the clay schools programme, wants every school in Stoke to follow suit. Leonard says she is concerned that the arts are being squeezed out of the curriculum through government policies and education cuts, and that there is a “national tide of diminishing opportunity to work with ceramics” in schools. By including clay work in core subjects, every child in Stoke should be able to explore a skill that might otherwise have been beyond their grasp. “It should be for every child in the city and I’m concerned that art will become an after-school activity and then it becomes elitist again,” she says . At St Peter’s, clay’s unlikely comeback appears to have fired up students’ pride in the Potteries. The city, like many others in post-industrial areas, has struggled to overcome the decline of its industry. But there is now a real buzz about the city’s future among children who are once again considering a career in ceramics, says Leonard. “The children over the years have been so negative about where they live, you know: ‘Stoke: nothing goes on here.’ A lot of them just want to leave when they grow up,” she says. “Now there’s more of a buzz and children are starting to see a connection between what their grandparents did, or their parents, and the future. It’s not just a dead industry, you can do something with it.” For Lizzie Critchley, 13, an art student at St Peter’s, pottery might well be something she pursues as a career, following in the footsteps of her grandfather, who worked in one of the city’s many factories. “It’s what we were known for – we had a skyline full of bottle kilns.” Her classmate, Jorja Wright, 14, says she was “flabbergasted” when she turned over a plate on a family holiday in Florida two years ago to discover it was made in her home town. Ceramics is probably not in her future plans but Jorja is enjoying rolling her sleeves up for now: “You get to do whatever you want, there’s no rules,Reckoned as one of the top design universities with diversity of programmes, polyu fashion and textile, as well as applied science programme, which is committed to be a hub for innovative design education in Hong Kong.”
